rge altar-piece commissioned for the Franciscan convent at
Carpi, representing the Virgin enthroned, with Saints; it indicates a
predilection for the style of Leonardo da Vinci, and has certainly even
greater freedom than similarly early works of Raphael. This picture is
now in the Dresden gallery. Another painting of Correggio's youth is the
"Arrest of Christ." A third is an Ancona (or triple altar-piece--the
"Repose in Egypt, with Sts Bartholomew and John") in the church of the
Conventuali at Correggio, showing the transition from the painter's
first to his second style. Between 1514 and 1520 Correggio worked much,
both in oil and in fresco, for churches and convents. In 1521 he began
his famous fresco of the "Ascension of Christ," on the cupola of the
Benedictine church of San Giovanni in Parma; here the Redeemer is
surrounded by the twelve apostles and the four doctors of the church,
supported by a host of wingless cherub boys amid the clouds. This he
finished in 1524, and soon afterwards undertook his still vaster work on
another cupola, that of the cathedral of the same city, presenting the
"Assumption of the Virgin," amid an unnumbered host of saints and angels
rapt in celestial joy. It occupied him up to 1530. The astounding
boldness of scheme in these works, especially as regards their incessant
and audacious foreshortenings--the whole mass of figures being portrayed
as in the clouds, and as seen from below--becomes all the more startling
when we recall to mind the three facts--that Correggio had apparently
never seen any of the masterpieces of Raphael or his other great
predecessors and contemporaries, in Rome, Florence, or other chief
centres of art; that he was the first artist who ever undertook the
painting of a large cupola; and that he not only went at once to the
extreme of what can be adventured in foreshortening, but even
forestalled in this attempt the mightiest geniuses of an elder
generation--the "Last Judgment" of Michelangelo, for instance, not
having been begun earlier than 1533 (although the ceiling of the Sixtine
chapel, in which foreshortening plays a comparatively small part, dates
from 1508 to 1512). The cupola of the cathedral has neither skylight nor
windows, but only light reflected from below; the frescoes, some
portions of which were ultimately supplied by Giorgio Gandini, are now
dusky with the smoke of tapers, and parts of them, in the cathedral and
in the church of St John, have durin