The Brera Nativity. A thoughtful painting by Correggio

Astonishment always accompanies those who wish to delve into the proposals that Correggio gradually poses to us in the youthful progress of his career, where the elements of surprise blossom and impose the extraordinary breadth of his culture, which reveals complex capacities and unexpected choices. If Abbot Lanzi asserted at the beginning of the 19th century that more than any other painter can always be written about him again, the intuition of a real richness not yet explicated is matched today by an adjective that �douard Pommier in a scholarly correspondence affixes to the artistic stature of the Emilian: immense! Let us therefore consider with fresh eyes a work that usually does not receive much comment in monographs. With warm thanks to the Pinacoteca di Brera, Letizia Lodi, Cesare Maiocchi, Oscar Riccò, and Umberto Lodesani.

The subject of the painting carries with it a character that we might call imprecise with respect to the usually stated event, that is, the Nativity according to the Gospel accounts, since on the holy night the relative Elizabeth could not have been there, at the stable in Bethlehem, with her own little son so small. By extension, the work, as a whole, presents itself as a mystical assumption of the entire childhood of Jesus by foreshadowing the events and (more broadly) the bond that He will have with His precursor cousin, up to the Redemptive Mission for all humanity. Usually Correggio is very precise in sticking to events and paying scrupulous attention to sacred scripture. Here the painter has exhibited a manifold and very rare painting on the theme of the Incarnation and Redemption that makes us reflect on his intense theological maturity. The protagonist is Christ who, as St. Bonaventure says by standing in the midst of the earth worked salvation. It is necessary to point out that, unlike the many previous representations, all in full light, this scene takes place in an advanced night: here is Correggio’s convinced fidelity to the certified events, and here is an early proof (very close experimentally to the little Judith of Strasbourg) of a vast scene recorded on the swing of darkness. It is a choice that launches the career of the brilliant painter on the effected light-shadow dialectic, eventually reaching the apex of naturalistic possibilities and new wonders in his maturity. Throughout the painting one can in fact bring in meticulous observations of details bathed in half-light but real and carefully arranged.

The gospels say that the divine Child, at the moment of birth, was laid in a manger (Luke 2:6-19); it truly appears in the painted scene, under the canopy on the right that shelters the donkey, but in this Correggio version we see Jesus on the ground, a truthful sign of the coming of the Word in the human context and an indication of a precise choice of poverty. He lies on top of a symbolic thickness of ears of wheat and is laid in the middle of a large-scale but very gathered white sheet that reaches up to wrap around his head, trinely rayed. The ears of wheat refer directly to the Eucharist, to the gift of his Body, and the sheet visibly refers to the shroud of the tomb. There is thus recalled here the entire Gospel afflatus of the Passion and Resurrection.

The Madonna, with the sweetest face contemplates the Child while holding her right hand enclosed in her cloak, and this concealment aroused Cecil Gould’s perplexity at the time, but Correggio follows with pious and participatory acumen the limpid text of St. Luke, who writes that Mary “kept all these things in her heart”: here the veiled hand over her heart confirms that this is truly an event filled with mystery. St. John appears attentive and aware, almost in a dialogical attitude with his little cousin; his presence for certain reveals the biblical role of the Forerunner, but he powerfully proposes the last act of the ancient Jewish Covenant that will now leave the leadership to the new universal Covenant: a total palingenesis of time worked for us by the divine will. Indeed, the figure of St. Elizabeth stands as a sculptural block, collected and shadowy, signifying the penumbra of the ancient centuries coming to their end. Here David Ekserdjian, along with a number of interesting considerations, has rightly pointed to a Mantegna-like reminiscence of the Allegri, who is linked to his Mantuan master by a not-so-distant focus on the theme of senectus. But the encounter between the two mothers and their little ones is the evidence of the painting, which contains the reality of scriptural substance.

