Correggio has frescoed the apse and dome …
Years: 1524 - 1524
Correggio has frescoed the apse and dome of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma between 1520 and 1524.
The dome appears to open to the sky, as Christ, surrounded by his apostles, ascends into the heavens.
Correggio's work in Parma establishes his reputation.
The Martyrdom of Four Saints is one of the canvasses commissioned by Parmesan noble Placido Del Bono for a chapel in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma.
They will be mentioned (although wrongly assigned to the city's cathedral) by late Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari in the first edition of his Lives.
The subject of the painting, rather rare in western religious art, is the martyrdom of Placidus and his sister Flavia (who had allegedly lived in the fourth century) and, behind them, that of two earlier Roman siblings, Eutychius and Victorinus, who appear to have been already beheaded.
An angel flies above them and holds the palm of martyrdom.
