Why Christ is playing with the Magdalene’s Hair

Nicholas Penny

  • Correggio by David Ekserdjian
    Yale, 334 pp, £45.00, January 1997, ISBN 0 300 07299 6
  • The 'Divine' Guido by Richard Spear
    Yale, 436 pp, £40.00, January 1997, ISBN 0 300 07035 7

In the centre of the most beautiful painting by Correggio in the Louvre there is a knot of flesh as intricate and lively as a swimming octopus. It consists of the left hand of the Virgin Mary delicately supporting the slightly smaller right hand of Saint Catharine, while the much smaller hand of the infant Christ tenderly picks out the Saint’s ring finger. This is a miniature example of an effect at which Correggio excelled: actions inspired by a sentiment of breathless intensity are somehow endowed both with angelic grace and with a formal complexity which is delightfully difficult to disentangle.

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