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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 153 °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).