ess about it than the religious subject. His
Dianas and Ledas are only so in name. They have little of the
Hellenic spirit about them, and for the sterner, heroic phases of
classicism--the lofty, the grand--Correggio never essayed them. The
things of this earth and the sweetness thereof seemed ever his aim.
Women and children were beautiful to him in the same way that flowers
and trees and skies and sunsets were beautiful. They were revelations
of grace, charm, tenderness, light, shade, color. Simply to exist and
be glad in the sunlight was sweetness to Correggio. He would have no
Sibylesque mystery, no prophetic austerity, no solemnity, no great
intellectuality. He was no leader of a tragic chorus. The dramatic,
the forceful, the powerful, were foreign to his mood. He was a singer
of lyrics and pastorals, a lover of the material beauty about him, and
it is because he passed by the pietistic, the classic, the literary,
and showed the beauty of physical life as an art motive that he is
called the Faun of the Renaissance. The appellation is not
inappropriate.

How or why he came to take this course would be hard to determine. It
was reflective of the times; but Correggio, so far as history tells
us, had little to do with the movements and people of his age. He was
born and lived and died near Parma, and is sometimes classed among the
Bologna-Ferrara painters, but the reasons for the classification are
not too strong. His education, masters, and influences are all shadowy
and indefinite. He seems, from his drawing and composition, to have
known something of Mantegna at Mantua; from his coloring something of
Dosso and Garofolo, especially in his straw-yellows; from his early
types and faces something of Costa and Francia, and his contours and
light-and-shade indicate a knowledge of Leonardo's work. But there is
no positive certainty that he saw the work of any of these men.

His drawing was faulty at times, but not obtrusively so; his color and
brush-work rich, vivacious, spirited; his light brilliant, warm,
penetrating; his contours melting, graceful; his atmosphere
omnipresent, enveloping. In composition he rather pushed aside line in
favor of light and color. It was his technical peculiarity that he
centralized his light and surrounded it by darks as a foil. And in
this very feature he was one of the first men in Renaissance Italy to
paint a picture for the purpose of weaving a scheme of lights and
darks through a tape