Correggio / A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the Painter with Introduction and Interpretation

Transcriber's Note.
The images in this eBook of the paintings are from the original book. However many of these paintings have undergone extensive restoration. The restored paintings are presented as modern color images with links.

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COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
To the general public the works of Correggio are much less familiar than those of other Italian painters. Parma lies outside the route of the ordinary tourist, and the treasures of its gallery and churches are still unsuspected by many. It is hoped that this little collection of pictures may arouse a new interest in the great Emilian. The selections are about equally divided between the frescoes of Parma and the easel paintings scattered through the various European galleries.
ESTELLE M. HURLL.
New Bedford, Mass.
December, 1901.

The art of Correggio was very justly summed up by his first biographer, Vasari. After pointing out that in the matter of drawing and composition the artist would scarcely have won a reputation, the writer goes on to say: To Correggio belongs the great praise of having attained the highest point of perfection in coloring, whether his works were executed in oil or in fresco. In another place he writes, No artist has handled the colors more effectually than himself, nor has any painted with a more charming manner or given a more perfect relief to his figures. Color and chiaroscuro were undoubtedly, as Vasari indicates, the two features of his art in which Correggio achieved his highest triumphs, and if some others had equalled or even surpassed him in the first point, none before him had ever solved so completely the problems of light and shadow.
Not only did he understand how to throw the separate figures of the picture into relief, giving them actual bodily existence, but he mastered as well the disposition of light and shade in the whole composition. To quote Burckhardt, In Correggio first, chiaroscuro becomes essential to the general expression of a pictorially combined whole; the stream of lights and reflections gives exactly the right expression to the special moment in nature.