Going once again along the path of the shocking comparison, so often proposed between Correggio’s Camera and that of Alessandro Araldi, so close and yet so far away in the monastery of San Paolo, favored today by the circumstance that the two works are both located a few rooms apart, one cannot help but be left speechless once again in front of an abyss of thoughts, style, emotions, sensitivity that divides two texts that have the subject and the Benedictine patronage in common. Thus it is probably the coherent iconographic program that informed the entire decoration of the church dedicated to John the Evangelist that brings him, in both cases, to the fore as the protagonist (and the clothing is also identical): but in Francia his role is still that of the most faithful disciple of Christ, for Correggio he is the son and the brother, he is the one who with the pressing embrace of the Virgin takes a new place at her side. Furthermore: both works are marked by the non-virtual memory of the tradition, from the Po Valley in fact, of terracotta Compianti from the second half of the 15th century: in particular those by Guido Mazzoni, which were found, not by chance, a short distance away: in Busseto in the Franciscan church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (1476-1477) and in Modena (1477-1479) then in the oratory of the hospital of San Giovanni della Buona Morte, a group restored and painted in 1509, and this is certainly no coincidence either, by Francesco Bianchi Ferrari (Lugli 1990, p. 320), probable master of the young Correggio.
In the Deposizione by the Bolognese artist the reference is essentially formal: the severe and monastic typology of the Virgin, in the physiognomic mask and in the very dark blue cloak, the suspended run with open arms of the pious woman who arrives from the right almost seem to be citations from the Busseto group, while the same composed arrangement of the group of pleurants around the centrality of the lifeless Christ seems inspired by the wise scenography of Mazzoni’s tableaux. But it is the atmosphere that changes: in Francia the emotion is restrained, the crying repressed, the pain already resigned, in a sentimental mediocrity that makes the Passion a necessary stage in that path of salvation alluded to precisely by the bright and dawning sky. It is precisely the expressive quality, the wisdom of the “motions of the soul” that Correggio finds, and makes his own, from those great and in some ways eccentric exempla, well beyond the iconographic and gestural lexicon that is instead singularly innovative. The central theme is in fact (in mystical consonance, certainly not devoid of meaning, with the Passione secondo Giovanni… ) the cognition, the representation, the feeling of pain. Starting from the choice of the narrative moment: which is neither that of the Deposition, nor that of the classic Lamentation (and here is the objective root of a certain uncertainty of definition in critical texts) but an intermediate moment, perhaps never told, that of the first and fatal contact between the Mother and the Son after the Cross, that of the ineluctable awareness of death. The time for pity, anointing and recomposition has not yet come: the already livid body of the son, lying on the mother’s lap is softly abandoned, the mouth half-open, the eyes with half-closed eyelids show the pupils rolled back (a detail so naturalistic, so Lombard), the hands are still stiffened like claws by the cruel tension of the nails. It is that primary contact that makes the Mother faint, almost kills her, so much so that John and one of the Marys turn to her worriedly, contemplating her ashen face. Certainly the iconographic term of the Virgin’s fainting, her “spasm”, is a very ancient term and renewed for example by Mantegna in the Crocifissione of the Louvre (1475-1479), and again by Raphael in the Deposizione of the Borghese Gallery (1507), however regarded with some suspicion now in this third decade of the 16th century as excessively expressive and liable to make the attention of the faithful slip from the theme of salvation to that of sacrifice. Here the loss of consciousness is precisely a demi-mort, the participatory underlining, accentuated by the above/below symmetry of the two faces, of the emotional consonance between the Mother and the Son. If on one side is the mother, on the other the bride cries (and the white and red, colours of pure love, of her bodice characterise her), Mary Magdalene, collapsed at her feet, her long dishevelled hair, her hands clasped almost to compress the feeling, the purple circles that mark her face. Alone like the bride or the abandoned lover, abandoned, wounded, alone to eternally stare at the torment of those lacerated feet: Correggio knows how to transform the iconographic necessity of the character into an image of absolute poetry. Her solitude breaks the symmetrical balance of the two groups but exalts the body of Christ which is offered diagonally, almost piercing the canvas, in a close-up of absolute value. If the perspective scheme is asymmetrical and new, this is due to the framing effect, as if the painter, using the cinematic expedient of the zoom ante litteram , brought the group closer, obviously eliminating the lateral wings: this is why we only see the base of the Cross, this is why we glimpse little more than the profile of the pious woman, and the edge of the shroud seems to slip out of the lower right corner. We are called into play, to enter the text (“spectator in tabula”?), to believe, see, contemplate, and of course cry and pray, our co-optation is the result of illusion. The sacrifice of Christ, in all his human suffering, is offered to us, placed before us with the value of an exemplum and with a peremptoriness that we cannot escape, accentuated by that directional, significant light, which from the right highlights its alabaster whiteness against the luminosity of the shroud. A light so full of value, of meaning, so Lombard, that it makes one imagine that the road that, in a few decades, will take Caravaggio from Milan to Rome, will also pass through Parma. He would have found this work in the Del Bono chapel of San Giovanni together with its pendant (inv. 353, card no. 148), he would have understood that that light was not only symbolic, but also “natural” (in fact it responded to the arrangement of the two canvases laterally with respect to a central window), he would have recognized that human and popular identification of the sacred that perhaps he was looking for.
