The Assumption of the Virgin (copy of the fresco in the cupola of Parma Cathedral)

This copy of Correggio's Assumption fresco from Parma Cathedral at the V&A is another record of his groundbreaking dome painting. Multiple copies were made over the centuries as artists and collectors sought to study and preserve the revolutionary illusionistic composition that had transformed European ceiling painting. Correggio's Madonna paintings are among the most technically accomplished devotional works of the Italian Renaissance, distinguished by the soft atmospheric modeling he absorbed from Leonardo and developed into something entirely personal. Working primarily in Parma, away from the major centers of Italian Renaissance culture, he developed an independent artistic language characterized by warm light, soft contours, and the specific quality of tender emotional intimacy that made his works enormously popular. His influence on subsequent European painting — particularly the Baroque emphasis on emotional accessibility and the Rococo celebration of sensuous beauty — was foundational, the tradition descending from him through Annibale Carracci to the entire seventeenth-century Italian tradition.

The copy translates the dome's circular format to a flat canvas, preserving the spiraling ascension of the Virgin amid tiers of saints and angels. The dramatic foreshortening is documented even if the copy cannot fully convey the original's spatial illusion.