Fig. 281. Lorenzo Lotto. The Marriage Yoke.—Madrid.
Fig. 282. Moretto of Brescia. Madonna with St. Nicholas.—Brescia.
Fig. 283. Correggio. Detail of Ceiling.—Convent of S. Paolo, Parma.
It is significantly the provincial painters and not the born Venetians who indulge these quite feminine refinements of sensibility. Such a one is Moretto of Brescia, born in 1498 and active until 1555. Although closely in touch with Palma and Titian, he avoids their positive color and dreams his pictures in delicate harmonies of silver and blue. There is a morning coolness about them which anticipates certain perfections of early Velasquez and even of the figure painting of Corot. He is a distinguished spirit but an anomaly in the age of Aretino. Milton would have understood him. In portraiture, as in the richly clad nobleman of the National Gallery, he forces the note of picturesqueness to restlessness. In such religious pictures as the Madonna in Glory, (1540), in San Giorgio Maggiore, at Verona, or in the Madonna with St. Nicholas, at Brescia, (1539), Figure [282], he shows an ecstatic lyrical feeling, and finds the free and florid compositional forms to express it. It has an informality which Titian would never have permitted himself at this moment.
Fig. 284. Correggio. St. Augustine. Fresco. Toschi’s Copy.—Cathedral, Parma.
Of course the greatest of those who in the name of sentiment undermined the grand style was Antonio Correggio,[[83]] a provincial painter, a disappointed and unsuccessful man, who lived out his less than fifty short years (1489?–1534) in or near Parma. His ideas he took from Mantegna, master of all Northern Italy, whose illusionism he carried a point further. He made in 1518 for the ceiling of the reception room of the Convent of San Paolo, Figure [283], a trellis through the verdurous ovals of which one sees pairs of nude boy geniuses at play. He paints away the domes of the Church of San Giovanni (1524) and of the Cathedral (1530), shows us Christ or His Mother soaring into the clouds with hosts of accompanying angels. He brings the clouds down through the painted wall and sets them before the pendentives. Church Doctors, Figure [284], or Evangelists ride their cloud-thrones easily in the company of the fairest nude angels of either sex. The painting fairly annuls the architecture. These decorative frescoes are so vital and so richly various that they demand admiration and disarm criticism. To walk among the demi-gods and goddesses that loll on the parapet painted about the Cathedral dome, Figure [285], is to have known the company of Homer’s immortals. The impression is over-powering and unforgettable. Cautious people have always resented such profusion and such unrestrained assertion of life and joy. At the time they called the dome, with its confusion of wriggling rosy legs of ascending angels, the “frog pond.” They cavilled at Correggio’s price and appealed to Titian, who knowing a miracle of fine workmanship, told them that if they turned the dome over and filled it with ducats, it would not be too much.
