form is distinguishable except legs and arms in vehement commotion.  Very different is Titian’s conception of this scene.  To express the spiritual meaning, the emotion of Madonna’s transit, with all the pomp which colour and splendid composition can convey, is Titian’s sole care; whereas Correggio appears to have been satisfied with realising the tumult of heaven rushing to meet earth, and earth straining upwards to ascend to heaven in violent commotion—­a very orgasm of frenetic rapture.  The essence of the event is forgotten:  its external manifestation alone is presented to the eye; and only the accessories of beardless angels and cloud-encumbered cherubs are really beautiful amid a surge of limbs in restless movement.  More dignified, because designed with more repose, is the Apocalypse of S. John painted upon the cupola of S. Giovanni.  The apostles throned on clouds, with which the dome is filled, gaze upward to one point.  Their attitudes are noble; their form is heroic; in their eyes there is the strange ecstatic look by which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural vision:  it is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an empyrean intolerable to mortal sense.  The point on which their eyes converge, the culmination of their vision, is the figure of Christ.  Here all the weakness of Correggio’s method is revealed.  He had undertaken to realise by no ideal allegorical suggestion, by no symbolism of architectural grouping, but by actual prosaic measurement, by corporeal form in subjection to the laws of perspective and foreshortening, things which in their very essence admit of only a figurative revelation.  Therefore his Christ, the centre of all those earnest eyes, is contracted to a shape in which humanity itself is mean, a sprawling figure which irresistibly reminds one of a frog.  The clouds on which the saints repose are opaque and solid; cherubs in countless multitudes, a swarm of merry children, crawl about upon these feather-beds of vapour, creep between the legs of the apostles, and play at bopeep behind their shoulders.  There is no propriety in their appearance there.  They take no interest in the beatific vision.  They play no part in the celestial symphony; nor are they capable of more than merely infantine enjoyment.  Correggio has sprinkled them lavishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by his temperament to overlay the melody with roulades.  Gazing at these frescoes, the thought came to me that Correggio was like a man listening to sweetest flute-playing, and translating phrase after phrase as they passed through his fancy into laughing faces, breezy tresses, and rolling mists.  Sometimes a grander cadence reached his ear; and then S. Peter with the keys, or S. Augustine of the mighty brow,