A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
History
A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
National Gallery (Great Britain); Painting -- England -- London -- Catalogs
The Apostle Peter, according to a Roman tradition, being terrified at
the danger which threatened him in Rome, betook himself to flight.
On the Via Appia our Saviour appeared to him bearing his cross. To
Peter's question: Domine quo vadis? ("Lord, whither goest Thou?")
Christ replied, "To Rome, to suffer again crucifixion." Upon which
the apostle retraced his steps, and received the crown of martyrdom.
So much for the subject. As for its treatment, the note of almost
comic exaggeration in St. Peter's attitude will not fail to strike the
spectator; and "there is this objection to be made to the landscape,
that, though the day is breaking over the distant hills and pediment on
the right hand, there must be another sun somewhere out of the picture
on the left hand, since the cast shadows from St. Peter and the Saviour
fall directly to the right" (Landseer's _Catalogue_, p. 193).
10. THE EDUCATION OF CUPID.
_Correggio_ (Parmese: 1494-1534).
Antonio Allegri--called Il Correggio from his birthplace, a
small town near Modena--is one of the most distinctive of
the old masters. What is it that constitutes what Carlyle
(following Sterne) calls the "Correggiosity of Correggio"? It
is at once a way peculiar to him amongst artists, of looking
at the world, and an excellence, peculiar to him also, in his
methods of painting. Correggio "looked at the world in a single
mood of sensuous joy," as a place in which everything is full
of happy life and soft pleasure. The characteristics of his
style are "sidelong grace," and an all-pervading sweetness.
The method, peculiar to him, by which he realised this way
of looking at things on canvas, is the subtle gradation of
colours,--a point, it is interesting to note, in which of all
modern masters Leighton most nearly resembles him (_Art of
England_, p. 98). "Correggio is," says Ruskin, "the captain
of the painter's art as such. Other men have nobler or more
numerous gifts, but as a painter, master of the art of laying
colour so as to be lovely, Correggio is alone" (_Oxford
Lectures on Art_, § 177). The circumstances of Correggio's life
go far to explain the individuality of his style. He was the
son of a modest, peaceful burgher, and Correggio and Parma,
where he spent his life, were towns removed from the greater
intellectual excitements and political revolutions of his time.
Ignorant of society, unpatronised by Popes or great Princes,
his mind was touched by no deep passion other than love for
his art, and "like a poet hidden in the light of thought," he
worked out for himself the ideals of grace and movement which
live in his pictures (see Symonds, _Renaissance_, iii. 248). Of
the details of his life little is known. His earliest works,
as Morelli first demonstrated, reveal the influence of the
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