Antonio da Correggio

Antonio Allegri was born in August 1489 in the town that gave him his name. He became the leading painter of the Parma school during the High Renaissance, working through the early decades of the sixteenth century. His command of chiaroscuro and his experiments with illusionistic perspective - figures receding into impossible depths, compositions that refused to sit still - put him ahead of his moment. The sensuous, vigorous works he produced would point toward the drama of seventeenth-century Baroque and the swirl of eighteenth-century Rococo, though he worked in neither. He died on 5 March 1534.