scious immorality or of what is
stigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his
seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination. They
belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a
certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a
delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with
the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. When
infantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to be
distinguished for any noble quality of beauty from Murillo's cherubs,
and are far less divine than the choir of children who attend Madonna
in Titian's 'Assumption.' But in their boyhood and their prime of
youth, they acquire a fulness of sensuous vitality and a radiance that
are peculiar to Correggio. The lily-bearer who helps to support S.
Thomas beneath the dome of the cathedral at Parma, the groups of
seraphs who crowd behind the Incoronata of S. Giovanni, and the two
wild-eyed open-mouthed S. Johns stationed at each side of the
celestial throne, are among the most splendid instances of the
adolescent loveliness conceived by Correggio. Where the painter found
their models may be questioned but not answered; for he has made them
of a different fashion from the race of mortals: no court of Roman
emperor or Turkish sultan, though stocked with the flowers of
Bithynian and Circassian youth, have seen their like. Mozart's
Cherubino seems to have sat for all of them. At any rate they
incarnate the very spirit of the songs he sings.

As a consequence of this predilection for sensuous and voluptuous
forms, Correggio had no power of imagining grandly or severely.
Satisfied with material realism in his treatment even of sublime
mysteries, he converts the hosts of heaven into a 'fricassee of
frogs,' according to the old epigram. His apostles, gazing after the
Virgin who has left the earth, are thrown into attitudes so violent
and so dramatically foreshortened, that seen from below upon the
pavement of the cathedral, little of their form is distinguishable
except legs and arms in vehement commotion. Very different is Titian's
conception of this scene. To express the spiritual meaning, the
emotion of Madonna's transit, with all the pomp which colour and
splendid composition can convey, is Titian's sole care; whereas
Correggio appears to have been satisfied with realising the tumult of
heaven rushing to meet earth, and earth straining