Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/265



The name of this great artist was Antonio Allegri, and he was born at Correggio, a small town in the Duchy of Modena, in 1494; hence his acquired name. It was for a long time the fashion to regard the divine creations of Correggio as the mere product of genius and accident; himself as a man born in the lowest grade of society; uneducated in the elements of his art, owing all to the wondrous resources of his own unassisted genius; living and dying in obscurity and poverty; ill paid for his pictures; and at length perishing tragically. It has been proved that there is no foundation for these popular fallacies. Correggio's own pictures are a sufficient refutation of a part of them; they exhibit not only a classical and cultivated taste, but a profound knowledge of anatomy, and of the sciences of optics, perspective, and chemistry, as far as they were then carried. His exquisite chiaro-scuro and harmonious blending of colors were certainly not the result of mere chance: all his sensibility to these effects of nature would not have enabled him to render them, without the profoundest study of the mechanical means he employed. The great works on which he was employed—his lavish use of the rarest and most expensive colors, and the time and labor he bestowed in analyzing and refining them—the report that he worked on a ground overlaid with gold—all refute the idea of his being either an ig