Perhaps he began his artistic training in his native town under his uncle Lorenzo Allegri, a mediocre painter, and then, it is believed, moved to Modena to study under Francesco Bianchi Ferrari (1503–1507). From there he seems certainly to have gone to Mantua, where he drew much from Mantegna, whose profound influence persists even in his mature works, while from Costa, who succeeded the Paduan master at the Gonzaga court, he absorbed the most immediate Emilian-Ferrarese element of his early style. Leonardo, though understood in terms of radiant light rather than veiled shadow, shaped his way of conceiving volumes; yet it is atonality—ultimately the keystone of his singular, boundless color, that is, of his entire art—that remains his most distinctive trait.
His works may be grouped as follows: paintings of his early youth inspired by Mantegna and the Emilian-Ferrarese school, from the *Deposition* in the atrium of Sant’Andrea in Mantua and the detached fresco of the *Madonna and Child with SS Francis and Quirinus*, now in the Estense Gallery in Modena, to the *Betrothal of St Catherine* in Detroit and another version in the Kress Collection in New York, where Mantegnesque forms are blended with Leonardesque ones in a grace that is at once childlike and spontaneous, up to the *Madonna of St Francis* in Dresden, his first dated painting (1514), from which period also date the *Judith* in the Strasbourg Gallery, the *Madonna and Child with Two Angels Playing Music and Seraphim* in the Uffizi, the *Nativity by Night* and the *Adoration of the Magi* in the Brera, the *Bolognini Madonna* in the Sforza Castle Museum in Milan, the *Malaspina Madonna* in the Pinacoteca of Pavia, and others.
The years between the execution of the St Francis altarpiece and his first major decorative commission—the ceiling of the Abbess’s room in the convent of San Paolo in Parma (1518–19)—include a series of works marked by a brighter, more vivid palette: pinks, violets, and ashen tones, as in the *Campori Madonna* in the Estense Gallery in Modena, one of the most representative paintings of this period, in which Emilian and Leonardesque elements are joined by what must surely be knowledge of Raphael, who at this very time had sent his *St Cecilia* altarpiece to Bologna, and which likewise inspired the *Madonna of Casalmaggiore* in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the one in the Orléans art gallery, another at Hampton Court, and the delightful *Madonna and Child with St John* in the Prado in Madrid—the true masterpiece of this phase.
Whether he had been to Rome and drawn fresh vigour from that source, or whether the sudden robustness was due to the natural intensification of maturity, it is certain that in the convent of San Paolo in Parma, in executing for Abbess Giovanna Piacenza the decoration of a small ceiling, he revealed an unsuspected strength through a vivid intensity of colour in which the golden tonality that would become his hallmark begins to dominate.
From the same period is the detached fresco of the *Madonna of the Staircase* in the Parma Gallery, where she appears seated in counter-light, radiant with grace and an autonomous glow, translated into supple harmonies of pink and gold, a warm ambience that pervades all his mature works, as may already be seen in two small, delightful pictures in the Naples Pinacoteca, *La Zingarella* and *The Betrothal of St Catherine*, or in the *Rest on the Flight into Egypt* in the Uffizi, or in the *St Jerome* in the church of San Fernando in Madrid.
In the decoration of the cupola of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma (1520–22), he created, with daring foreshortenings, effects of the infinite. The same grandeur and intensity of expression are found in the *St John Seated with the Eagle at his Feet* in the lunette near the sacristy, and in the *Coronation* of the apse, of which only the central section survives, repeatedly moved with its entire masonry support and restored only recently, when cleaning revealed its original essence with all its transparent glazes intact, intense in the expression of the Redeemer, most tender in the face of the Assumption, where Roman and Mantegnesque reminiscences, evident throughout the composition, seem submerged in the impetuous inspiration of his superb figures.
Among the easel paintings executed during or shortly after the decoration of the San Giovanni cupola are several that show a marked regression, due above all to a certain conventional sweetness of expression even in the attitudes. Such are the *Noli me tangere* in the Prado, the *Adoration of the Child* in the Uffizi, the *Christ in the Garden* in London, the *Deposition* and the *Martyrdom of SS Placidus, Flavia, Eutychius and Victorinus* in Parma, and the well-known *St Sebastian* altarpiece in Dresden, where, to contemplate the divine vision, St Sebastian twists against the trunk to which he is bound, while St Irene points him out to the beholder.
More closely tied to the past, though enriched by the opulence of the design, are the *Betrothal of St Catherine* in the Louvre and the *St Catherine Reading* in the Royal Palace at Hampton Court, spontaneous as is the *Allegory of Love* in the National Gallery in London, with which the series of secular paintings begins.
But it is in the cupola of Parma Cathedral, executed between 1526 and 1530, that his characteristic colour is most fully determined, permeating both objects and figures. This atmosphere, which envelops clouds and figures alike, is truly a sky of amethyst and rose suddenly opened to admit the hosanna of angels forming a crown about the Assumption, while below the balustrade the funeral of the Virgin is celebrated with Apollo and pine branches scattering sparks.
Contemporary with the Duomo cupola are the restored fresco lunette of the *Annunciation* in the Parma Gallery, the admirable *Madonna of St Jerome* altarpiece in the same gallery—one of Correggio’s supreme works—and the *Madonna della Scodella* there, which, together with the one in Dresden’s *St George*, equally reflects the salient features of the Duomo cupola, while in the *Holy Night* from the same gallery, the luministic researches of his early years reach a pre-Caravaggesque solution.
Other works of his final period are marked by a more serene and intimate familiarity, such as the *Madonna della Cesta* in the National Gallery in London and the *Madonna del Latte* in Budapest, of a divinely human reality like the group of the *Loves of Jupiter*; these were commissioned by Federico Gonzaga and left unfinished at the painter’s death, among them being the *Antiope* in the Louvre, whose face is the same as that of the Assumption in the Parma Duomo but furrowed with pagan feeling, the *Danaë* in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the *Leda* in Berlin, and *Jupiter and Ganymede* in the Vienna Gallery. — See pl. XXXII.