New light on an old master
Jonathan Keates
CORREGGIO by David Ekserdjian Yale, £45, pp. 334 Correggio is a small town in the province of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, one of those delightfully neat, unassuming places which, with its centro storico fanning out into leafy boulevards and its general air of no-frills prosperity, confounds our gloomier thoughts about the end of civilisation. It gave its name to the painter born here as Antonio Allegri in 1489, though perhaps through an instinct of academic over-scrupulousness David Ekserdjian, in his pioneering monograph, seems reluctant to assert this as a fact.
The artist we know as Correggio spent most of his career either on his home patch or else in the city of Parma, about 20 miles to the north, where he died in 1534. In a life whose profile seems spectacularly undramatic when compared to those of such contemporaries as Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini, almost the only event of any personal significance apart from visits to Rome and Mantua seems to have been his marriage to a girl named Hieronima Merlini. Their eldest child was called Pomponio after the celebrated humanist Pomponius Laetus, and evidence suggests that Correggio himself was more than usually learned, even for a Renaissance painter. Vasari tells us that he was modest, gloomy, pestered by a grasping family, and that he died from drinking tainted water on his way to Parma to collect a debt.
This meagre life record is entirely over- whelmed by the paintings themselves, a body of work which impresses us not simply as that of a numinous figure in the aesthetic orthodoxy of later ages, but more importantly for the extraordinary gamut of styles across which it ran in the space of scarcely more than 20 years. To most of us Correggio is merely an honoured art- historical name, given occasional substance by the reproduction of the National Gallery `School of Love' or that oddly uninspiring `Virgin Adoring the Christ Child' in the Uffizi. Those inclined to pass him by with a polite nod as the saccharine-sweetened version of his contemporary (and inevitable influence) Raphael need to invest forthwith in Ekserdjian's book, whose dramatic impact springs from its disclosure, both in text and plates, of Correggio's multiple artistic incarnations as experimental innovator, visual poet, designer, scholar and interpreter of painterly traditions communicated by sources as diverse as St Placidus and St Flavia, central figures in Martyrdom of Four Saints' Galleria Nazionale, Parma Leonardo, Mantegna and Di1rer.
The pitch of lyrical elegance which so dazzles us in such works as the glowing tempera allegories of Virtue and Vice painted by Isabella D'Este, or the sym- phonic fresco inventions tumbling across Parma cathedral's great octagonal cupola, was not reached without difficulty. We can scarcely avoid noticing the problems he had with figure-drawing, for example. Even after the Dresden 'Madonna of St Francis', painted in 1514, which seems to indicate a newly attained sophistication in the young Correggio, the protagonists in a Brera `Adoration of the Magi' three years later retain the oddly cut-down dimensional par- simony of his early manner, as does the head of the green-hooded Virgin in the Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum.
A real technical breakthrough evidently arrived in 1519 with the Camera di San Paolo, a room in a Parmesan convent whose ceiling and fireplace the painter covered with frolicking putti, leafy trellis- work, grisaille lunettes based on Roman coins and a vigorous Diana bowling through the clouds in her chariot. Here as elsewhere in this book (try the chapter on the so-called Giorno Madonna if you don't believe me) Ekserdjian, the bit firmly between his teeth, injects that vitalising enthusiasm which art history, too easily embarrassed by any hint of obsession or personal commitment, so often denies us just when we might feel the artist's achieve- ment demands it.
Only occasionally is the honour done to his subject, in the sheer depth of Ekserd- jian's perspectives, permitted to obscure certain points on which he could have turned aside to enlighten us. If the brows- ing goat in the background of the Vienna `Virgin and Child' is 'endowed with sym- bolic meaning', why not tell us what it is? And how exactly are trim-buttocked cupids and pagan deities appropriate to the cabi- net of a Benedictine abbess, even in Renaissance Italy? If we accept Cecil Gould's argument that the gorgeous lateral canvases in the Del Bono Chapel are meant to be viewed obliquely, it still seems perverse to read the diagonal composition of the 'Martyrdom of Four Saints' from right to left, rather than downwards from the executioner's upraised sword towards the ecstatic Saint Flavia, as the artist surely wants us to.
In every important respect this book challenges our indolence in respect of an artist whom connoisseurship has tended for too long coldly to revere without really wanting to look properly at what he achieved. Expertly balancing passion and distance, Ekserdjian's pages reveal Correggio's eternal capacity for surprising the onlooker. We thought we knew the humble, self-doubting Antonio Allegri well enough. Partisanship of this quality, in the first serious critical study of him ever published, shows us just how wrong we were.
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