Of two pictures in the Cabinet at Madrid, the principal is that of Christ praying in the Garden, with an Angel on high pointing to a Cross and a Crown of Thorns on the ground, scarcely discernible. The open but drooping arms of the Saviour express his entire resignation to the will of his Father. The most poetic singularity of this picture is its chiaroscuro: Christ receives his light from Heaven, the Angel from Christ: at a distance on lower ground, and nearly evanescent, are the three Disciples in graceful and picturesque attitudes, and farther off, the approaching host of captors. At first sight, the whole seems to be divided into two masses only of light and darkness, but on inspection, the ambient medium and the more and less of distinctness in the objects as they approach the light or recede from it, is divinely expressed. There is a tale, which even Lomazzo and Scanelli repeat, that Correggio parted with this picture to his apothecary for four scudi, which he owed him; that afterwards it was sold for five hundred crowns to Pirrho Count Visconti, who resold it for seven hundred and fifty gold doubloons, to the Marchese Camarena, Governor of Milan, by whom it was bought in commission for Philip the Fourth. Every day discovers some copy, or, if you choose to believe those who wish to dispose of them, some duplicate or triplicate of this picture. Padre Resta possessed not one, but four, all of which he insisted on being believed in as originals: one on copper, another on wood, which Lelio Orsi was said to have copied on canvass; a third, likewise on panel but somewhat worm-eaten, disposed of to Monsignor Marchetti, and a fourth again on copper. Some of these are probably in England.
The companion of this picture is the Madonna dressing the Infant, with Joseph planing a board in the back-ground; a performance though inferior in style to the former, not less original from the pentimenti still discoverable in the two principal figures.
The Duke of Alba possesses of Correggio, in figures somewhat less than Nature, Mercury teaching Cupid to read in the presence of Venus. Venus has the singular attribute of wings, and of a bow in her left hand; and Mengs persuades himself to discover in her forms a reminiscence of an imitation of the Apollino, formerly in the Villa Medici at Rome. The characteristic excellence of the execution, and an evident pentimento in the arm of the Mercury, leave no doubt of its having a better claim to originality than the duplicates in France and Germany. It formerly made part of the collection of Charles the First, and Sandrart saw it in the Palace of Whitehall, from whence it was purchased by an ancestor of the Duke of Alba.
Not to waste time on conjectural works, we finish this list with a picture formerly in the house Barberini, now supposed to be in England: it is painted on panel, and represents from the narrative of S. Marc, the young man who followed our Saviour at the moment of his captivity, but fled on being laid hold of, and left his garment in the hands of the captors. Mengs describes a duplicate of this picture, painted on canvass, at his time in the hands of an Englishman at Rome, and though, in his opinion, only the study for the other, in the principal parts, especially the figure of the youth, highly finished: his expression, form and attitude, remind the critic so strongly of the same in the eldest son of the Laocoon, that he is persuaded they are an imitation, though in a style more consonant with Correggio's manner.
The cause and circumstances of his death we are not acquainted with, since the idle tale has been discarded which Vasari tells, of his perishing in consequence of having carried home a load of sixty scudi in copper, which he had received in payment at Parma. He who considers what strength would be required to carry sixty crowns in quattrini, will find its confutation in the tale itself; let it be added that the extreme heat which is said to have aggravated the fatigue, and accelerated his death, is, even in Italy, not coincident with the season in which he must have taken the journey,[165] as he died on the fifth of March. The magnificence and number of his commissions; the deference paid to his powers in the face of rival artists, by the very patrons of those men, or societies, that might have saved expense by admitting concurrence; the handsome, though not quite metropolitan prices, which he received, and what Mengs has observed, the expensive goodness of his colours, of his panels, and canvasses—make it not only extremely improbable that he should have lived in the depressed circumstances, to which vulgar tradition has sunk him; but add an air of truth to the opinion of those who thought him, if not opulent, yet nearer allied to affluence than want.
Correggio was a monument without a tomb; but it appears strange that a century and a half should have elapsed before the thought of erecting him one occurred to the Senate and citizens of his native place, and then was suffered to evaporate in ineffectual projects. The boastful intentions of Padre Resta proved equally nugatory: the tombstone set and inscribed by Girolamo Conti still remains a solitary offering to his genius:
D. O. M.
Antonio. Allegri. Civi.
Vulgo. Il Correggio.
Arte. Picturæ. Habitu. Probitatis.
Eximio.
Monum. Hoc. Posuit.
Hier. Conti. Concivis.
Siccine. Separas. Amara. Mors.
Obiit. Anno. Ætatis. XL. Sal. MDXXXIV.
On such a face as Correggio's, physiognomy might have established principles or drawn some inferences from it, had not a perverse destiny left us as ignorant of it, as of his complexion, stature, character, and habits. Vasari's exertions to obtain a portrait of him were not only unsuccessful, but hopeless; and the profile which is shown in the dome of Parma as his, becomes inadmissible from the very name of the artist to whom it is ascribed.[166] The head which found its way into the third and every following edition of Vasari, has certainly nothing repugnant with the notions we may form of his character, but age. Meditation, simplicity, serenity, compose it. It is said to have been copied from a picture not quite finished, which appears to have the touch of Correggio, and came from Sicily to Naples. He is represented contemplating a design, the original of which, report has placed at Vienna with Prince Esterhazy. The portrait which is at Turin, in the "Vigna della Regina," engraved by Valperga, with the epigraph, in part hid by the frame, but read by Lanzi "Antonius Corrigius f." (i. e. fecit) though by some believed genuine, appears spurious from this very circumstance, the large character of the letters and the space they occupy; a manner of writing often used to indicate the person painted, never the painter. Another portrait, which from Genoua is said to have been carried to England, with the indorsed inscription "Dosso Dossi dipinse questo ritratto di Antonio da Correggio," fronts the Memorie of Ratti. Without examining the authenticity of this inscription, it is sufficient to observe, that Antonio da Correggio is likewise the name of Antonio Bernieri, a celebrated miniature painter, and fellow citizen of Allegri, whose date coincides with that of Dosso, and whom there will be occasion to mention again.
Of Correggio's numerous pretending imitators, Lodovico Carracci appears to be the only one who penetrated his principle. The axiom, that the less the traces appear of the means by which a work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, is not an axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation, which Lodovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and its comparison with Nature; and where could that be met with in a degree equal to what he found in the infinite unity and variety of Correggio's effusions? They inspired his frescoes in the cloisters of S. Michele in Bosco: the foreshortenings of the muscular labourers at the hermitage, and of the ponderous demon that mocks their toil; the warlike splendour in the Homage of Totila; the Nocturnal Conflagration of Monte Casino; the wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insidious charms of the sister nymphs in the garden scene, equally proclaim the pupil of Correggio.
His triumph in oil is the altar-piece of St. John preaching in a chapel of the Certosa at Bologna, whose lights seem embrowned by a golden veil, and the shadowy gleam of Valombrosa; though he sometimes indulged in tones austere, pronounced, and hardy: such is the Flagellation of Christ in the same church, whose tremendous depth of flesh-tints contrasts the open wide-expanded sky, and less conveys than dashes its terrors on the astonished sense.