If the plan of M. Agnolo must be estimated by other principles, his process must be settled by other rules than the plan and process of Correggio at Parma. Though the first and greatest, Correggio was no more than a Machinist. It was less the Assumption of the Virgin, less a monument of triumphant Religion he meditated to exhibit by sublimity of conception or characteristic composition, than by the ultimate powers of linear and aerial perspective at an elevation which demanded eccentric and violent fore-shortening, set off and tuned by magic light and shade, to embody the medium in which the actors were to move; and to the splendour and loftiness of that he accommodated the subject and subordinated the agents. Hence his work, though moving in a flood of harmony, is not legitimate Composition. The synod that surrounds the glory, the glory itself that embosoms the Virgin and her angelic choir, Christ who precipitates himself to meet the glory, are equally absorbed in the _bravura_ of the vehicle, they radiate, reflect and mass, but show us little more than limbs. This makes the cupola of Correggio less epic or dramatic than ornamental. The technic part of Composition alone, though carried to the highest pitch of perfection, if its ostentation absorb the subject, stamps inferiority on the master. Take away Homer's language, and you take much, but you leave the epic poet unimpaired; take it from Virgil, strip him of the majesty, the glow, the propriety of his diction, and the remainder of his claim to epic poetry will nearly be reduced to what he borrowed from Homer's plan. What is it we remember when we leave the cupolas of Correggio? what when we leave the Chapel of Sixtus? There, a man who transferred to a colossal scale the dictates of his draped or naked model, applied them with a comprehensive eye and set them off by magic light and shade and wide expanded harmony of tone; here an epic plan combined and told in simple modes of grandeur. Each man gave what he had: Correggio, limbs and effect; M. Agnolo, being, form and meaning. If the cupola of Correggio be in its kind unequalled by earlier or succeeding plans, if it leave far behind the effusions of Lanfranchi and Pietro da Cortona, it was not the less their model; the ornamental style of machinists dates not the less its origin from him.