On such a face as Correggio's, physiognomy might have established principles or drawn some inferences from it, had not a perverse destiny left us as ignorant of it, as of his complexion, stature, character, and habits. Vasari's exertions to obtain a portrait of him were not only unsuccessful, but hopeless; and the profile which is shown in the dome of Parma as his, becomes inadmissible from the very name of the artist to whom it is ascribed.[166] The head which found its way into the third and every following edition of Vasari, has certainly nothing repugnant with the notions we may form of his character, but age. Meditation, simplicity, serenity, compose it. It is said to have been copied from a picture not quite finished, which appears to have the touch of Correggio, and came from Sicily to Naples. He is represented contemplating a design, the original of which, report has placed at Vienna with Prince Esterhazy. The portrait which is at Turin, in the "Vigna della Regina," engraved by Valperga, with the epigraph, in part hid by the frame, but read by Lanzi "Antonius Corrigius f." (_i. e._ fecit) though by some believed genuine, appears spurious from this very circumstance, the large character of the letters and the space they occupy; a manner of writing often used to indicate the person painted, never the painter. Another portrait, which from Genoua is said to have been carried to England, with the indorsed inscription "Dosso Dossi dipinse questo ritratto di Antonio da Correggio," fronts the Memorie of Ratti. Without examining the authenticity of this inscription, it is sufficient to observe, that Antonio da Correggio is likewise the name of Antonio Bernieri, a celebrated miniature painter, and fellow citizen of Allegri, whose date coincides with that of Dosso, and whom there will be occasion to mention again. Of Correggio's numerous pretending imitators, Lodovico Carracci appears to be the only one who penetrated his principle. The axiom, that the less the traces appear of the means by which a work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, is not an axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation, which Lodovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and its comparison with Nature; and where could that be met with in a degree equal to what he found in the infinite unity and variety of Correggio's effusions? They inspired his frescoes in the cloisters of S. Michele in Bosco: the foreshortenings of the muscular labourers at the hermitage, and of the ponderous demon that mocks their toil; the warlike splendour in the Homage of Totila; the Nocturnal Conflagration of Monte Casino; the wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insidious charms of the sister nymphs in the garden scene, equally proclaim the pupil of Correggio.