 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (detail) (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
"From late 1520 to early 1521, Correggio painted the Vision of St John on Patmos on the dome of S. Giovanni, attended by four patron saints of Parma and Doctors of the Church in the pendentives. . . . The memory of Mantegnesque illusionism and the experience of Raphael's recent essays coalesced in this setting, the daring and perspective realism of the one expanding the controlled ideality of the other. Correggio's experience of the Sistine Ceiling is also much in his mind – so much that the dome and its pendentives are permeated by quotations from it – but the inspiration of Michelangelo serves for figure motifs and magnitude of human drama, not illusion; Michelangelo's limits on illusion are not what an ambition founded in Mantegna would accept. . . . The painted revelation probes strongly and surprisingly into space like a Mantegnesque illusion of the Quattrocento and uses its devices of foreshortening, but without reference to a perspective scheme. This is not an illusion of static form but of a mobility, and of the energy that convinces us that forms are alive. Differently from Raphael's recent illusionisms, the more urgent verity that Correggio intends, and its overriding energy, demand to be projected as a unity in which restraints of architectural geometry may not intervene. Correggio has conceived a mode of illusion that exacts a concentrated, instant act of credence, of which the apparatus is not the measuring intelligence, as for Mantegna's illusionisms, nor the intellect that discerns form, as for Raphael's, but the intense convincingness of its sensuous and spiritual life."
 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (detail) (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (detail) (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (detail) (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
"The descriptive means and yet more the optical devices Correggio employs to achieve this measure of illusion affirm a factor of reality in the image that exceeds the normal usages of classical style; but it is not his main purpose thereby to attain a more objective truth. On the contrary, the increased verity is the means to a subjective end: the credibility of form is intended as an agency of communication. As in the most recent art of Raphael, but still more like the first inventions of the Mannerism of Central Italy, Correggio seeks for a way of communication more immediate than classical style had allowed, and of a more urgent tenor of emotions. It is his private passion that inspires substance in the Vision and infuses its light. This subjective energy is Correggio's essential communication, inhabiting what he represents of appearance and illustrates as subject matter. From the moment of his entrance into the church the spectator is involved with the artist in a transaction, in which he is required physically to move, as the painted image seems to do, and required to respond to its living sense until he stands finally transfixed, a surrogate for the Evangelist, beneath St. John's vision."
 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (detail of pendentive) (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (detail of pendentive) (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Ascension of Christ (detail of pendentive) (Vision of St. John on Patmos) 1520-21 fresco Abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Assumption of the Virgin 1524-30 fresco Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Parma |
"In November 1530 the last payment to Correggio for his work on the cathedral dome was made – only half the project that Correggio had been commissioned for eight full years before; that commission intended that Correggio decorate the apse as well, as he had done at S. Giovanni. His reason for abandoning the rest of the scheme is nowhere documented, but it may be surmised that what he did paint had provoked discomfort in his patrons on two grounds, one aesthetic and the other moral – objections that were ingeniously combined at an early date in a canon's epigram that called the dome a 'stew of frogs'. It must have been difficult for the canons and burghers of the Duomo to find themselves the owners of the most drastically revolutionary act of art made so far in the Cinquecento. It would carry its status of unmatched revolutionary invention into the next century."
 |
| Correggio Assumption of the Virgin (detail) 1524-30 fresco Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Assumption of the Virgin (detail) 1524-30 fresco Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Parma |
"Commissioned in November 1522, the designs for the dome were probably made only late in 1523 or early in 1524; the painting was certainly not begun before spring of that year. In September 1526 half the work was paid for, but it is uncertain what this sum defines, for the whole includes not just the dome proper, with its representation of the Assumption of the Virgin, but four patron saints in the pendentives, a frieze in the spaces between them, and allegorical figures in the soffits. All this was compete, as we observed, before November 1530. . . . Still more than at S. Giovanni, Correggio's conception of his new theme, the Assunta, is a gestalt in the full round: an enactment, unfolded on the surface of the hemisphere the architectural space provides, of a scene that in an easel painting would be projected on a flat field. The Apostles [directly below] are distributed around the drum of the dome, standing vertiginously on its cornice in front of a fictive balustrade, in postures of impassioned action. Angels, as if suddenly materialized, swarm on the balustrade's top edge. Above them is a space of light-struck moving clouds, then the miracle itself, portrayed in a mingling of foreshortened human and angelic forms and clouds into a shape like that of a funnel, suspended in the heavens and rotating slowly. Within this cone the figures rise upwards, level upon level, fading as they recede towards the light of a central opening into an infinite sky. Towards the forward and lower part of this rotating form, where it will take the eye of the spectator as he approaches from the nave, there is a concentration of the heavenly host, among whom the Virgin is borne upward by a jubilation of angels. The perspective of these figures, like that of the whole form within which they are gathered, is not strictly central but inclined slightly towards the oncoming spectator."
 |
| Correggio Assumption of the Virgin (detail) 1524-30 fresco Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Parma |
"The giant Apostles [directly above], standing where the ribs of the drum should be, translate the architectural statics of the drum into the dynamics of their human action, which almost as much as the patron saints in the pendentives [directly below] is defined as taking place before the wall and in our space. Still higher, the illusion of the heavenly figures projected in foreshortening conveys the sense of an energy in them that derives not so much from their physical action as from the energy of light that falls on them and infuses the surrounding air. There is no real effort in their flight; theirs is a floating in a divinely generated turbulence to which Correggio has given the look of an event of nature. Its effect of an ascent towards an infinity is absolute. Differently from the Vision at S. Giovanni, this scheme accepts no classicizing spatial constraints from the form of the architecture on which it is painted. It far more urgently commands connexion with the viewer's space below, and extends its penetration upward without a sense of limit."
 |
| Correggio Assumption of the Virgin (detail of pendentive) 1524-30 fresco Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Parma |
 |
| Correggio Assumption of the Virgin (detail of pendentive) 1524-30 fresco Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Parma |
– quoted passages by S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)