Correggio: The Complete Story
Tip your head back under the dome of Parma Cathedral and the ceiling seems to dissolve into open sky, a spiral of figures rushing up toward the light. When Correggio painted it, some contemporaries were baffled, one reportedly sneering that it looked like a hash of frogs legs. They were wrong. He had just invented the future of ceiling painting.
Correggio worked far from Rome and Florence, in the northern city of Parma, yet his soft, sensual, dizzying art quietly prophesied the whole Baroque to come.
The dome that became the sky
Correggio painted the inside of the Parma Cathedral dome as a swirling vortex of figures spiralling up into light, seen sharply from below. Nothing like it had been attempted.
That dizzying upward illusion, a daring feat of fresco painting, prophesied the great Baroque ceilings of the following century.
Softness and sensuality
His figures are famously tender and soft, modelled in gentle gradations of light and shade that seem to melt rather than carve. He used chiaroscuro not for drama but for caress.
That sweetness made him one of the most admired painters of tenderness and the female form in all of Italian art.
The Loves of Jupiter
Late in life Correggio painted a set of erotic mythologies for Federico Gonzaga of Mantua, the Loves of Jupiter, showing the god seducing mortals as a cloud, a swan, a shower of gold and an eagle, probably meant as a princely gift for the emperor Charles the Fifth.
Their later history was rough. One pious owner was so disturbed by the Leda that he had her head cut out of the canvas, before it was later restored.
Famous late, then loved
Correggio was little known beyond Parma in his lifetime, but later painters fell hard for him. From Lanfranco to the high Baroque, artists studied him to learn how to open a roof into the heavens.
His reputation grew steadily after his death until he was ranked among the great masters of soft, sensual painting.
A few things people ask about Correggio
What is he known for?
His illusionistic Parma dome and his soft, sensual figures.
Why was the dome important?
Its dizzying upward illusion prophesied the great Baroque ceilings.
What are the Loves of Jupiter?
Erotic mythologies painted for Federico Gonzaga of Mantua.
When did he die?
In 1534.
Why his sky still opens
Correggio worked in a quiet provincial city and changed the course of painting anyway, teaching ceilings to dissolve and figures to melt into light. The frog legs joke aged badly: a century of Baroque masters spent their careers catching up to him.
When that pious owner sliced the head from his painting of Leda, it was a backhanded compliment: Correggio had made desire so convincing that someone felt they had to cut it out. The panel was repaired, and the sensuality survived. Painters travelled to Parma for generations just to stand under that dome and learn its secret, and his name became shorthand for soft, melting beauty. The provincial outsider had quietly rewired what a ceiling, and a body, could do in paint. From a quiet cathedral in Parma, a painter few had heard of taught all of Europe how to make stone open onto heaven.