From Allegri to Laetus-Lieto: the shaping of Correggio's artistic distinctiveness

Giancarla Periti

The placing of artists' signatures on works of art has been viewed as an act that communicates the masters' presence and authenticates the authorship. Signatures usually consist of artists' names or monograms, but they also appear as visual, phonetic, emblematic, or literary transformations of the masters' names. These alternative forms of self-identification may occur not only as signatures on works of art but also as the artists' chosen name in records. This essay focuses on a paradigmatic case of an artist's self-naming, exploring the denotative force of the name and how it contributed to forging both the master's personal and professional persona. Names were part of the metaphoric way of thinking about individuals and their identities in the early modern period. They were signifiers of cultural processes through which relationships between the self, art, and the historical context were negotiated. Signatures and adopted names thus constitute fruitful areas for examination, pointing to issues of artistic identity, painterly style, and intentionality.

Antonio Allegri, better known as Correggio, from his hometown, identified himself by means of an unusual signature between 1517 and 1519. This consisted of the Latinized "Anton.[ius] Laet.[us]" that the artist inscribed on his Portrait of a Lady (Fig. 1) and on the Madonna of Albinea (Fig. 2), now lost, but known through copies. In the latter painting the artist carved this signature on a rock near Saint Lucy, while in the former he placed it on the tree trunk behind the sitter. In the following years, the same form of self-presentation also entered official records. Documents dating between 1521 and 1524 attest that he had assumed the cognomen Lieto, the Italian version of Laetus, substituting this for his actual patronymic, Allegri. These documents, which include a record of affiliation with the Benedictine congregation of S. Giustina, (1) a note from Allegri's hand appended to the agreement for his Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 3), (2) and an autograph receipt for payment received from the administrator of the S. Giovanni Evangelista Benedictine monastery in Parma, (3) all name the painter as Antonio Lieto of Correggio. These records suggest that Allegri's self-presentation had gone beyond its origin as a personal and artistic matter to become an identification that was publicly accepted and understood. More than simply a variation of the artist's patronymic, it was revelatory of the way Allegri constructed his self-identity and achieved an effect of subjectivity both as an individual and as an artist.

In general, the cognomen Lieto has been interpreted as a transformation of the artist's patronymic Allegri. The etymological meaning of lieto as happy, lighthearted, or joyful has been seen to contain a pun embracing the artist's family name Allegri (merry). Such assessments have relied on the assumption that the terms lieto and allegro had the same meaning in the Renaissance. It can be ascertained, however, that for sixteenth-century readers these vernacular words and their Latin equivalents, laetus and alacer, albeit interchangeable, maintained their specific connotation. Niccolo Perotti and Ambrogio Calepino's sixteenth-century dictionaries refer to laetus as the joy expressed in faces or bodily motions or, alternatively, as fertile soil (laetamen, fertilizer, has the same root), while associating the adjective alacer with a jocular, active spirit. (4) With his adopted name Laetus-Lieto, the artist embraced the essence of merriment and joy inherent in his cognomen, utilizing its inner force to direct the development of his personal and professional selves. Allegri thus demonstrated an awareness that names were perceived as comments on the essence of things and as having the power to impress themselves on the characters of those who bore them. Names were therefore testimony to a myriad of possible discourses that far surpass a simple explanation of Allegri's name Laetus-Lieto merely in terms of a translation of his patronymicus.

Meditations on the significance of names belong to a long tradition that can be traced back to classical lore and to the Bible. Whether names were labels arbitrarily imposed and retained by convention or whether they somehow revealed the essence of what they named was a question that Plato discussed in the Cratylus. (5) Throughout the Old and New Testaments, we find that to know and state certain names is to be empowered, both as the bearer and as the speaker of the name. Saint Augustine proposed various etymological principles to explain how all words encapsulated the essence of what they described. Names and their etymologies found a relevant place in Isidore of Seville's Etymologiarum libri as fundamentals of grammar and rhetoric, and they remained an obligatory ornament of poetry. (6) The philosophy of names had also a strong influence on the poetics of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In Dante's Vita nuova, Beatrice's name was to inspire a love understood to be true, since, Dante argues, "names are the consequence of things [nomina sunt consequentia rerum]." (7) Petrarch's and Boccaccio's poetics, which attained great importance in cinquecento Italy, contributed much to reestablishing a relation between the naming and the characters of individual personalities. (8) Ernst Robert Curtius has acutely discussed etymology as a "Denkform" (a category of thought). (9) Curtius's observation that the etymological evaluation of proper names was considered among the "attributes" of a person lends weight to an understanding of the power of names.

All this serves as a prologue to the problem that concerns us: the significance of Allegri's self-naming Laetus-Lieto viewed as an act by which the historical maker of works of art retires behind the persona introduced by his chosen name. Within this context, a change of name suggests a change in identity and role. Allegri's self-constructed identity Laetus-Lieto, as will be demonstrated below, marked his status as a fully fledged artist and the achievement of an artistic distinctiveness that he integrated into his art as an aspect of lietezza to affect the beholder. Lietezza thus became the artist's "signature style," which, it will be seen, reflects his self-identity and subjectivity bound into the process of creating his art. (10) There will, in particular, be given accounts of two paintings, his Madonna of Saint Francis, the lieto character being represented in the artist's namesake, Saint Anthony, and his Portrait of a Lady, in which the painter's joyful self was transposed into both the subject and the stylistic features of the painted imagery. (11) While in the former the artist moves toward an ontology of the self to render homage to his piety, in the latter he declares his intentionality as the inventive author. Allegri's style of lietezza and his adopted name will also be understood as responses to the cultural values and activities stimulated at his hometown court by the local ruler-poets Niccolo da Correggio and Veronica Gambara, as well as to broader discourses on the human passions, including happiness. Despite his acquaintance with members of the ruling family and the noble status held by painting at the da Correggio court, Allegri never became their court artist because the rulers had not the wealth to secure the services of masters such as he. (12) Yet more important than their patronage had been the intellectual discourses localized in the literary academy of Correggio and the interrelations between the self, painting, and nature as commented on by Leonardo da Vinci. Whether scholarship has, in general, observed the sense of joy characteristic of Allegri's production and the pleasing forms of his figures, the significance of the artist's laetae forms in relation to his self-naming and to discourses of artistic distinctiveness and human passions has until now remained untouched. (13)

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Discourses of Self-Referentiality

Allegri was commissioned to paint the Madonna of Saint Francis (Fig. 4) for the high altar of the church of S. Francesco in Correggio on August 1514, as a record testifies. (14) Cecil Gould has sustained that the altarpiece includes a self-portrait of the artist in the guise of his name saint, Saint Anthony of Padua. (15) The scholar has observed that Saint Anthony (at far left) is set apart from his companions, Saint Francis, Saint Catherine, and Saint John the Baptist, through the combination of joyful aspect and individualized features. In the altarpiece. Saint Anthony communicates with the viewer by glance and bodily posture. Gould's hypothesis entails a discourse of homonymic visualization between the figure's character and its author, with the name determining the way the depiction was conceived. A similar interaction between masters and their art was characteristic of some Renaissance portraiture, with the poetic painted metaphors suggesting the sitter's name as found in Leonardo's Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, his Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, and Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Lucina Brembati. (16) In the case of Allegri's representation, a bond is implicit between the painter, his saint figure, and its outer features, the center of which resides at the intersection of discourses of artistic persona, theories of art, and naming.

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It might first be asked how Correggio's depiction of Saint Anthony diverges from earlier representations, and if so in which ways? The saint is shown not as an ascetic leader of the Church, as in Donatello's or Cosme Tura's Saint Anthony (Fig. 5), but rather as a clean-shaven, cheerful young man wearing the Franciscan habit, with his head covered. Allegri's image of the saint most impresses the observer for the happy spirit it conveys. Saint Athanasius's biography of Saint Anthony attests to the saint's unrestrained jollity, which, along with the significance of the artist's very name, may have suggested how the master's eponymous saint be depicted. (17) The artist might thus have conceived the saint figure in his own likeness as lieto. But what might this gesture of self-referentiality signify? Artists like Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Mantegna, Filarete, and Albrecht Durer inserted their self-portraits into works that revealed their identity and authorship to their audience just as readily as a written signature, at the same time mirroring ideas about their art. (18) Yet Allegri's self-inclusion as the joyful Saint Anthony is more than a mere declaration of authorship echoing the signature. "ANTO[N]IUS DE ALEGRIS P.," placed on the rim of Saint Catherine's wheel. Scholarship has suggested that this signature, the very first in Correggio's career, signaled his status as a fully fledged artist, manifested through the production of such a large altarpiece as the Madonna of Saint Francis for an important local church. (19) The monumental Saint Francis altarpiece is also the artist's earliest documented work. In the altarpiece, Correggio had thought for the first time in terms of the softening of contours and blending of colors that would later become the distinguishing qualities of his art. The Madonna of Saint Francis has been viewed as the artist's response to the Franciscans' spirituality and to their position on visual imagery. (20) The potential of art to lead the devotees to a higher state of mind by the web of the theme, the visual metaphors, and charming stylistic features was the basis for the Franciscans' view of art as a means of access to the divine. (21) The Franciscans' spirituality combined the Christian doctrine with the ideal of courtly joy as a trope for the friars' commitment to an interior life for the sake of divine plenitude. In Franciscan texts, joy was viewed as the most pleasant companion of human life. (22) This suggests that the particular strength of Correggio's figures, their engaging gestures and joyful expressions, may have had special appeal for the Franciscans. Thus, Correggio seems to realize that through the pleasing aspects of his forms he could affect the way the painted theme was experienced more effectively by its audience. Yet what is the relation between the painter's attained mastery of art and his self-presentation as lieto? I would contend that Allegri's self-inclusion draws on the association between his new artistic status and his personal self. This artist's gesture negotiates the notion not only that the maker and his work are inextricably linked as discrete entities, each with a stable identity, but also that his artistic power is put to the service of expressing discourses of faith. The artist's self-inclusion in the Madonna of Saint Francis altarpiece does not evoke a notion of self-homage, pointing instead to the depicted subject of Christian salvation. In other words, the artist did not want to be recognized as merely the inventive author; his act is revelatory of his personal devotion to the Franciscans, in whose church he and his family were to be buried. Allegri's self-presentation is therefore a gesture that alludes to his own piety through a combination of imagery and self-identification.

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The Ontology of the Self

In his monumental Portrait of a Lady (Fig. 6), Allegri provides the most suggestive manifestation of his signature/self-identification in the inscription "Anton. Laet." More than an assertion of authorship, the inclusion of the master's Latinized name is an act that reveals how he conceived the presentation of subjective character as such: that is, how he achieved the artistic effect of his subjectivity. In the life-size portrait, Correggio painted a young woman in three-quarter view, seated beneath trees of laurel and ivy, which form a kind of niche around her head. The woman is clothed in a dark, low-cut gown, which leaves her shoulders and upper torso bare. The lady's undergarment, a fine white chemise, is gathered in soft folds with a black bow. Her headdress is a white rete (net) made of threads knotted together with gold and blue embroideries. She has a gioiello da testa to ornament the rete that gathers up her dark hair. The lady holds a metal bowl with a Greek inscription, as though presenting it to the observer. The beholder is attracted to this representation of a beautiful woman whose braided snood identifies her as a married woman; the dark dress suggests that she has probably been widowed. The lady also shows the girdle of a Franciscan tertiary visible at her knee, an affiliation confirmed by the brown scapular pendant on a gold chain around her neck.

