Of course the greatest of those who in the name of sentiment undermined the grand style was Antonio Correggio,[83] a provincial painter, a disappointed and unsuccessful man, who lived out his less than fifty short years (1489?–1534) in or near Parma. His ideas he took from Mantegna, master of all Northern Italy, whose illusionism he carried a point further. He made in 1518 for the ceiling of the reception room of the Convent of San Paolo, Figure 283, a trellis through the verdurous ovals of which one sees pairs of nude boy geniuses at play. He paints away the domes of the Church of San Giovanni (1524) and of the Cathedral (1530), shows us Christ or His Mother soaring into the clouds with hosts of accompanying angels. He brings the clouds down through the painted wall and sets them before the pendentives. Church Doctors, Figure 284, or Evangelists ride their cloud-thrones easily in the company of the fairest nude angels of either sex. The painting fairly annuls the architecture. These decorative frescoes are so vital and so richly various that they demand admiration and disarm criticism. To walk among the demi-gods and goddesses that loll on the parapet painted about the Cathedral dome, Figure 285, is to have known the company of Homer’s immortals. The impression is over-powering and unforgettable. Cautious people have always resented such profusion and such unrestrained assertion of life and joy. At the time they called the dome, with its confusion of wriggling rosy legs of ascending angels, the “frog pond.” They cavilled at Correggio’s price and appealed to Titian, who knowing a miracle of fine workmanship, told them that if they turned the dome over and filled it with ducats, it would not be too much. [Illustration: FIG. 285. Correggio. Detail of fresco decoration of Dome of the Cathedral. After Toschi’s Copy.—_Parma._ ] It was Correggio’s distinction to fill an immense decoration with lyrical ecstacy. Michelangelo in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel had done as much in elegiac vein. Both set a destructive example to smaller men who followed. For two centuries after Correggio’s death in 1534 the clouds blew into churches, and rosy angelic apparitions cooled their nude charms in these clouds and dangled their delicate legs therefrom, and painters worked their will upon mere architecture, and the baroque style took possession of all Catholic Europe. At its best it is captivating even to an unwilling Protestant imagination, but it never regained the height of its beginnings in Correggio. [Illustration: FIG. 286. Correggio. “The Day.”—_Parma._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 287. Correggio. Marriage of St. Catherine.—_Louvre._ ]