CORREGGIO

The two allegories, Allegory of Virtues and Allegory of Vices, were painted to complete the decoration of Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in the Palazzo Ducale of Mantua. These are some of the most enigmatic works of Correggio, their subject is difficult to decipher.

The two allegories, Allegory of Virtues and Allegory of Vices, were painted to complete the decoration of Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in the Palazzo Ducale of Mantua. These are some of the most enigmatic works of Correggio, their subject is difficult to decipher.

Born in Correggio, a small town equidistant between Mantua and Parma in northern Italy from which he takes his name, Antonio Allegri is now perhaps the least familiar of the great painters of the Italian Renaissance. His most important works - innovative vault and dome frescoes and many altarpieces - remain in Parma, the native city of his follower, Parmigianino. Only a relatively small number of other religious images, two allegorical pictures, and the artist’s six erotic paintings on mythological themes - including ‘The School of Love’ - for Federigo II Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua, have entered major European museums. Had a painter as accomplished and influential as Correggio been employed in a more self-conscious and self- publicising artistic centre, such as Florence or Rome, he would surely have been better documented in his lifetime. Were Parma still on the tourist trail, as it was in the more leisurely century of Grand Tourism, he might be better known today. Few of the millions of visitors to Rome now realise, for example, that the great Baroque dome and vault decorations of the city’s churches, flooded with heavenly light and dizzying crowds of saints and angels, emulate Correggio’s frescoes of a hundred years earlier, through the agency of Lanfranco, a painter from Parma. Equally, the playful sensuality of eighteenth-century Rococo art owes much to Correggio’s easel paintings in French royal collections.

The fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral of Parma marks the culmination of Correggio’s career as a mural painter. This fresco (a painting in plaster with water-soluble pigments) anticipates the Baroque style of dramatically illusionistic ceiling painting. The entire architectural surface is treated as a single pictorial unit of vast proportions, equating the dome of the church with the vault of heaven. The realistic way the figures in the clouds seem to protrude into the spectators’ space is an audacious and astounding use for the time of foreshortening.

Correggio accommodated the larger space of the octagonal cupola of Parma Cathedral by increasing the number of figures and the complexity of the design. A series of foreshortened figures acts as a device to visually lead the viewer up into the dome. Four gigantic saints provide a sense of support for the drum. As in the earlier frescoes for the cupola of San Giovanni Evangelista, Christ appears in the centre now much reduced in size, so as to emphasize a greater implied and actual distance.

The fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral of Parma marks the culmination of Correggio’s career as a mural painter. This fresco (a painting in plaster with water-soluble pigments) anticipates the Baroque style of dramatically illusionistic ceiling painting. The entire architectural surface is treated as a single pictorial unit of vast proportions, equating the dome of the church with the vault of heaven. The realistic way the figures in the clouds seem to protrude into the spectators’ space is an audacious and astounding use for the time of foreshortening.

This detail shows the Apostles.

This detail shows the angelic musicians.

Between the end of the 15th and the beginning of 16th century the nunnery of St Paul became one of the most active meeting places for the intellectuals in Parma. The nunnery was headed from 1507 to 1524 by Giovanna da Piacenza, an astute, cultured, and youthful mother superior. It was she who entrusted Correggio with the decoration of her bedchamber.

The paintings present themes that refer to antiquity, but they are based neither on a single classical text nor on an iconographic tradition.

Between the end of the 15th and the beginning of 16th century the nunnery of St Paul became one of the most active meeting places for the intellectuals in Parma. The nunnery was headed from 1507 to 1524 by Giovanna da Piacenza, an astute, cultured, and youthful mother superior. It was she who entrusted Correggio with the decoration of her bedchamber.

The fresco decoration of the Camera di San Paolo, a private room in a Parmese convent, was painted for a female patron. It provides further evidence of Correggio’s skill with ancient subject matter, particularly of a sensual nature. The program is ambitious and continues the decorative tradition exemplified by Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi. The imitation marble architecture as well as the arrangement of the figures engage the viewer to distinguish the real from the fictive. Correggio constructs a trellis of vines that give structure to his invention.

