20 SEPTEMBER 1930, Page 21

Correggio is one of the great Italian painters whose mastery

can only be appreciated to the full in the land of their birth. But the few very fine • examples of his work in our national collections, supplemented by Signor Corrado Ricci's admirable new monograph, Correggio (Warne, 81s. 6d.), will give some idea of the master's genius. Signor Ricci, who wrote a good life of Correggio a generation ago, had exceptional oppor- tunities as director of the Parma Gallery for studying the painter's frescoes in the great churches of that city. He gives sound reasons for believing, with Vasari and other contem- poraries, that Correggio never went to Rome and was entirely uninfluenced by Michelangelo and Raphael. Indeed, no one seeing his work for the first time would think of connecting it with the Roman masters. Signor Ricci's commentary is accompanied by nearly three hundred excellent collotypes of Coneggio's pictures, frescoes and sketches—a marvellous output, in quantity and quality, for a man who died at forty- live.