on his
figures like an impalpable Coan gauze, aerial and transparent,
enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved. His
colouring, in like manner, has none of the superb and mundane pomp
which the Venetians affected; it does not glow or burn or beat the
fire of gems into our brain; joyous and wanton, it seems to be exactly
such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety. There is
nothing in his hues to provoke deep passion or to stimulate the
yearnings of the soul: the pure blushes of the dawn and the crimson
pyres of sunset are nowhere in the world that he has painted. But that
chord of jocund colour which may fitly be married to the smiles of
light, the blues which are found in laughing eyes, the pinks that
tinge the cheeks of early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of
healthy flesh, mingle as in a marvellous pearl-shell on his pictures.
Both chiaroscuro and colouring have this supreme purpose in art, to
effect the sense like music, and like music to create a mood in the
soul of the spectator. Now the mood which Correggio stimulates is one
of natural and thoughtless pleasure. To feel his influence, and at the
same moment to be the subject of strong passion, or fierce lust, or
heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is
impossible. Wantonness, innocent because unconscious of sin, immoral
because incapable of any serious purpose, is the quality which
prevails in all that he has painted. The pantomimes of a Mohammedan
paradise might be put upon the stage after patterns supplied by this
least spiritual of painters.

It follows from this analysis that the Correggiosity of Correggio,
that which sharply distinguished him from all previous artists, was
the faculty of painting a purely voluptuous dream of beautiful beings
in perpetual movement, beneath the laughter of morning light, in a
world of never-failing April hues. When he attempts to depart from the
fairyland of which he was the Prospero, and to match himself with the
masters of sublime thought or earnest passion, he proves his weakness.
But within his own magic circle he reigns supreme, no other artist
having blended the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro,and faunlike
loveliness of form into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm.
Bewitched by the strains of the siren, we pardon affectations of
expression, emptiness of meaning, feebleness of composition,
exaggerated and melodramatic attitudes. There is wha