Correggio was an Italian Renaissance painter, born Antonio Allegri around 1489 in the small town of Correggio, in the Emilia region of northern Italy. He is known by the name of that town, where he also died, in 1534.
In Parma he painted the cathedral dome so that the roof seems to open onto heaven, a trick the Baroque painters, masters of the grand theatrical style that followed the Renaissance, would copy for a century.
For the duke of Mantua he also made the Loves of Jupiter, a set of sensual scenes from myth.
Under that dome, the painted figures are seen from below, their legs and robes foreshortened as if they floated high overhead. A crowd climbs through the clouds toward a light at the top, and the stone overhead disappears.
For all that fame, few documents about the man who made it survive. Even the death most books give him is almost certainly a legend, as the end of his story shows.
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What the records do show begins in his birthplace, where his father was a merchant. How the boy learned to paint is far less certain, though there was at least one painter in the family, an uncle.
The first firm date is 1514. That year the Franciscans of the town, friars of the order founded by Saint Francis, ordered an altarpiece from him, a painting to stand above the altar of their church.
This Madonna of Saint Francis, now in Dresden, is his first documented commission.
By 1519 he was working in Parma, a larger city in the same region, and that year he married Girolama Francesca di Braghetis. In Parma he also decorated a private room for the abbess of a convent. Surprisingly for a nun's room, its ceiling shows no saints.
What he took from other painters
Before Parma, Correggio had learned mostly by looking…
What You'll Discover
What he took from Mantegna and Leonardo.
What he hid in an abbess's dining room.
How he painted the sky.
Who took the Holy Night away.
What happened to Leda's head.
How he really died.