_Correggio_ (Parmese: 1494-1534).
Antonio Allegri--called Il Correggio from his birthplace, a
small town near Modena--is one of the most distinctive of
the old masters. What is it that constitutes what Carlyle
(following Sterne) calls the "Correggiosity of Correggio"? It
is at once a way peculiar to him amongst artists, of looking
at the world, and an excellence, peculiar to him also, in his
methods of painting. Correggio "looked at the world in a single
mood of sensuous joy," as a place in which everything is full
of happy life and soft pleasure. The characteristics of his
style are "sidelong grace," and an all-pervading sweetness.
The method, peculiar to him, by which he realised this way
of looking at things on canvas, is the subtle gradation of
colours,--a point, it is interesting to note, in which of all
modern masters Leighton most nearly resembles him (_Art of
England_, p. 98). "Correggio is," says Ruskin, "the captain
of the painter's art as such. Other men have nobler or more
numerous gifts, but as a painter, master of the art of laying
colour so as to be lovely, Correggio is alone" (_Oxford
Lectures on Art_, § 177). The circumstances of Correggio's life
go far to explain the individuality of his style. He was the
son of a modest, peaceful burgher, and Correggio and Parma,
where he spent his life, were towns removed from the greater
intellectual excitements and political revolutions of his time.
Ignorant of society, unpatronised by Popes or great Princes,
his mind was touched by no deep passion other than love for
his art, and "like a poet hidden in the light of thought," he
worked out for himself the ideals of grace and movement which
live in his pictures (see Symonds, _Renaissance_, iii. 248). Of
the details of his life little is known. His earliest works,
as Morelli first demonstrated, reveal the influence of the
Ferrarese masters, nor was he untouched by the creations of
Mantegna at Mantua, where he studied for two or three years. In
1514, in his twentieth year, he was entrusted with an important
commission by the Minorite Friars of Correggio. The Court of
Correggio was then a centre of refinement and culture, under
the rule of Giberto and his wife Veronica, who was one of the
most accomplished women of the day, and greatly admired "our
Antonio," as she called the painter. In 1518 Correggio left his
native city for Parma, which was to become for ever associated
with his name. "There is little reason," says his latest
biographer, "to lament that he never visited Rome or any other
great city. Parma, rising in smiling tranquillity upon her
fertile plains, girdled by castles and villages, and looking
out upon the vaporous line of hills from which the streams
which give her water descend into the champaign, offered our
painter not only the serenity that suited his temperament,
but a vaster field of activity than had ever been allotted to
any artist. There were altar-pieces to be painted, rooms to
be decorated; and the joyous fancies of his genius were to be
allowed ample scope in the decoration of two stately cupolas"
(Ricci). He was first employed by the Abbess of the Convent of
S. Paolo to paint her principal chamber. It is characteristic
of the time that the subjects selected were from pagan
mythology. Afterwards Correggio was commissioned to cover with
frescoes the cupolas of the Church of S. Giovanni Evangelista,
and of the cathedral. In these compositions, Correggio "carries
the foreshortening of the figures to a point which, while it
displays the daring of the artist, too often transcends the
limits of grace." Seen from below, little of the figures is
sometimes distinguishable except legs and arms in vehement
commotion. When one of the frescoes in the cathedral was first
uncovered, a canon is said to have remarked that it looked
to him like a "fricassee of frogs." But many of the angels'
heads in Correggio's frescoes are exquisitely beautiful. It is
only in Parma that Correggio's power can be fully appreciated.
His charm is to be found rather in his oil-paintings, and
in these the National Gallery possesses some acknowledged
masterpieces. In 1530 Correggio lost his wife, and returned to
his native town. "Although by nature good and well-disposed, he
nevertheless," says Vasari, "grieved more than was reasonable
under the burden of those passions which are common to all men.
He was very melancholic in the exercise of his art, and felt
its fatigues greatly." His life was but little longer than that
of Raphael, for he died in his forty-first year. The stories of
his poverty given in many biographies appear to be ill-founded.
He was in constant employment; he was treated as a person of
consideration, and received good remuneration; and the Governor
of Parma wrote to the Duke of Mantua on the painter's death,
"I hear he has made comfortable provision for his heirs." His
fame was great, and has been enduring; but his influence upon
later art was not fortunate. "His successors, attracted by an
intoxicating loveliness which they could not analyse, threw
themselves blindly into the imitation of Correggio's faults....