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The original destination of the portrait is mysterious, and as a consequence, the identification of the sitter has been a matter of debate. (23) The portrayed woman has been identified as the Petrarchan poetess Veronica Gambara, the wife of Count Giberto IX da Correggio. (24) Alternatively, it has been suggested that she is Ginevra Rangone, wife of Giangaleazzo da Correggio, because of the evident signs of her piety. (25) Whether the sitter was Veronica Gambara or Ginevra Rangone, both of whom were widowed in the years 1517-18, or perhaps another local noblewoman, the fact remains that the portrait depicts one of the "virtuous ladies of Correggio" described in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and that it is merged with courtly discourses developed at that court. (26) The sitter's affiliation with the Franciscan tertiary order denotes Ginevra Rangone as the most plausible candidate for Allegri's painting. Here, the artist created a portrait that exhibits the dynamic relation between the portrayed lady as the subject and the patron of the painting and his self-presentation as Laetus, thereby presupposing an interdependence between the painter's self-naming, the female identity, and the image itself. (27) In what follows, the focus on the noblewoman's biography, her description conveyed by poets, and the modalities of seeing the image and its creator will strengthen the identification of the sitter as Ginevra Rangone, while at the same time enhancing the issues of the artist's self-naming and painterly style.

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Ginevra Rangone came from a Modenese family of learning and sophistication, being one of the daughters of Niccolo Rangone and Bianca Bentivoglio. (28) Sixteenth-century sources describe Ginevra as a cultivated girl, well versed in Petrarchan poetry. (29) Nothing is certain about the date on which Ginevra entered the Franciscan order, but it is known that her family was much devoted to the Franciscans. Ginevra married Giangaleazzo in 1503, settling at the court of Correggio. (30) Widowed in 1517, she had not produced an heir. According to her husband's testament, the lady was returned her dowry and was given the usufruct of her husband's landed property. (31) Two years later, after marrying Luigi Alessandro Gonzaga in July 1519, the woman moved to her new husband's fiefdom at Castelgoffredo, near Mantua. Sources report that Ginevra Rangone died in 1540 without heirs. She was buried in Mantua in the habit of a Franciscan tertiary, with the cord and the scapular, as the Modenese chronicler Lancellotti reports. (32)

A poetic image of the lady comes from a sonnet contained in Enea Irpino's still-unpublished Canzoniere (composed before 1520), in which the poet plays with the woman's name (Ginevra / genebro=juniper). Gentility and grace account for the features of her character; her beauty, Irpino writes, cannot be divorced from "honesty [honestate]" and is accompanied by "the other outstanding and superior virtues [altre gratie alme, et supreme]," which constitute the notatio of her inner essence, of which her outer beauty is but the adornment. Ginevra's celestial sembiante (appearance) is characterized by "that which is divine [da non so che divin]" of her eyes. (33) The famous Italian poet Niccolo da Correggio, Ginevra Rangone's father-in-law, in a letter addressed to Isabella d'Este, reports that Ginevra's virtues and beauty make her worthy of a husband's love. (34)

In the Portrait of a Lady, Correggio embodied the sitter's inner qualities by turning the tool of poetry into painting, thus acknowledging the conception of pictorial composition as analogous to literary invention. The notion ut pictura poesis and the concept of the power of painting were among the most significant sixteenth-century claims for the superiority of painting over poetry. This was Leonardo's paragone, which might have been known to the courtly milieu of Correggio. Niccolo da Correggio met Leonardo in Milan in early 1490 and, as will be shown below, dedicated to him a sonnet. (35) Leonardo defended painting on the basis of its nobility, which consisted of showing perfected nature through the use of geometry and of the activity of the artist's individual ingegno (creative faculty). He praised the artist's imagination, which led to the creation of graceful and pleasing movements in depicted figures so as to reflect those of the mind and soul, thereby eliding the distinction between the form of images and the truth they represent. (36) For Leonardo, painters were superior to writers because of their power to arouse lovers' feelings at the encounter with their portrayed beloved or to solicit more efficaciously than do written words the prayers of the faithful in the presence of images of God. (37)

Niccolo da Correggio echoes the word-image paragone in several sonnets. (38) His rima no. 77 is a particularly significant evocation of the dialectical relation between painter and poet in the creation of an ideally perfect female beauty: the poet addresses the "occhio interior" (the eye within), while the painter "I'altro de fuori" (the eye operating from without). Yet, Niccolo concedes, both painters and poets compete with nature as the principle of perfection and knowledge. In the rima no. 189, Niccolo compares ancient to modern artists, claiming that Leonardo surpasses both ancient and modern. (39) For Niccolo, Leonardo was able to capture in his portrait what he strives to represent, thus defeating his rivals and fulfilling the pun (the notion of victory) contained in his cognomen. (40) The name Vinci stands not only as a metaphor for the master's pictorial perfection but also as a figura of his self. Leonardo's very name thus posits a circuit that affirms the double force of identification and self-proclamation through the representation of the feminine beauty. This paradigm of artistic creation, with the artist absorbed with, and his identity bound within, the process of creation, well suits a painting such as Allegri's Portrait of a Lady, produced for Niccolo da Correggio's daughter-in-law Ginevra Rangone.

Correggio's remarkable image presents a youthful, appealing lady placed against the shade of trees. The woman's physical features, her straight nose, delicately colored cheeks, and fine lips, all record a beauty worthy of the Petrarchan ideal of feminine perfection. In contrast with the standard description of a woman as fair-haired, here the artist creates a "brunette" beauty. Allegri conceived the woman's distinguishing bodily attributes by re-creating an ideal of form established by Leonardo in his Mona Lisa (Fig. 7). (41) Leonardo represents the form and character of this lady through the graceful posture of her body and the mysterious fascination of her gaze and smile. (42) Similarly, Allegri reworked the posture, attitudes, and gesture of the Leonardesque model to convey the sense of Ginevra Rangone's inner qualities through the perfection of her beauty and bodily demeanor. What characterizes Correggio's portrait are the lady's penetrating dark eyes, which quietly and intensely meet those of the beholder, and her elusive gaze. The ambiguity of the woman's expression arises from eyes that are serious, contrasting with her radiant face and her sidelong glance. The similarity between this sitter's canon of beauty and that shown in other figures by Allegri, such as the Virgin in his Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Francis (Fig. 8), confirms that this model of feminine perfection was devised by the artist himself. (43) The simultaneously conventional and ideal beauty created by the artist and the loving effect of the figure's gaze and gestures have the power not only to bring the beholder to actually feel love for the lady depicted but also, as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo write, to give the viewer a sense of emotional kinship with her. (44) The portrait, like poetry, thus establishes and maintains a close relationship with the audience. (45)

Such a relationship is enhanced through the presentation of the sitter in the fullness of a youthful beauty that had won her a husband's love and, at the same time, showing her adherence to religious precepts that made her worthy of that love. This reconciliation of secular and religious discourses of love in the pictorial imagery of the portrait pointedly echoes the sacred and poetic nexus that Veronica Gambara's lyrics encompass. (46) Sonnet no. 24 ("Ite, pensier fallaci e vana speme," Go fallacious thoughts, and vain hope) is an especially perspicuous evocation of the lady's amorous desire for a Signore (a Lord). Such a notion incorporates a range of meanings from social, domestic, and religious contexts: benevolent father, beloved husband, and God the Father. By invoking her "Signor mio caro" (my dear Lord), Veronica reconciles her desire for passionate love with a love of God, the ultimate source of all love. Such a correlation, which fits both secular and religious discourses, is particularly effective for elucidating Correggio's beautiful rendering of the reduced-size scapular attached to the golden chain the lady has around her neck. The scapular, a triangular piece of brown fabric, rests on the very place--her heart--reserved for amorous devices, as discussed in sixteenth-century literature on women. Bartolomeo Gottifredi's "Specchio d'amore" (1542) reports that women, in order to manifest much affection to their beloved, wore devices suspended at the end of a chain. (47) In the portrait, the artist's replacement of an amorous emblem with a Franciscan symbol of penitence and piety elides the distinction between sacred and profane love. This replacement points to a referential shift from the sitter's expression of personal love to its integration into a discourse of Christian love. (48) Through this shift, in turn, the artist negotiates the reconciliation of the sitter's love for a signore (a lover or a lord) with love for the Signore (the Lord).

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Correggio's Portrait of a Lady represents a remarkable effort on the part of the artist to reinterpret the forms and conventions of contemporary portraiture. (49) The portrait shows the reality of the subject as that of an individual, historical being; at the same time it reflects the role that the painting played in the imagination as the portrayal of ideas invested in the portrait by the sitter and the artist himself. In this instance, the paradoxical combination of the sitter's youthful physical allure, despite her status as a widow, together with signs of amorous desire and religious piety, points to her self-identity as a bella donna. Though contemporary treatises recommended that widows and Franciscan tertiaries be discreetly covered, there is evidence that in their demeanor and in their dress younger widows were perceived as presenting a seductive appeal to men. (50) Saint Bernardine and Boccaccio describe widows as seductresses, pointing out that the contrast between the luminous beauty of their faces and their rich, dark attire captured men's gazes in the obscurity of churches. (51)

The artist himself is localized in a dialectical relation with the painted imagery, through the force of his signature/self-presentation as "Anton. Laetus." This inscription adapts the language and conventions of love poetry, in which lovers' names were carved on tree trunks, to the celebration of the artist's self and to the revelation of the theme itself. In the portrait, the discourse of artistic identity is thus inextricably tied to what the painter creates, positing the problematic relation between the master and his work conceived as an extension of his self. John Freccero's and Thomas Greene's comments on Petrarch's poetics of self-reflexivity are particularly suggestive here. (52) While Freccero posits a sense of completion to the circle of autoreflexivity in the creation of the text, Greene contests this view, arguing that the poet seeks to create himself out of failed signifiers. The poetic fiction, in short, represents the author's fundamentally interiorized, absorptive quest for himself. Petrarch never attains the sense of eternalness essential for the construction of a stable self. (53) Greene's discussion of the ontology of authorship in Petrarch's poetics shows that the author's own self is consciously implicated in the process of artistic creation. During this process, the author is necessarily absorbed with, and his identity bound within, the self-reflexive creation. Only when it is finished can the author presumably retrieve his identity as autonomous from the work. But the paradox of this conception lies in the very fact that even if the author is capable of finishing his work and distancing himself from it, he frequently falls in love with what he has created, and the absorptive cycle therefore begins anew.

