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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.
Sabba da Castiglione, that fastidious scholar and refined writer of the sixteenth century, counted himself fortunate because as a boy he had seen and known "this most famous, most courteous and gifted cavalier in all Italy." Ariosto saw him in his vision upholding the Fountain of Song, and chanting in his own lofty and noble style "Un Signor di Correggio Con alto stil par che cantando scriva."
The first acquaintance with a great work of art has usually proved an important event in every young artist's life. When Correggio first gazed on Raphael's 'Saint Cecilia, he felt within himself an awakened power, and exclaimed, "And I too am a painter" So Constable used to look back on his first sight of Claude's picture of 'Hagar, as forming an epoch in his career.
In 1448, at the age of twenty-one, this brilliant lady had wedded Borso da Correggio, a brother of the reigning prince of that city, and, after her first husband's early death, had become the wife of Tristan Sforza, an illegitimate son of the great Condottiere Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan.
As for his criticism, I am sorry to remember only one. It was upon the picture of the Nativity, by Correggio, in the Tribune, where the mother is kneeling before the Child, and adoring it in an awful rapture, because she sees the eternal God in its baby face and figure.
In the Prado there is no one else present when he is by, with his Philips and Charleses, and their "villainous hanging of the nether lip," with his hideous court dwarfs and his pretty princes and princesses, his grandees and jesters, his allegories and battles, his pastorals and chases, which fitly have a vast salon to themselves, not only that the spectator may realize at once the rich variety and abundance of the master, but that such lesser lights as Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rembrandt, Zurbaran, El Greco, Murillo, may not be needlessly dimmed by his surpassing splendor.
Like Raphael, Correggio died young; but his brief life was spent in comparative obscurity and solitude. Far from the society of scholars and artists, ignorant of courts, unpatronised by princes, he wrought for himself alone the miracle of brightness and of movement that delights us in his frescoes and his easel-pictures. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden,
From the works of these architects Odo formed his first conception of the earlier, more virile manner which the first contact with Graeco-Roman antiquity had produced. The Count told him, too, of the great painters whose popularity had been lessened, if their fame had not been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido, Guercino, and the Bolognese school.
From Modena Girolamo went to Parma, where he had heard that there were some works by the same Correggio, and he copied some of the pictures in the tribune of the Duomo, considering them extraordinary works, particularly the beautiful foreshortening of the Madonna, who is ascending into Heaven, surrounded by a multitude of Angels, with the Apostles, who are standing gazing on her as she ascends, and four Saints, Protectors of that city, who are in the niches S. John the Baptist, who is holding a lamb; S. Joseph, the husband of Our Lady; S. Bernardo degli Uberti the Florentine, a Cardinal and Bishop of Florence; and another Bishop.
Raphael's pictures stood in one row, Titian's in another, Guido Rheni's in a third. One part of the wall was peopled by Hannabal Carrache, another by Correggio, and another by Rubens. To be short, there was not a great master among the dead who had not contributed to the embellishment of this side of the gallery.
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