Making Assumptions

You could make the bold statement that all Western art since the 15th century has been a reaction to the Renaissance. Correggio came at the tail end of the period known as the High Renaissance, dying on March 5, 1534. Born sometime in August 1489, Correggio began as a painter in the vein of Leonardo da Vinci, especially in works such as The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (above, from 1520), which recalls mystical group portraits of Leonardo’s such as The Virgin of the Rocks and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne. Correggio never emulates Leonardo’s distinctive sfumato, but he does approach the gentle handling of the genius and the naturalism of his figures. The wondering eyes of the infant Jesus staring at the ring on Saint Catherine’s finger, presumably symbolizing their “mystical marriage,” are familiar to anyone with a young child with a yen for shiny things. Behind the group, a beautifully green woodland landscape extends, similar to the stretches of natural wonder Leonardo would place behind his religious figures.

Correggio soon took his painting in a different direction—literally upwards with frescoes such as his Assumption of the Virgin (above, from 1526-1530) in the Cathedral of Parma. Standing beneath the dome, we see what the Virgin Mary would have seen during her assumption into Heaven. At the center of the swirling mass of figures, Jesus descends in a beautiful display of artistic foreshortening. Seemingly flying around the perimeter of the dome, Correggio gathers various saints and Bible figures (including Adam and Eve) to bear witness to the event. The illusionistic effects of Correggio’s gravity-defying ceiling frescoes blew the minds of spectators, helping creating a market for such effects that led to the excesses of Baroque frescoes, which soon burst out from cathedrals and churches and found new homes in the palaces of kings and queens seeking self-glorification. Correggio didn’t invent such perspective tricks, but he took them to a whole new level that stretched them beyond the bounds of Renaissance taste.

Correggio brought the same bravura brushwork and inventiveness to mythological themes such as Jupiter and Io (above, from 1531). The radiant flesh tones of Io rival that of the finest sculptors of the Baroque. Her pose of ecstacy prefigures similar poses in marble by Bernini a century later. Centuries later, the artists of the Rococo period would adopt Correggio as a forefather for his lavish treatment of the female nude in mythological guise. The excesses of an artist such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard have their root in the relative restraint of Correggio. It’s interesting that Correggio left no students behind to carry on his style, yet had such a wide range of influence centuries later. Working in Parma, outside the hotbed of artistic innovation that was Rome, Correggio stayed clear of the limelight in life and engaged the giants of the Renaissance at a distance. It’s hard to make assumptions about what Correggio’s motivations were in avoiding the artistic center of Rome, but like modern artists today who avoid the bright lights of New York, he most likely would have been a different artist if he had followed the crowd.

Charity Case

There’s something truly disturbing in the cold, dead eyes of the blind beggar in Bartolomeo Schedoni’s painting The Charity (above, from 1611). Born January 23, 1578, Schedoni knew the work of his slightly older contemporary Caravaggio and copied the more famous artist’s strong use of lights and darks for dramatic effect. Schedoni, however, resists the reductive label of “Caravaggisti” through the greater softness of much of his works, which make him a kindler, gentler Caravaggio in many ways. Schedoni studied with Annibale Carracci and admired the works of Correggio, whose gentleness, especially in religious genre paintings, set the standard for a generation of Italian artists. The little boy staring out at the viewer in the bottom right could have stepped right out of a Correggio painting. That little boy’s soft, yet still almost accusing glance balances the unseeing, yet clearly confrontational “glance” of the blind boy with the walking stick. In those two figures you can almost see Schedoni standing with one foot in each of the two schools—the little cherub representing Correggio and the striking charity case representing Caravaggio. In The Charity, the realism of the beggars symbolically asks the beauty of Correggioesque lyricism for the means of survival.

Of course, Caravaggio was the new, hot thing, so Schedoni found himself veering more towards that new style than the old ones. In The Deposition (above, from 1613), Schedoni captures wonderfully the pure compositional chaos as well as the dramatic lights and darks of Caravaggio. In fact, Schedoni’s Deposition bears a striking similarity compositionally to Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600), right down to the detail of a standing figure pointing to the jumbled left side of the image. If Caravaggio mastered the power of blackness, Schedoni perfected whites “whiter than white,” as the old detergent ads used to promise. The white of the woman’s rolled sleeve almost explodes with light against a sea of darkness. Maybe Schedoni could have taken the Baroque style in a completely different direction—towards light rather than dark. Sadly, he met his end almost as quickly as Caravaggio did.

Schedoni must have been a man of great passions. He reportedly almost lost the use of his right, painting hand from playing tennis too obsessively. The same fervor that drove him to perfect his art through risky innovation, unfortunately, also enflamed him to risk money at the gambling table. Heavy losses at gambling allegedly led Schedoni to take his own life in 1615. In that same last year, Schedoni painted The Holy Family with the Virgin Teaching the Child to Read (above, from 1615), a tender, decidedly non-Caravaggioesque painting of great intimacy—a return to Correggio in many ways. Schedoni painted many small works as this as devotionals for patrons to complement his income from larger, public works for churches. Schedoni gave this particular version to his wife, perhaps in a moment of affection and thanks for her putting up with his difficult ways. For centuries after his death, Schedoni became known more for his wild ways, ala Caravaggio, than his art. The early English Romantic novelist Ann Radcliffe named a sinister monk in her novel The Italian, Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents “Schedoni” after the painter. Although Schedoni’s whites still gleam brightly today, his star in the art history firmament faded long ago into just another shooting star that once held great promise but burned out much too soon.