It was quite time:  exasperated by his sufferings, the artist had resolved to let himself die.

    Trois Maitres (Paris, 1861).

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Dante, Inferno III.

MAGDALEN IN THE DESERT

(CORREGGIO)

AIME GIRON

Correggio was a painter and a poet at the same time, interpreting Nature, flattering her, idealizing her, and realizing her creations in their double aesthetic expression, with undulating outlines and tender tones.  His drawing was modelled and supple, with a certain vigour of line and a certain solidity of relief.  He had a charming imagination of conception and a voluptuous grace in its accomplishment, which are requisites in the painting of women and children.  He therefore excelled in rendering bambini.  With a note-book in his hand, he studied them everywhere.  This explains why his Loves and his Cherubs have such rare truth of mien, of flesh, and of life.  His knowledge of anatomy is great and he foreshortens on canvas and ceiling astonishingly before the advent of Michael Angelo.  His enchanting colouring, impasted like that of Giorgione, vivid as that of Titian, ran through the most delicate gradations and melted into the most elusive harmonies.  Beneath his facile brush, soft and thick, the transparencies of the skin and the morbidezza of the flesh become ideal.

He was the first to apply himself to the choice of fabrics, and one of the first in Italy to attend to the scientific distribution of light.  But, in the famous chiaroscuro he does not get his effects by contrasts, but by analogies, superimposing shadow upon shadow and light upon light, both being disposed in large masses and graduated in progression.  This process occurs at its fullest in the Christmas Night, where the moon shines, and the child glows with radiance, in a kind of symbolic struggle between the natural light of this world and the supernatural light of the other.  The effect is such that the spectator is forced instinctively to blink his eyes, as does the Shepherdess herself entering the stable.

“When Correggio excels he is a painter worthy of Athens,” wrote Diderot, whose art criticism had in it more of sentiment than knowledge.

“With Correggio everything is large and graceful,” said Louis Carrache, who gave Correggio a large place in his eclecticism.  But after studying and weighing everything, from his somewhat excessive qualities it follows that Correggio was more of an idealist than a mystic and obeyed Art more than Faith, with a leaning towards the apotheosis of form.  He painted Io and Jupiter for Frederick Gonzaga of Mantua.  This picture having passed to the son of the Regent, the two passionate heads so strongly troubled his prudery that he cut them out and burned them.  Coypel then begged the Prince to spare the rest and to give it to him.  He obtained it on condition that “he would make good use of it,” and on the death of Coypel, M. Pasquier, depute du Commerce de Rouen, paid 16,500 livres for the mutilated remains, as I find in a very old account.