has handled the colors more effectually than
himself, nor has any painted with a more charming manner or given a
more perfect relief to his figures." Color and chiaroscuro were
undoubtedly, as Vasari indicates, the two features of his art in which
Correggio achieved his highest triumphs, and if some others had
equalled or even surpassed him in the first point, none before him had
ever solved so completely the problems of light and shadow.

Not only did he understand how to throw the separate figures of the
picture into relief, giving them actual bodily existence, but he
mastered as well the disposition of light and shade in the whole
composition. To quote Burckhardt, "In Correggio first, chiaroscuro
becomes essential to the general expression of a pictorially combined
whole; the stream of lights and reflections gives exactly the right
expression to the special moment in nature."

The quality of Correggio's artistic temperament was essentially
joyous.[1] The beings of his creation delight in life and movement;
their faces are wreathed with perpetual smiles. Hence childhood and
youth were the painter's favorite subjects. The subtleties of
character study did not interest him; and for this reason he failed in
representing old age. He was perhaps at his best among that race of
sprites which his own imagination invented, creatures without a sense
of responsibility, glad merely to be alive.

[Footnote 1: Tradition says that the temperament of the man himself
was exactly the reverse of that of the artist, being timid and
melancholy.]

This temperament explains why the artist contented himself with so
little variety in his types. We need not wonder at the monotony of the
Madonna's face. She is happy, and this is all the painter required of
her psychically. He took no thought even to make her beautiful: the
tribute he offered her was the technical excellence of his art,--the
exquisite color with which he painted flesh and drapery, the
modulations of light playing over cheek and neck. With hair and hands
he took especial pains, and these features often redeem otherwise
unattractive figures.

In his predilection for happy subjects Correggio reminds us of
Raphael. The two men shrank equally from the painful. But where the
Umbrian's ideal of happiness was tranquil and serene, Correggio's was
exuberant and ecstatic. Raphael indeed was almost Greek in his sense
of repose, while Correggio had a passion for motion. "He divines,
k