Volume 25, Number 18 · November 23, 1978
Solving the Correggio Problem
By Henri Zerner, Translated by Peter France
The Paintings of Correggio
by Cecil Gould
Cornell University Press, 307, 370 illustrations pp., $85.00
In 1880 Giovanni Morelli, the founder of modern connoisseurship, who aimed to establish the attribution of works of art on a more systematic or 'scientific' basis, made a sensation in the art world by announcing that Correggio's Reclining Magdalen was a mere pastiche by a late seventeenth-century Dutch painter. The Magdalen was then considered one of the Dresden Museum's greatest jewels. With brilliant invective, Morelli ridiculed the blind reverence museum visitors showed in front of this painting—the very same visitors who were unmoved by Giorgione's great Sleeping Venus, then hanging in the same museum and labeled as a copy of a Titian, painted by Sassoferrato. This double coup by Morelli, the discovery of the Giorgione and the killing of the Correggio, was the most spectacular demonstration of his method. His authority has been such that, since then, the Reclining Magdalen was defended in print only in 1882 by Adolfo Venturi (not himself a particularly fine connoisseur), and then abandoned to almost complete obscurity.
Review, 4367 words
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