Humanist scholars debating the literary theory of imitation and invention also reinvented the notion of the author defined by a distinctive manner and personal voice, which resulted from the recognition of a certain individuality that demands a distinctive mode of self-expression. (54) Allegri's self-constructed identity Laetus-Lieto suggests his adherence to this model of expression. Though emphatically self-referential, Allegri's art exemplifies the fact that the master's self-identity and his subjectivity are closely bound in the creation of his work. In his Portrait of a Lady, Allegri's self-presentation as Laetus shows that the artist is undoubtedly enamored of his work, but he distances himself from his art to create it. For in effecting an elision of love of self and love for his art, the artist renders his art an imitation of himself. As Leonardo writes in his manuscripts, "every painter paints himself." He observes that "figures often resemble their masters ... because judgment is that which moves the hand to the creations of lineaments of figures through varying aspects until it is satisfied .... he who falls in love naturally loves things similar to himself." (55) Whether Allegri knew this passage remains difficult to ascertain, but his immersion in this conception of painting was such that his self-adopted name Laetus-Lieto impressed so much on his character as to be transposed into the qualities of his art. Scholarship has suggested that Correggio's pictorial intelligence led him to absorb the Leonardesque models into his new distinctive style, but in fact he truly understood Leonardo's approach to art, his relations between human bodies and inner feelings, and his conception of the moving effect of painting. Correggio viewed nature as both a principle of imitation and a source of knowledge with which art competed in creating its own artifice. Allegri learned not simply how to imitate natural and artificial perfections but to re-create them according to his own inclination and individual traits. His language of lietezza appeals directly to the observer's emotions, enhancing the sense of pleasure in his audience. The artist's style of laetae forms was essentially a version of poetic education by seduction, in which the depicted bodies, with graceful attitudes, joyful expressions, and soft and delicate tone complexions, draw the beholders to the subject and move their souls.

In the Portrait of a Lady, Correggio's delicate and sensitive manner of lietezza avoids the violent contrast of light and shadow. Twilight is diffused in the composition and unifies it, thus creating a fusion between the portrayed lady and the landscape setting. Correggio's remarkable natural view weaves into the portrait fabric, flowers, greenery, mountains, and valleys. Rendered with delicate tonalities merged in an atmospheric light, the landscape invites the eye into the distance, though the view is blocked by the dominating figure of the sitter. The eye is liberated through seeing the beauty of the landscape and takes pleasure in it: as Leonardo writes, the sight of a natural setting quiets the soul of the beholder, who takes solace in nature. (56) The perfectly managed foreground and background constructions also accommodate the relation between this image of a bella donna and the painted metaphors shown in the picture. These motifs--especially the laurel bush and the ivy clinging to the tree--should not be considered static symbols but rather poetic metaphors standing for the living female body.

The laurel tree, which Correggio renders with great naturalism, simultaneously evokes notions of fidelity, chastity, and poetic attainment. (57) Petrarch made the laurel his sign of poetic triumph (the poeta laureato) and of the lover's enthrallment: it points to an affective liaison between lovers, which was worked in the Petrarchan female tradition into themes of passionate love in marriage. Correggio alludes to this concept through the motif of the ivy clinging to the tree. Such a motif has its literary root in Catullus's Roman Epithalamium, in which he stresses the sexual aspect of marriage and describes the bride as a clinging ivy passionately embracing the tree, that is, her husband ("ut tenax hedera hunc et huc / arborem implicat errans"). (58) The hedera-arbor metaphor thus suggests themes of desire, fertility, and bliss in marriage. (59) In Allegri's Portrait of a Lady, the ivy leaves are brown, but they are streaked with green to evoke the possibility of the recovery of marital bliss. This concept is, in turn, echoed in the artist's signature "Laet.[us]" carved, among the ivy leaves, on the tree trunk. As Rensselaer Lee has demonstrated, the carving of names on trees was an Arcadian motif drawn from pastoral poetry, signaling discourses of love, desire, and joy between lovers. (60) The artist's very name thus aptly suits the painted theme, that is, its lietezza evoked through the complex negotiations between painted and poetic motifs. On the one hand, the artist's name suggests his mastery and love for his art. On the other hand, it manifests that happiness attained by Correggio as the result of the manual and intellectual labor invested in the work. As Aristotle wrote, "if happiness is ... won by virtue and by some kind of study or practice, it seems to be one of the most divine things that exist.... If it is better to be happy as a result of one's own exertions than by the gift of fortune, it is reasonable to suppose that this is how happiness is won; inasmuch as in the world of nature things have a natural tendency to be ordered in the best possible way, and the same is true of the products of art." (61)

The sentiment of happiness the painting elicits is also realized as part of a conversation with the beholder, who takes full pleasure in looking at this representation of an alluring woman, which was to be displayed in a domestic setting where virtue, beauty, and lietezza should have been at home. The conversation is initiated by the woman's glance, which meets the observer's gaze with a sidelong look that appeals so directly to him that he has to return her gaze. The dialogue is then pursued by the lady's gesture of touching the folds of her white sleeves, while offering the beholder the golden bowl she holds on her knee. This gesture, along with the Greek inscription on the bowl--three words in elegant classical capital letters--deserve examination. Of the three words only the central one is fully legible: it reads [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Fig. 9). The term comes from Homer's Odyssey, and it refers to a wonderful drug of forgetfulness that the beautiful Helen of Troy offered to her guests. She poured nepenthes into their cups of wine so that they would forget their sorrows and afflictions; so powerful was the nepenthes, writes Homer, that they would not mourn even the deaths of close relatives. (62) Scholars have, in general, interpreted the inscription on the bowl as a quotation from Homer. Recently, Nigel Wilson has instead argued that the inscription comprises three autonomous words, the first of which, [PHI]YTON (phuton, a plant) did not derive from Homer. Wilson has further observed that this word might have been added on behalf of the "artist's patron [who] chose to vary the text of the quotation." (63) Yet what about the Greek inscription functioning as a sententia (a small-form sentence conceived within the genre to which Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam's Adagiorum chiliades gave great popularity in the Renaissance)? It was a sententia invented in the same spirit of the Homeric text, albeit not copying it. Besides the central word, nepenthes, the final three letters, TON, of the first word on the left, and three letters, AXO, of the term on the right can be made out. The word on the left, containing four letters, can be completed as HTON (eton), meaning "it was / there was." [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the center means "dissolving sorrows." For the word on the right the five Greek letters may be completed as AXOAO (acholo), meaning "banishing anger." The reconstructed sententia thus reads: HTON [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] AXOAO, which might be translated as: "it was (a remedy) dissolving sorrows and banishing anger."

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

The Greek sententia centers on the concept of oblivion. While evoking this notion, it redirects the meaning to the reality and to the sentiments of the portrayed lady, Ginevra Rangone. The inscription encompasses the sitter's sorrow for the death of her husband and a remedy to heal her pain and inner disharmony. But the inscribed bowl the lady offers to the beholder appears to be empty. Its contents, the nepenthes as administered by Helen to her guests to instill joy, has been consumed. (64) Such a symbolic consumption of the nepenthes confirms for us that Allegri's Portrait of a Lady thematizes the sitter's dissolution of pains and sorrows, the passing from a condition of suffering toward a state in which pains have been quieted, thereby summoning an ideal of lietezza itself. Since Ginevra Rangone remarried in July 1519, the promised bliss and lietezza had seemed possible once again at the very time of the production of the portrait in about 1518-19. (65)

Lietezza in Art

Correggio's Portrait of a Lady is an extremely intriguing picture in the way it blurs the distinction between the inventive author, his art, and the thematized subject, thus prompting a discussion of the significance of Allegri's artistic language of lietezza. Before turning to this argument, I want to outline briefly the dimension of the master's shift from Allegri to Laetus-Lieto in terms of the cultural discourses involved in such a process of self-naming. John Shearman and David Ekserdjian have seen Allegri's self-presentation as the proof of his affiliation to the accademia in Correggio. (66) The first reference to scholars' conversations in the setting of Veronica Gambara's household as the accademia comes from Annibale Camilli's Latin dedicatory letter dated 1516 and published in 1520. (67) Camilli eulogizes Veronica's virtues and sophisticated culture, and he declares how much he owes to the accademia she had established. (68) Camilli further likens the unending literary debates in Veronica's palace to courtly activities in which learning was cultivated through exchanges between individuals versed in different fields, such as medicine, poetry, and theology. (69) His description makes it clear that the local accademia promoted the humanist model of education that contributed to the formation of learned individuals. (70)

Since no records have been found to document the artist's affiliation with the academy in Correggio and consequent educational opportunities, Shearman's and Ekserdjian's arguments rely on indirect evidence. Allegri was on close terms with the academy's local principe, Giovanni Battista Lombardi, as is demonstrated by two pieces of evidence: first, a codex of Francesco Berlinghieri's translation in terza rima of Ptolemy's Geographia that Allegri was given by Lombardi; (71) and second, a baptismal record reporting that Lombardi acted as godfather to Allegri's first son, Pomponio Quirino. (72) Shearman has further speculated that the name Pomponio was a homage to Pomponius Laetus, the principe of the Roman academy. There is, however, more in the adoption of this name than an indirect homage, since the name of the artist's first daughter, born in Parma in 1524, was recorded as Francisca Letitia, the second name being the feminine counterpart of his chosen cognomen Lieto. (73) At stake is neither the question of Allegri's "humanist" education nor of his membership in the local accademia--both possible--but rather the familiarity with discourses of naming that were standard in academies and court milieus.

Within literary academies the adoption of pseudonyms or fictional names, as Marc Fumaroli has observed

   alluded to a shift of identity and reflected a kind of rite, a
   passage from an inferior, vulgar, to a superior society ...
   [pseudonyms] entailed a practice of abandoning the old persona that
   was governed by the passions of the vita attiva, for the adoption of
   a new persona, whose attitudes were supplied by another society
   driven by the free choices of the philosophical and poetic vita
   contemplativa, according to the custom specific to the otium
   literatum defined by Petrarch. (74)

Carlo Ossola has complemented this argument, suggesting that puns were considered manifestations of wit and, thus, clues to the revelation-concealment of the self in the Renaissance. (75) In courtly and academic contexts, individuals were invited to lighten their conversations through both wordplays such as bischizzi (that is, the change of a word by either adding or omitting a syllable) and interpretations of names as recommended in the most paradigmatic sixteenth-century courtly text, Baldassare Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano. (76) These observations also accord well with discourses on the transformation of names ("mutazione dei nomi") as later proposed in Ludovico Castelvetro's Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570). (77)

In the cinquecento, it is evident that practices of naming signaled the attainment of a distinctiveness and of a new status, in the eyes of both the namer and others; it reflected a process of renovatio that determined the actions and experience of an individual character. To adopt a new name thus meant the appropriation of a certain identity and, with it, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving, as Stephen Greenblatt and others have observed. (78) In Allegri's case, the artist's self-naming Laetus-Lieto therefore marked his process of personal, social, and artistic renovatio. (79) Allegri's self-identity was therefore a calculated gesture that reflected both his attainment of a singular artistic individuality and his understanding of discourses on human passions such as happiness, which also involved a philological dimension in Renaissance culture.

