Martyrdom of Saints Placido, Flavia, Eutichio and Vittorino, c.1524 Antonio Allegri Correggio (1489-1534)

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We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

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Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
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Once the painting Martyrdom of Saints Placido, Flavia, Eutichio and Vittorino is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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A blade hangs low at the left, while another is raised behind the kneeling woman. Between them, Placido remains almost unnaturally calm in his black habit, his pale face tilted toward the light. Flavia twists upward in orange, blue, and crimson drapery, meeting the violence around her with an expression closer to rapture than fear. Correggio fixes Martyrdom of the Saints Placido, Flavia, Eutichio and Vittorino at the instant before the next blow falls.

The scene is built on unstable diagonals. The executioner at left turns his bare shoulder toward us; the sweep of his body continues through Placido and Flavia to the soldier looming above her. At the lower edges, fragments of other bodies and a severed head identify the fate of Eutichio and Vittorino. Nothing is neatly contained. Figures press against the frame, and the dark tree at center divides the action without calming it.

High at the right, an angel arrives as if carried by a sudden gust. White fabric streams behind the airborne figure, who reaches down with a thorn crown - the martyrs’ reward and a promise of salvation. The victims look toward this apparition rather than toward their killers. Their acceptance is unsettling because Correggio places it so close to physical brutality: sharpened steel, exposed flesh, and the dead crowded into the foreground.

The episode came from the Roman Martyrology and was chosen in connection with the patron, a monk named Placido. The account describes Placido as an early disciple of Saint Benedict who traveled to Messina, where his sister Flavia and his brothers joined his mission. Their deaths offered a model of constancy in faith, a subject with particular force around 1524, when religious conflict was becoming increasingly urgent.

This canvas was conceived in relation to a Lamentation. In that companion painting, Christ’s crown of thorns lies beside his hand; here, another thorn crown descends toward new martyrs. The storm-dark violet-blue sky, struck by cold light, binds the two worlds of suffering and redemption. Yet the most persistent detail may be Flavia’s orange mantle: it billows like flame beneath the descending crown, making her surrender seem both humanly vulnerable and fiercely chosen.