Bo oks

Sweetness and light

Kenneth Clark

The Paintings of Correggio Cecil Gould 1Faber and Faber £50.00) The historian of art must always be prepared for ridiculous changes in taste: but few have been more shocking than the change in tile fashionable attitude towards Correggio. Fervently admired in his own time, his reputation grew until, in the seventeenth century, lle was placed on a par with Raphael, as one 0.f the two greatest painters who have ever I ived; and this position he retained in Stendhal's L'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie (I817). Twenty years later the word 'Baroque became, as it still is among ignorant reciPle, a synonym for artificial and riclicu°us. Correggio, who is the unquestioned recursor of the Baroque style, vanished rorn the pages of fashionable criticism. Of course, a few genuine lovers of art never

ceased to love him, and his pictures still held Dl to

of honour in Dresden and the Louvre. uLit the taste snobs had dropped him. How ctillany of them ever visited Parma? Even to Y, when Mannerist and Baroque are once rilcire fashionable, a series of art monogr.aPhs seldom includes the name of Correggl°The painter of sweetness, happiness and gr„ is less to our taste than the skeletons of (nat half-crazy neurasthenic, Rosso Fiorentino.

, was therefore good news for all who cl re interested in art-history that one of the ,.!4ding English scholars was writing a major .°rk on Correggio. The work has now apeared and is indeed a formidable volume. It is thick, packed with information, solidly ,_t.Ind and contains over 250 black and "ite illustrations which, since they are in isetterpress 'half-tone, are clear rather than ih°wY. The colour plates, produced in Italy f.r1 some nameless technique, are less satis1,4c.,torY, except for those reproducing dee7,11s. of the Cupola, which give a fair notion .1 Its tonality. This is emphatically not a ac.°Iree-table' book ; it is a book for scholars, rich I hope that university libraries will feel first enough to stump up the £50 which at rs,..t, sight seems rather a stiff price for it. e,„'ecil Gould's catalogue of the sixteentheiturY Italian pictures in the National the had shown him to be a scholar with tile highest standards of accuracy and r°ughness; and these qualities are even re evident in the volume under review. Lus catalogue of Correggio's authentic rorks is a masterpiece of full and precise in:illation. All the appendices are equally a ear and convincing, and one of them, dna!Ysing Correggio's technique as revealed N11.11.11g the cleaning of his pictures in the i„"u ational Gallery, breaks new ground. The strations, of which the author and pub

lisher have been so prodigal, reproduce all pictures plausibly attributed to Correggio, all relevant drawings, a number of very revealing X-rays and some early engravings of the pictures, which are a benefice for the scholar. The whole arrangement and machinery of the book is admirable; I have never known a large book on a complex subject that is easier to use. From the point of view of information, it seems unlikely that anyone will have to write a book on Correggio again.

But when one turns from information to criticism the book is not quite so satisfactory. The introductory chapters describing Correggio's works are overloaded with problems of chronology and derivation. Chronology is indeed an essential element in studying an artist's development, but with Cecil Gould it becomes an obsession. Derivations are also instructive, but in this book they are pursued so relentlessly that we sometimes lose sight of the artist's own work in our search for his sources. However, the author brings off one splendid coup, the discovery that the Louvre 'Venus and a Satyr' is largely derived from Michelangelo's 'Fall of Man' in the Sistine. This conversion of a tragic drama into one of the most ravishingly sensual t xperiences in art is profoundly revealing.

'The best chapter in the book is the last, in which the author shows how the rediscovery of Correggio in the seicento (not that he had ever been forgotten, but it had taken over a century to catch up with him) became the basis of the Baroque style. In painting this had been analysed by Strygowski (1898) and Wolfflin whose name is surprisingly omitted from the book. But Cecil Gould is, I believe, the first critic fully to appreciate the influence of Correggio on Bernini: one of those things that are obvious enough when they are pointed outs All Bernini's sentiment appears already in the martyrdom from the del Bono Chapel (c. 1524), and the St Teresa (c. 1650) is almost a Correggio in marble.

Cecil Gould includes some well-chosen quotations to show the heights to which Correggio's fame had reached in the eight eenth century. My favourite is from Algarotti: 'May the divine spirit of Raphael par

don me if, in contemplating this painting [the Giornol I lose faith in him and am tempted to say secretly to Correggio III solo nil Piaci.'

The author deals with Correggio's fall from fame in two pages, and ends the book with some eloquent words of contempt for the modern critics who still neglect his hero. But he makes no attempt to account for the cause of this neglect. To have done so would have led him into the kind of critical judgments which he feels it his duty, as a scholar, to avoid. This is not because he is incapable of them, but because of the current feeling that a scholar who indulges in critical judgment endangers his professional status.

What the non-specialist reader will miss in this book, if he ever has access to it, is any description of Correggio's art as a whole. It is composed of varying strands. There is a genuine religious feeling, as in the National Gallery 'Christ taking leave of His Mother,' the Eisler 'Pieta,' the two pictures from the del Bono Chapel, and the Apsley House 'Agony in the Garden'; and this feel ing is still perceptible in the Notte. But in the Giorno it has vanished and its place has been taken by grace. It is completely absent from his last religious picture, the unconvincing 'Christ Presented to the People.' (If, for a moment, I may emulate Cecil Gould, I would suggest that the more serious head of Christ revealed by an X-ray suggests that this picture was begun earlier.) In Correggio's last altarpiece, the brilliant and com.

plex' Madonna with Four Saints' in Dresden, the figure of St John the Baptist is an en tirely frivolous concept, and looks as if it

had been painted \from a girl. The turning point in Correggio's art seems to have been

that work of incredible virtuosity, the cup ola of the Cathedral in Parma. A hostile critic called it a hash of frogs, but looked at in detail it turns out to be a riot of sensuality, and Correggio evidently relied on that emotion to keep him at work on the gigantic project.

This sensuality, refined and controlled, reaches its highest point in the figures of Mary Magdalene in Ii Giorno, and is not limited to the head and the amorous pose, but extends to details like the Magdalene's exquisite hand touching the Child's foot. St Catherine, in the Louvre picture, extends an equally beautiful hand for the Infant Christ to place a ring on her finger. These pictures, to say nothing of the girlish Baptist in Dresden, excuse Berenson's definition of Correggio as the master of femininity. Of course this is oversimplified. Berenson says nothing about Correggio's amazingly original powers of composition which make him the precursor of Baroque. But the two approaches are not irreconcilable, for the rhythm of Baroque, in architecture as well as painting, is based on the double curve, and the human original of this rhythm is the female body.

Cecil Gould agrees with Berenson in feeling that Correggio's sensuality led inevitably to mythological subjects, and that these are the summit of his art. He says that although the details in his religious pictures are often frivolous, in his mythologies, no matter how erotic the subject, the artist's approach is reverential.' Would that the author had allowed himself more critical asides of this quality. Unfortunately the two latest and most ambitious of the pagan pictures, the Leda and the Danae, are badly preserved; indeed I sometimes wonder if the Danae is not an early copy. I admire the Nolte and the Giorno more than any of the mythologies, and feel that it is in them above all that Correggio's wonderful genius is most fully extended.