Correggio is the Faun or Ariel of Renaissance painting.  Turning to him from Raphael, we are naturally first struck by the affinities and differences between them.  Both drew from their study of the world the elements of joy which it contains; but the gladness of Correggio was more sensuous than that of Raphael; his intellectual faculties were less developed; his rapture was more tumultuous and Bacchantic.  Like Raphael, Correggio died young; but his brief life was spent in comparative obscurity and solitude.  Far from the society of scholars and artists, ignorant of courts, unpatronised by princes, he wrought for himself alone the miracle of brightness and of movement that delights us in his frescoes and his easel-pictures.

    Like a poet hidden
      In the light of thought,
    Singing hymns unbidden,

was this lyrist of luxurious ecstasy.  In his work there was nothing worldly; that divides him from the Venetians, whose sensuousness he shared:  nothing scientific; that distinguishes him from Da Vinci, the magic of whose chiaroscuro he comprehended:  nothing contemplative; that separates him from Michael Angelo, the audacity of whose design in dealing with forced attitudes he rivalled, without apparently having enjoyed the opportunity of studying his works.  The cheerfulness of Raphael, the wizardry of Lionardo, and the boldness of Michael Angelo, met in him to form a new style, the originality of which is indisputable, and which takes us captive—­not by intellectual power, but by the impulse of emotion.  Of his artistic education we know nothing; and when we call him the Ariel of painting, this means that we are compelled to think of him as an elemental spirit, whose bidding the air and the light and the hues of the morning obey.

Correggio created a world of beautiful human beings, the whole condition of whose existence is an innocent and radiant wantonness.[263] Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway; nor could he deal with subjects demanding pregnancy of intellectual meaning.  He paints the three Fates for instance like young and joyous Bacchantes; if we placed rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human destinies, they might figure upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii.  Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which seeks the highest beauty of design in architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail.  He was essentially a lyrical as distinguished from an epical or dramatic poet.  The unity of his work is derived from the effect of light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremulous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies the whole.  It was enough for him to produce a gleeful symphony by the play of light and colour, by the animation of his figures, and by the intoxicating beauty of his forms.  His angels are genii disimprisoned from the chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic Paradise, elemental