In antiquity, pleasure and happiness and their opposites were viewed as parts of a dual system representing antithetical choices of life. Plato's hostile view of pleasure, which led him to devaluate its positive connotations and its status of a good, was modified by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle argued that happiness ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], eudaimonia) was the supreme good inherent to life. (80) He set happiness as the goal of humankind, the ultimate good that is sufficient in itself. (81) Happiness consists of "at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things." (82) According to Aristotle, happiness is a virtue that leads human beings to secure the good in respect to both individual persons and the whole nation. To secure the good for the community is far nobler than to secure it for the individual; therefore, Aristotle set politics over ethics. (83) He used the word eudaimonia to define happiness that pertains both to the individual and to the community. In opposition to this tradition, Epicurus saw earthly pleasures as the alpha and omega of life. Having attacked the Epicurean view, Cicero charged the discourses on happiness with an ethical dimension in his De officiis. (84) He reported the ancient tale of Hercules debating the two ways to reach joy as recounted in Xenophon's Memorabilia. (85) Written by the Stoic Prodicus, the story defines the two paths as personified by [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (euphrosyne), the virtuous form of happiness, and by eudaimonia, seen as a vice. Cicero shifted the philosophical content of Prodicus's roads to happiness, however, viewing them as the ways of virtus and voluptas. The path of voluptas led to earthly pleasure, while the road of virtue, which Hercules preferred, gave him "a place in the council of gods." (86) Petrarch discusses the story of Hercules in his De vita solitaria, emphasizing that the choice of the path of virtue is the one through which to obtain fame. The poet thereby associated the notion of individual happiness with the immortality to which his self aspired through his works. (87)

Faced with these positions, Lorenzo Valla grounded his defense of voluptas in the theory of language. (88) Valla's De voluptate validated the notion of voluptas (pleasure) as the unicum bonum, construing it as the detachment of its almost universal association with the body and the designation of its appropriation for the promised joy of Christianity. Valla conducted a philological reexamination of the word voluptas, showing that biblical and philosophical texts expressed pleasure and delight with a series of terms: fruitio, delectatio, hilaritas, iocunditas, gaudium, and voluptas. In the sixteenth century, the notion of happiness was translated into the vernacular by different words, each of which came to be interpreted with a specific meaning. The term allegrezza consisted of the enjoyment of a delightful stimulation of the senses and the body, while letizia referred to the perception of an inner, spiritual joy. Allegrezza evoked the feeling of bodily joy, while letizia reflected the joy experienced by the soul. The latter was desirable as a step toward the perfect happiness of the soul's union with God. Petrarch and Erasmus, in particular, taught their contemporaries how to incorporate into their lives the philosophia Christi of humanism and reach the letizia of the soul. (89) Such a state of letizia was thus considered an internal joy emanating from an expansion of the spirit. (90) In this dual system of meaning, an ethical opposition was therefore imposed on the concepts of allegrezza and letizia. This opposition became especially charged in relation to Renaissance writings focusing on the nature of love.

The definition of allegrezza as an unhealthy passion appears with notable suggestiveness in Pietro Bembo's Asolani and in Mario Equicola's De natura d'amore. (91) Both Bembo and Equicola viewed allegrezza as having negative connotations; allegrezza is presented as taking men beyond what is appropriate ("convenevole"), thereby reflecting a "deceptive and stupid belief." (92) Bembo sees allegrezza as a fallacious and troubled state of mind because the joy that makes us "merry [allegri]" is desired for its own sake. (93) Equicola posits that lovers' allegrezza is a "windy inflation [ventoso gonfiamento]" that eclipses their minds. (94) The emotional state of allegrezza seizes individuals in the presence of their beloved, after having searched for the latter beyond rational measure. The notion of letizia instead refers to the pleasure of the mind and soul, which can be evaluated only through reason and knowledge. (95) This relies on the concept of gaudium as discussed in Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae.

Begun in 1354, completed in 1366, and dedicated to Azzo da Correggio, Petrarch's De remediis presents an extensive treatment of the four passions. Petrarch's text was surely read at the court of Correggio, having been written in honor of one of the greatest ancestors of the da Correggio ruling family. In two chapters, respectively entitled De tabulis pictis and De statuis, Petrarch refers to visual art, relating the notion of gaudium to the viewing of works of art. (96) A sophisticated beholder knowledgeably takes pleasure in seeing the beauty of painted bodies and the gaiety of represented subjects, as well as "portraits that seem about to breathe." (97) It is only the enjoyment of the master's talent and of his ingegno that provides the discerning viewer with delight and pleasure.

The argument has now come full circle, to a point where the significance of Allegri's self-constructed identity, Laetus-Lieto, can be seen more clearly. The artist's self-naming reflected the passage from a condition of the self's potentiality to a state of claiming one's own subjectivity. This means he passed from the fallacious state of allegria to that of letizia. Allegri thus translated into his cognomen the quality of lietezza of this new, renewed, self and transposed it successfully into his art when the sense of joy that his figures embody fully emerged in a way that affects the beholder. Allegri's "signature style," here understood as a set of signs through which Correggio enacts his own distinctiveness, is revealed particularly through the charming outlines of the eyes, the graceful character of the eyebrows, and the smiling expression of his figures. The claim that the representation of joyous emotions in painting was a true difficulty was first made by Alberti in his De pictura. Alberti writes that it is only with "the greatest labor, study, and care [that the artist] could represent faces in which the mouth and chin and eyes and cheeks and forehead and eyebrows all accord together in ... hilarity." (98) Leonardo investigated the problems of expressing hilaritas through the theorization of his "smiling figures." (99) Correggio, who, Giorgio Vasari reports, was "a great discoverer of whatever difficulties there were in painting," also found his own personal answer to such a challenge. (100) Correggio's painterly style avoided Leonardo's heavy obscurity and shadowy darkness. The artist's smooth gradation of tenderly blended hues and the softness of the hair give his heads an aspect at once gracious and joyous, which departs from the heroic ones wrought by Michelangelo through his colori cangianti and severe contours, as well as from the sculptured perfected beauty and grandeur of Raphael's and even of Titian's creations, whose pleasing forms, as Paolo Giovio writes, were modeled with "minute dark traits." (101) Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian pursued the poetics of counterpoise in their art. Correggio instead practiced a visual rhetoric, aiming at unione (fusion), by merging his figures with a golden light and softening their contours and devising bodies that are never as spatially aggressive as those by Raphael and Michelangelo. (102) The overall result was that Allegri's forms, his melting light, soft shadows, and blurred contours that delineate the bodies in action provoke a sense of pleasure in the beholder, who experiences the appropriateness of the features in the context of the painted narrative and is won over by the laetae elements of his art.

It was Vasari who first wrote about the sense of joyful refreshment conveyed to the observer by Allegri's works. Describing the Madonna of Saint Jerome (Fig. 10), Vasari says that whoever looks at the smiling putto is induced to smile, stressing the power of the artist's figures to move the beholder's mind to joy. (103) Although Vasari does not associate the painter's cognomen with the very quality of lietezza of his style, he recognizes the pleasure and joy experienced by looking at Allegri's image. It is a joy that also derives from the contemplation of his figures' smiling faces, and which is related to the artist's tender, pliant perception of nature.

In commenting to his cousin on Allegri's works in Parma, Annibale Carracci located Raphael and Allegri respectively in the two stylistic polarities of hard ("cosa di legno") and soft ("tenero"). Although Annibale declares his incapacity to elaborate on Allegri's style, he writes that his putti breathe, live, and laugh with such grace and truth that they compel us "to laugh and to feel happy along with them." (104) Annibale further states that Allegri's personal style was his own conspicuous invention, thereby the mark of his own individual self bound into his work:

   Correggio's works were his own thoughts, his own conceptions, which
   one sees he drew out of his own head, and invented on his own,
   testing these only against the original. The others all lean on
   something that is not their own, either on the model, or on statues,
   or on drawings and prints. All the works of these others represent
   things as they could be, but Correggio's as they truly are. (105)

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

Vasari's and Annibale's remarks ultimately confirm for us that the artist transposed the sense of delight and joy inherent to his cognomen into his works. (106) Allegri's distinctive style of lietezza characterizes the subject of his Portrait of a Lady, as well as the figures' heads, ecstatic expressions, and the clasped hands in his Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, with Saint Sebastian, and the enchanting features of his playing putti in the Camera di S. Paolo. The quality of lietezza is also significantly manifest in the artist's Madonnas, with their characteristic smiling faces and lowered eyes, as in his Madonna of the Basket and his Madonna of Saint Sebastian. It has even been observed that in the Adoration of the Shepherds the Madonna's "glorious smile is the focus of the whole painting." (107) The sweet traits of her face and gracious air communicate the Christian truth directly to believers.

Correggio's singular style of joyous figures emerges from the painter's desire to unite himself with his production, to render the individual person of his labor. The artist's style of lietezza therefore sets him in a mirror relationship with the beholder, whose joyful feelings reflect the painter's original act of creating his art as the extension of his self. Allegri's personal syntax of lietezza resulted from a gradual evolution and differentiation from his artistic models (especially Mantegna and Leonardo) toward an affective, lyrical language of forms. (108) Through inventing his distinctive laetae forms, Correggio was already responding to conceits later discussed in Paolo Pino's Dialogo di pittura (1548). Pino wrote that the happy painter is one "who does not steal another's labor. Invention also consists in properly differentiating, ordering and arranging things said by others, fitting the subjects well to the figures' actions, that all be directed to the expression of the [work's] intent and that the figures' poses be varied and graceful." (109) Pino continued that "things go badly for the artificer if the work moves its audience to laughter, for what is good causes stupefaction, but that which is disproportionate and clumsy calls forth mockery." (110)

The master's adoption of the name Laetus-Lieto further reveals that he lay claim to his ingenium as the creative faculty that, like the laetamen fertilizing the soil, nourished his imagination in the invention of his works. The relation between the artist and the notion of artistic creation is not something that Allegri originated. In his case, however, it had a specific connotation that is implicit in the artist's self-presentation, in the relation between his self-naming and his language of lietezza. Viewed through these lenses, the manifestation of Allegri's artistic distinctiveness is thus comprehensible not merely as an emanation of an irretrievable individual consciousness but also as evidence of a consciously fashioned sophisticated personality bound in the process of generating pleasing works of art.

Notes

I am very grateful to Charles Dempsey, my dissertation adviser, for his valuable comments and suggestions. I also owe thanks to Maria Grazia Albertini Ottolenghi, the late Salvatore Camporeale, Jean Campbell, Stephen Campbell, Michael Cole, Elizabeth Cropper, Pier Luigi De Vecchi, Marzia Faietti, Pier Massimo Forni, Alessandra Galizzi, Megan Holmes, Charles McKay, Giovanna Perini, Alessandra Talignani, Julia Triolo, and an anonymous Art Bulletin reader for their constructive criticism. I would like to thank the Charles Singleton Center for Italian Studies at the Villa Spelman, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the Universita di Macerata for the financial support they provided me while researching and writing this article. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

1. Archivio di Stato, Parma, Diplomatico, pergamene miniate, doc. 18. Written by the congregation's prior, Gerolamo del Monferrato, the document, which dates May 15, 1521, was republished in Marzio dall'Acqua, ed., Correggio e il suo tempo, exh. cat., Archivio di Stato, Parma, 1984, 37-38. The relevant passage reads: "egregio viro magistro Antonio L[i]eto de Corigia" (distinguished master Antonio L[i]eto of Corigia).

2. Archivio di Stato, Modena, Archivio per materie, arti belle, pittori, cass. 13/1: "Et io Antonio Lieto da Correggia mi chiamo haver receputo al di e milesimo soprascritto quanto e sopra scritto et in segno di cio questo ho scritto di mia mano" (And I myself, Antonio Lieto of Correggia declare that I have received what is written above on the above-mentioned day and year and, as a proof, I wrote this note by my hand). This statement follows the agreement, dated October 14, 1522, between Alberto Pratonieri and the artist for the painting commission. The document was published several times: Luigi Pungileoni, Lettera dell'Abate Severino Fabriani al Padre Luigi Pungileoni sopra un autografo di Antonio Allegri riguardante la famosa tavola della Notte (Modena: Dalla Reale Tipografia Soliani, 1833), n.p.; and Gaetano Milanesi, ed., La scrittura di artisti italiani (sec. XIV-XVII), 3 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1876-77), vol. 2, 115.

