Antonio da Correggio

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Antonio Allegri da Correggio (Correggio, Italy August 1489 – March 5, 1534) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance.

It is not alway possible to identify a stylistic link between his paintings. Correggio is an enigmatically eclectic provincial painter; he appears to have emerged out of no major apprenticeship, and had little immediate influence in apprenticed successors, but his works are now considered to have been revolutionary and influential to subsequent artists. A century after Correggio's death, his work was well known to Vasari, who felt that he had not had enough Roman exposure to make him a better painter. They seem to prefigure many mannerist and baroque stylistic approaches. In other words, he appears to have fostered artistic granchildren, despite being barren of direct disciples outside of Parma. In Parma, he was highly influential of Giovanni Maria Francesco Rondani, Parmigianino, and Giorgio Gandini del Grano.

He was born near the town of Reggio in Emilia. Little is known about Correggio's life or training. He may have apprenticed to the Modenese Francesco Bianchi Ferrara. His date of birth is uncertain. We have no work documented prior to 1514. There are echoes of Mantegna's style in his work, and he was influenced also by Lorenzo Costa and Leonardo da Vinci. Correggio was an elder contemporary of Parmigianino, albeit their painting styles were very different.

His first documented work was the Madonna of St. Francis altarpiece (1514, now in Dresden Gemäldegalerie) for the Franciscan monastery in Corregio. He worked mostly in a provincial center, such as Parma and as opposed to Florence, Rome, Milan, or Venice). Vasari claims, on hearsay alone, that Corregio honed his skilled draftsmanship in Parma, since he never traveled to Rome. He moved Parma, the locus of most of his works, by 1518. His first major commission was the ceiling of the the private dining salon of a mother superior of the Convent of St Paul, called Camera di San Paolo. Here he painted a delightful arbor with playful cherub-filled oculi. [1] While painted for the local convent, it hearkens to the secular frescoes of the pleasure palace of the Villa Farnesina in Rome.

He then painted the illusionistic Vision of St. John on Patmos (1520-21) for the dome of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista. Three years later he would decorate the dome of the cathedral of Parma with a startling Assumption of the Virgin, crowded with layers of receding figures in perspective.[2] The complexity of the work, and its disruption of the architeral roof and suggestiong of divine infinity was innovative. Most fresco work was framed as canvases upon walls.

Other masterpieces include The Lamentation and The Martyrdom of Four Saints [3], both at the Galleria Nazionale of Parma. The Lamentation is haunted by a lambence that is rarely hertofore seen in Italian painting. The Martyrdom is also a striking work resembling later Baroque arrangements, such as those of Bernini (Truth) and Ercole Ferrata (Death of Saint Agnes) and others, showing an emotively gleeful saints entering martyrdom.

 

Loves of Jupiter

In addition to his religious art, he produced a set of 4 mythological masterpiece paintings centered around the Loves of Jupiter as itemized in Ovid's Metamorphosis. The set was commisioned by Federico Gonzaga II of Mantua and intended as a gift to the visiting Holy Roman Emperor Charles I; thus, within a few years of completion(c 1532), these paintings had left Italy, and thus were likely not influential to subsequent painting in Italy.

They are stunning and elegantly sensous. "Leda and the Swan", now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, is an orgy of events: a central one with Leda straddling a swan, and on the right half, a sheltering but satisfied maiden. Danae now in the Borghese Gallery shows the maiden being inpregnated by a gilded brocade of rain [4] and [5]. Semi-covered by sheets, Danae appears more innocent and gleeful than Titian's 1545 version [6]of the same topic, where the rain is numismatic. Some reviews group Anthiope and the Satyr with this series.[7] Ganymede abducted by the Eagle (Jupiter) depicts the young man aloft in literal amourous flight [8]. Some have interpreted the abduction as a metaphor for the effects of John the Evangelist; however, given the erotic context of the other paintings, this seems unlikely. This painting and it partner "Jupiter and Io" are in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This final painting (featured here) is unlike any contemporary painting. The sinuously placed Io is enveloped by the dark lustful divinity, fitfully coalescing into misty hand and face. The painting succeeds, perhaps along with Danae, because it so deftly depicts the figuratively undepictable force of divinity joined with vivid passion. These paintings foreshadow the amorous trysts depicted by late Baroque artists.

See Titian's darker Anthiope and the Satyr (1540) [9] or his turbulent Jupiter and Europa.