c. 1489 - 1534 • Italian • Painter • Late Renaissance/proto-Baroque
"It is impossible to describe the delicate vivacity which characterizes the works of Antonio da Correggio. He depicted hair in a manner unknown before ... soft and downy, the separate hairs polished so that they seemed of gold and more beautiful than natural ones, which were surpassed by his coloring." - Vasari, mid-16th century
Ecstatic bliss, spiritual and sexual, characterizes the works of Correggio. His ceiling paintings combine the illusionistic trickery of MANTEGNA'S Camera degIi Sposi ( 1465-74) with the energized, muscular figures of MICHELANGELO's Sistine Chapel ceiling ( 1508- 12). The viewer feels swept up into a whorl of celestial activity. On the domes of a church and the Cathedral of Parma, the city where he spent most of his career, Correggio painted Christ in one and the Virgin in the other, each levitating directly overhead. The audacity of looking up into their swirling robes was at least as bold as Mantegna's eye- level view in the painting Dead Christ, in which Christ is seen feet first. Correggio's ceilings were prototypes for BAROQUE artists. The mythological FRESCOES he painted in Mantua, to satisfy Duke Federigo GONZAGA's appetite for unusual excitements, illustrated the extramarital affairs of the god Jupiter, legendary ancestor of the Gonzaga family. Jupiter and lo (c. 1532) portrays the lustful god as a huge smoky cloud, his grip on the naked, fleshy Io like a huge, dark paw, and just the shadow of his face kissing hers. This sexual rapture seems prescient of BERNINI'S Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, sculpted more than a century later.
