The first photographic report that enables us to truly appreciate the work of one of the greatest names in Italian art.
Finally Correggio appears in all his expressive power and masterly skill in depicting figures entwined in space. Based on a specially commissioned photographic report of close-ups, this study of Correggio reveals the greatness of an artist who was undoubtedly on a par with the greatest painters of the Renaissance. The preface is by Pierre Rosenberg, President and Honorary Director of the
Louvre. For the very first time, through text and images, this book does justice to the painter who succeeded in freeing painting from the constraints of his century. The book examines three fresco cycles in Parma painted by Correggio in the later part of his life. Works which provide a clear measure of his skill at organizing space, painting intertwined human figures with a clever interplay of gestures and expressions, and depicting nudity with a force that is perhaps only comparable with that of Michelangelo. From the “Mother Superior’s Chamber”, where the iconography focuses on the Roman goddess of Hunting, Diana, to the dome of the Benedictine church of San Giovanni Evangelista, painted between 1520 and 1524, Correggio’s virtuosity culminates in the frescoes of the Assumption in the dome of Parma Cathedral. Here we find “twelve prodigious figures, painted with unprecedented audacity, hovering so convincingly in the air, and with such a convincing portrayal of perspective, that surely nothing like it has ever been achieved before in this sphere”.