Parma and Correggio

 

 

 

For some reason that he could not fully explain, Parma was one of the few little cities in Italy that he "had never been able to love." Still there was the "Duomo in its noble piazza," and the magnificent work of Correggio. 

 

 

The church is a cruciform building under an open octagon surmounted by a dome; the choir is raised above a crypt, and from the outside the arcaded apse is, I think, its most beautiful feature. But the church as seen from the street is arcaded everywhere: on the façade we have a triple columnar gallery; each which ends with a quadrilateral, itself arcaded, to which is added a semicircular apse again arcaded. Nothing more noble, rich and charming can be imagined. …

The great spectacle of the church, however, is of course the overwhelming frescoes of Correggio in the dome, which everyone who comes at all to Parma comes to see. For myself, they are beyond anything else to be found in Parma, and indeed among the most astonishing things in all Lombardy. 

 

Correggio’s first frescoes had been painted  for the Camera di S. Paulo, fortunate and lovely works, and later he had decorated the cupola of S. Giovanni Evangelista. It was therefore with a full knowledge of his work that in 1522 he began to cover the dome of the Cathedral with these frescoes of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, to whom the church was dedicated, while below stand the Apostles and the four patron saints of Parma.

 

Nothing else, I suppose, in European art has quite the sense we find here, the sense of flight. Madonna caught up from death, from the earth and all earthly things, is borne in an ecstasy, her arms stretching open wide, by a glad crowd of angels and cherubs, one of whom, laughing for joy, nestles in her bosom, into the heaven of heavens, a vast dome of light, built of angels, circle after circle, up to the brightness which is the smile of God. And out of that dazzling firmament one peerless archangel, Gabriel, god’s messenger, has hurled him down, trembling for joy, to meet her and welcome her, the Queen of all. Nothing else in Europe, I think, expressed so fully and so unreservedly that sense of flight—the eagerness, the joy, and the confident, radiant power of flight—as does this matchless fresco. It is impossible to look upon it without emotion or to doubt for a moment that the painter had seen a vision. One simply disregards the painter’s foibles and weaknesses; the thing is a rhapsody more wonderful than a Magnificat by Marenzio, almost inarticulate, if you like, for joy; a musical rapture that is beyond music, hat is the expression once and for all of the highest religious emotion. And to those who would criticize it, I would give the reply Titian, who had also painted an Assumption, gave; “Turn it upside down and fill it with gold, and you will still come short of its proper price.” It has been tended with careless hands, and it is to-day but a wreck of what it once was. Yet in colour still, as in gesture and delight, it remains something beyond the power of words to express, something that never was in the world or is here in no satisfying quantity.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 273-274.