Sense and sensuality

Correggio and the Antique
National Gallery and other locations in Parma, until 25 January 2009

Unlike the other leading artists of the Italian High Renaissance — Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian — Correggio lived a life of provincial obscurity. Unable to find any likeness of him, Vasari was obliged in his Lives of the Artists to leave blank the portrait space in the frontispiece above Correggio’s brief and often inaccurate entry.

Born Antonio Allegri in Correggio near Parma in around 1489, he spent his entire career in this out-of-the-way region on the northern plains, dying there in 1534. Yet even during his lifetime he won fame, inspiring artists for generations to come and powerfully influencing the development of the Baroque and Rococo.

Correggio’s works are extremely precious and scattered around Europe (there are surprisingly few in the US). This welcome gathering of such a high proportion of his canvases and drawings, curated by Lucia Fornari Schianchi, may be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Visitors can also admire his three great fresco cycles in the Camera di San Paolo, the St John the Evangelist church and the Duomo (a special platform has been constructed in the Duomo so that the frescoes there can be seen at close hand for the duration of the exhibition).

The inescapable sensuality of Correggio’s paintings, even his religious works, has always been recognised and frequently seen as problematic. The 19th-century Italian critic Giovanni Morelli at once praised and excused it when he wrote: ‘no one has ever represented sensuality so spiritualised, so ingenuous, so pure as Correggio’. At around the same time his Victorian contemporary J.A. Symonds recognised the pointlessness of prudery when he observed of the artist: ‘within his own magic circle he reigns supreme, no other artist having blended the witcheries of colouring, chairoscuro, and faun-like loveliness of form into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm’.