In his religious pieces and mythologies, Correggio is respectful to the grand style. He had in one way or another taken account of his Titian, Raphael, and Michelangelo, and he builds his groups in their active symmetries. But such an allegiance to the decorous style is merely superficial, his affinities are with the following centuries and the devotees of sensibility. Even in a grandly composed picture like the Holy Family called The Day, Figure 286, the women are disquieting in their personal loveliness. There is no relation to the Parthenon marbles, as there always seems to be in Titian, no suggestion of a larger air. These Maries know love, and raptures and tears. In the somewhat earlier Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure 287, at Paris, the mood is simply one of great tenderness. In later pictures like the Madonna with St. George and the Holy Night, at Dresden, the excitement of all the figures becomes almost unpleasant. So, in the mythologies, Leda, or Danae, or Antiope, Figure 288, is not goddesslike but perturbingly feminine and desirable. A most delicate erotic appeal is in all this work. It is like Alexandrian sculpture. It is still noble, but less so than Titian or Raphael, less abstract and stylistic. The exquisite ambiguity of the mood is not quite compatible with the compositional formulas. One feels it is but a step and a legitimate one from Correggio to the rare, sentimental nudes of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua and Romney. [Illustration: FIG. 288. Correggio. Jupiter and Antiope.—_Louvre._ ] In every phase Correggio’s work is distinguishable by the most beautiful handling of color and light and dark. Like Moretto and Lotto he prefers a blonder scale than the Venetian, and makes his surfaces so many miracles of ivory, silvery grays and straw yellows, invested with shadow tenuously modulated, yet of strongest modelling power. He cares nothing about textures or individually rich passages; it is the whole picture that counts. The brush sweeps lightly and swiftly, there is no loading of color, everywhere an exquisite economy and a subtlety that conceals itself. At all points, technically as well as psychologically, Correggio deals in overtones. And by that token he is not of the Renaissance, but is greater or smaller than it, as you may choose to decide. He is more our contemporary than he is Titian’s. Meanwhile Titian himself is passing into a subjective phase. In 1545 he was at Rome. Michelangelo, who offered him unusual courtesies, doubtless showed him the Sistine ceiling and the recently finished Last Judgment. Titian, as he writes himself, studied with humble amazement the “marvellous old stones” that the Roman soil was yielding up to the newly founded museums. [Illustration: FIG. 289. Charles V. at Mühlberg.—_Madrid._ ]