nows and paints the finest movements of nervous life," says
Burckhardt.

Even when he sought to portray a figure in stable equilibrium, he
unwittingly gave it a wavering pose; witness the insecurity of Joseph
in the Madonna della Scodella, and of St. Jerome in the Madonna
bearing his name. Usually he preferred some momentary attitude caught
in the midst of action. In this characteristic the painter was allied
to Michelangelo, the keynote of whose art is action.

It is a curious fact that two artists of such opposed natures--the one
so light-hearted, the other burdened with the prophet's spirit--should
have so much in common in their decorative methods. Both understood
the decorative value of the nude, and found their supreme delight in
bodily motion. In a common zeal for exploiting the manifold
possibilities of the human figure, the two fell into similar errors of
exaggeration. In point of design Correggio cannot be compared with
Michelangelo. He was utterly incapable of the sweeping lines
characteristic of the great Florentine. He seldom achieved any success
in the flow of drapery, and often his disposition of folds is very
clumsy.

It is interesting to fancy what Correggio's art might have been had he
been free to choose his own subjects. Limited, as he was, in his most
important commissions, to the well-worn cycle of ecclesiastical
themes, he could not work out all the possibilities of his genius.
Nevertheless, he infused into the old themes an altogether new spirit,
the spirit of his own individuality. It is a spirit which we call
distinctly modern, yet it is as old as paganism.

Among the works of the old Italian masters, Correggio's art is so
anomalous that it has inevitably called forth detractors. What to his
admirers is mere childlike sweetness is condemned as "sentimentality,"
innocent playfulness as "frivolity," exuberance of vitality as
"sensuality." Certainly there is nothing didactic in his art. "Space
and light and motion were what Antonio Allegri of Correggio most
longed to express,"[2] and to these aims he subordinated all motives
of spiritual significance. One of his severest critics (Burckhardt)
has conceded that "he is the first to represent entirely and
completely the reality of genuine nature." He, then, who is a lover of
genuine nature in her most subtle beauties of "space and light and
motion," cannot fail to delight in Correggio.

[Footnote 2: E. H. Blashfield in Italian Cities.]

II.