consequently in 1786 he fled to France, and remained there till the death of Pedro III., when he again took up his residence with Alafoès. But having given a lodging in the palace to a French Girondist, he was forced to flee to England, where he found a protector in Sir Joseph Banks, and became a member of the Royal Society. In 1797 he was appointed secretary to the Portuguese embassy, but a quarrel with the ambassador drove him once more to Paris (1802), and in that city he resided till 1813, when he crossed over to New York. In 1816 he was made Portuguese minister-plenipotentiary at Washington, and in 1820 he was recalled home, appointed a member of the financial council, and elected to a seat in the Cortes. Three years after, and in the same year with the fall of the constitutional government, he died. Correa da Serra ranks high as a botanist, though he published no great special work. His principal claim to renown is the Colecção de livros ineditos da historia Portugueza, (4 vols., 1790–1816), an invaluable selection of documents, exceedingly well edited.
CORREGGIO, or Coreggio, the name ordinarily given to Antonio Allegri (1494–1534), the celebrated Italian painter, one of the most vivid and impulsive inventors in expression and pose and the most consummate executants. The external circumstances of his life have been very diversely stated by different writers, and the whole of what has been narrated regarding him, even waiving the question of its authenticity, is but meagre.
The first controversy is as to his origin. Some say that he was born of poor and lowly parents; others, that his family was noble and rich. Neither account is accurate. His father was Pellegrino Allegri, a tradesman in comfortable circumstances, living at Correggio, a small city in the territory of Modena; his mother Bernardina Piazzoli degli Aromani, also of a creditable family of moderate means. Antonio was born at Correggio, and was carefully educated. He was not (as has been often alleged) strictly self-taught in his art—a supposition which the internal evidence of his pictures must of itself refute. They show a knowledge of optics, perspective, architecture, sculpture and anatomy. The last-named science he studied under Dr Giovanni Battista Lombardi, whom he is believed to have represented in the portrait currently named “II Medico del Correggio” (Correggio’s physician). It is concluded that he learned the first elements of design from his uncle, Lorenzo Allegri, a painter of moderate ability at Correggio, and from Antonio Bartolotti, named Tognino, and that he afterwards went to the school of Francesco Ferrari Bianchi (named Frarè), and perhaps to that of the successors of Andrea Mantegna in Mantua. He is said to have learned modelling along with the celebrated Begarelli at Parma; and it has even been suggested that, in the “Pietà” executed by Begarelli for the church of Santa Margherita, the three finest figures are the work of Correggio, but, as the group appears to have been completed three years after the painter’s death, there is very little plausibility in this story. Another statement connecting Begarelli with Correggio is probably true, namely, that the sculptor executed models in relief for the figures which the painter had to design on the cupolas of the churches in Parma. This was necessarily an expensive item, and it has been cited as showing that Correggio must have been at least tolerably well off,—an inference further supported by the fact that he used the most precious and costly colours, and generally painted on fine canvases or sometimes on sheets of copper.
The few certain early works of Correggio show a rapid progression towards the attainment of his own original style. Though he never achieved any large measure of reputation during his brief lifetime, and was perhaps totally unknown beyond his own district of country, he found a sufficiency of employers, and this from a very youthful age. One of his early pictures, painted in 1514 when he was nineteen or twenty years old, is a large altar-piece commissioned for the Franciscan convent at Carpi, representing the Virgin enthroned, with Saints; it indicates a predilection for the style of Leonardo da Vinci, and has certainly even greater freedom than similarly early works of Raphael. This picture is now in the Dresden gallery. Another painting of Correggio’s youth is the “Arrest of Christ.” A third is an Ancona (or triple altar-piece—the “Repose in Egypt, with Sts Bartholomew and John”) in the church of the Conventuali at Correggio, showing the transition from the painter’s first to his second style. Between 1514 and 1520 Correggio worked much, both in oil and in fresco, for churches and convents. In 1521 he began his famous fresco of the “Ascension of Christ,” on the cupola of the Benedictine church of San Giovanni in Parma; here the Redeemer is surrounded by the twelve apostles and the four doctors of the church, supported by a host of wingless cherub boys amid the clouds. This he finished in 1524, and soon afterwards undertook his still vaster work on another cupola, that of the cathedral of the same city, presenting the “Assumption of the Virgin,” amid an unnumbered host of saints and angels rapt in celestial joy. It occupied him up to 1530. The astounding boldness of scheme in these works, especially as regards their incessant and audacious foreshortenings—the whole mass of figures being portrayed as in the clouds, and as seen from below—becomes all the more startling when we recall to mind the three facts—that Correggio had apparently never seen any of the masterpieces of Raphael or his other great predecessors and contemporaries, in Rome, Florence, or other chief centres of art; that he was the first artist who ever undertook the painting of a large cupola; and that he not only went at once to the extreme of what can be adventured in foreshortening, but even forestalled in this attempt the mightiest geniuses of an elder generation—the “Last Judgment” of Michelangelo, for instance, not having been begun earlier than 1533 (although the ceiling of the Sixtine chapel, in which foreshortening plays a comparatively small part, dates from 1508 to 1512). The cupola of the cathedral has neither skylight nor windows, but only light reflected from below; the frescoes, some portions of which were ultimately supplied by Giorgio Gandini, are now dusky with the smoke of tapers, and parts of them, in the cathedral and in the church of St John, have during many past years been peeling off. The violent foreshortenings were not, in the painter’s own time, the object of unmixed admiration; some satirist termed the groups a “guazzetto di rane,” or “hash of frogs.” This was not exactly the opinion of Titian, who is reported to have said, on seeing the pictures, and finding them lightly esteemed by local dignitaries, “Reverse the cupola, and fill it with gold, and even that will not be its money’s worth.” Annibale Caracci and the Eclectics generally evinced their zealous admiration quite as ardently. Parma is the only city which contains frescoes by Correggio. For the paintings of the cupola of San Giovanni he received the moderate sum of 472 sequins; for those of the cathedral, much less proportionately, 350. On these amounts he had to subsist, himself and his family, and to provide the colours, for about ten years, having little time for further work meanwhile. Parma was in an exceedingly unsettled and turbulent condition during some of the years covered by Correggio’s labours there, veering between the governmental ascendancy of the French and of the Pope, with wars and rumours of wars, alarms, tumults and pestilence.
Other leading works by Correggio are the following:—The frescoes in the Camera di San Paolo (the abbess’s saloon) in the monastery of S. Lodovico at Parma, painted towards 1519 in fresco,—“Diana returning from the Chase,” with auxiliary groups of lovely and vivacious boys of more than life size, in sixteen oval compartments. In the National Gallery, London, the “Ecce Homo,” painted probably towards 1520 (authenticity not unquestioned); and “Cupid, Mercury and Venus,” the latter more especially a fine example. The oil-painting of the Nativity named “Night” (“La Notte”), for which 40 ducats and 208 livres of old Reggio coin were paid, the nocturnal scene partially lit up by the splendour proceeding from the divine Infant. This work was undertaken at Reggio in 1522 for Alberto Pratoneris, and is now in the Dresden gallery. The oil-painting of St Jerome, termed also “Day” (“Il Giorno”), as contrasting with the above-named “Night.” Jerome is here with the Madonna and Child, the Magdalene, and two Angels, of whom one points out to the Infant a passage in the book held by the
