Ascending Anew

In Correggio's Homeland, the Overlooked Old Master Is Reborn and Rising to His Deserved Level of Prominence

PARMA, Italy

Until about a hundred years ago, there were five godfathers of Western art: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian -- and Correggio.

Correggio, possibly the greatest artist we've almost forgotten.

Correggio: Born Antonio Allegri in about 1489, in the northern Italian hamlet of Correggio (hence his nickname), dead by 1534 and a favorite of art lovers for the next 3 1/2 centuries. And now, only 100 years or so further on, virtually unknown.

Correggio's first full-scale retrospective (such has been his decline) opened this fall in venues across Parma, the wealthy little city where he did his most important work and where he died, in his artistic prime, of a sudden fever. The exhibition's aim is to bring its local hero back to life. That's not far-fetched: A show in Milan did it for Caravaggio, back in 1951 when he was far more thoroughly forgotten than Correggio has ever been.

Connoisseurs have never quite lost track of the artist. Once you've seen them, Correggio's best paintings areso obviously gorgeous and enthralling that you wonder why they aren't everywhere on Christmas cards. Few other pictures ever have had their mix of powerful emotions, wild eccentricity and convincing realism.

So what accounts for Correggio's fall from public favor? Some blame rests with the accidents of history: Many of his best works were in Parma, which fell off the tourist route, and on church ceilings, where they needed to be seen in person to impress. Other major paintings ended up behind the Iron Curtain, and have turned out to be too delicate to travel. Few fine Correggios ever made it to the United States.

And then there's the fact that nothing juicy's known about the man or his life. He's so much less biopicable than rivals such as Michelangelo (the temperamental gay genius) or Leonardo (the ambidextrous polymath who never finished things).

Finally, there's the art itself. Correggio's paintings are so idiosyncratic and so subtle that they don't yield the sound bites history prefers, as with Titian ("Brushstroke Guy") or Michelangelo ("Mr. Classic Nude"). Correggio's art seems all about resisting simple views, of art or of the worlds it shows. We can't get an easy handle on Correggio's pictures, because they're dedicated to flux, indirection and obliquity. He may have used that combination to stand out from the crowd in talent-packed Renaissance Italy. But, like most artistic choices, it must mostly have depended on this painter's view of the world.

The ultimate example of Correggio's unique vision is the huge fresco he unveiled in the dome of Parma cathedral, in 1530, after years and years of work. This is Correggio's most innovative project, and his most influential. It seems to open up the dome to let us see a teeming host of angels in the sky beyond. (Many Catholic churches now have similar ceilings, probably without knowing that they owe them to Correggio.) And yet, despite the cupola's stunning special effects, this is also the least legible of paintings. Correggio has taken a standard Christian story -- of the Virgin Mary's bodily assumption into heaven at the moment of her death -- and painted it as something so complex, it's hardly graspable. It may be the perfect picture for a dome: Its floating figures aren't tied down to a single view, so worshipers below can take it in from any spot. And yet that also means that there's no stable order to hang on to, no single take-home message you can pull out of its turmoil.

For Correggio, this is heaven: a place where nothing ever settles down and there's no one way to look at things.

This is an artist who prefers off-kilter views. He rarely lets us see a face from right in front, or even in a nice clean profile. Instead, a head that seems at first to be in profile rotates enough toward us to make its far eye just emerge -- but not enough to give us any kind of contact with it. Even more strangely, Correggio often turns a head far enough past profile so that all we get is a glancing view of its near cheek and ear, with just a hint of eye or nose to make us sense the details of a face.