The other Italian master

Idiosyncratic and subtle: Correggio's 'The Madonna of Saint Jerome', late 1520s. Photo: Galleria...
Idiosyncratic and subtle: Correggio's 'The Madonna of Saint Jerome', late 1520s. Photo: Galleria Nazionale, Parma.
Correggio's 'Mystic Marriage of St.Catherine', c. 1520. Even as he's busy sowing confusion,...
Correggio's 'Mystic Marriage of St.Catherine', c. 1520. Even as he's busy sowing confusion, Correggio is also dedicated to thoroughgoing realism. Photo: Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte.
Powerful emotions, wild eccentricity and convincing realism: Correggio's 'Jupiter and Io', 1530s....
Powerful emotions, wild eccentricity and convincing realism: Correggio's 'Jupiter and Io', 1530s. Photo: Parma Cathedral
The ultimate example of Correggio's unique vision is the huge fresco he unveiled in the main...
The ultimate example of Correggio's unique vision is the huge fresco he unveiled in the main cupola of Parma cathedral in 1530 after years and years of work. Photo: Kuntsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

A sometimes overlooked godfather of Western art is being rediscovered in Parma, Italy, reports Blake Gopnik, of The Washington Post.

Until about a hundred years ago, there were five godfathers of Western art: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Correggio.

Correggio, possibly the greatest artist we've almost forgotten.

Correggio: Born Antonio Allegri in about 1489, in the northern Italian hamlet of Correggio (whence his nickname), dead by 1534 and a favorite of art lovers for the next three and a-half centuries.

And now, virtually unknown.

Correggio's first full-scale retrospective (such has been his decline) opened this northern autumn in venues across Parma, the wealthy little city where he did his most important work and where he died, in his artistic prime, of a sudden fever.

The exhibition's aim is to bring its local hero back to life.

That's not far-fetched: A show in Milan did it for Caravaggio, back in 1951 when he was far more thoroughly forgotten than Correggio has ever been.

Connoisseurs have never quite lost track of the artist.

Once you've seen them, Correggio's best paintings are so obviously gorgeous and enthralling that their absence from our greeting cards seems almost inexplicable.

Few other pictures ever have had their mix of powerful emotions, wild eccentricity and convincing realism.

So what accounts for Correggio's fall from public favour? Some blame rests with the accidents of history: Many of his best works were in Parma, which fell off the tourist route, and on church ceilings, where they needed to be seen in person to impress.

Other major paintings ended up behind the Iron Curtain, and have turned out to be too delicate to travel.

And then there's the fact that nothing juicy is known about the man or his life.

He's so much less biopicable than rivals such as Michelangelo (the temperamental gay genius) or Leonardo (the ambidextrous polymath who never finished things).

Then there's the art itself.

Correggio's paintings are so idiosyncratic and so subtle that they don't yield the sound bites history prefers, as with Titian ("Brushstroke Guy") or Michelangelo ("Mr Classic Nude").

Correggio's art seems all about resisting simple views, of art or of the worlds it shows.

We can't get an easy handle on Correggio's pictures, because they're dedicated to flux, indirection and obliquity.

That combination may have helped him stand out from the crowd in talent-packed Renaissance Italy.

But, like most artistic choices, it must mostly have depended on this painter's view of the world.

The ultimate example of Correggio's unique vision is the huge fresco he unveiled in the main cupola of Parma cathedral, in 1530 after years and years of work.

This is Correggio's most innovative project, and his most influential.

It seems to open up the dome to let us see a teeming host of angels in the sky beyond. (Many Catholic churches now have similar ceilings, probably without knowing that they owe them to Correggio.) And yet, despite the cupola's stunning special effects, this is also the least legible of paintings.

Correggio has taken a standard Christian story of the Virgin Mary's bodily assumption into heaven at the moment of her death and painted it as something so complex, it's hardly graspable.

It may be the perfect picture for a dome: Its floating figures aren't tied down to a single view, so worshippers below can take it in from any spot.

And yet that also means that there's no stable order to hang on to, no single take-home message you can pull out of its turmoil.

For Correggio, this is heaven: a place where nothing ever settles down and there's no one way to look at things.

This is an artist who prefers off-kilter views. He rarely lets us see a face from right in front, or even in a nice clean profile.

Instead, a head that seems at first to be in profile rotates enough toward us to make its far eye just emerge but not enough so we can achieve any kind of contact with it.

Even more strangely, Correggio often turns a head far enough past profile so that all we get is a glancing view of its near cheek and ear with just a hint of eye or nose to make us sense the details of a face.