Cupolas through the length and breadth of Italy began to be
covered with clouds and simpering cherubs in the convulsions
of artificial ecstasy. The attenuated elegance of Parmigiano,
the attitudinising of Anselmi's saints and angels, and a
general sacrifice of what is solid and enduring to sentimental
gewgaws on the part of all painters who had submitted to the
magic of Correggio, proved how easy it was to go astray with
the great master. Meanwhile, no one could approach him in that
which was truly his own--the delineation of a transient moment
in the life of sensuous beauty, the painting of a smile on
Nature's face, when light and colour tremble in harmony with
the movement of joyous living creatures" (Symonds: _Sketches
and Studies in Italy and Greece_, ii. 158).
One of the most celebrated works in the Gallery--"the two pictures
which I would last part with out of it," Ruskin once said, "would be
Titian's Bacchus and Correggio's Venus." It is a great picture first
because it is true to nature. "Look at the foot of Venus. Correggio
made it as like a foot as he could, and you won't easily find anything
liker.... Great civilised art is always the representation, to the
utmost of its power, of whatever it has got to show--made to look as
like the thing as possible" (_Queen of the Air_, § 163). Notice, too,
the roundness of effect produced in the limbs by the gradation of
full colours, the reflected lights, and the transparent shadows. The
"chiaroscuro" is so clever that you can look through the shadows into
the substance.
As for the subject of the picture, Mercury, the messenger of the gods
(dressed therefore in his winged cap and sandals), is endeavouring
to teach Cupid (Love) his letters, of which, according to the Greek
story, Mercury was the inventor. Venus, the Goddess of Beauty and the
Mother of Love, looks out to the spectator with a winning smile of
self-complacent loveliness and points us to the child. She has taken
charge meanwhile of Cupid's bow (from which he shoots his arrows into
lovers' hearts), and is herself represented (as sometimes in classical
gems) with wings, for Beauty has wings to fly away as well as Time and
Love. The picture is sometimes called the Education of Cupid, but Love
learns through the heart and not through the head, and "if you look at
this most perfect picture wisely, you will see that it really ought to
be called 'Mercury trying, _and failing_, to teach Cupid to read,' for
indeed from the beginning and to the end of time, Love reads without
letters, and counts without arithmetic" (_Fors Clavigera_, viii. 238).
This famous picture has had a strange, eventful history. It was
painted in 1521 or 1522, and a century later it was still in the Ducal
Gallery at Mantua. In 1625 Charles I. of England despatched his music
master, Nicholas Laniere, to Italy to buy pictures for him. Laniere
communicated with a picture-dealer named Nys, who purchased several
works from the Mantuan gallery. When the transaction became known,
the citizens took it so ill that the Duke would have paid double the
money to be rid of the bargain. But Nys would not relent, and the
picture was included in the artistic freight which the ship _Margaret_
took to London in 1628. On its arrival, our picture was hung in the
king's private apartments in Whitehall. When he was beheaded, and his
collection sold, the Correggio was bought for £40 by the Duke of Alva,
and taken to Spain. It afterwards passed through several collections,
and ultimately into that of Murat, King of Naples. Upon his fall from
power his wife took it with her when she escaped to Vienna. During
the congress of sovereigns in 1822 her chamberlain communicated with
the ministers of all the Powers, with a view to the sale of this and
another Correggio (15). Russia was negotiating for the purchase of them
when Lord Londonderry, hearing by mere accident of the affair, went to
the chamberlain, paid the larger price against which Russia was holding
out, and despatched his courier post haste to Vienna to convey the
treasures to England. An attempt was made to stop him, but they reached
this country almost before the Russians had heard of the purchase.[45]
The picture has not come unscathed out of these changes and chances.
"Repairs," says Sir Edward Poynter, "are visible in many places.
Injudicious cleaning has done even more injury; and it has undoubtedly
been deprived of much of that final delicate surface-painting which,
in the hands of a great master, does so much to unite a picture into
one harmonious whole. It remains, nevertheless, one of the most
distinguished works in the collection" (_The National Gallery_, i. 4).