We must emphasize how in the face and image of Mary (beautiful virgin coming out of the rustic shelter and taking herself among the cooperating ruins of an ancient majestic domus, or a Roman imperial monimentum ) Correggio seems to have caught the invocation of the Spirit in the Song of Songs, who invites with quivering intimacy the desired one: ... columba mea, in foraminibus petrae, in caverna maceriae ostende faciem tuam... (Ct 2:13-14). Here is the admirable creation of Mary’s breathing face turned to the Babe: a true meditation where the young Allegri distances himself from any masterful model that has preceded him and concentrates in a form of love. The whole figure of Mary is a masterpiece of linear and chromatic balance, precise and harmonious, hinging on the red-humanity of this mother’s robe that the light from above bathes on her face and pressing hand.

Exactly in the space between the two mothers who impersonate the biblical delivery, a second plane opens up that is pregnant with meaning: next to the aeolian column (which will later be used again by Allegri as a sign of the constancy of classicism in history) stand two shepherds alone to whom a young angel gliding harmoniously points the way to enter with Jesus. This choice is reminiscent of the future mandate Jesus will give to his disciples and witnesses (Lk, 10). The figure of the angel is singular and sweet, physical but suspended and inclined. The necessary annotation concerns the small number of witnesses called first by the heavenly messengers: Correggio carefully dispenses with the numerous presences we always find in other paintings of tradition, since he chooses an intimate and subdued conversation between the angel and the human hearts of the two shepherds: dum medium silentium tenet omnia. In this way we concerning can also participate in the angel’s teaching that marks the passage, that is, the open gate of a meager enclosure, which is spiritually the easy way to Christ. The Allegrianinventio of the little gate (which no gospel mentions) reminds us that in Jewish antiquity the approach to God could take place only once a year and only for the High Priest, who had to cross at Passover the veil of the Temple and enter the Holy of Holies at the Ark of the Covenant; the Correggio instead posits a flowing passage that allows the humble, the lowly, an approach that will be total in Christian history. Truly beautiful is the loquela digitorum of the heavenly creature, to which the elderly shepherd responds analogically, and here Correggio is certainly mèmore than Leonardo in the Virgin of the Rocks: the angel marks the Savior with the forefinger of his right hand, and the man (who in Jewish society was the rejected one) similarly imitates the gesture with his middle finger, which is a sign of convinced virtue. A deliberate, weighed, symbolic and new figurative invention, due to a culture as profound as it is profound and certainly mindful of the spiritual-symbolic prosody of the Byzantine and medieval foundation, where every character and every gesture is imbued with eternity.

The two darting little angels with pointed wings dance above Mary and Joseph; they seem to assure us that the little sleeping creature on the white cloth really comes from heaven, and is divine in nature, as also confirmed by those golden rays in their natural yet precise and suave unreality, which Bernini certainly observed. Cecil Gould says that the rays descend from the star that always accompanies the Nativity (here outside the painting), and here, therefore, is the soft light that irradiates Mary and the other characters at the waning of this holy night that is dying. We must dwell on the two little angels; they are among the first nudes in Renaissance painting to appear suspended in space as real, plastic bodies, rotating freely in an open physical encasement and varied in their mimicry attitudes of authentic children: early, studied and beloved evidence of movements absolved by the law of gravity. An earlyness that Correggio here deliberates with art unfettered but rich in acute study of the children: quick, capturing observations, pursued and blissfully resolved in the shady auras of the loco. Even in such resolution this painting is crucial and innovative.

St. Joseph sleeps on the saddle, an instrument of travel that will accompany him another time in Allegri’s paintings; at first glance it seems strange that he does not notice the presence of the two guests and does not receive them as is appropriate, especially since the birth of the Child took place amidst unfortunate difficulties and Mary had to be helped in everything. But this is precisely the point that opens wide the entire value of the painting to a grandiose mystical significance. Joseph’s attitude recurs especially when it is intended to indicate that he is dreaming. In the Gospels he is the one who receives in a dream God’s commands: after the Annunciation take Mary as your wife; He who is to be born comes by the Holy Spirit (Mt 1:18-23) and after the visit of the Magi soon, take with you the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt (Mt 2:13-14).