3. British Museum, London, Egerton MS 1, fol. 42r, Jan. 23, 1524. Allegri's receipt was transcribed by Gould, 181: "Io Antonio lieto da coreggio pictore ho receputo a di soprascritto da Don Zoan Maria da Parma monaco et cellerario dil monasterio de S. Ioanne Evagelista de Parma Ducati 27 de oro in oro larghi in moneta.... Antonius manu propria" (I myself, Antonio lieto of coreggio, painter, received 27 golden ducats in large gold coins on the above-mentioned day from Don Zoan Maria of Parma, monk and administrator of the monastery of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma.... written by the hand of Antonius).

4. Nicolaus Perotti, Cornucopiae, sive lingua Latina comentarii (Venice: Aldus, 1513), 233, Alacer: "Quid tu es tristis, quid tu es alacris, modo laetum, et veluti in spe aliquam gestientem a quo alacritus dicta mutatio quaedam vultus in aliquam spem gestientis"; 574, Laetus: "quid faciat laetas segetes et laetum legumen, hoc est fertile idem ... sic letamen appellamus fimum, quod agrum faciat laetum, hoc est pinguem et fertilem"; Ambrosii Calepini, Dictionarium, 2 vols. (Venice: Aldi Filios, 1552), vol. 1, d, Alacer: "qui viget sensibus universis, quod est indicium erecti animi atque sublimis"; ibid., uuiiy, Laetus: "qui, hilaritatem, quam intus habet, etiam vultu ostendit, a latitudine mentis, ut quidam putant. Nam qui gaudium aspectu promunt, dilatare quodam modo faciem videntur."

5. Timothy M. S. Baxter, The Cratylus: Plato's Critique of Naming (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).

6. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum libri, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957); and Marian Rothstein, "Etymology, Genealogy, and the Immutability of Origins," Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1990): 332-47.

7. Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova (Milan: Garzanti, 1982), chap. 13.

8. Speaking names ("Lauro-Laura" in Petrarch's lyrics or "Filoloco" and "Fiammetta" in Boccaccio's texts) are borne by the principal figures' characters as discussed by Francois Rigolot, "Paronomase et poesie dans le Canzoniere petrarquien," in Poetique et onomastique: L'exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1977), 107-10; and Luigi Sasso, "L'Interpretatio nominis in Boccaccio," Studi sul Boccaccio 12 (1980): 129-74.

9. Ernst R. Curtius, "Etymology as a Category of Thought," in European Literature and the Latin Middle Age, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 495-501. On the question of names and theories of naming, see Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), translated into Italian by Lidia Lonzi as S/Z: Una lettura di Sarrasine di Balzac (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 89-92; Carlo Ossola, "Il nome nascosto," in Figurato e rimosso: Icone e interni del testo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), 175-211; Fiora Bassanese, "What's in a Name? Self-Naming and Renaissance Women Poets," Annali di Italianistica 7 (1989): 104-15; Francois Rigolot, "La lecture du nom propre: Histoire et theorie," in Le texte et le nom, ed. Martine Leonard and Elisabeth Nardout-Lagarge (Montreal: Bibliotheque Nationale du Canada, 1996), 11-21; Jacques Derrida, Il segreto del nome, chora, passioni, salvo il nome, ed, Gianfranco Dalmasso, Italian trans. Francesco Garritano (Milan: Jaca Books, 1997), 45-86, 129-77; Anthony Molho, "Names, Memory, Public Identity, in Late Medieval Florence," in Art, Memory and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 237-52.

10. I found the notion of a "signature theory of style" significantly appropriate to Correggio's art. Such a notion has been developed with particular suggestiveness by Nelson Goodman, "The Status of Style," Critical Inquiry 1, no. 4 (1975): 799-811; and Charles Altieri, "Style as the Man: From Aesthetics to Speculative Philosophy," in Analytic Aesthetics, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 59-84; idem, "Personal Style as Articulate Intentionality," in The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Caroline van Eck, James McAllister, and Renee van de Vall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 201-19.

11. Another work by Correggio that might pose lingering questions about the artist's presence and intention is his dome decoration in Parma Cathedral. If one understands the male individualized figure above the Virgin as the artist's self-portrait, much could be said regarding Allegri's ideas about his art, the labor that this process implied, and his conscious decision to leave the fresco unfinished; see Roberto Tassi, Il Duomo di Parma: La cupola del Correggio (Parma: Cassa di Risparmio di Parma, 1967), 150, for this identification. For the sake of thoroughness, it should be mentioned that Allegri's adopted name Lieto can be found on a copy of his Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, as the inscription in Pierre Etienne Moitte's 18th-century reproductive engraving shows: "Laus Deo. Per Donna Matilde d'Este, Antonio Lieto da Correggio fece il presente quadretto per sua divozione A. 1517." See Massimo Mussini, Correggio Tradotto: Fortuna di Antonio Allegri nella stampa di riproduzione fra cinquecento e ottocento (Milan: Federico Motta, 1996), 101.

12. There have been suggestions that Allegri's Head of Christ, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, conceived as an image of the veil of Saint Veronica, could have been commissioned by Veronica Gambara; see Ekserdjian, 6, 170. In recent literature, the poetess's patronage of artists has been discussed by Katherine McIver, who has, however, overlooked visual and textual sources, and by Maddalena Spagnolo; McIver, "The Ladies of Correggio: Veronica Gambara and Her Matriarchal Heritage," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 26 (2000): 25-44; idem, "Two Emilian Noblewomen and Patronage Networks in the Cinquecento," in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2001), 159-76; and Spagnolo, "Correggio's Reclining Magdalen: Isabella d'Este and the Cult of St. Mary Magdalen," Apollo, June 2003, 37-45.

13. In the latest monographic study on the painter, Ekserdjian, 214, observed that Correggio was "above all an artist for whom the depiction of happiness is a very serious business."

14. The contract for the altarpiece has correctly been transcribed by Elio Monducci, "Documenti," in La pittura del cinquecento a Reggio Emilia (Milan: Motta, 1985), 248. It was endorsed by several parties: the two local sindaci (governors) of the Franciscan convent, the artist, and his father. The Franciscans provided the panel, the frame, and the cover and drew up separate contracts with artisans; these documents have been published in part by Gould, 175. The contract for the Saint Francis altarpiece has been a touchstone especially for the reconstruction of Correggio's early career and birth date. Depending on how scholarship has interpreted this record, the artist's birth date has been ascribed as prior to 1490 or, at ca. 1494, slightly later. Convincing arguments for Correggio's birth date as ca. 1489 have been proposed by Giovanni Romano, "Correggio in Mantua and San Benedetto Po," in Dosso's Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, ed. Luisa Ciammitti, Steven F. Ostrow, and Salvatore Settis (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities, 1998), 15-40.

15. Gould, 22.

16. David A. Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco, eds., Lorenzo Lotto: A Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1997, 115-16; David A. Brown, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 101-21; and Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo: Una carriera da pittore (Milan: Motta, 1999), 166-73.

17. Athanasius, The Life of Saint Anthony, trans. Robert T. Meyer (Westminster: Newman, 1950), chap. 14. For Saint Anthony's biography, see Maria Letizia Casanova, "Sant'Antonio da Padova," in Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 14 vols. (Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII nella Pontificia Universita Lateranense, 1962), vol. 2, 155-90.

18. Andre Chastel et al., "L'art de la signature," Revue de l'Art 26 (1974): 8-56; Erik S. Kooper, "Art and Signature and the Art of the Signature," in Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Glyn S. Burgess (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1980), 223-31; Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307-30; Victor I. Stoichita, "Nomi in cornice," in Der Kunstler uber sich in seinem Werk: Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rom, 1989, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VHC, Acta Humaniora, 1992), 294-315; Randolph Starn, "Places of the Image in Italian Renaissance Art: Clues, Symbols, and Signatures in Mantegna's Camera Picta," in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. Alvin Vos (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 217-20; Daniel Arasse, "Signe Mantegna," in Le sujet dans la tableau: Essais d'iconographie analytique (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 31-40; Louisa C. Matthew, "The Painter's Presence: Signatures in Venetian Renaissance Pictures," Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 616-48; Lubomir Konecny, "Joris Hoefnagel's 'Emblematic' Signature Reconsidered," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1999): 267-72; Maria Monica Donato, "Le opere e i nomi: Problemi e ricerche," in Le opere e i nomi: Prospettive sulla "firma" medievale (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2000), 9-14; Creighton Gilbert, "A Preface to Signatures (with Some Cases in Venice)," in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. Mary Rogers (London: Ashgate, 2000), 79-89; Rona Goffen, "Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Italian Renaissance Art," Viator 32 (2001): 303-70; and Lisa Pon, "Raphael's Signature," in Raphael, Durer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 67-82. There have also been discussions on Ghiberti, on Filarete's portrait signatures with reference to antique models, and on Mantegna's signature in Greek: Katherine King, "Filarete's Portrait Signature on the Bronze Doors of St. Peter's and the Dance of Bathykles and His Assistants," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 296-99; and Nigel G. Wilson, "Greek Inscriptions on Renaissance Paintings," Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 35 (1992): 223-25.

19. Ekserdjian, 46-52. Gould, 201, reports that the authenticity of the signature has been questioned in the scholarship.

20. Rona Goffen, "A Bonaventurian Analysis of Correggio's Madonna of St. Francis," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 103 (1984): 11-18; and Marcin Fabianski, Correggio and Sacra Conversazione (Nakladem: Uniwersyter Jagiellonski, 1994), 19-37.

21. John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 75-76.

22. Lorenzo di Fonzio, "Spiritualita Francescana," in Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, ed. Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca, 10 vols. (Rome: Paoline, 1977), vol. 4, 470-74.

23. The portrait had first been shown attributed to Lorenzo Lotto in an exhibition catalogue of paintings from Russian private collections held at St. Petersburg in 1909. It entered the Hermitage Museum in 1925: Tatyana K. Kustodieva, Catalogue of Western European Painting, Hermitage, Leningrad, Italian Painting: Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (Florence: Giunti, 1994), 135-36. It was then attributed to other masters, including Palma il Vecchio, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Giulio Campi. See Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell'arte italiana: Il cinquecento, 9 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1929), vol. 9, 46; and Bernard Berenson, The North Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: Putnam, 1907), 187.

24. Roberto Longhi, "Le fasi del Correggio giovane e l'esigenza del suo viaggio romano," Paragone 9, no. 101 (1958): 43-44. Veronica Gambara died in 1550 and was buried in the church of S. Domenico in Correggio. When in 1557 this church was rebuilt, the citizens placed her remains in the church of S. Francesco: Rinaldo Corso, Vita di Veronica Gambara e gli honori della casa di Correggio ... con due capitoli in lode delle donne correggesche (Ancona: Astolfo de' Grandi, 1566), 41.

25. Riccardo Finzi, "Il ritratto di gentildonna del Correggio all'Ermitage di Leningrado," Nuove Lettere Emiliane 1 (1962): 1-4.

26. In the first edition of the Orlando Furioso (1516), Ariosto writes that two noblewomen of Correggio welcome him from the shore: "Quella che scende con Ginevra al mare, / Veronica da Correggio mi pare" (The lady who descends to the sea with Ginevra seems to be Veronica da Correggio). In the third and final edition of the poem, the description of the local women is better articulated and includes, beside the two ladies already mentioned, other noblewomen from the court of Correggio; Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 46.3.4: "Oh what fair, what virtuous ladies, what excellent knights I see gracing the shore, and what good friends, too. I shall be forever indebted to them for the happiness they feel at my return. I can see Mamma Beatrice out on the tip of the pier with Ginevra and other ladies of Correggio. With them is Veronica Gambara, the darling of Apollo and the choir of muses. I can see another Ginevra from the same family, and Julia with her."

