Correggio was an Italian Renaissance painter, born Antonio Allegri around 1489 in the small town of Correggio, in Emilia, who died there in 1534. In Parma he painted the cathedral dome so that the roof seems to open onto heaven, a trick Baroque painters would copy for a century. He is also remembered for the Loves of Jupiter, sensual mythologies painted for the duke of Mantua.
Stand under that dome and the ceiling stops being a ceiling. A crowd of figures climbs through the clouds toward the light, and the stone above your head has disappeared.
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The cathedral of Parma gave him the job in November 1522. The canons asked for the apse, the dome and the choir, and promised 1,000 gold scudi, plus the lime, the scaffolding and a closed room to store his materials. Correggio finished only the dome, and it took him until 1530.
Parma did not know what to make of it. One critic, so the story goes, called the dome a stew of frogs' legs. Nobody knows who said it, and the remark may be only a good line that stuck. What is certain is that the painters who came after stood under it and took notes.
Then there is the man. Few documents about his daily life survive, and most of what the world knows comes from Giorgio Vasari, who wrote decades after Correggio died. Vasari also gave him the death everyone repeats, and it is almost certainly a legend.
What You'll Discover
Who taught him to paint.
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.