Correggio, Antonio Allegri, Known as Il

CORREGGIO, Antonio Allegri, Known as Il. - B. at Correggio di Reggio Emilia before 30 Aug. 1489, d. there, 5 March 1534.

Perhaps he began his artistic education in his native town with his uncle Lorenzo Allegri, a mediocre painter, then, it is believed, moved to Modena, to the school of Francesco Bianchi Ferrari (1503-1507). From there it seems certain that he went to Mantua, where he drew much from Mantegna, whose profound influence persists even in the works of his maturity, while from Costa, who succeeded the Paduan master at the court of the Gonzagas, he derived the Emilian-Ferrarese element most immediate to his beginnings. Leonardesque, though understood in terms of radiance of light rather than veils of shadow, is his painterly way of conceiving volumes, but the atomism, which is in fact the keystone of his peculiar, boundless color, that is, of his entire art, is a characteristic peculiarly his own.

His works can be grouped as follows: paintings of his early youth inspired by Mantegna and by the Emilian-Ferrarese masters, from the Deposition in the atrium of S. Andrea in Mantua, and from the Madonna with Child and Sts. Francis and Quirinus, a detached fresco, now in the Estense gallery in Modena, to the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine in Detroit, to the other in the Kress collection in New York, where Mantegnesque forms are combined with those of Leonardo, permeated by an infantile and spontaneous grace, up to the altarpiece of S. Francesco in Dresden, his first dated painting, which is from 1514; to this period also belong the Judith of the Strasbourg gallery, the Madonna with Child between Two Music-making Angels and Seraphim of the Uffizi gallery, the Night Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi in Brera, the Madonna Bolognini in the museum of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Madonna Malaspina in the picture gallery of Pavia, etc.

The years from the execution of the S. Francesco altarpiece to his first great decoration, the vault of the chamber of the Abbess in the convent of S. Paolo in Parma (1518-19), comprise a series of works of a more cheerful and vivid color: pink, violet and pale blue, as in the Madonna Campori of the Estense gallery in Modena, one of the most representative paintings of this period, where to the Emilian masters and to Leonardo is certainly added the knowledge of Raphael who, precisely at this time, had sent the St. Cecilia altarpiece to Bologna, to which are likewise inspired the Madonna of Casalmaggiore in the Städel museum in Frankfurt, the one in the art gallery of Orléans, the other at Hampton Court, and the delightful Madonna with Child and the Infant St. John of the Prado museum in Madrid, the true masterpiece of this period.

Whether he was in Rome and drew from it new vigor for his art, or whether the sudden robustness is due to the natural strengthening of maturity, it is certain that in the convent of S. Paolo in Parma, executing for the abbess Giovanna Piacenza the decoration of the vault of a small room, he reveals with a vivid intensity of colors, in which the golden tonality that would be peculiar to him begins to dominate, an unsuspected power.

Of the same time is the detached fresco with the Madonna of the Staircase in the gallery of Parma, who appears seated against the light, radiant with grace and with a self-contained light, translated into supple harmonies of pink and gold, a warm atmosphere that pervades all the works of his maturity, as can already be seen in two small, delightful paintings of the picture gallery of Naples, the Zingarella and the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, or in the Rest on the Flight into Egypt of the Uffizi gallery, or in the St. Jerome that is in the church of S. Fernando in Madrid.

In the decoration of the dome of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Parma (1520-22), he creates, with new and most audacious foreshortenings, effects of infinity. The same grandeur and intensity of expression is in the seated St. John with the eagle at his feet in the lunette near the sacristy, and in the Coronation of the apse, of which only the central part has remained, several times moved together with its entire wall support and which only the recent restoration and cleaning has restored to its original essence, with all its transparent and intact glazes, intense in the expression of the Redeemer, most sweet in the face of the Assumed Virgin, where the Roman and Mantegnesque commissions, evident throughout the composition, are as it were submerged in the inspired impetus of his superb figures.

Among the paintings executed during the decoration of the dome of S. Giovanni or in the years between this and that of the Cathedral, many mark an evident regression, due above all to an accentuation of expressive sweetness that is rather conventional even in the attitudes. Thus in the Noli me tangere in the Prado, in the Adoration of the Child in the Uffizi, in the Christ in the Garden in London, in the Deposition and in the Martyrdom of Sts. Placidus, Flavia, Eutychius and Victorinus in Parma, and in the well-known altarpiece of St. Sebastian in Dresden, where, in order to contemplate the divine vision, St. Sebastian writhes against the trunk to which he is bound, while Geminianus points him out to the viewer.

More closely tied to the past, though enriched by the opulence of the drawing, are the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine in the Louvre and the St. Catherine Reading of the Royal Palace of Hampton Court, spontaneous, like the Education of Cupid of the National Gallery in London, with which the series of profane paintings begins.

But it is in the dome of the cathedral of Parma, executed from 1526 to 1530, that his particular color, which permeates things and figures, is best defined. And this atmosphere, which envelops clouds and figures, is truly a sky of amethyst and pink, suddenly opened to let pass the jubilant choir of angels that form a crown around the Assumed Virgin, while around the balustrade the funeral rites of the Madonna are celebrated, with Apostles in bold foreshortenings and youths holding smoking torches and pine branches sputtering sparks.

Certainly contemporary with the dome of the Cathedral are the restored fresco lunette with the Annunciation of the gallery of Parma, the admirable altarpiece of the Madonna of St. Jerome in the same gallery, among the greatest works of C., and the Madonna della Scodella there, which, with that of St. George in Dresden, equally reflects the most salient characteristics of the dome of the Cathedral, while in the Holy Night, of the same gallery, the luministic researches of his early period are brought to a pre-Caravaggesque solution.

Informed by a more serene and intimate familiarity are other works of the last period, such as the Madonna of the Basket of the National Gallery in London and the Madonna of the Milk in Budapest, of a divinely human reality like the group of the Loves of Jupiter; canvases commissioned from him by Federico Gonzaga and left unfinished at the painter's death; among them: the Antiope of the Louvre, which has the same face as the Assumed Virgin of the cathedral of Parma, but furrowed with pagan sensuality: the Danae of the Borghese gallery in Rome, the Leda of Berlin; the Io and the Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle of the gallery of Vienna. - See pl. XXXII.

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