The interpretation of the represented themes is not easy in the case of unconventional depictions which are not based on known texts or particular iconographic traditions. Correggio’s decoration in the Camera di San Paolo is a good example of the “enigmatic” depictions generally found in small, private rooms.

The picture shows a detail of the ceiling of the Camera di San Paolo. Correggio’s decoration is related to the myth of Diana by alluding to the story of Actaeon with a putti who are displaying a stag’s head.

Correggio’s decorative scheme is enchanting, with the effect of garlanded and beribboned pergola stretching overhead, decorated with bunches of fruit. Oval openings give the spectator a view of cavorting putti in movement against the blue sky. Arches at the base of the pergola are painted as illusionistic niches filled with sculptures based on antique themes models.

Correggio’s masterpiece, Danaë, depicts one of the four stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses about the “Loves of Jupiter”, commissioned in around 1531 by Federico II Gonzaga in Mantua as a present for Charles V (the other scenes are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and the National Gallery, London).

The scene is set in an interior draped with rich and suitably folded hangings, framing a window opening onto the landscape, as if to “unveil” the union. Danaë, the daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos, and of Eurydice, had been shut up by her father in a tower with bronze doors, as it had been prophesied that she would gave birth to a son who would be the cause of Acrisius’ own death. But Zeus visited her in the form of a shower of gold falling from a cloud, and from their union Perseus was born. The maiden is reclining on a bed of classical design ornamented with knobs. Nearby Eros, as an intercessor between Zeus and the maiden, and representing divine desire, helps her to hold the sheet, so as not to loose the seed. At their feet two cupids, one wingless and the other winged, and intended as a contrast between “sacred love and profane love”, are busy engraving a tablet with an arrow. It is a perfectly handled and balanced scene, that, while reminiscent of Titian’s paintings, is not free of influence of Giulio Romano.

Correggio’s painting maintains a purity of style that never descends to the vulgarly erotic. Thus it reveals itself to be almost a prelude to some of Canova’s sculptures and to certain neoclassical solutions: that sheet, rumpled so as to resemble an unmade bed became a model for a great deal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting.

Danaë is frequently represented in Renaissance and Baroque painting.

You can view other depictions of Danaë in the Web Gallery of Art.

This painting, together with its companion piece the Martyrdom of Four Saints, was painted for the Del Bono chapel in San Giovanni, Parma. The unusual shape of the figures, which never fit into the scene, are probably due to the original dimensions of the chapel (which was later enlarged).

Two vertical canvases depicting Io and Ganymede, datable to 1531-32, are now in Vienna. These were made for Federico Gonzaga, first duke of Mantua. The duke intended to line a room in his palace with the Loves of Jupiter. Jupiter was a mythical ancestor of the Gonzaga family and, in his amorous exploits, not unlike Federigo.

The Abduction of Ganymede, who is carried off by Zeus in the form of an eagle, has been seen as an allegorical interpretation that prefigured, in its moralizing intent, St John the Evangelist which Correggio painted several times in the church of the same name, and as referring to the flight of the intellect, liberated from earthly desires, toward the heaven of contemplation.

Ganymede, the son of Tros, who gave his name to Troy, or of Laomedon, the father of Priam, was the most beautiful of mortal youths. Zeus chooses him as his cup-bearer and, covered with eagle feathers, takes him away from his earthly games and from his dog, that looks on in fear as the abduction takes place. The landscape beneath is of an almost eighteenth-century modernity, to the point where it resembles a transparent English watercolour.

Two vertical canvases depicting Io and Ganymede, datable to 1531-32, are now in Vienna. These were made for Federico Gonzaga, first duke of Mantua. The duke intended to line a room in his palace with the Loves of Jupiter. Jupiter was a mythical ancestor of the Gonzaga family and, in his amorous exploits, not unlike Federigo.

In the first picture, Io, daughter of Inachus, the first king of Argos, and of Melia, priestess of Hera, whose anger she aroused for having attracted the attention of Zeus, is invited by the latter, at night, in a dream, to follow him and lie with him in the meadows of Lerna. Zeus, camouflaged within a blackish cloud of constantly changing forms and in which his face and hand can be seen, undergoes new metamorphoses to conceal their loving from indiscreet gazes, covering them “with mist to show that divine things are concealed in the human face,” as Ovid puts it in his story.

