Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/432

402 Painting was yet wanting in the masterpieces of his cotemporaries, which appeared hard and dry compared with the soft melting lines, the gliding outlines, and transparent shadows of his graceful conceptions. He delighted in depicting the pleasurable emotions; and all his figures express heavenly rapture or earthly bliss : they are bathed, so to speak, in the joy of existence, and even in suffering have an expression of gentle melancholy rather than of woe. All is life, movement, and variety ; but it must be owned that, in his love of expressing the passions, he sometimes degenerated into affectation. Of Correggio's early life little is known. He neither belonged to the noble family De Allegris, nor was he brought up in poverty ; both of which have been recorded of him. His early teachers in art were men of no note, but in 1511 he visited Mantua, and was much influenced by the works of Mantegna. His genius ripened early, and on his return to Correggio in 1514, at about the age of twenty, he executed for the Franciscan Convent at Carpi, a large altar-piece known as the Madonna di S. Francesco, now in the Dresden Gallery, and a few years later a series of frescoes in the convent of S. Paolo, at Parma, in which the influence of Da Vinci is very noticeable. In 1520 Correggio was commissioned to paint the cupola and choir of S. Giovanni, at Parma, which town he had previously visited in 1515. For the former he chose as a subject the Ascension of Christ. The pictures, though some are removed and others much damaged, exhibit considerable grandeur of design, and are remarkable for the extensive use of fore- shortening which the study of perspective had introduced ; and for the latter the Coronation of the Virgin, now in