Antonio Allegri da Correggio (August 1489 – 5 March 1534), usually known as just Correggio (/kəˈrɛdʒioʊ/, also UK: /kɒˈ-/, US: /-dʒoʊ/,[1][2][3]Italian:[korˈreddʒo]) was an Italian Renaissance painter who was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the High Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the sixteenth century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured the Baroque art of the seventeenth century and the Rococo art of the eighteenth century. He is considered a master of chiaroscuro.
Early life
Antonio Allegri was born in
Correggio, a small town near Reggio Emilia. His date of birth is uncertain (around 1489). His father was a merchant.[4] Otherwise little is known about Correggio's early life or training. It is, however, often assumed that he had his first artistic education from his father's brother, the painter Lorenzo Allegri.[5]
In 1503–1505, he was apprenticed to
Dresden Gemäldegalerie
).
One of his sons, Pomponio Allegri, became an undistinguished painter. Both father and son occasionally referred to themselves using the Latinized form of the family name, Laeti.[6]
Works in Parma
Mannerist painter. In 1519 he married Girolama Francesca di Braghetis, also of Correggio, who died in 1529.[7]
From this period are the Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John, Christ Leaving His Mother and the lost Madonna of Albinea.
Correggio's first major commission (February–September 1519) was the ceiling decoration of a private chamber of the mother-superior (abbess Giovanna Piacenza) of the convent of St. Paul in Parma, now known as Camera di San Paolo. Here he painted an arbor pierced by oculi opening to glimpses of playful cherubs. Below the oculi are lunettes with images of statues in feigned monochromic marble. The fireplace is frescoed with an image of Diana. The iconography of the scheme is complex, combining images of classical marbles with whimsical colorful bambini.
He then painted the illusionistic
Baciccio in Roman churches. The massing of spectators in a vortex, creating both narrative and decoration, the illusionistic obliteration of the architectural roof-plane, and the thrusting perspective toward divine infinity, were devices without precedent, and which depended on the extrapolation of the mechanics of perspective. The recession and movement implied by the figures presage the dynamism that would characterize Baroque
painting.
Other masterpieces include
Truth and Ercole Ferrata's Death of Saint Agnes, showing a gleeful saint entering martyrdom.[8]
Mythological series
Jupiter and Io (c. 1531) typifies the unabashed eroticism, radiance, and cool, pearly colors associated with Correggio's best work.
Aside from his religious output, Correggio conceived a now-famous set of paintings depicting the Loves of Jupiter as described in
Palazzo Te. However, they were given to the visiting Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
and thus left Italy within years of their completion.
Borghese Gallery, depicts the maiden as she is impregnated by a curtain of gilded divine rain. Her lower torso semi-obscured by sheets, Danae appears more demure and gleeful than Titian's 1545 version of the same topic, where the rain is more accurately numismatic. The picture once called Antiope and the Satyr is now correctly identified as Venus and Cupid with a Satyr
.
Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle depicts the young man aloft in literal amorous flight. Some have interpreted the conjunction of man and eagle as a metaphor for the evangelist John; however, given the erotic context of this and other paintings, this seems unlikely. This painting and its partner, the masterpiece of Jupiter and Io, are in Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna. Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle, one of the four mythological paintings commissioned by Federico II Gonzaga, is a proto-Baroque work due to its depiction of movement, drama, and diagonal compositional arrangement.
Death
Returning to his home town in later years, Correggio died there suddenly on 5 March 1534. The following day he was buried in San Francesco in Correggio near his youthful masterpiece, the 'Madonna di San Francesco', housed today in Dresden. The precise location of his tomb is now unknown.
Correggio was remembered by his contemporaries as a shadowy, melancholic, and introverted character. An enigmatic and eclectic artist, he appears to have emerged from no major apprenticeship. In addition to the influence of Costa, there are echoes of
Vasari, who felt that he had not had enough "Roman" exposure to make him a better painter. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his works were often noted in the diaries of foreign visitors to Italy, which led to a reevaluation of his art during the period of Romanticism
. The flight of the Madonna in the vault of the cupola of the Cathedral of Parma inspired many scenographical decorations in lay and religious palaces during those centuries.
Correggio's illusionistic experiments, in which imaginary spaces replace the natural reality, seem to prefigure many elements of
St. Jerome, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, c. 1515–1518Madonna della Scala (c. 1523)—Fresco, 196 × 141.8 cm, Galleria Nazionale, Parma
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The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, c. 1526–27
Head of Christ (1525–1530)
Venus and Cupid(1525)
Assumption of the Virgin, Duomo, Parma, 1522–30
Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle (1531–32)
Portrait of a Man (c. 1520), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
_(Italian)_-_Head_of_Christ_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
Media related to Antonio da Correggio at Wikimedia Commons