The naked priestess leans against a white sheet and her body and face convey an impression of ecstasy, of pleasure and amorous rapture, revealing a particular capture for erotic suggestiveness. This was what was demanded by the culture of the Duke of Mantua and his court, which did not shrink from the power of painting to stir the imagination. The chiaroscuro is particularly effective, with the rocky sward covered with shrubs suggesting an abandoned place ideally suited to a secret assignation.

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Leda is playing in the stream with her maidens, and receives the embrace of the swan-god. Beautiful as the treatment is, it is decidedly voluptuous, and so incensed the pious zeal of Louis, son of the Regent at Paris, that he attacked it with a knife and cut off Leda’s head. The present head therefore is not Correggio’s but a restoration by Schlesingen.

Sorrow and glory are indistinguishable in this intimate work. Even the cloud-angels are solemn. The music-making angel on the right seems to play to the Child to sweeten the present, and distract him from his awareness of the future. The colours, too, are deep but muted. Correggio’s figures occupy more three-dimensional space than those of many of his contemporaries’ works.

The painting was probably cut down slightly on the sides and top, painted originally for a local church at the same time that he was working on the frescoes in the Cathedral. It can be considered as the companion of the Nativity (The Night) in Dresden.

Considered his masterpiece among the altarpieces, the composition is built up as a remote variation of the pyramidal arrangements favoured by Leonardo, broken by the dominating verticality of St Jerome on the left. The sacra conversazione is transformed into an informal and incidental narrative that takes place in a landscape. A makeshift red canopy has been constructed in the foreground, where his figures are massed on a compact, constricted plane. Their poses are particularly hard to reconstruct because they are either figures covered by draperies that effectively hide their structure, or are in intricate unnatural positions. As Correggio grew older, he began to take liberties with the conventions regarding the proportion of figures. Saint Jerome on the left, accompanied by his identifying lion, occupies almost the entire height of the painting, assuming a dominant role even in relation to the Madonna and Child. His thick, muscular right leg is strikingly long in comparison to his upper body and rather smallish head.

The pictorial effects derive from a masterly application of the oil paint, confident and elegant colour, and idealized, refined faces.

This fragmented fresco was detached from the facade of the oratory of the Blessed Virgin Mary (formerly at Porta San Michele) in 1812. Vasari described the fresco as follows: “Over the gates of the city Correggio also painted a Madonna and Child; it is astonishing to see the lovely colouring of this fresco which has won him the most enthusiastic praise, even from passing strangers, who have seen nothing else of his.”

This is Correggio’s penultimate great altarpiece, painted for the church of San Sepolcro. The frame was made by Marcantonio Zucchi to Correggio’s own design.

The flight of angels, clinging to the clouds, which so closely resembles the solutions adopted in the dome of the Cathedral of Parma and in The Night, is contrasted by the harmonious and static connection between the diagonal poses of the figures, creating a continuity that is reminiscent of the Madonna with Saint Jerome. The influence of Leonardo can be seen in the smile and attitude of the Virgin, and that of Raphael in the brilliant tints of the violets, the whites, and the orange-yellows.

If Correggio’s mythologies seem to anticipate the boudoir decorations of the eighteenth century, this ravishing tiny picture prefigures developments in seventeenth-century religious sentiment and imagery. Indeed, it may have directly affected them through drawn and engraved copies.

In this painting Correggio turns the theme of Holy Family into an idyll of innocence, of maternal and filial love. The scene is suffused with tenderness. Sitting outdoors under a tree, the Virgin, workbasket at her side, is trying a jacket she has just made on the Christ Child. He wriggles on her lap, reaching for the sun-dappled leaves. Mary is dressed in old rose, and the painting is dominated by the soft harmony of grey-pinks and grey-blues. In the background, pale as if in a haze of dust in the sunshine, Joseph is working with a carpenter’s plane. Their ramshackle home has been built abutting on grandiose ruins. The twisting, complex pose of the Virgin, the extreme foreshortening of the Child’s leg and groin, are made to seem effortless. Correggio’s famous ‘softness’, the gradual transitions from shadow to light which he learned from Leonardo’s Milanese works, but interpreted through a golden prism of Venetian colour, casts a seductive veil over the figures. Even though the scale of the picture invites close inspection, and the Virgin and Child are near to us, we cannot quite see them sharply in the blur and shimmer of the painter’s brush.

