that of painting the hair[1] with great facility, and has shown to later artists the true method whereby the difficulties of accomplishing this point may be overcome, an advantage for wffiich all succeeding painters are largely indebted to him. It was indeed at the instance of the artists belonging to our vocation that Messer Fabio Segni, a Florentine gentleman, composed the following verses:—
Hujus cum regeret mortales spiritus artus
Pictoris, Charites supplicuere Jovi:
Non alia pingi dextra, Pater alim, rogamus:
Hunc praeter, nulli pingere nos liceat.
Annuit his votis summi regnator Olympi,
Et juvenem subito sidera ad alta tulit,
Ut posset melius Charitum simulacra referre
Praesens, et nudas cerneret inde Deas[2]
At the same time with Correggio lived the Milanese Andrea del Gobbo,[3] a good painter and very pleasing colourist, many of whose works are to be found dispersed among the houses of his fellow countrymen in Milan, and the surrounding neighbourhood. At the Certosa of Pavia likewise, there is a large painting by this master; the subject is the Ascension of the Virgin, but the death of the artist before he had had
- ↑ This passage of Vasari has been much criticised, and he is accused of fixing his whole attention on the one point of painting hair, but he needs no other defence than that of the life itself: he is manifestly describing this only as one among the many excellencies of Correggio, and nothing more.
- ↑ The reader will be pleased to accept the following as a free translation
of the above:—
While yet the painter breathed the life of mortals,
Thus did the Graces supplicate their sire:—
Father, by him alone be henceforth limned
These forms, thy gift;—to none save him permit
That high emprize. This heard Olympian Jove,
And granted. Straight he called the limner hence,
And seated ’mid the stars. There all unveiled
Henceforth to find, and ever to behold
The charms celestial, which his hand alone
Duly portrayed. - ↑ Andrea Solari, of Milan, was called del Gobbo, not because he was himself afflicted with the defect implied (hunch-back), but because his brother Cristoforo, an excellent sculptor and architect, had that misfortune. Andrea del Gobbo is, literally, “The Hunchback’s Andrew.”—See Passavant, Malerschulen der Lombardei, in the Kunstblatt for 1638. See also Lanzi, ut supra, vol. ii. p. 499 (English edition), the last-named writer eunmerates Andrea Solari among the disciples of Guadenzio Ferrari,
