Mantoua,[154] the birth-place of Virgil, a name dear to poetry, by the adoption of Andrea Mantegna and Giulio Pippi claims a distinguished place in the history of Art, for restoring and disseminating style among the schools of Lombardy.
Mantoua, desolated by Attila, conquered by Alboin, wrested from the Longobards by the Exarch of Ravenna, was taken and fortified by Charles the Great: from Bonifazio of Canossa it descended to Mathilda; after her demise, 1115, became a republic tyrannized by Bonacorsi, till the people conferred the supremacy on Lodovico Gonzaga, under whose successors it rose from a marquisate, 1433, to a dukedom, 1531, and finished as an appendage to the spoils of Austria.
Revolutions so uninterrupted, aggravated by accidental devastations of floods and fire, may account for the want of earlier monuments of art in Mantoua and its districts, than the remains from the epoch of Mathilda.[155] A want perhaps more to be regretted by the antiquary than the historian of art, whose real epoch begins with the patronage of Lodovico Gonzaga and the appearance of Andrea Mantegna.[156]
This native of Padova[157] was the adopted son and pupil of Squarcione, in whose school he acquired that taste for the antique which marks his works at every period of his practice; if sometimes mitigated, never supplanted by the blandishments of colour and the precepts of Giovanni Bellino, whose daughter he had married.
Perhaps no question has been discussed with greater anxiety, and dismissed from investigation with less success, than that of Correggio's origin, circumstances, methods of study, and death.
The date of his birth is uncertain, some place it in 1475, others in 1490; were we to follow a MS. gloss in the Library at Gottingen, mentioned by Fiorillo, which says he died at the age of forty in 1512, he must have been born in 1472; but the true date is, no doubt, that of the inscription set him at Correggio, viz. that he died in 1534, aged forty. The honour of his birth-place is allowed to Correggio, though not without dispute.[158] His father's name was Pellegrino Allegri, according to Orlandi, countenanced by Mengs. He was instructed in the elements of literature, philosophy, and mathematics; however doubtful this, there can be no doubt entertained on the very early period in which he must have applied to Painting. The brevity of his life, and the surprising number of his works, evince that he could not devote much time to literature, and, of mathematics, probably contented himself with what related to perspective and architecture. On the authority of Vedriani and of Scannelli, Mengs and his follower Ratti make Correggio in Modena the pupil of Franc. Bianchi Ferrari, and in Mantoua of Andr. Mantegna, without vouchers of sufficient authenticity for either: the passage quoted by Vedriani from the chronicle of Lancillotto, an historian contemporary with Correggio, is an interpolation; and Mantegna, who died in 1505, could not have been the master of a boy who at that time was scarcely in his twelfth year.
Some supposed pictures of Correggio at Mantoua, in the manner of Mantegna, may have given rise to this opinion. An imitation of that style is visible in some whose originality has never been disputed: such as in the St. Cecilia of the Palace Borghese, and a piece in his first manner of the Gallery at Dresden.
Father Maurizio Zapata, a friar of Casino, in a MS. quoted by Tiraboschi, affirms that the two uncles of Parmegianino, Michele and Pier Stario Mazzuoli, were the masters of Correggio,—a supposition without foundation; it is more probable, though not certain, that he gained the first elements from Lorenzo Allegri his uncle, and not, as the vulgar opinion states, his grandfather.
Equal doubts prevail on his skill and power of execution in architecture and plastic: the common opinion is, that for this he was beholden to Antonio Begarelli. Scannelli, Resta, and Vedriani, pretend that Correggio, terrified by the enormous mass and variety of figures to be seen foreshortened from below in the cupola of the Domo at Parma, had the whole modelled by Begarelli, and thus escaped from the difficulty, correct, and with applause. They likewise tell in Parma, that by occasion of some solemn funeral, many of those models were found on the cornices of the cupola, and considered as the works of Begarelli: hence they pretend that Correggio was his regular pupil, and as such finished those three statues which a tradition as vague as silly has placed to his account in Begarelli's celebrated composition of the Deposition from the Cross in the church of St. Margareta.