Getty Museum
Saint Matthew
Creator
Correggio (Antonio Allegri)Italian Artist · 1489–1534
All works by this person →Born Antonio Allegri, Correggio was named after the town of his birth. His ability to manipulate light and shade to create luminous atmospheric effects resulted in some of the most sumptuous religious paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Giorgio Vasari, a sixteenth-century biographer of artists, wrote, "everything that is to be seen by his hand is admired as something divine." Correggio was profo
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1523
- Medium
- Red chalk
- Culture
- Italian
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
In traditional format, Saint Matthew sits cross-legged with pen in hand, while an angel, the saint's attribute, supports Mathew's book. To capture an idea quickly, Correggio sketched with great freedom and speed. Here he used loops and squiggles to show Saint Matthew's hair and cursory, broken lines to shape the saint's body. The facial features are smudged, a technique Correggio used to achieve the softness characteristic of his work. This animated sketch may be an early idea for a corner of a curved ceiling in the cupola of a church in Parma. In the final painting, the saint and the angel appear with Saint Jerome.
The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.