27. In general, scholarship has agreed on the sitter's identification as Ginevra Rangone: Brown, 87-88; Myron Laskin, "The Early Work of Correggio," Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1964, 70; John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, Andrew Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1963), 218; Everett Fahy, The Legacy of Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Paintings from Leningrad, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1979, 65-72; and Massimo Pirondini, La pittura del cinquecento (as in n. 14), 106. The lack of any record concerning the Portrait of a Lady led Ekserdjian, 6, 75, to be skeptical about this identification, but he concurred that the portrait is imbued with the local courtly culture.

28. The Counts Rangone had a long tradition of relations with the Bentivoglio, the ruling dynasty of Bologna, which was reinforced through marriages. See Girolamo Tiraboschi, "Rangone Ginevra," in Biblioteca modenese o notizie della vita e delle opere degli scrittori natii negli stati del Serenissimo Sig. Duca di Modena, 6 vols. (Modena: Presso la Societa Tipografica, 1783), vol. 4, 295-96; idem, "Rangone Ginevra," in Storia della letteratura italiana, 9 vols. (Modena: Presso la Societa Tipografica, 1791), vol. 7, 98-99; and Piero Gualteriotti, "Ginevra, marchesa di Castel Goffredo, vivace damigella di Lucrezia Borgia," Il Tartarello 4 (1981): 17-19.

29. Antonio Maria Visdomini, "De Ocio et Sibyllis," in Oratio cum laudatione Joannis Bentivoli Secundi et Carmina (Bologna: Galligulam Bazillerium, 1500), 23.

30. Archivio Comunale, Correggio, Not. Affaroso Affarosi, filza 2, Oct. 7, 1503.

31. Ibid., Not. Antonino Covi, filza 309, no. 19, Feb. 17, 1517. Giangaleazzo da Correggio's properties were inherited by his sisters, Beatrice and Heleonora, but a quarrel arose between these ladies, who sued each other. Ginevra, though not involved in the lawsuits, must surely have been disturbed by this family animosity caused by the lack of a natural heir.

32. Tommasino de' Bianchi detto de' Lancellotti, Cronaca modenese, ed. Carlo Borghi, Luigi Lodi, and Giorgio Ferrari Moreni, 12 vols. (Parma: Fiaccadori, 1868), vol. 7, 381: "10 Agosto 1540--Mori la Signora Zenevere sorela fu del Sig. conte Guido Rangon, et figliola del Sig. conte Nic. E de M. Biancha Bentivoglia, quale fu maridada in el Sig. Zan Galeazo da Corezo, et al presente del Sig. Aloviso da Gonzaga gotoso in Castello da Fredo, lei fu sepelita in Mantua a di 10 del presente vestita del terzo ordine de Osservanza de S. to Franc. con li zocholi in pedi descalza, e portata da dette Sore, e accompagnata da dette Sore piu di 60; cussi ha detto ser Biaxio Paganin modenese averla veduta" (August 10, 1540--Lady Ginevra, the count Guido Rangone's sister, and the count Niccolo and Bianca Bentivoglio's daughter, died. She first married the count Giangalezzo da Correggio, and then the gouty count Aloviso [Luigi Alessandro] of Castelgoffredo. She was buried in Mantua today 10 August: she was in the habit of a Franciscan tertiary with sabots on her bare feet; and she was borne by sisters of the order and was accompanied by more than 60 sisters. Biagio Paganin of Modena who had seen it, told me all this).

33. Biblioteca Palatina, Parma, Enea Irpino, Canzoniere, MS Palatino 127, fol. 38r. Irpino's Canzoniere contains poems praising portraits of beautiful women by the hands of Alessandro Araldi and Leonardo. The relevance of Irpino's sonnet for the identification of the sitter for Leonardo's Mona Lisa as Isabella Gualanda has been assessed by Carlo Vecce, "La Gualanda," Achademia Leonardi Vinci 3 (1990): 51-72.

34. The letter, dated Nov. 17, 1503, was transcribed by Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, "Niccolo da Correggio," Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 21 (1893): 234: "... bona per naturale e bona per accidentale forma, conveniente a moglie da essere amata" ([Ginevra] is good in natural and good in accidental ways, and thus suitable to be loved as a wife).

35. Niccolo da Correggio's literary production comprises poems, sonnets, as well as inventioni to be inserted in badges and medals; Carlo Dionisotti, "Nuove rime di Niccolo da Correggio," Studi di Filologia Italiana 17 (1959): 135-88; Arnaldo di Benedetto, "Appunti sull' opera di Niccolo da Correggio," Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 147 (1970): 161-82; Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, Niccolo da Correggio e la cultura di corte nel Rinascimento padano (Reggio Emilia: Cassa di Risparmio di Reggio Emilia, 1989); Ronald L. Martinez, "The Politics of Love Poetry in Renaissance Italy," Interpres 11 (1991): 93-111; Francesco Bausi, "Per le rime di Niccolo da Correggio," Interpres 12 (1992): 197-222; Peter Porcal, "Due lettere sulle imprese di casa Gonzaga: Contributo alla prassi pre-accademica delle prime imprese italiane," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes 40, nos. 1-2 (1996): 233-35; and Mauda Brogli Russo, "Matteo Maria Boiardo e Niccolo da Correggio," in Il Boiardo ed il mondo estense nel quattrocento: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, ed. Giuseppe Anceschi and Tina Matarrese (Padua: Antenore, 1998), 481-87.

36. A. P. McMahon, Treatise on Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 111: "The most important thing that can be found in the analysis of painting are the movements appropriate to the state of mind of each living creature, such as desire, contempt, anger, pity, and the like." On Leonardo's combination of light and color for conferring graceful movements on the depicted figures, also consult Clare Farago, "Leonardo's Color and Chiaroscuro Reconsidered: The Visual Force of Painted Images," Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 63-88; and Marcia Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 116-22.

37. Leonardo, 29-32.

38. Niccolo da Correggio, "Rime," in Opere: Cefalo, psiche, silva, rime, ed. Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1969), 51, 77, 286. The motif of the poetry-painting paragone had its fons et origo in the vernacular literature in Petrarch's two sonnets on Laura's beautiful portrait by Simone Martini.

39. Ibid., 189: "Zeusi, Lisippo, Percotile o Apelle / che avuto avesse a ritrar questa in carte, / dovendo in lei mirar ciascuna parte / e la grazia che e puoi mixta con quelle, / como a guardar el sole o contar stelle / la vista in lui seria mancata e l'arte, / perche natura a l'occhio non comparte / potenzie in quel che essa natura excelle, / Cusi, Leonardo mio, se il tuo cognome / Voi conseguir, che ogni altro Vinci e excedi, / Coprili il viso e incomincia a le chiome, / Perche se a un tratto sue bellezze vedi, / Tu el ritratto serai, non lei, che some / d'occhio mortal non son, vo' che mi credi" (Zeusis, Lisippus, Percotile, or Apelles / having to portray a woman on paper / would have studied each of her parts / and the grace with which they are infused / as if one looks at the sun or counts starts / his sight and artistic skill would be defeated / because nature does not give to the eye any power / in what nature herself excels. / So, my dear Leonardo, if you wish to attain your name which conquers and surpasses all the others, / you should cover the lady's face and begin with her hair / because if suddenly you gaze at her beauty, / you will portray yourself and not her / since her beauties / are not for terrestrial eyes, please believe me).

40. Puns were conceits recommended in speeches and poetry to attract the ear of listeners and excite "their attention by some resemblance of equality or contrast of words"; Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 9.3.66.

41. Brown, 88; and Everett Fahy (as in n. 27), 65-72.

42. On current theories of this image, see Frank Zollner, Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa; Das Portrat der Lisa del Giocondo (Frankfurt: Fisher, 1994), 10-74.

43. Elizabeth Cropper, "The Beauty of Women: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Differences in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 175-90; and Giovanni Pozzi, "Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d'inizio cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione," 145-71, and "Nota additiva alla 'descriptio puellae,'" 173-84, in Sull'Orlo del visibile parlare (Milan: Garzanti, 1993).

44. Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura et De sculptura; On Painting and On Sculpture, trans. and ed. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 83 (par. 42): "[In an istoria I like to see someone who] invites you to laugh or weep with them. Everything the people in the painting do among themselves, or perform in relation to the spectators, must fit together to represent and explain the 'istoria'"; and Leonardo, 220: "That which is included in narrative paintings ought to move those who behold and admire them in the same way as the protagonist of the narrative is moved. So if the narrative shows ... lamentation, or pleasure, joy and laughter and similar states, the minds of the beholders should move their limbs in such a way as to make it seem that they are united in the same fate as those represented in narrative painting. And if they do not do this, the painter's ability is useless."

45. On the dialectical relation between painter and poet, see Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1-8, 23-26.

46. The elision of secular and religious discourses of love, a conventional part of both Petrarchan poetics and humanist writings, found expression in several of Correggio's representations. See Gould, 117; Ekserdjian, 150; and Marcin Fabianski, "Correggio's Angel in Parma Cathedral, Ganymede, and Raphael," Master Drawings 35, no. 1 (1997): 50-53. On Veronica Gambara and the female Petrarchan poetic tradition in 16th-century Italy, see Luciana Borsetto, "Narciso ed Eco: Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del cinquecento; Esemplificazioni e appunti," in Nel cerchio della luna, ed. Marina Zancan (Venice: Marsilio, 1983), 171-233; Elisabetta Selmi, "Per l'epistolario di Veronica Gambara," in Veronica Gambara e la poesia del suo tempo nell'Italia settentrionale: Atti del convegno, ed. Cesare Bozzetti, Pietro Ghibellini, and Ennio Sandal (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1989), 143-81; Ronald Poss, "Veronica Gambara," in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 47-65; William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). 134-46; and Veronica Gambara, Le rime, ed. A. Bullock (Florence: Leo Olschki and the University of Western Australia, 1995).

47. Bartolomeo Gottifredi, "Specchio d'amore: Dialogo nel quale alle giovani s'insegna innamorarsi," in Trattati d'amore del cinquecento, ed. Giuseppe Zonta (Bari: Laterza, 1912), 270: "io voglio, per piu segno d'amore, che tu porti la impresa sua, la quale troverai nei colori del primo favore ch'egli ti mandera, e, se possible sara, in loco ch'egli la possa vedere .... e potra' lo fare appiccando questo pendaglio, che hai in fondo alla collana" (I want you, as a greater sign of love, to wear your lover's device, which you will find in the colors of the first thing he will send you, and if it is possible, you should wear such a device in a place he can see it .... and you will do so by attaching this pendant which you have at the end of your chain).

48. Piety, devotion, and concern for personal salvation were among the principal reasons for joining the Franciscan tertiary order on the part of lay women, for which see Fredegando da Anversa, Il terzo ordine secolare di San Francesco 1221-1921 (Rome: Tipografia Unione, 1921); Gabriele Andreoli, Storia delle regole e delle costituzioni dell'ordine francescano secolare (Perugia: Guerra, 1988); and Mario Panczar, "Le forme dell'Apostolato dei laici francescani nel corso dei secoli," Analecta Tertii Ordinis Regularis Sancti Francisci 24 (1993): 23-58.

