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| Correggio Coronation of the Virgin ca. 1522 detached fresco Galleria Nazionale di Parma |
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| Correggio Madonna della Cesta ca. 1524 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
"On a more private scale, the small Madonna della Cesta (London, National Gallery) is freer and still more explicit in the means it uses to communicate its activity of form and content. Madonna and Child are placed extremely near to us, in sloping postures that (without the justification for them of decorator's illusionism) approximate foreshortening. Their shapes are composed into a concavity that magnetically demands invasion by the viewer's eye. The energy of these figures vibrates in the space that closely adjoins ours, or seems even to intersect with it. Behind them, an opening on a deep diagonal into the background extends the effect of a spatial continuity from the viewer's world into the painting. Upon this whole mobile structure, Correggio's brush moves to give its surface the appearance of an inspired acceleration. The patterns of drapery modulate from swift, taut grace into sparkling brilliance. The light, differentiating tender, quicksilver colours, breaks to a vibrating climax in the central forms. This concert of subtlety and brilliance is much more than virtuoso play of visual effects: it is the legible response to the human presence Correggio describes. He feels this presence in its living unity of psyche and substance, and so passionately responds to its loveliness that the image takes on, as in loving, an overcast of sensuality. The patterns of this picture are manipulated into a charged equilibrium that is a requisite of classicism, but neither its form nor its content in the end makes a classically finite self-sufficiency. It is not only that its physical presences are near to us, or that its energies of form and content demand sharing, but that what is in this easel picture . . . insists that there is no boundary between its world and ours. It is, still like the classical image, an exaltation of our world, but unlike the classical picture it is an episode and not an entity: what happens in it begins this side of the picture surface and outside the limits of the frame."
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| Correggio Agony in the Garden ca. 1525 oil on panel Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London |
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| Correggio Noli me tangere ca. 1525 oil on panel, transferred to canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Correggio Head of Christ ca. 1525-30 oil on panel Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Correggio Ecce Homo ca. 1525-30 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Correggio Education of Cupid (also called Venus with Mercury and Cupid) ca. 1525 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
"In yet another vein during these years Correggio's inclination is neither assertively like a baroque nor like Mannerism, but closer to the modes of classicism. This is the effect made by his first important essay in an easel painting on a mythological theme, the Education of Cupid (London, National Gallery) [directly above]. The theme solicits Correggio's instinct sensuality and permits that its expression be overt rather than an undertone of meaning. Nowhere previously – not even in Titian – is there such a demonstration of the way in which an optical technique can convey the effects and the emotive associations of the sense of touch. Yet these are contained forms of classicizing beauty, idealizing sensuality. The same amalgamation of erotic emanation and idealized shape is in the pendant of the Education, the so-called Jupiter and Antiope (Paris, Louvre) [directly below], but responsive as he is to theme, Correggio here exploits what it implies of action and more pointed sensuality. By foreshortening, the figures shape out a concavity of explicitly erotic implication: sinuous oblique arabesques quicken the sleeping figure of Antiope, and a rotating impulse spurs the action into continuity and makes us know how the satyr's movement must conclude. The ideality and grandeur of the forms exalts the tone of the enactment but cannot obscure the novelty of means by which the spectator is psychologically compelled to participate in it, not only by a spatial and optical device but by a remarkable new conception of his sharing in a continuity of narrative theme."
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| Correggio Jupiter and Antiope (also called Venus and Cupid with a Satyr) ca. 1528 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Correggio Allegory of Vice ca. 1528-30 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Correggio Allegory of Virtue ca. 1528-30 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Correggio Abduction of Ganymede ca. 1530 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Correggio Jupiter and Io ca. 1530 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
"Correggio's chief commissions in his last years were for secular themes, among them four illustrations of the Loves of Jupiter for Federigo Gonzaga of Mantua: the Ganymede, the Jupiter and Io (both Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) [both above], the Danaë (Rome, Borghese) and the Leda (Berlin) [both below]. Emotion in these consists of an extreme sophistication of erotic sensuality – the counterpart of Correggio's compassion in religious themes and, as we observed, a frequent undertone in their expression. The response to sensuality is now at an unexampled level of complex subtlety, at once explicit and oblique, prurient and lyrical, impassioned and exquisitely tender, and the pictures are at the same time overt illustrations and high art. The mingled skein of feeling and the extreme refinement with which feeling is expressed makes these works kin to the mentality of Maniera, and this sense is reinforced by certain elements of form. The grace with which shapes and postures are described hovers close to preciosity, and the emanation made by light on flesh is tempered to a silvered opalescence, distilling sensual effects."
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| Correggio Danaë ca. 1530-31 oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Correggio Leda and the Swan 1532 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
– quoted passages by S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)