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Correggio
Selection copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All rights
reserved. This
edition may not be reproduced or redistributed to third parties
without
permission of the author.
[From the essay on "Parma" in Sketches in
Italy and Greece, 1874. I have divided the essay
into shorter paragraphs than the original.]
What, then, is the Correggiosity of Correggio? In other words,
what is the characteristic which, proceeding from the personality
of the artist, is impressed on all his work? The answer to this
question, though by no means simple, may perhaps be won by a
process of gradual analysis. The first thing that strikes us in
the art of Correggio is, that he has aimed at the realistic
representation of pure unrealities. His saints and angels are
beings the like of whom we have hardly seen upon the earth. Yet
they are displayed before us with all the movement and the vivid
truth of nature. Next we feel that what constitutes the
superhuman, visionary quality of these creatures, is their
uniform beauty of a merely sensuous type. They are all created
for pleasure, not for thought or passion or activity or heroism.
The uses of their brains, their limbs, their every feature, end
in enjoyment; innocent and radiant wantonness is the condition
of their whole existence.
Correggio conceived the universe under the one mood of
sensuous joy: his world was bathed in luxurious light; its
inhabitants were capable of little beyond a soft voluptuousness.
Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway, and very rarely did
he attempt to enter on it: nothing, for example, can be feebler
than his endeavour to express anguish in the distorted features
of Madonna, St John, and the Magdalen, who are bending over the
dead body of a Christ extended in the attitude of languid repose.
In like manner he could not deal with subjects which demand
a pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates
like young and joyous Bacchantes. Place rose-garlands and thyrsi
in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human
destinies, and they might figure appropriately upon the panels
of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii. In this respect Correggio might
be termed the Rossini of painting. The melodies of the Stabat
Mater — Fac ut portem or Quis est homo —
are the exact analogues in music of Correggio's voluptuous
renderings of grave or mysterious motives.
Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of
composition which subordinates the fancy to the reason, and which
seeks for the highest intellectual beauty in a kind of
architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness
in detail. The Florentines and those who shared their spirit
— Michael Angelo and Leonardo and Raphael — deriving
this principle of design from the geometrical art of the middle
ages, converted it to the noblest uses in their vast well-ordered
compositions. But Correggio ignored the laws of scientific
construction. It was enough for him to produce a splendid and
brilliant effect by the life and movement of his figures, and by
the intoxicating beauty of his forms. His type of beauty, too,
is by no means elevated. Leonardo painted souls whereof the
features and the limbs are but an index. The charm of Michael
Angelo's ideal is like a flower upon a tree of rugged strength.
Raphael aims at the loveliness which cannot be disjoined from
goodness. But Correggio is contented with bodies "delicate
and desirable." His angels are genii disimprisoned from the
perfumed chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic paradise,
elemental spirits of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime.
 To accuse the painter of conscious immorality or of what is
stigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his
seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination.
They belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they
combine a certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of
inspiration, a delight in rapid movement as they revel amid
clouds or flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness
of the master's style. When infantine or child-like, these
celestial sylphs are scarcely to be distinguished for any noble
quality of beauty from Murillo's cherubs, and are far less divine
than the choir of children who attend Madonna in Titian's
"Assumption." But in their boyhood and their prime of
youth, they acquire a fullness of sensuous vitality and a
radiance that are peculiar to Correggio. The lily-bearer who
helps to support St Thomas beneath the dome of the cathedral at
Parma, the groups of seraphs who crowd behind the Incoronata of
San Giovanni, and the two wild-eyed open-mouthed St Johns
stationed at each side of the celestial throne, are among the
most splendid instances of the adolescent loveliness conceived
by Correggio. Where the painter found their models may be
questioned but not answered; for he has made them of a different
fashion from the race of mortals: no court of Roman emperor or
Turkish sultan, though stocked with the flowers of Bithynian an
Circassian youth, have seen their like. Mozart's Cherubino seems
to have sat for all of them. At any rate they incarnate the very
spirit of the songs he sings.
As a consequence of this predilection for sensuous and
voluptuous forms, Correggio had no power of imagining grandly or
severely. Satisfied with material realism in his treatment even
of sublime mysteries, he converts the hosts of heaven in a
"fricassee of frogs," according to the old epigram. His
apostles, gazing after the Virgin who has left the earth, are
thrown into attitudes so violent and so dramatically
foreshortened, that seen from below upon the pavement of the
cathedral, little of their form is distinguishable except legs
and arms in vehement commotion. Very different is Titian's
conception of this scene. To express the spiritual meaning, the
emotion of Madonna's transit, with all the pomp which colour and
splendid composition can convey, is Titian's sole care; whereas
Correggio appears to have been satisfied with realising the
tumult of heaven rushing to meet earth, and earth straining
upwards to ascend to heaven in violent commotion — a very
orgasm of frenetic rapture. The essence of the event is
forgotten: its external manifestation alone is presented to the
eye; and only the accessories of beardless angels and cloud-
encumbered cherubs are really beautiful amid a surge of limbs in
restless movement.
More dignified, because designed with more repose, is the
Apocalypse of St John painted upon the cupola of San Giovanni.
