From Allegri to Laetus-Lieto: the shaping of Correggio's artistic distinctiveness

The placing of artists' signatures upon works of art has been viewed as an act that communicates the masters' nearness and authenticates the authorship. Signatures usually consist of artists' names or monograms, on the contrary they also appear as visual, phonetic, emblematic, or literary transformations of the masters' names. These alternative forms of self-identification may present itself not only as signatures upon works of art but also as the artists' chosen name in records. This essay focuses upon a paradigmatic case of an artist's self-naming, exploring the denotative force of the name and in what way it contributed to forging the one and the other the master's personal and professional persona. Names were part of the metaphoric way of thinking about individuals and their identities in the early new period. They were signifiers of cultural processe from one side which relationships between the self art, and the historical adjoining matter were negotiated. Signatures and adopted names thus constitute fruitful areas for examination, pointing to issues of artistic identity, painterly diction and intentionality.

Antonio Allegri, better known as Correggio, from his hometown, identified himself by the agency of means of an unusual signature between 1517 and 1519 This consisted of the Latinized "Anton.[ius] Laet.[us]" that the artist inscribed upon his Portrait of a Lady (Fig. 1) and upon the Madonna of Albinea (Fig. 2) now not to be found but known through copies. In the latter painting the artist carved this signature upon a rock near Saint Lucy while in the former he placed it upon the tree trunk behind the sitter. In the following years, the same form of self-presentation also pierceed official records. Documents dating between 1521 and 1524 attest that he had assumed the cognomen Lieto, the Italian version of Laetus, substituting this for his actual patronymic, Allegri. These documents, which include a record of affiliation with the Benedictine congregation of s Giustina, (1) a note from Allegri's hand appended to the agreement for his Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 3) (2) and an autograph receipt for payment received from the administrator of the s Giovanni Evangelista Benedictine monastery in Parma, (3) all name the painter as Antonio Lieto of Correggio. These records glance at that Allegri's self-presentation had gone beyond its origin as a personal and artistic matter to become an identification that was publicly accepted and understood. More than simply a variation of the artist's patronymic, it was revelatory of the way Allegri builded his self-identity and achieved an event of subjectivity both as an individual and as an artist.

In general, the cognomen Lieto has been interpreted as a transformation of the artist's patronymic Allegri. The etymological meaning of lieto as happy, lighthearted, or jolly has been seen to contain a quibble embracing the artist's family name Allegri (merry) like assessments have relied on the assumption that the bounds lieto and allegro had the same meaning in the Renaissance. It can be ascertained, however, that for sixteenth-century readers these vernacular words and their Latin equivalents, laetus and alacer, albeit interchangeable, maintained their specific connotation. Niccolo Perotti and Ambrogio Calepino's sixteenth-century dictionaries give in charge to laetus as the delight expressed in faces or bodily motions or, alternatively, as fertile soil (laetamen, fertilizer, has the same root) while associating the adjective alacer with a jocular, active spirit. (4) With his adopted name Laetus-Lieto, the artist embraced the essential part of merriment and joy inherent in his cognomen, utilizing its inner force to direct the exhibition of his personal and professional selve Allegri thus demonstrated an awareness that names were perceived as make notess on the essence of things and as having the power to impress themselves upon the characters of those who bore them. Names were therefore testimony to a myriad of possible discourses that far surpass a simple explanation of Allegri's name Laetus-Lieto barely in terms of a translation of his patronymicus.

Meditations upon the significance of names belong to a lengthy tradition that can be traced back to classical lore and to the Bible. Whether names were labels arbitrarily imposed and retained by the agency of convention or whether they somehow or other revealed the essence of what they named was a question that Plato discussed in the Cratylus. (5) through every part of the Old and New Testaments, we find that to know and state certain names is to be empowered, one as well as the other as the bearer and as the speaker of the name. Saint Augustine propos various etymological principles to explain in what manner all words encapsulated the inmost nature [i]or[/i] substance of what they described. Names and their etymologies rest a relevant place in Isidore of Seville's Etymologiarum libri as fundamentals of grammar and rhetoric, and they remained an obligatory ornament of metrical composition (6) The philosophy of names had also a robust influence on the poetics of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In Dante's Vita nuova, Beatrice's name was to inspire a regard with affection understood to be true, since, Dante argues, "names are the issue of things [nomina sunt consequentia rerum]" (7) Petrarch's and Boccaccio's poetics, which attained great importance in cinquecento Italy, contributed a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to reestablishing a relation between the naming and the characters of individual personalities. (8) Ernst Robert Curtius has acutely discussed science of etymons as a "Denkform" (a category of thought) (9) Curtius's observation that the etymological evaluation of individual names was considered among the "attributes" of a somebody lends weight to an understanding of the power of names.