This “merely” human quality of the characters is so predominant that only by getting very close can we discern the halos: but they are so thin, they seem so casual that they could pass for superfluities. Each of these considerations takes us away not only from the climate and rules of the full Renaissance, but also from Correggio’s most celebrated artistic path, so much so as to underline the undoubtedly eccentric character of our Compiantoe and Martirio (see entry no. 148), confirmed by critical judgments that are not always homogeneous, sometimes disoriented (Freedberg 1971; Battisti 1979) or, conversely, by the enthusiasm with which the Baroque seventeenth century, from Annibale Carracci to Bernini, nourished them. Iconographic and stylistic suggestions (therefore also religious) that in some way must have been appreciated, if not even requested, by Placido Del Bono, the Benedictine monk who is historically credited with commissioning the two canvases, executed between the end of the works in San Giovanni (1524) and the beginning of the construction of the Cathedral (1526). Unfortunately we know little about the education and culture of this Benedictine from a noble family, but we can presume something from the circumstance that he became the confessor of the bishop of Parma Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul III: he was certainly decisive in the thematic choice of the two works (in 1522 his iconographic consultancy for the decoration of the Bergonzi chapel is also documented).
And the theme is, evidently for both and precisely in their mutual mirroring, that of martyrdom, of sacrifice, and therefore of the Imitazione di Cristo as the path to salvation. A central theme in the religious debate of the time and certainly not foreign to the cultured Benedictine environment of Parma, inserted in the reformed sphere of the Cassinese Congregation to which the monastery of San Giovanni (like that of Polirone in San Benedetto Po, of Santa Giustina in Padua) had adhered since 1477. Despite the relative dispersion of the library of the Parma abbey, we can assume that, within the context of a true theology of the Cross, texts such as the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (1379-1471), the Meditazioni sulla vita di Cristo by the pseudo Bonaventure of the end of the 13th century, or the Arte del ben pensare e contemplare la Passione del nostro Signore Gesù Christo benedetto by Pietro da Lucca published in Venice in 1525 (see Ginzburg – Prosperi 1975), also circulated in Parma, as is revealed by documented readings of the major religious exponents of the congregation itself (Muzzi 1982; Piva 1988). For example, in the case of Lorenzo Lotto it is his Libro delle spese diverse, together with the most careful and involved iconological reading of the works, to testify (Prosperi 1998) the religious restlessness of the great Lombard painter and his sensitivity to these themes, we must not forget that Correggio’s relationship with the Benedictine patronage, and therefore with the religious culture of the time, is not at all extemporaneous. Beyond the continuity of the relationship between the artist and the Order, which is configured as a sort of real bond of intellectual patronage (the first contact in 1514 with Polirone, in 1519 in Parma for the Benedictine nuns of San Paolo, then the great cycle of works in San Giovanni from 1520 to 1524), even more significant appears his total and participated adhesion to the complex iconographic program of the monks (Toscano 1974). : More than well-known is the letter of 14 September 1521 with which the Cassinese congregation, signed by the president Girolamo da Monferrato, awarded the painter the diploma of brotherhood and spiritual communion, with all the benefits that came with it, a privilege that was generally granted only to the great benefactors of the Order and which further underlines the very special, and in some way equal, character that bound the artist to his clients. Therefore, going beyond the conventional reading, legitimized by Vasari, of Correggio as a “spontaneous” artist (but he signed himself, humanistically, “Laetus”), immediate and without cultural filters, as the nineteenth century mostly read him, even though he loved him so much, we instead verify once again in Del Bono’s canvases that ability to renew the stylistic and iconographic tradition in terms of substantial originality that certainly cannot be separated from a personal and articulated participation in the contemporaneity of the religious debate. The intimate and human revisitation of religious experience: this is certainly a typically “Lombard” quality, it is the singular sentimental and chronological congruity that inevitably brings into contact the works of the two most, apparently, solitary painters of the 16th century, Correggio and Lotto. Certainly in terms of elective affinities, perhaps for something more: Bergamo and Parma are not so far away…
Luisa Viola’s card, taken from Fornari Schianchi L. (edited by), Galleria Nazionale di Parma. Catalogue of the works of the sixteenth century and Farnese iconography, Franco Maria Ricci, Milan, 1998.