The apostles throned on clouds, with which the dome is filled,
gaze upward to one point. Their attitudes are noble; their form
is heroic; in their eyes there is the strange ecstatic look by
which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it
is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-
savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental
genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the
salamanders of an empyrean intolerable to mortal sense. The point
on which their eyes converge, the culmination of their vision,
is the figure of Christ. Here all the weakness of Correggio's
method is revealed. He had undertaken to realise by no ideal
allegorical suggestion, by no symbolism of architectural
grouping, but by actual prosaic measurement, by corporeal form
in subjection to the laws of perspective and foreshortening,
things which in their very essence admit of only a figurative
revelation. Therefore his Christ, the centre of all those earnest
eyes, is contracted to a shape in which humanity itself is mean,
a sprawling figure which irresistibly reminds one of a frog. The
clouds on which the saints repose are opaque and solid; cherubs
in countless multitudes, a swarm of merry children, crawl about
upon these feather beds of vapour, creep between the legs of the
apostles, and play at bopeep behind their shoulders. There is no
propriety in their appearance there. They take no interest in the
beatific vision. They play no part in the celestial symphony; nor
are they capable of more than merely infantine enjoyment.
Correggio has sprinkled them lavishly like living flowers about
his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn
strain of music, but was forced by his temperament to overlay the
melody with roulades.
Gazing at these frescoes, the thought came to me that
Correggio was like a man listening to sweetest flute-playing, and
translating phrase after phrase as they passed through his fancy
into laughing faces, breezy tresses, and rolling mists. Sometimes
a grander cadence reached his ear; and then St Peter with the
keys, or St Augustine of the mighty brow, or the inspired eyes
of St John, took form beneath his pencil. But the light airs
returned, and rose and lily faces bloomed again for him among the
clouds. It is not therefore in dignity or sublimity that
Correggio excels, but in artless grace and melodious tenderness.
The Madonna della Scala clasping her baby with a caress which the
little child returns, St Catherine leaning in a rapture of
ecstatic love to wed the infant Christ, St Sebastian in the bloom
of almost boyish beauty, are the so-called sacred subjects to
which the painter was adequate, and which he has treated with the
voluptuous tenderness we find in his pictures of Leda and Danae
and Io. Could these saints and martyrs descend from Correggio's
canvas, and take flesh, and breathe, and begin to live; of what
high action, of what grave passion, of what exemplary conduct in
any walk of life would they be capable? That is the question
which they irresistibly suggest; and we are forced to answer,
None! The moral and religious world did not exist for Correggio.
His art was but a way of seeing carnal beauty in a dream that had
no true relation to reality.
Correggio's sensibility to light and colour was exactly on
a par with his feeling for form. He belongs to the poets of
chiaroscuro and the poets of colouring; but in both regions he
maintains the individuality so strongly expressed in his choice
of purely sensuous beauty. Tintoretto makes use of light and
shade for investing his great compositions with dramatic
intensity. Rembrandt interprets sombre and fantastic moods of the
mind by golden gloom and silvery irradiation, translating thought
into the language of penumbral mystery. Leonardo studies the laws
of light scientifically, so that the proper roundness and effect
of distance should be accurately rendered, and all the subtleties
of nature's smiles be mimicked. Correggio is content with fixing
on his canvas the many-twinkling laughter of light in motion,
rained down through fleecy clouds or trembling foliage, melting
into half-shadows, bathing and illuminating every object with a
soft caress. There are no tragic contrasts of splendour sharply
defined on blackness, no mysteries of half-felt and pervasive
twilight, no studied accuracies of noonday clearness in his work.
Light and shadow are woven together on his figures like an
impalpable Coan gauze, aerial and transparent, enhancing the
palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved.
His colouring, in like manner, has none of the superb and
mundane pomp which the Venetians affected; it does not glow or
burn or beat the fire of gems into our brain; joyous and wanton,
it seems to be exactly such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for
its satiety. There is nothing in his hues to provoke deep passion
or to stimulate the yearnings of the soul: the pure blushes of
the dawn and the crimson pyres of sunset are nowhere in the world
that he has painted. But that chord of jocund colour which may
fitly be married to the smiles of light, the blues which are
found in laughing eyes, the pinks that tinge the cheeks of early
youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of healthy flesh, mingle
as in a marvellous pearl-shell on his pictures.
Both chiaroscuro and colouring have this supreme purpose in
art, to affect the sense like music, and like music to create a
mood in the soul of the spectator. Now the mood which Correggio
stimulates is one of natural and thoughtless pleasure. To feel
his influence, and at the same moment to be the subject of strong
passion, or fierce lust, or heroic resolve, or profound
contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is impossible. Wantonness,
innocent because unconscious of sin, immoral because incapable
of any serious purpose, is the quality which prevails in all that
he has painted. The pantomimes of a Mahommedan paradise might be
put upon the stage after patterns supplied by this least
spiritual of painters.
It follows from this analysis that the Correggiosity of
Correggio, that which sharply distinguished him from all previous
artists, was the faculty of painting a purely voluptuous dream
of beautiful beings in perpetual movement, beneath the laughter
of morning light, in a world of never-failing April hues. When
he attempts to depart from the fairy-land of which he was the
Prospero, and to match himself with the masters of sublime
thought or earnest passion, he proves his weakness. But within
his own magic circle he reigns supreme, no other artist having
blended the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro, and faunlike
loveliness of form into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous
charm. Bewitched by the strains of the siren, we pardon
affectations of expression, emptiness of meaning, feebleness of
composition, exaggerated and melodramatic attitudes.
There is what Goethe called a demonic influence in the art
of Correggio: "in poetry," said Goethe to Eckermann,
"especially in that which is unconscious, before which
reason and understanding fall short, and which therefore produces
effects so far surpassing all conception, there is always
something demonic." It is not to be wondered that Correggio,
possessed of this demonic power in the highest degree, and
working to a purely sensuous end, should have exercised a fatal
influence over art.
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