ng in his native town, was one of the
witnesses to the marriage of his sovereign, the Lord of Correggio. In
the following year the painter had engaged to paint an altar-piece for
an employer, who paid Correggio in advance twenty-five gold crowns, but
the latter dying very soon afterwards, in the forty-first year of his
age, 1534, his father, who was still alive, was in circumstances to
repay the advance on the picture, which had not been painted.

Correggio is said to have been modest and retiring in disposition, and
this, together with the fact that, like Giorgione, he did not have a
school, has been suggested as the source of the traditions which
prevailed so long in Italy. These traditions described the painter as a
man born in indigent circumstances, living obscurely in spite of his
genius (there is a picture of Correggio's in England, which was said to
have been given in payment for his entertainment at an inn), and leading
to the end a life of such ill-requited labour, that having been paid for
his last picture in copper money, and being under the necessity of
carrying it home in order to relieve the destitution of his family, he
broke down under the burden, and overcome by heat and weariness, drank a
rash draught of water, which caused fever and death.

The story, disproven as it is, is often alluded to still, and remains as
a foil to those flattering and courtly anecdotes which I have been
repeating of royal and imperial homage paid to Duerer, Titian, and
Holbein. I fancy the last-mentioned stories may have grown from small
beginnings, and circulated purely in the artist world; but that the
former is an utterance of the engrained persuasion of the great world
without, that art as a means of livelihood is essentially
non-remunerative in the sense of money-getting.

Modest as Correggio may have been, he was not without pride in his art.
After looking for the first time on the St Cecilia of Raphael, Correggio
is reported to have exclaimed with exultation, 'And I too am a painter.'

He left behind him on his death a son and a daughter, the former living
to be a painter of no great name. In the picture of Correggio in the
attitude of painting, painted by himself, we see him a handsome spare
man with something of a romantic cavalier air, engaged in his chosen
art.

Correggio's pictures go to prove that under his seemingly quiet exterior
he was a man of the liveliest sensibilities and the keenest perceptions,
His