or the inspired eyes of S. John, took form beneath his pencil.  But the light airs returned, and rose and lily faces bloomed again for him among the clouds.  It is not therefore in dignity or sublimity that Correggio excels, but in artless grace and melodious tenderness.  The Madonna della Scala clasping her baby with a caress which the little child returns, S. Catherine leaning in a rapture of ecstatic love to wed the infant Christ, S. Sebastian in the bloom of almost boyish beauty, are the so-called sacred subjects to which the painter was adequate, and which he has treated with the voluptuous tenderness we find in his pictures of Leda and Danae and Io.  Could these saints and martyrs descend from Correggio’s canvas, and take flesh, and breathe, and begin to live; of what high action, of what grave passion, of what exemplary conduct in any walk of life would they be capable?  That is the question which they irresistibly suggest; and we are forced to answer, None!  The moral and religious world did not exist for Correggio.  His art was but a way of seeing carnal beauty in a dream that had no true relation to reality.

Correggio’s sensibility to light and colour was exactly on a par with his feeling for form.  He belongs to the poets of chiaroscuro and the poets of colouring; but in both regions he maintains the individuality so strongly expressed in his choice of purely sensuous beauty.  Tintoretto makes use of light and shade for investing his great compositions with dramatic intensity.  Rembrandt interprets sombre and fantastic moods of the mind by golden gloom and silvery irradiation, translating thought into the language of penumbral mystery.  Lionardo studies the laws of light scientifically, so that the proper roundness and effect of distance should be accurately rendered, and all the subtleties of nature’s smiles be mimicked.  Correggio is content with fixing on his canvas the [Greek:  anerithmon gelasma], the many-twinkling laughter of light in motion, rained down through fleecy clouds or trembling foliage, melting into half-shadows, bathing and illuminating every object with a soft caress.  There are no tragic contrasts of splendour sharply defined on blackness, no mysteries of half-felt and pervasive twilight, no studied accuracies of noonday clearness in his work.  Light and shadow are woven together on his figures like an impalpable Coan gauze, aerial and transparent, enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved.  His colouring, in like manner, has none of the superb and mundane pomp which the Venetians affected; it does not glow or burn or beat the fire of gems into our brain; joyous and wanton, it seems to be exactly such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety.  There is nothing in his hues to provoke deep passion or to stimulate the yearnings of the soul:  the pure blushes of the dawn and the crimson pyres of sunset are nowhere in the world that he has painted.  But that chord of jocund colour which may fitly be married to the smiles of