Le Corrège

Almost nothing is recorded about Antonio Allegri's early life beyond his birth around 1489 in the small town of Correggio, near Reggio Emilia, and it is only guesswork that his uncle, a local painter, gave him his first training. He appears in the historical record mainly through his contracts, and the most important of them, signed in November 1522, committed him to fresco the dome of Parma Cathedral.

He spent the better part of eight years on it. Working the ceiling as if the dome had opened straight into the sky, he painted Christ and a spiral of ascending figures receding upward in a technique later called di sotto in su, seen from below. Contemporaries found it disorienting rather than devotional. One church canon is said to have compared the crowded, foreshortened bodies to a stew of frogs' legs.

Correggio died in his home town in 1534, only 44 years old and known mainly around Parma itself. It was the next century's Bolognese painters, especially Annibale Carracci, who traveled to see this dome and began treating Correggio as a founding figure of Baroque illusionism.