and Lionardo and Raphael—­deriving this principle of design from the geometrical art of the Middle Ages, converted it to the noblest uses in their vast well-ordered compositions.  But Correggio ignored the laws of scientific construction.  It was enough for him to produce a splendid and brilliant effect by the life and movement of his figures, and by the intoxicating beauty of his forms.  His type of beauty, too, is by no means elevated.  Lionardo painted souls whereof the features and the limbs are but an index.  The charm of Michelangelo’s ideal is like a flower upon a tree of rugged strength.  Raphael aims at the loveliness which cannot be disjoined from goodness.  But Correggio is contented with bodies ‘delicate and desirable.’  His angels are genii disimprisoned from the perfumed chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic paradise, elemental spirits of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime.  To accuse the painter of conscious immorality or of what is stigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination.  They belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master’s style.  When infantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to be distinguished for any noble quality of beauty from Murillo’s cherubs, and are far less divine than the choir of children who attend Madonna in Titian’s ‘Assumption.’  But in their boyhood and their prime of youth, they acquire a fulness of sensuous vitality and a radiance that are peculiar to Correggio.  The lily-bearer who helps to support S. Thomas beneath the dome of the cathedral at Parma, the groups of seraphs who crowd behind the Incoronata of S. Giovanni, and the two wild-eyed open-mouthed S. Johns stationed at each side of the celestial throne, are among the most splendid instances of the adolescent loveliness conceived by Correggio.  Where the painter found their models may be questioned but not answered; for he has made them of a different fashion from the race of mortals:  no court of Roman emperor or Turkish sultan, though stocked with the flowers of Bithynian and Circassian youth, have seen their like.  Mozart’s Cherubino seems to have sat for all of them.  At any rate they incarnate the very spirit of the songs he sings.

As a consequence of this predilection for sensuous and voluptuous forms, Correggio had no power of imagining grandly or severely.  Satisfied with material realism in his treatment even of sublime mysteries, he converts the hosts of heaven into a ’fricassee of frogs,’ according to the old epigram.  His apostles, gazing after the Virgin who has left the earth, are thrown into attitudes so violent and so dramatically foreshortened, that seen from below upon the pavement of the cathedral, little of their