One of the very great artists of the Renaissance, who has come into his own of appreciation in recent years again, is Antonio Allegri, generally known as Correggio, from the small town near Mantua in which he was born. He is one of the most surprising figures in the history of art. So far as we know, he had no teachers and no pupils. He seems never to have visited any of the cities in which in his time (1494-1524) so many great pictures might have been seen, nor did he seek to make the acquaintance of any of his great contemporaries. All that we know of him was that he had "an uncle who painted, but was no artist." He influenced the artists of the after-time in Italy almost more than any of his contemporaries. By some he is placed among the decadent or "sweet" school of Italian painting, and undoubtedly such painters as Guido Reni and Carlo Dolci, who were for many centuries more popular than the greater masters, were deeply influenced by him. While so negligent of others' achievements in life he was destined to form a school that attracted more attention from subsequent generations than almost any of his contemporaries. His pictures represent a climax of Italian religious art, and his painting of angels and celestial beings, together with that of Fra Angelico two generations before, serves to show how wonderfully the Italian painters of this time were able to visualize spiritual conceptions. [Illustration: CORREGGIO, MARRIAGE OF ST. CATHERINE (LOUVRE)] Grimm, in his "Life of Michelangelo," says of Correggio: "As Parma, where he (Correggio) painted, lies between Milan, Florence and Venice, so does Correggio's painting represent a middle term between the schools of these cities. Greater {67} than all who came after Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael there are many qualities of his art in which Correggio excels even these. Unlike the Venetians, he did not neglect drawing; he embraced the whole of his art and made a distinct advance." Grimm goes as far as to say, "If we could think of streams flowing together out of the genius of Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Michelangelo to form a new spirit, that spirit would be Correggio's. He has the dreamy smiling sweetness of Leonardo, and to add an external detail, his fate as to our absolute ignorance of his inner and outer life; he has the joyous, radiant, uncreated quality of Raphael with his brief life and its interruption in the very bloom of it; he has the boldness of Michelangelo, his liking for unprecedented attitudes and his power to reproduce them in marvellous foreshortening; he has Titian's soft coloring and the gift to picture the palpitating naked flesh as if the pulse was beating in it." It is one of the world's greatest losses in art that he was cut off in his prime at the early age of thirty, yet what we have from him shows the supreme artist, and though we might have had further precious art treasures, we could scarcely have had a completer revelation of his genius.