Correggio painted this altarpiece for the oratory of the confraternity of San Pietro Martire in Modena. Around the Madonna and Child are set St Gimignano who is holding a model of the city of Modena, of which he is the patron, along with St John the Baptist, St Peter the Martyr, patron of the confraternity, and St George with his foot on the dragon’s head. The putto closest to the foreground has a vivacity that brings Parmigianino to mind. Correggio is using a Mannerist back lighting, derived from Beccafumi.

Virgin and Child enthroned, on their left SS. Francis and Anthony of Padua. The first painting by Correggio of which we have documentary record and authentic date. Still very Ferrarese in character but showing also Mantegna’s influence.

This early painting, showing mantegnesque elements, is close in style to the Madonna with St Francis in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

The painting was commissioned in October 1522 and completed at the end of the decade. It has been described as the first monumental nocturnal scene in European painting, and it is an ideal companion to the Madonna with St Jerome, also known as The Day, painted only a few years earlier for another private chapel.

The artist, following the trail blazed by a number of celebrated works by Titian, interprets a scene that is fully ‘à la chandell’ and produces an outstanding result. The light appears simultaneously to bathe and to emerge from the Child, who is lying on a rough pallet, only to soften on the face of the Virgin, tenderly rapt in a maternal embrace. They are surrounded by the fluid gestures of the shepherds and of St Joseph, who is holding back the donkey, and by the kicking legs of the angels transported by the cloud that spreads hazily through the picture.

Although attenuated by the dim nocturnal light that tones down all the shades, the painting is not lacking in color and the chiaroscuro spreads over and softens every form, bringing out their rotundities and caressing those leaves that are reminiscent of Leonardo and Veneto-Ferrarese painting. It is a picture that points the way toward the future Lombard investigation of luministic effects, and was used as a model by such painters as Procaccini, Reni, and Domenichino, and even later on, by Barocci and Maratta.

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Untempted by Rome, Florence or Venice, Correggio, working in the North Italian city of Parma, maintained his originality throughout the High Renaissance and became one of the most important influences on seventeenth-century Baroque painting. However, he was receptive to the art particularly of Raphael and Leonardo: his sense of ideal beauty and the structure of his compositions owe much to Raphael, while his handling of textures and light presupposes Leonardo.

In this work he uses a pyramidal composition of classic High Renaissance kind and a diagonal movement anticipating the Baroque. The beautiful landscape evokes the light of dawn, the time when Mary Magdalene met Christ by the tomb.

A marked change can be observed in the style of Correggio after 1520 which is apparent in the decorations that he realized in the great Benedictine construction in Parma, the church of San Giovanni Evangelista. There is no doubt that earlier visits to Rome to see Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican had an impression on him.

The painter was commissioned to decorate the dome with its pendentives, the apse of the main chapel, the candelabrum motifs in the transept over the high altar, and the frieze of the nave.

The dome whose vault has no lantern and only receives light from the four oculi set in the drum, was reserved for the illustration of the Passing away of Saint John, the last of the Apostles to die, aged over a hundred, at Ephesus. It is a traditional belief that at the moment of his death Christ came to meet him, surrounded by all Apostles.

This portrait of an unknown lady is one of the rare portraits by Correggio. Among those purported to be the subject of this portrait is the notorious poisoner Lucretia Borgia and Salome, the legendary step-daughter of Herod Antipas, among others. A better-founded but still speculative interpretation is that she is the poet Veronica Gambara (1485-1550), who ruled the principality of Correggio after the death of her husband. The laurel tree symbolizes the model’s poetic gifts, and the ivy indicates her married (widowed) status. The word on the inner edge of the bowl reads (in Greek letters) “nepenthes” which means a medicine for sorrow, supporting indirectly the interpretation that the sitter is a poet.