Correggio in this panel that it is therefore insufficient to call “Nativity” flaunts the entire first part of the divine design of the Incarnation. The painting includes how Herod’s order to kill the children has already been issued. The two soldiers on the proda are placed to guard the border crossing, the sky swirls in heavy clouds beyond the dark mountain reminiscent of Dante’s Pietra di Bismantova; over there stretches the sea (the only time Correggio paints the sea), and beyond flickers the outline of the imaginary city of Pharaoh. Here is the totality of the raw story of the coming of the son of God to the dwelling place of men: poverty, the encounter with the humble, the delivery of the word to the Forerunner, the danger of death, the exile in a foreign land. An evangelical-theological synthesis that willingly engaged the young painter from Lombardy, who had already visited Padua and Venice, and known the limpid lagoon mirror. In his figurative conception, Allegri goes far beyond the schemes still in force in the first decade of the sixteenth century and assigns to pictorial art the freedom to be highly compendious, to gather vast explanatory paraphrases.

On the executive level here Correggio also evolves: from the fulcrum of Baby Jesus he assigns at least four radial directions to the viewer’s gaze penetrating the different spaces that revolve around the pivot of the classical column, which sports an elegant anthemion (its decorated collar) in the body of the capital. The arrangement of structural-architectural elements is as elaborate as can be: on the right, the wooden canopy, as an animal shelter, leaning fortunately against the powerful Roman wall; then the massive brick mole perhaps pertaining to a curial building, with the empty niche with a statuary vocation, but abandoned and shadowy; then the well-modulated column, a clue to a now-collapsed “orders” facade; to the side, on the left, a collaborating fornix among disconnected members. Finally, the grand naturalistic-luministic poetry of trees shaken by a wrathful wind, against a livid and distant light, which thrilled the sympathetic eye of Eugenio Riccòmini in a vivid Courbettian comparison. Here watch over the restless guardians of Herod. Here is Correggio’s pictorial and mystical tablature; here is the accompanying score along the stages of the story: Jesus is born when classicism has already fulfilled its task and from its ruins a new civilization is about to be born. Thus we have, together with the lyrical-pictorial chant that “compact visual symbolism,” that exegesis of the sacred narrative that has sprung from the conversations Allegri always held and cared for with monks, the wise religious, in his frequentations since his youth.

Behind Saint Elizabeth’s back is repeated the diagonal of a very steep proda connoted by trees and two bushy masses, of which the lowest, within the enclosure, is a veritable anthology of field grasses, carefully defined with the naturalistic love that would always pour from Correggio’s paintings. One glimpses plantain, a wild geranium, umbellifers and some grasses: the usual botany of the Po Valley humus. The complex texture of the divine event is thus greeted with the dense semantic simplicity that would constantly accompany Correggio on his serene and luminous journey, aimed from earth to heaven, like a true itinerarium mentis in Deo.

Geometric-compositional appendix

Cecil Gould, in his 1976 monograph, observes that the center of the composition of this Nativity is not well understood, the suspended problem of which nevertheless interests him with care. We add then these notes.

“A” - The diagonals of the entire panel meet exactly on the hand of the Angel inviting the shepherds, a gesture essential to the incarnation of the Word: it is the call of humanity to welcome Christ.

“B” - All the figures are placed in a square on the right that has the height of the painting (the smaller measure) as its side: the use of containing the figures in such a dimension will often continue in Correggio. The two diagonals of the “square of people” meet at Mary’s mouth, from which the “fiat” and “Magnificat” came out: another eminent evangelical signification.

“C”-In the lower left fourth part of this tetragon the diagonal gathers St. John and the Infant Jesus.The horizontal midline of the panel marks the height of the heads of St. Joseph and St. Elizabeth.

Throughout the composition, therefore, there are carefully considered harmonic rhythms that Correggio prepares with wisdom and content, and as he would not forget in his career.

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