One of the most distinctive and perhaps the most sensuous of the
Italian masters is Correggio (1494-1534), who takes his name from his
birthplace, Il Correggio, a small town near Modena. It was natural,
therefore, that he should have become the pupil of Francesco Bianchi
of the school of Modena. Correggio came under almost all the leading
influences which distinguish the principal Italian schools of the
early sixteenth century. His “sidelong grace,” his subtle gradations
of tone, his daring foreshortening, his sublimity of space and light,
his vivid imagination, his profound knowledge of chiaroscuro, render
him an isolated phenomenon in Italian art at the moment when it was
passing into precipitate decline. His _Marriage of St. Catherine_
(No. 1117, Plate XV.) entirely lacks the dignity and solemnity which
are the dominant features of truly religious art. The figures which
make up this fascinating composition are delicate, but by no means
of an elevated type. This pseudo-religious picture, when studied
together with the _Jupiter and Antiope_ (No. 1118), shows the justice
of the criticism that Correggio’s pictures are “hymns to the charm of
femininity the like of which have never been known before or since in
Christian Europe.” It is more remarkable that this mythological canvas,
which is so full of sensuous vitality, should have been added to the
royal collection of England in the seventeenth century than that it
should have been allowed by Cromwell to leave the country a few years
later. Two Allegories of _Virtue_ and _Vice_, executed by Correggio in
gouache, hang in one of the Rooms of Drawings.
Parmigianino (1504-1540), an imitator of Correggio and in a less degree
of Raphael, who were both shortlived artists, painted the two small
panels of a _Holy Family_ (No. 1385), and a _Holy Family and Saints_
(No. 1386).