Painting: The Sensual Innocent

"The Italian Renaissance," wrote the late Bernard Berenson, "was a period in the history of modern Europe comparable to youth in the life of an individual. It had all youth's love of finery and of play." This is true of its art, and never more so than when the work itself was done by a young, aspiring painter. Such is the case with Correggio's youthful masterpiece (opposite), done when the artist was barely 21.

To purchase the painting, the Art Institute of Chicago had to pay a half million dollars and considers it the most important acquisition since El Greco's Assumption of the Virgin in 1906. Actually, any pricing of Correggio is arbitrary; in his 40 years, he painted only 40 well authenticated works, and until Chicago's purchase only five were owned by U.S. museums.* And, although Connoisseur Berenson judged Correggio "too sensuous, and therefore limited," the artist has remained astonishingly popular through the centuries.

Except for the glint of halos, the figures in this youthful Madonna, despite their hierarchic gestures, are close kin to flesh and blood. Subtly but simply, the artist has divided his composition in two: at right, the blue haze dissolves into atmospheric depth; while at left, the leafy, lemon-bearing latticework seems to push the Madonna's arm forward. The artist flips her cloak inside out to balance the push and pull between foreground and background, playing its green lining against distant hills, its blue surface against the trellis.

Correggio was incredibly accomplished for a man who lived far from Florence and Rome. Born Antonio Allegri around 1494 and called after the town of his birth, he may never have seen the art capitals of his time. Yet he was thoroughly a man of his age, more influenced by the classical traditions of Greece and Rome than by the devotional art of the Middle Ages. The alabaster flesh relates to marble rather than to the painted wood of medieval altarpieces. More human than divine, Correggio's early masterpiece is both sensual and innocent. Alive with the fresh greenness of spring, its testimony is to the Renaissance fascination with man as the image of God.