49. On the conventions and the idealizing nature of Renaissance female portraiture, consult Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 54-61: Angelika Dulberg, Privatportrats: Geschichte und Ikonologie einer Gattung im 15, und 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mann, 1990), 31-45; Patricia Simons, "Portraiture, Portrayal and Idealization," in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 271-85; Harry Berger, "Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture," Representations 46 (1994): 87-120; and Joanna Woodall, introduction to Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1-25.

50. Modern scholars have been perplexed by representations of appealing widows. Yet such pictures offer clues to the complexity of young widows' lives, status, and broad negotiations in the remarriage market in the Renaissance. Some interesting remarks come from Giovanni Giorgio Trissino's Epistola ... che deve tenere una donna vedova (1524), where he defines widows as free women; see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 71-72. The ambiguous status of widows as perceived in sermons, conduct literature, and discourses on love has also been discussed by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 117-31; and Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 56-62. Klapisch-Zuber argues that the young widows' complicated situation stemmed from the conflict between two systems, the dotal (which allowed a widow to take her dowry back and eventually remarry) and the patrilineage (which obliged a widow, especially with a male heir, to live with her deceased husband's family).

51. Saint Bernardino, "Come si debbono onorare le vere vedove," in Le prediche volgari di San Bernardino da Siena, ed. Luciano Banchi, 4 vols. (Siena: Tipog. all'insegna di S. Bernardino, 1884), vol. 3, 196-202; and Giovanni Boccaccio, "Corbaccio," in Tutte le opere, ed. Dante Isella (Milan: Garzanti, 1994), 457.

52. John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 20-32; and Thomas Greene, "Petrarch: The Ontology of the Self," in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 104-26.

53. Greene (as in n. 52), 124: "One could argue that the fundamental subject of the Canzoniere is not so much or not only the psychology of the speaker as the ontology of his selfhood, the struggle to discern a self or compose a self which could stand as a fixed and knowable substance. This struggle, with its intermittences and truces, its partial victories, its circularities, its temptation by despair, its numbing rehearsals and reenactments, is finally a failure, since the closing poem [the Canzoniere] envisions the redemptive composition of a self at peace only in the form of a prayer for that which is not yet given."

54. David Quint, introduction to Parker and Quint (as in n. 52), 1-19; Martin McLaughlin, "The Dispute between Politian and Cortesi," in Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2001), 187-217.

55. Leonardo da Vinci, On Painting: A Lost Book (Libro A), reassembled from the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas 1270 and from the Codex Leicester by Carlo Pedretti (London: Peter Owen, 1965), 35 (fol. 15, par. 11); Martin Kemp, "Ogni Dipintore Dipinge Se: A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo's Theory," in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Paul Kristeller, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 311-12. For critical remarks on Leonardo's response to the Tuscan proverb "Every painter paints himself," see Frank Zollner, "Ogni Pittore Dipinge Se: Leonardo da Vinci and 'Automimesis,'" in Winner (as in n. 18), 138-60; and Robert Zwijnenberg, "Ogni Pittore Dipinge Se: On Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist," in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (London: Ashgate, 2003), 48-67.

56. Leonardo, 32: "But, if a painter in the cold and harsh wintertime set before you the same or similar landscapes as those in which you once took your pleasures beside a spring, you will be able to picture yourself again as a lover with your beloved in flowery meadows, beneath the sweet shade of verdant trees. Will you not obtain a different pleasure than from hearing the poet's description of such effect?"

57. Mirella Levi d'Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1977), 202-3.

58. Catullus, The Poems of Catullus, ed. and trans. Guy Lee (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1990), 61.34-35: "As clinging ivy entwines the tree, / roving here and there."

59. Arthur L. Wheeler, "Tradition in the Epithalamium," American Journal of Philology 51 (1930): 205-23; and Ole Thomsen, Ritual and Desire: Catullus 61 and 62 and Other Ancient Documents on Wedding and Desire (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993), 26-31, 112-14.

60. Rensselaer W. Lee, Names on Trees: Ariosto into Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 9-11.

61. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1982), 1.9.3-6.

62. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Augustus T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 4.220-224: "Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, took other counsel. At once she cast into the wine of which [her guests] were drinking a drug to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. Whoever should drink this down, when it is mingled in the bowl, would not in the course of that day let a tear fall down over his cheeks, no, not though his mother and father should lie there dead, or though before his face men should slay with the sword his brother or dear son, and beheld it."

63. Wilson (as in n. 18), 243.

64. Macrobius and Plutarch explain that Helen's administration of nepenthes attains its goal in the narration of comforting stories appropriate to the situation; Macrobius, Saturnalia (Leipzig: B. G. Teubneri, 1963), 7.1.18; and Plutarch, Table-Talk (Quaestiones Convivales), trans. Paul A. Clement and Herbert B. Hoffleit, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1966), 1.1.614.4. Extrapolating from pharmacological texts, Pliny's Naturalis Historia claims that the effect of Egyptian nepenthes was to instill joy, and that Helen benefited "all mortals": Pliny, Naturalis Historia, trans. W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1966), 25.5.11-14. Erasmus's Praise of Folly connects the notion of nepenthes with the type of joy that Folly gives rise to in human beings; Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 9.

65. It is difficult to agree with Gould's proposed date for this painting (211). On the basis of the similarity between the sitter's huge slashed sleeves and those painted by Titian in his Miracle of the Usurer's Heart, ca. 1511, Scuola del Santo, Padua, Gould has suggested that Correggio painted this portrait ca. 1511-12. Yet, the scholar continues, Correggio altered the painted imagery some years later.

66. John Shearman, "Correggio and the Connoisseurs," review of The Paintings of Correggio, by Cecil Gould, Times Literary Supplement Mar. 18, 1977, 302; Ekserdjian 6; and Shearman, Only Connect ... Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 37 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 247.

67. Published in Bologna, Camilli's volume contains three pamphlets--De subjecto logicae quaestio, the Maximo et minimo tractatus, and the Quadraginta asinina sophismata--preceded by a preface; Tiraboschi, 1791 (as in n. 28), vol. 7, pt. 1, 172.

68. Tiraboschi, "Accademie di Correggio," in Tiraboschi, 1783 (as in n. 28), vol. 1, 34-38, and "Camilli Annibale," vol. 1, 374-76. Also consult Corrado Ricci, Antonio Allegri da Correggio: His Life, His Friends, and His Time, trans. Florence Simmonds, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1896), vol. 1, 80-83.

69. David S. Chambers, "The Earlier Academies in Italy," in Individuals and Institutions in Renaissance Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 1-14. In the cinque-cento, the term "accademia" implied no more and no less than scholars' conversations in a private household and had nothing to do with the 18th-century concept of the academy as an institutionalized site of education. Leonardo was one of the first artists to associate his name with the idea of an academy (for the Leonardus Vinci Accademia, see Vasari, vol. 4, 21; and Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992], 125-26). Such an "accademia" was an intellectual circle in Milan whose members met to discuss common intellectual interests. Conversations among friends and colleagues were intended to recreate the convivial atmosphere as evoked in Plutarch's Table Talk, Aulus Gellius's Noctes atticae, and recast in Erasmus's Colloquia. Six of Erasmus's colloquies, the Convivia, describe friends who gathered together to eat and talk; Louis V. Ryan, "Erasmi Convivia: The Banquet Colloquies of Erasmus," Medievale et Humanistica 8 (1977): 201-15; Carlo Ossola, "L'homme accompli: La civilisation des courts comme art de la conversation," Le Temps de la Reflexion 4 (1983): 77-89; and Adriano Prosperi, introduction to Erasmus, Colloquia, ed. C. Asso (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), ix-lviii.

70. Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie d'Italia, 2 vols. (Bologna: Licinio Cappelli, 1927), vol. 2, 96. The humanist pattern of education became the model for artistic training in the late cinquecento; Charles Dempsey, "Some Observations on the Education of Artists in Florence and Bologna in the Later Sixteenth Century," Art Bulletin 63 (1980): 562-69; and Cynthia E. Roman, "Academic Ideals of Art Education," in The Children of Mercury: The Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, exh. cat., Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, 1984, esp. 81-83.

71. Luigi Pungileoni, Memorie storiche di Antonio Allegri detto il Correggio, 3 vols. (Parma: Stamperia Ducale, 1818), vol. 2, 51, reports that the codex was inscribed on the frontispiece with Lombardi's name and the date February 1, 1488, followed by Allegri's name and the date June 2, 1513. Unfortunately, Berlinghieri's codex is now lost.

72. Gould, 189, published the artist's first son's baptismal record: "Pomponius Quirinus fil. Antonii de Alegris die 3 7bris. [3 Septembris 1521] compater Mag. Joan Baptista de Lombardis, comater [--] de Fassis."

73. For Allegri's daughter, baptized in Parma on December 12, 1524, see Gould, 190: "Francisca Letitia filia Antonii de Alegris de Corrigia et Hieronyme ux[oris], nascitur VI, bap[tizata] XII December, compater magister Jo. Marcus Garbatius physician et D. Ludovica de Bagnanis."

74. Marc Fumaroli, "Academie, Arcadie, Parnasse: Trois lieux allegoriques du loisir lettre," in Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century, ed. David S. Chambers and Francois Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute and University of London, 1995), 23.

75. Carlo Ossola, "Il libro del cortegiano: Esemplarita e difformita," in Dal cortigiano all'uomo di mondo (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 51-52.

76. Baldassar Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. Salvatore Battaglia (Milan: Rizzoli, 1987), 2.61: "[Un'altra sorte e ancor, che chiamiamo bischizzi]; e questa consiste nel mutare o vero accrescere o minuire una lettera o sillaba" ([Another case is what we call bischizzi]; and this consists of a mutation, that is, an addition or subtraction of a letter or a syllable); 2.62: "E' medesimamente bello interpretare i nomi e finger qualche cosa, perche colui di chi si parla si chiami cosi, o vero perche una qualche cosa si faccia" (Likewise, it is delightful to interpret names and imagine some reason why the man spoken of is named as such, or why some particular thing is done).

77. Ludovico Castelvetro, Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani, 2 vols. (Rome: Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1978-79), vol. 1, 276-77. Castelvetro suggests that the mutation of names signals a renovatio as the typical gesture of somebody who either founded an academy or dedicated himself to a life of study. At the same time, he introduces another interpretation, arguing for a renovatio that implied the giving up of false, idolatrous beliefs as the premise for the conversion to the "true religion." It is worth noting that this last interpretation was expounded in subsequent reeditions of Castelvetro's Poetica.

78. Philip Gleason, "Identifying Identity: A Semantic History," Journal of American History 69, no. 4 (1983): 910-31; Thomas M. Greene, "The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature," in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History, ed. Thomas Greene, Peter Demetz, and Lowry Nelson Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 241-68; and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

79. Records testify that in the 1520s Allegri had reached a certain wealth and social status in his hometown: he had been bequeathed lands and urban properties by an uncle, though this led to a lawsuit (Archivio Comunale, Correggio, Not. Alfonso Bottoni, filza 178, no. 518, Jan. 18, 1518); he owned several landed properties; and he acted as a witness for Manfredo da Correggio and/or Veronica Gambara in transactions that took place in the princely palace; ibid., filza 178, no. 569, Sept. 4, 1519; ibid., Not. Giovanni Gaspare, filza 586, no. 560, Feb. 15, 1525; ibid., Not. Francesco Alfonso Bottoni, filza 180, no. 196, Jan. 7, 1533; ibid., filza 180, no. 285, Jan. 14, 1534. On these archival records, see Pungileoni (as in n. 71), vol. 2, 146, 193, 250-51; and Ricci (as in n. 68), vol. 1, 83.

