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Her marvelous resemblance to Leoline, in all but one thing, struck him more and more there was the same beautiful transparent colorless complexion, the same light, straight, graceful figure, the same small oval delicate features; the same profuse waves of shining dark hair, the same large, dark, brilliant eyes; the same, little, rosy pretty mouth, like one of Correggio's smiling angels.
His angels, too, in S. Cristoforo, as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensity of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality.
The original aims of the Eclectics are well summed up in a sonnet by Agostino Carracci, which has been translated as follows: "Let him who wishes to be a good painter acquire the design of Rome, Venetian action and Venetian management of shade, the dignified color of Lombardy that is of Leonardo da Vinci the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, Titian's truth and nature, the sovereign purity of Correggio's style and the just symmetry of a Raphael, the decorum and well-grounded study of Tibaldi, the invention of the learned Primaticcio, and a little of Parmigianino's grace; but without so much study and weary labor let him apply himself to imitate the works which our Niccolò dell Abbate left us here."
His immobility, his admiration, can only be understood by other souls open to ideal beauty, to the ineffable joy of beholding art made perfect; such as these can stand for whole hours before the Antiope Correggio's masterpiece before Leonardo's Gioconda, Titian's Mistress, Andrea del Sarto's Holy Family, Domenichino's Children Among the Flowers, Raphael's little cameo, or his Portrait of an Old Man Art's greatest masterpieces.
Correggio's pictures go to prove that under his seemingly quiet exterior he was a man of the liveliest sensibilities and the keenest perceptions, His pictures, unlike Titian's in their repose, are full of motion and excitement.
Reynolds, who was fond both of colour and strong tone contrast, had to compromise, as he tells us in his lectures, by making the shadows all the same brown colour, to keep a harmony in his work. A further development of the composition formula illustrated by Correggio's "Venus". Added force is given by lighting with low direct light elimination half-tones.
This painting is not characteristic of Correggio's work, but nevertheless it is very beautiful. The brilliant warm light which comes from the Infant Jesus in His mother's arms is reflected upon the faces of those gathered about, and even illuminates the angelic group hovering above him.
The same authority tells us of Correggio, that he has painted 'the very heart-throbs of humanity. But it seems as if such a nature, with its self-conscious veil of forced stillness, must have had a tendency to vehemence and excess; and so we hear that Correggio's fore-shortening was sometimes violent, and the energy of his actors spasmodic; thus the cruelly smart contemporary criticism was pronounced on his frescoes of the 'Assumption of the Virgin, in which legs and arms in wild play are chiefly conspicuous from below, that Correggio had prepared for the Parmese 'a fricassée of frogs. In addition, the great modern critic, Mr Ruskin, has boldly accused Correggio 'both of weakness and meretriciousness, and there is this to be said of a nature so highly strung as Correggio's was strung, that it was not a healthily balanced nature.
There seem to have been few unusual events in Correggio's life; very little that helps us to judge the man, but there is a general opinion that he was a kind and devoted father and husband, as well as a good citizen. With little demand upon his moral character, he did his work, did it well, and his work alone gave him place and fame.
And Dutch trickeries of base resemblance, and French fancies of insidious beauty, soon occupied the eyes of the populace of Europe, too restless and wretched now to care for the sweet earth-berries and Madonna's ivy of Cima, and too ignoble to perceive Titian's colour, or Correggio's shade. Enough sources of evil were here, in the temper and power of the consummate art.
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