You'd imagine that the one thing a Renaissance master would make clear and legible would be his figures' eyes, the "windows on the soul".

Yet in most Correggios, whether of a saint, a sinner or an angel, eyelids and eyes and the shadows under them meld into a single, mysterious blur; you can barely tell pupil from iris from the whites around them.

Or eyes are cast so far down or up or to one side that all we get to see are lids. The immediate communicative power of the direct gaze is foiled.

It's too easy for this painter. Instead, he deals almost entirely in sidelong glances.

Correggio doesn't always let his figures look at each other, either.

In his great Lamentation of Christ, painted in the 1520s after the artist had reached Parma and achieved a certain level of success, Jesus' mourners don't seem to exchange a single look. Each figure's gaze goes its own way, absorbed in its own thoughts.

Even in a wonderful painting of Mary adoring her newborn son, two figures who should be deeply absorbed in each other have sightlines that never meet.

Correggio's whole art seems built around a sense of things not quite coming together.

Brushstrokes slip and slide across his surfaces as in few paintings before his.

In a stunning picture showing Saint Catherine's famous vision of the Virgin Mary and her child, Correggio's surface is in ecstatic disarray from edge to edge.

Correggio is also surprisingly willing to let Christ's face be obscured by the female ones in front.

He makes theological precedence give way to how things stack up in space.

In other pictures, the draperies rendered with those brushstrokes seem subject to the same chaotic forces: Mysterious winds seem to blow through Correggio's scenes, disturbing settled order.

Even the compositions of his paintings are built from lines and forms that careen across the picture plane.

Correggio's approach to subject matter can also be less than direct.

There are strange details in his paintings that seem to have slipped in from a passing flow beyond the artist's control.

In the great altarpiece called The Madonna of Saint Jerome but commonly known as Il Giorno (Day) a juvenile angel has crept into the edge of the scene, where, having nothing better to do, he sniffs a pot of myrrh he's nabbed from Mary Magdalene, anointer of Christ's feet.

Correggio even manages to bring obscurity to well-established stories.

When Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, got Correggio to paint myths from the Roman poet Ovid, scholars must have spelled out the basic storylines: how Jupiter entered the locked chamber of the sleeping Danae in a shower of gold coins, how he turned himself into a cloud to be with the nymph Io.

But they couldn't have suggested that Correggio should render Jupiter and Io ecstatically dissolved together into mist, with the god's face just solid enough to kiss her lips.

Or that he should show the coins in Danae's golden rain edge-on, as tiny slivers of light, rather than as nice, crisply minted circles.

In each case, Correggio prefers near-impenetrable to the clearly spelled out thereby doing unique justice to the elusiveness of Ovid's metamorphoses.

But what's most surprising is that, even as he's busy sowing such confusion, Correggio is also dedicated to some of the most thoroughgoing realism of any artist of his time.

His silks are perfectly silken. His babies are notably babylike.

A silver pot of myrrh reflects and distorts its holders' fingers just as it ought to.

Sometimes, his effects can verge on 3-D, as when he shows bodies feet-first, or hands from fingertips, as in Il Giorno. (He likely used wax models suspended from strings to figure out some of these foreshortenings.) And he's got such unrivalled control of light that, when he portrays it bouncing through his scenes, the empty space between his objects seems to open up.

In that picture of Mary adoring the infant Jesus, for instance, the lighting on the Virgin's hands makes them seem in front of the flatness of the canvas almost like a View-Master slide.

Take in the picture, with its off-centre perspective, from its left, and the effect doubles.

It quadruples in Correggio's Lamentation, which was meant for the side wall of a narrow, gated chapel, so that most viewers would have never seen the picture from in front.

Look at the painting at a raking angle, as Correggio intended, and Christ's bent legs seem to pop out from the surface of the canvas.

The man who is on the ladder in the middle of the scene, oddly close and central when the picture is viewed straight-on, now slides into the background as he should.

But even as we take in all this realism, Correggio is playing his usual capricious games: The fact that his Lamentation changes as we move is more unsettling than not.

Here, as almost always, Correggio gives us an impressively convincing world and asks us not to trust in its stability.

The goal of Correggio's realism is to convince us that the volatility we feel doesn't merely come from his technique and style; it's there in the unstable world that he depicts so realistically.

On the web
For a video tour of Correggio's cathedral dome in Parma and a multi-angle look at two of his paintings, go to washingtonpost.com/museums

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