In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a book that established the canon for Italian artists, the 16th-century painter Giorgio Vasari, inventor of the term “Renaissance,” accorded Antonio da Correggio, “the first modern painter of Lombardy,” a sort of second-class status. If only Correggio, who lived from 1489 to 1534, had gone to Rome and studied antiquity, Vasari posits, he would have rivaled “the great artists.” Vasari is provocative about Correggio’s shortcomings. “Timid and overanxious, he subjected himself to severe and continuous labor for the support of his family. While he bore this oppressive burden, he afflicted himself further by resisting the temptations common to all mankind.” READ ON