Correggio Italian Renaissance artist

Antonio Allegri da Correggio

(1489 – 1534)

Stylistically influenced by the following painters - Lorenzo Costa, Francesco Francia,Mariotto Albertinelli Michelangelo Anselmi and Andrea Mantegna

One of the Greatest Painters Of All Time

Correggio Biography and Information

The quality of Correggio's artistic character was fundamentally cheerful. The figures he painted are filled with joy in life and movement. Their faces are wreathed with eternal joy. Mythological, Biblical and youth themes were his favorite subjects. A major part of Correggio's career as an artist was focused on mural painting. The subject Correggio was most famous for was that of the Madonna and Child. His magnificent style, particularly in his depiction of women, holy or otherwise, was fortunately unscathed by the age of Savonarola.

Correggio's life prior to becoming one of the most celebrated painters in all of Italy was tumultuous and heartbreaking. His family was poor and he often went to bed hungry. The great painter was remembered by his colleagues as a mysterious, gloomy and reclusive man, occasionally given to bouts of binge drinking.

The endless wonder of Renaissance painters for all things classical spurned them on to study the human body in ways not seen since the ancients. A change of attitude was taking place. Artists reveled in their new found passion, the passion for beauty, for sophistication, and for elegance.

Francesco Petrarca is known as the "father of humanism". He was a brilliant Renaissance era poet and scholar. He was born in Arezzo, Italy in 1304 and spent his life traveling and writing. Petrarca was one of the most important people of the Renaissance era. Until the Middle Ages men regarded themselves as following the Good Shepherd, and art consequently did not recognize the individual in particular. In the structure and position of the figures, as in their expression, a general and uniform type of beauty prevailed. Author Clara Erskine Clement asserts "We cannot say that the art of the Renaissance originated in one city or another, because the movement in the revival of art was so general throughout Italy; but Florence has a strong claim to our first consideration from the fact that Filippo Brunelleschi was a Florentine and did his greatest work in his native city, and on account of it has been called "the father of the Art of the Renaissance."

The early Renaissance marks the victory of individualism and the uncompromising prominence of he individual. Renaissance historian Jacob Burckhardt asserted "Freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in speech and form."

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Important Words, People, Phrases, Characteristics related to the Italian Renaissance Art Movement - rebirth, rediscovery of the classical world, City-state, Humanism, Humanist, Francesco Petrarch, Reform, The Prince, Theocracy, The Inquisition, Human Reasoning, Medici Academy, publication of Della Pittura, a book about the laws of mathematical perspective for artists, sfumato, chiaroscuro, linear perspective, Heliocentric Theory, Petrarch, Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, liberal arts, civic humanism, Verrocchio, secularism, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Neo-Platonism, nominalism, Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Quattrocento, vanishing point, Savonarola, oligarchy spiritually significant, illuminated manuscript, idealized biblical themes, scriptorium, emotion, illuminator, iconoclast, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, Age of Discovery, axonometric drawing, curiosity about the natural world, mythology, realistic use of colours and light, Bonfire of the Vanities, Old Testament stories, ethereal and foggy backgrounds, Gospel parables, The Blackdeath, romanticized landscapes, Christian symbolism. Paradise

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