pictures, unlike Titian's in their repose, are full of motion and
excitement. Correggio is spoken of as a painter who delighted 'in the
buoyance of childish glee, the bliss of earthly, the fervour of heavenly
love,' whose radiant sphere of art sorrow rarely clouded; but when
sorrow did enter, it borrowed from the painter's own quivering heart the
very sharpness of anguish. The same authority tells us of Correggio,
that he has painted 'the very heart-throbs of humanity.' But it seems as
if such a nature, with its self-conscious veil of forced stillness, must
have had a tendency to vehemence and excess; and so we hear that
Correggio's fore-shortening was sometimes violent, and the energy of his
actors spasmodic; thus the cruelly smart contemporary criticism was
pronounced on his frescoes of the 'Assumption of the Virgin,' in which
legs and arms in wild play are chiefly conspicuous from below, that
Correggio had prepared for the Parmese 'a fricassee of frogs.' In
addition, the great modern critic, Mr Ruskin, has boldly accused
Correggio 'both of weakness and meretriciousness,' and there is this to
be said of a nature so highly strung as Correggio's was strung, that it
was not a healthily balanced nature.

But if the painter were really inferior in his sense of form and
expression to his great predecessors, he was so great in one department,
that in it he was held worthy, not only to found the school of Parma,
but to be classed with the first four painters of Italy.

That chiarascuro, or treatment of light and shade, in which Lionardo and
Andrea Mantegna were no mean proficients, was brought to such perfection
by Correggio, that, as Mrs Jameson has sought to illustrate technical
expressions, 'you seem to look through. Correggio's shadows, and to see
beyond them the genuine texture of the flesh.' In undulating grace of
motion, in melting softness of outline, fixed on a canvas, he surpassed
all rivals, including Raphael; and this widely attractive quality
('luscious refinement,' Mr Ruskin terms it) in connection with
Correggio's ardent, if undisciplined sensibility, has rendered him one
of the most valued of painters; his best paintings being highly prized
and costly as the easel pictures attributed to Raphael. Sir W. Stirling
Maxwell writes that an old Duke of Modena was suspected of having caused
Correggio's 'Notte' to be stolen from a church at Reggio, and that the
princes of Este were wont to carry 'The Magdalene Reading'