1543 GAUDENTIUS. Another of Spanzotti’s pupils was Sodoma, who was born at Vercelli in Piedmont, in 1477. He is best known for the large amount of work that he executed at Siena. This prolific artist, like a number of other painters of this unimportant school, is not represented in the Louvre. He died in 1551. A faint echo of the teaching of Spanzotti may at times be detected in the works of Defendente Ferrari (fl. 1500-1535) and Girolamo Giovenone (fl. 1513-1527), who are not represented in the Louvre. [Illustration: PLATE XV.—CORREGGIO (1494-1534) SCHOOL OF PARMA No. 1117.—THE MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF ST. CATHERINE (Mariage mystique de Sainte Catherine) The Virgin, in a red tunic and blue mantle, is seated to the left of the composition holding on her lap the Infant Christ. He is about to place the wedding-ring on the third finger of the outstretched right hand of the kneeling St. Catherine, who wears a gold-brocaded robe. Behind her stands St. Sebastian, looking on with interest and clasping in his hand the arrows, the symbol of his martyrdom. In the landscape background are depicted scenes of the martyrdom of the two Saints. Painted in oil on panel. 3 ft. 5½ in. × 3 ft. 4 in. (1·05 × 1·02.)] THE SCHOOL OF PARMA One of the most distinctive and perhaps the most sensuous of the Italian masters is Correggio (1494-1534), who takes his name from his birthplace, Il Correggio, a small town near Modena. It was natural, therefore, that he should have become the pupil of Francesco Bianchi of the school of Modena. Correggio came under almost all the leading influences which distinguish the principal Italian schools of the early sixteenth century. His “sidelong grace,” his subtle gradations of tone, his daring foreshortening, his sublimity of space and light, his vivid imagination, his profound knowledge of chiaroscuro, render him an isolated phenomenon in Italian art at the moment when it was passing into precipitate decline. His _Marriage of St. Catherine_ (No. 1117, Plate XV.) entirely lacks the dignity and solemnity which are the dominant features of truly religious art. The figures which make up this fascinating composition are delicate, but by no means of an elevated type. This pseudo-religious picture, when studied together with the _Jupiter and Antiope_ (No. 1118), shows the justice of the criticism that Correggio’s pictures are “hymns to the charm of femininity the like of which have never been known before or since in Christian Europe.” It is more remarkable that this mythological canvas, which is so full of sensuous vitality, should have been added to the royal collection of England in the seventeenth century than that it should have been allowed by Cromwell to leave the country a few years later.