ONE of the most distinctive and perhaps the most sensuous of the Italian masters is Correggio (1494–1534), who takes his name from his birthplace, Il Correggio, a small town near Modena. It was natural, therefore, that he should have become the pupil of Francesco Bianchi of the school of Modena. Correggio came under almost all the leading influences which distinguish the principal Italian schools of the early sixteenth century. His “sidelong grace,” his subtle gradations of tone, his daring foreshortening, his sublimity of space and light, his vivid imagination, his profound knowledge of chiaroscuro, render him an isolated phenomenon in Italian art at the moment when it was passing into precipitate decline. His Marriage of St. Catherine (No. 1117, Plate XV.) entirely lacks the dignity and solemnity which are the dominant features of truly religious art. The figures which make up this fascinating composition are delicate, but by no means of an elevated type. This pseudo-religious picture, when studied together with the Jupiter and Antiope (No. 1118), shows the justice of the criticism that Correggio’s pictures are “hymns to the charm of femininity the like of which have never been known before or since in Christian Europe.” It is more remarkable that this mythological canvas, which is so full of sensuous vitality, should have been added to the royal collection of England in the seventeenth century than that it should have been allowed by Cromwell to leave the country a few years later. Two Allegories of Virtue and Vice, executed by Correggio in gouache, hang in one of the Rooms of Drawings.

Parmigianino (1504–1540), an imitator of Correggio and in a less degree of Raphael, who were both shortlived artists, painted the two small panels of a Holy Family (No. 1385), and a Holy Family and Saints (No. 1386).