The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (117 page)

Correggio
(Antonio Allegri)
.

(
c.
1490–1534).
Italian painter, named after the small town in Emilia where he was born. His career is poorly documented and his training has to be conjectured on stylistic grounds. Echoes of
Mantegna's
manner in many of his early paintings indicate that he may have studied that master's work in Mantua, and he was influenced in these works also by Lorenzo
Costa
and
Leonardo
, adopting Costa's pearly Ferrrarese colouring and, in the St John of the
St Francis
altarpiece (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, 1514), his first documented work, Leonardo's characteristic gesture of the pointing finger. Later he developed a style of conscious elegance and allure with soft
sfumato
and gestures of captivating charm. Correggio may well have visited Rome early in his career, although
Vasari
maintains that he never went there and the obvious inspiration of the paintings of
Raphael
and
Michelangelo
could be accounted for by drawings and prints that were known all over Italy. Although he worked mainly in provincial centres, he was one of the most sophisticated artists of his time, blending disparate sources into a potent synthesis.
He was probably in Parma, the scene of his greatest activity, by 1518. His first large-scale commission there was for the decoration of the abbess's room in the convent of S. Paolo. The theme of the decorations is Diana, goddess of chastity and the chase, and the vaulted ceiling uses Mantegna's idea of a leafy trellis framing
putti
and symbols of the hunt. The S. Paolo ceiling was followed by two dome paintings in which Correggio developed the
illusionist
conception—already used by Mantegna—of depicting a scene as though it were actually taking place in the sky above (see
SOTTO IN SU
). The first of these domes was commissioned for the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in 1520. The twelve Apostles sit on clouds round the base, while Christ is shown in steep foreshortening ascending to heaven. In the commission six years later for an
Assumption of the Virgin
in the dome of Parma Cathedral he used the same principle, but on a much larger scale and with still more daring foreshortening. These works reveal Correggio as one of the boldest and most inventive artists of the High
Renaissance
and they were highly influential on the development of
Baroque
dome painting (one of his most important successors,
Lanfranco
, was a native of Parma). Other aspects of Correggio's work were even more forward-looking. His extraordinarily sensuous mythologies, notably the series on the
Loves of Jupiter
painted for Federigo
Gonzaga
in
c.
1530–3 (
Ganymede
and
Jupiter and Io
in the Kunsthistorisches Mus., Vienna;
Leda
in the Staatliche Mus., Berlin;
Danaë
in the Borghese Gal., Rome), foreshadow the paintings of
Rococo
artists such as
Boucher
, and it was at this time that Correggio's reputation was at its height.

 
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Corrente
.

An anti-Fascist association of young Italian artists formed by Renato
Birolli
in Milan in 1938;
Guttuso
, was among the founder members. The association had no fixed artistic programme beyond a desire to oppose what they regarded as the provincialism of the
Novecento
and of official art. They stood for the defence of ‘modern’ art at a time when the Nazi campaign against
degenerate art
(
entartete Kunst
) was spreading to Italy. The association's activities, which included exhibitions and the publication of a review of literature, politics, and the arts, were dissipated by the Second World War.

 
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Cortese
.

See
COURTOIS
.

 
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(1596–1669).
Italian painter, architect, decorator, and designer, second only to
Bernini
as the most versatile genius of the full Roman
Baroque
style. He was named after his birthplace in Tuscany and probably had some training with his father, a stonemason, before being apprenticed as a painter in Florence. In 1612 or 1613 he moved to Rome. His first major works were frescos in Sta Bibiana, Rome (1624–6), commissioned by Urban VIII (Maffeo
Barberini
), and the patronage of the Barberini family played a major part in his career. For their palace he painted his most famous work, the huge ceiling fresco,
Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power
. This was begun in 1633, but he interrupted the work in 1637 to go to Florence and paint two of four frescos commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany for the
Pitti Palace
. He returned to finish the Barberini ceiling in 1639. This, one of the key works in the development of Baroque painting, is a triumph of
illusionism
, for the centre of the ceiling appears open to the sky and the figures seen from below (
di sotto in su
) appear to come down into the room as well as soar out of it. It demonstrates Pietro's belief, which came out in a celebrated controversy with Andrea
Sacchi
in the Accademia di S. Luca, that a history painting could be compared with an epic and was entitled to use many figures; Sacchi, intent on
classical
simplicity and unity, argued for using as few figures as possible. In 1640–7 Pietro was back in Florence to finish his decorations in the Pitti Palace, where he received a new commission for seven ceilings. These
Allegories of Virtues and Planets
have elaborate
stucco
accompaniments uniting the painted ceilings with the framework of the rooms, and this form of decoration was widely influential, not only in Italy, but also in France. (Pietro turned down an invitation to visit Paris from Cardinal Mazarin , but his style was taken there by his best pupil,
Romanelli
.) From 1647 until his death Pietro again worked in Rome, his major paintings from this period being an extensive series of frescos in Sta Maria in Vallicella (the Chiesa Nuova, 1647–65), in which, as in his Pitti decorations, paint and stucco are magnificently combined. Throughout his career he also painted easel pictures of religious and mythological subjects.
Pietro once wrote that architecture was merely a pastime for him, but he ranks among the greatest architects of his period. His masterpiece is the church of SS. Martina e Luca in Rome (1635–50), which was the first Baroque church designed and built as a complete unity. Although his architecture has all the vigour of his painting, there is less correspondence between the two fields than might be imagined. He never decorated any of his own churches, and indeed they were not designed with fresco decoration in mind. Pietro's great contemporary reputation sank in the next century with that of many other Baroque artists. In a famous passage in his
Dizionario delle belle arti
(1797), Francesco Milizia wrote: ‘Borromini in architecture, Bernini in sculpture, Pietro da Cortona in painting … represent a diseased taste—one that has infected a great number of artists.’

 
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