Martyrdom of Saints Placido, Flavia, Eutichio and Vittorino, c.1524 by Antonio Allegri Correggio
Canvas Print - 8226-CAA

Look at Flavia's face. A blade is entering her breast, yet her head tips back and her lips part as if she were hearing music. Beside her, her brother Placido kneels in a black Benedictine habit, arms folded against his chest, eyes rolled upward in the same rapt surrender. Correggio sets these two expressions right next to the violence being done to them, and the unsettling closeness of pain and ecstasy is what makes the Martyrdom of the Saints Placido, Flavia, Eutichio and Vittorino so hard to look away from.

The story is obscure. Placido, a disciple of Saint Benedict, went to Messina to preach and was joined there by his sister and brothers, children of a Roman senator. When raiders struck Sicily, all four were killed. The subject was almost certainly suggested by the patron, a monk also named Placido, who commissioned the canvas around 1524 for his family chapel in Parma, where it hung opposite Correggio's Lamentation. For Christians of that decade, pressed by the Reformation on one side and Ottoman power on the other, a tale of saints dying for their faith would not have felt remote.

Correggio first sketched a calm, symmetrical arrangement, then abandoned it for something far more restless. The final picture runs on a diagonal that winds back into depth: from the severed heads of the two younger brothers, glimpsed at the lower right, through Flavia and Placido, up to the raised sword of the executioner at the left. That soldier is the painting's most striking figure. Seen from behind, one shoulder bare, legs planted wide, he turns his head in sharp profile toward his victim, backlit so that his silhouette stands out against the dark trees like a cutout.

The color is as unruly as the action. Flavia's cloak glows a hot orange-gold over a deep blue dress, and it clashes on purpose with the crimson of the man stabbing her. Above, the sky churns in a violet-blue so stormy it seems to belong to a much later century, to painters like Turner or Füssli. A gust of wind appears to have swept in the angel at the upper right, who arrives without the usual bank of clouds, holding out a crown for the new martyrs. Correggio places this messenger not off to one side but almost in front of the kneeling saints, a daring piece of perspective that explains where their upturned eyes are fixed.

Now in the Galleria Nazionale in Parma, the canvas belongs to the moment when painting began to stage emotion openly, a direction that would carry into the Baroque. The executioners watch their victims; the victims watch only the angel. Between those two sets of gazes, the whole drama hangs suspended, the sword forever about to fall.