80. Aristotle (as in n. 61), 1.8.8-9.

81. Ibid., 1.7.5-6: "No one chooses happiness for the sake of honor, pleasure, etc., nor as a means to anything whatever other than itself. The same conclusion also appears to follow from a consideration of the self-sufficiency of happiness--for it is felt that the final good must be a thing sufficient in itself."

82. Ibid., 1.8.14.

83. Ibid., 1.8.4-13. Also consult Alessandro Ghisalberti, "Liberta e felicita nell'etica dell'umanesimo," in Malinconia ed allegrezza nel rinascimento, ed. Luisa Rotondi Secchi Tarugi (Milan: Nuovi Orizzonti, 1999), 31-44. Several of Alberti's intercoenales (dinner pieces), such as Happiness, Affliction, and the Slave, involve a moral-philosophical view of happiness; Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces, trans. David Marsh, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton, N.Y.: Renaissance Society of America, 1987), 31-33, 82-90, 91-97.

84. Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 1.32.118. On the "ethical" dimension of joy, see also Seneca, "On Pleasure and Joy," in The Epistles of Seneca, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1967), 59.

85. Xenophon, "Memorabilia," in Memorabilia and Oeconomics, trans. E. C. Marchant, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1979), 2.1.21-34.

86. Cicero (as in n. 84), 3.5.25.

87. Francesco Petrarca, De vita solitaria, ed. Guido Martellotti (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 1.4, 2.13; and Theodor Mommsen, "Petrarch and the Story of the Choice of Hercules," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 178-92.

88. Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure (De Voluptate), trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch (New York: Abaris, 1977), 27-89, 197-224, 267-73; Charles Trinkaus, Adversity's Nobleman: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 112-14; Salvatore Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla; Umanesimo e teologia (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1972), 173-208; Maristella de Panizza Lorch, A Defense of Life: Lorenzo Valla's Theory of Pleasure (Munich: W. Fink, 1985), 27-32; and Nancy Struever, "Lorenzo Valla: Humanist Rhetoric and the Critique of the Classical Languages of Morality," in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 191-206.

89. Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, and Erasmus institutionalized the bona litterae (humanist studies) as a part of spiritual life. Petrarch has been recognized as the father of the European movement of humanist piety, which promoted a personal spirituality based on the cultivation of a polished eloquence. Petrarch preceded Valla and Erasmus in teaching the sophisticated individuals of his own day on how to remedy their souls through solitude and spiritual exercises; Salvatore Camporeale, "Renaissance Humanism and the Origins of Humanist Theology," in Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus, ed. John O' Malley, Thomas Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 101-34; Francisco Rico, Il sogno dell'umanesimo (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 85-134; and Ronald G. Witt, "Petrarch, Father of Humanism?" in In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 230-91. The conception of humanist piety that prevailed in Counter-Reformation Rome centered on the notion of Christian joy, as in Saint Philip Neri's dialogue Philippus sive de laetizia Christiana (1591).

90. The soulful letizia also harmonized with the concept of nature itself as smiling, as expressed in Homer's Iliad and in the Homeric Hymns, where the earth laughed beneath the gleaming weapons with which Achilles was about to arm; Homer, Iliad, trans. Augustus T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 19.359; and Homeric Hymns, trans. Michael Crudden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 219-20 n. 118.

91. Pietro Bembo, Asolani, ed. Giorgio Dilemmi (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1991), 1.20: "Sono adunque, o donne, le passioni dell'animo queste generali et non piu, dalle quali tutte l'altre derivando in loro ritornano: ... soverchio disidirare, soverchio rallegrarsi, tema delle future miserie e nelle presenti dolore. Le quai passioni, percio che si come venti contrari turbano la tranquillita dell'animo et ogni quiete della nostra vita, sono per piu segnato vocabolo perturbationi chiamate da gli antichi auttori" (The soul's passions are thus, ladies, the following general ones and no more, and from them all the other passions derive and return: ... excessive desire, excessive happiness, fear of future miseries, and current pain. Therefore, these passions, like opposite winds troubling the soul's tranquillity and the quietness of our life, are more appropriately called perturbations by ancient authors).

92. Ibid., 1.22: "Sanza che ogni allegrezza, quando ella trappassa e termini del convenevole, non e sana, et piu tosto ventoso gonfiamento d'animo et credenza fallace et stolta, che vera allegrezza, si puo chiamare" (No happiness is healthy if it goes beyond the limits of what is appropriate; rather it is a windy inflation of the soul and a deceptive and stupid belief, and it cannot be called true happiness).

93. Ibid., 1.22: "Hora facendo vela da questi duri scogli del disio, il mare dell'allegrezza solchiamo. E' adunque certissima cosa, o donne, che tanto a noi ongi gioia si fa maggiore, quanto maggiore ne gli animi nostri e stato di quello il disio che a noi e della nostra gioia cagione; et tanto piu oltra modo nel conseguire delle cercate cose ci rallegriamo, quanto piu esse da noi prima sono state cercate oltra misura" (Now, embarking from these hard cliffs of desire, we sail on the sea of happiness. Thus, it is most certain, ladies, that our every happiness is greater as much as in our souls desire is greater, a desire which is the reason for our own joy; and as much as we enjoy happiness when we possess things we have sought, how much more do we enjoy these things which once were sought beyond measure).

94. Mario Equicola, De natura d'amore (Venice: Appresso Gio. Battista Ugolino, 1583), 410: "alleggrezza d'amante e ventoso gonfiamento, che d'ogni cosa ci fa dimentichi" (the lover's joy is a windy inflation, which makes us forget everything).

95. The interpretation proposed here is in disagreement with the reading put forward by Christiane Hessler, "Allegrezza versus Ragione: Petrarcas De remediis in Volgare--1549--und die Kunstliteratur bei Giolito," in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift fur Matthias Winner, ed. Victoria von Flemming and Sebastian Schutze (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 100-116, which treats the concept of allegrezza as synonymous with those of gratia and leggiadrezza.

96. Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1.40: "Paintings: Pictis tabulis delector." Also consult Erich H. Wilkins, "On Petrarch's Appreciation of Art," Speculum 36 (1961): 297-300; Maurizio Bettini, "Petrarca fra Plinio e Sant'Agostino: 'De Remediis' I, 40 e 41," in Francesco Petrarca sulle arti figurative: Tra Plinio e Sant'Agostino (Livorno: Sillabe, 2002), 41-59.

97. Petrarch (as in n. 96), 1.40: "And you are fascinated by the lifelike gestures, the movement in these inanimate and immobile pictures, the faces jutting out of posts, and the portraits that seem about to breathe and make you think that they might utter words. The danger here lies in the fact that great minds, in particular, are captivated by these things--and what a peasant will pass off with brief enjoyment, a man of intellect may continue to venerate with sighs of admiration."

98. Alberti (as in n. 44), 81 (par. 42). The concept of hilaritas was included in a list of desirable virtues in Baldassare Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano. Ilarita, wrote Castiglione, is whatever restores the spirit, gives pleasure, and keeps us from remembering those vexing troubles of which our life is full; Castiglione (as in n. 76), 2.45-47. Joy (zoglia) as the key notion of courtly life also emerges in Matteo Maria Boiardo, Amorum libri tres, ed. Tiziano Zanato (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), xvii-xviii, 1.44, 3.25.

99. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, "The Joy of the Bridegroom's Friend: Smiling Faces in Fra Filippo, Raphael, and Leonardo," in Art, the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson, ed. Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freedman Sandler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 193-210.

100. Vasari, vol. 4, 111. On the power of names in Vasari's Vite, see Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 39-59.

101. Paolo Giovio, Scritti d'arte: Lessico ed ecfrasi, ed. Sonia Maffei (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1999), 218: "In Titiano laetae rerum facies austeris distinctae lineolis et obliquitates exquisitae laudem ferunt" (in Titian's art, praise is given to the joyous aspects of things outlined with minute dark traits and elaborated foreshortening).

102. On the notion of unione, see Francesco Scannelli, Microcosmo della pittura (Cesena: Per il Neri, 1657), 288-89.

103. Vasari, vol. 4, 114: "In Sant' Antonio ancora di quella citta [Parma] dipinse una tavola, nella qual'e una Nostra Donna e Santa Maria Madalena: ed appresso vi e un putto che ride, che tiene a guisa di angioletto un libro in mano, il qual par che rida tanto naturalmente che muove a riso chi lo guarda, ne lo vede persona di natura malinconica, che non si rallegri" (For Sant'Antonio, in the same town [Parma], he painted a panel representing a Madonna, with Saint Mary Magdalene; near them is a smiling putto who, in the guise of an angel, holds a book in his hand and his smile seems so natural that he moves whoever beholds him to smile, nor can any person, be his nature ever so melancholy, see him without being cheered).

104. Annibale Carracci, quoted in Giovanna Perini, Gli scritti dei Carracci, Villa Spelman Colloquia (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1990), 150-51: "i puttini del Correggio spirano, vivono e ridono con una grazia e verita che bisogna con essi ridere e rallegrarsi."

105. Annibale Carracci, quoted in Anne Summerscale, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 97-98; and Perini (as in n. 104), 153: "perche quelle del Coreggio sono stati suoi pensieri, suoi concetti, che si vede si e cavato lui di sua testa et inventato da se, assicurandosi solo con l'originale. Gli altri sono tutti appoggiati a qualche cosa non sua, chi al modelo, chi alle statue, chi alle carte, tutte le opere de gli altri sono rappresentate come possono esser, queste di quest'homo come veramente sono."

106. David Summers, "Aria II: The Union of Image and Artist as an Aesthetic Ideal in Renaissance Art," Artibus et Historiae 20 (1989): 15-31.

107. Ekserdjian, 214.

108. On Correggio's imitation and re-creation of Leonardo's models, see Henry Thode, Correggio (Bielefeld: Velhagen und Klasing, 1898); and Brown, 12-34.

109. Paolo Pino, quoted in Mary Pardo, "Paolo Pino's 'Dialogo di Pittura': A Translation with Commentary," Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1984, 334; and Paolo Pino. "Dialogo di pittura," in Trattati d'arte del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1960), vol. 1, 115: "Felice colui che non fura l'altrui fatiche! E' anco invenzione il ben distinguere, ordinare e compartire le cose dette dagli altri accomodando bene li soggetti agli atti delle figure, e che tutte attendano alla dechiarazione del fine; che l'attitudini delle figure siano varie e graziose."

110. Pino, quoted in Barocchi (as in n. 109), 106: "mal e per l'artefice se l'opera muove a riso li circostanti, perche si stupisce del bene e si burla del sporzionato e goffo."

Frequently Cited Sources

Brown, David A., The Young Correggio and His Leonardesque Sources (New York: Garland, 1981).

Ekserdjian, David, Correggio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

Gould, Cecil, The Paintings of Correggio (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976).

Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings, ed. and trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1906).

Giancarla Periti, adjunct professor of art history, explores the relations between visual art, intellectual culture, and society in Renaissance Emilia in her research. She is the editor of Drawing Relationships in Northern Italian Renaissance Art (2004) and is currently engaged in research on female representational spaces in sixteenth-century Parma [Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Documentarie, Artistiche e del Territorio, Universita degli Studi di Macerata, 62100 Macerata, Italy].

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