This painting was commissioned in c. 1520 by jurist Francesco Munari - affluent jurist and a man of great culture - for the family chapel of the Immaculate Conception in the Church of St Francis in Correggio. For this small altarpiece, Correggio draws inspiration from a miraculous episode narrated in the apocryphal gospel of pseudo-Matthew: Mary stopped to rest under a date palm and, seeing it full of fruits, she asked Joseph to pick some. However, considering the fruits were too high to reach, Joseph replied they should rather think about finding some water. Jesus then asked the palm to bend its branches so they could refresh themselves with its fruits, and at its roots there appeared a spring of clear water. Correggio paints the moment when Joseph, still holding a branch, offers Jesus some fruits. The intimate dimension of the event is rendered in the serenity of affections within the family group in everyday life, amidst luxuriant natural surroundings (in this case the welcoming shade of the palm tree and of the oak grove).

Correggio’s style merges Leonardo’s expression of the variety of affections with Raphael’s classical harmony. The Child, standing on Mary’s knees, holds out his hand to take the fruits, but his intense gaze is turned towards the observer. The Virgin, universal mediatrix, is seated under the palm tree and looks to her left towards St Francis including him in the life of the group, though chronologically extraneous to the narrative. Its presence is justified both as the namesake saint of the patron, Francesco Munari, and for the church designation, belonging to the Franciscan Order.

The work, sold by the Franciscan friars to duke Francesco d’Este in 1638, was acquired soon afterwards by grand duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici in exchange for the Sacrifice of Isaac by Andrea del Sarto (now in Dresden). The small altarpiece immediately hung in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, among the masterpieces of the Medici collections.

The Duke of Mantua Ferdinando Gonzaga gave Grand Duke Cosimo II de’Medici this picture as a present in 1617; the canvas was put in the Uffizi Tribune, beside the best masterworks of Medicean collection. The luminous brightness that emanates from the Child and the expressive gesture of the Virgin are characteristic of the artist’s style, whose sentimental and devotional taste was developed by Baroque painters.

This is one of the six erotic paintings on mythological themes made by Correggio for Federico II Gonzaga, Lord of Mantua.

Correggio’s artistic formation was unusually dependent on his geographical origins. Working in Parma, within the larger triangle of Venice, Milan and Rome, he drew on the disparate pictorial traditions of these cities as well as on the Mantuan works of Mantegna and on prints from across the Alps. The blurred contours, veiled transitions from rosy shadow to gold and white highlight and from flesh to feather, and the elusive mood of ‘The School of Love’ recall Giorgione, but Leonardo’s influence is also evident in the exquisitely silky hair, the dreamy smiles, the complex pose of Venus. X-rays reveal major alterations: Mercury and Venus may even have exchanged places. This method of working directly on the canvas derives from Venice. Yet Correggio draws these various elements together in an entirely individual way, partly through his method of composition.

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This panel belongs to a large group of Madonna painting where Correggio expressed his feminine ideal. He painted this subject previously in several small paintings and later it was copied or imitated in the 19th century.

The picture shows a detail of the ceiling of the Camera di San Paolo.

The Three Graces, a classical theme that became popular in the Renaissance, was based upon Roman sculptures of the subject, including a well-known group that survived in Siena. It was rendered in reliefs and paintings, including the small picture by Raphael. Correggio’s approach is loose and while the figures are intended to represent marble, they reveal soft flesh that is nothing like cold stone, and their proportions are full almost to the point of exaggeration.

This painting is probably the companion-piece of The Education of Cupid in the National Gallery, London. It shows a lustful satyr uncovering Venus sleeping in sensuous abandon on the ground. She represents the Terrestrial Venus’ of carnal passion. In the National Gallery canvas, a winged Venus and Mercury unite in instructing Cupid, as married lovers educate their offspring or the benevolent planets which these divinities personify influence children born under their zodiacal signs. This ‘Celestial Venus’, however, appears no less desirable than her earthly Parisian sister.

The painting is sometimes erroneously called The Sleep of Antiope.

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This painting was extraordinarily popular for several centuries, and many versions, engravings and copies of it have survived. However, the quality of the Budapest picture, especially the tender modelling and expressive beauty of faces and hands, have led scholars to believe that this must be the original painting so greatly treasured in seventeenth-century Rome, and reproduced in a contemporary engraving. The landscape background seen in the engraving is hardly visible in the painting, which has darkened considerably with age.