Correggio, ANTONIO ALLEGRI DA, was so styled from the place of his birth, a small town 20 miles E. of Parma, where he was born in 1494. Modern research has proved the inaccuracy of Vasari's highly coloured account of his struggles and poverty. His father, a well-to-do merchant or tradesman of Correggio, seems to have designed him for a learned profession; but he turned to art, studying under his uncle and three other masters. He is believed to have gained some idea of foreshortening and perspective from the works of Mantegna at Mantua, which he visited in 1511, and to have been influenced by the graceful colouring of Lorenzo Costa. At the age of about twenty he returned to his native town, where in 1514 he painted an altarpiece for the Franciscan convent, a work, now in the Dresden Gallery, distinguished by more gravity, restraint, and religious feeling than characterise his later productions. In 1518 he began his great series of works at Padua by a beautiful fresco series of mythological subjects for the decoration of the convent of San Paolo, which are still in an excellent state of preservation. From 1521 to 1524 he was engaged upon his subject of 'The Ascension' in the cupola of the Benedictine church of San Giovanni, a fresco in which the master's power is fully visible. His next great monumental work was the decoration of the cathedral of Parma, commissioned in 1522. The subject chosen for the interior of the main dome was 'The Assumption of the Virgin.'
During the execution of these frescoes Correggio was also much occupied with easel-pictures in oils. Among these are his very celebrated Adoration of the Shepherds, known as 'La Notte' or 'The Night,' commissioned in 1522, now in the Dresden Gallery, a work of marvellous softness and delicacy. Five years later he painted 'Il Giorno,' an exquisite picture, now in the Parma Gallery.
In 1530 Correggio removed from Parma to his native town, where, in the same year, he purchased an estate, and in 1533 some additional land. The production of the 'Jupiter and Antiope' of the Louvre, 'The Education of Cupid' of the National Gallery, London, of the 'Danae' of the Borghese Gallery, and of the 'Leda' of the Berlin Museum, has been assigned to the painter's later years; and the 'Reading Magdalene,' of which the picture in the Dresden Gallery is now regarded as merely a 17th-century copy, was completed in 1528. He died at Correggio, at the early age of forty, on the 5th of March 1534, and was buried in the cloister of the Franciscan church of the place.
The art of Correggio is distinguished by its grace and gaiety, by its sunny sensuous charm. His figures are rendered with a bounteous sweeping outline, and he delineates rapid motion and momentary attitudes and expressions with singular power. His colouring possesses the finest delicacy and luminosity; his foreshortening is bold and skilful, if sometimes rather extravagant; and, above all, he was unrivalled as a master of subtle and refined chiar-oscuro. His works present the strongest possible contrast to the gravity and restraint, to the reverential feeling and the accurately balanced compositions, of the earlier devotional painters of Italy.
His only son Pomponio, by his wife Girolama Merlino (whom Correggio married in 1520, and who died in 1529), was born in 1521, and was alive in 1593. He also was a painter, and an altar-piece from his hand is in the Academy at Parma.
See, besides Julius Meyer's article in the Künstler-Lexicon (1870; Eng. trans. 1876), the fully illustrated Life by Corrado Ricci (trans. by Simmonds, 1896), and Correggio, by Selwyn Brinton (1900).