LONDON – It was probably in 1524 that Parmigianino, a prodigiously talented young painter who would forever be known to the world by his sweet-toned, polysyllabic nickname (it means ‘the little one from Parma’), traveled the 300 miles from his birthplace in north to Rome, accompanied by his uncle. He would spend the next three years of his life in the Eternal City, where artists’ reputations could be established and then destroyed as quickly as a cookie.
On that trip he took with him a painting he had made, which he called “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” That extraordinary work, with its puzzling distortions, warps and elongations, led the poet John Ashbery to write a long and compellingly enigmatic musing on an answer of the same name. The poem was published in 1975, more than four hundred years after Parmigianino had planned to show this appetizing work as a calling card to potential clients, one of three works – the other two had a religious theme – that accompanied him to Rome. .
Ashbery won all three major book awards for his poem: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Parmigianino also did quite well once he reached Rome, although it all almost ended in disaster when the barbarians stormed in.
In Rome he was commissioned by Maria Bufalini, a wealthy widow from a noble family, to create an altarpiece for the burial chapel of her late husband in the church of San Salvatore in Lauro. This large altarpiece is the object of our attention in the National Gallery today, recently restored and accompanied by nine preparatory drawings, many of which are directly related to the evolution of the painting. Others show Parmigianino learning his craft at lightning speed, practicing, for example, the ability to summon lush foliage. He drew furiously and compulsively for a lifetime, leaving behind at least a thousand completed drawings when he died at the tragically young age of 37.
We do not know exactly where in the chapel the altarpiece would have stood, but what is immediately striking is how restrictive the dimensions were within which Parmigianino would have had to work. This altarpiece, held in such a fierce embrace by its gilded frame, is extremely tall and narrow. Looking at it is almost entirely a top-down or bottom-up – hardly left-to-right – experience. This strange narrowness only adds to its visual impact, increasing the intensity of one’s seeing. We climb the rock wall. It weighs on us.
Its title – not of Parmigianino’s own choice, it must be said – is ‘The Vision of Saint Jerome’ (also called ‘Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Saint Jerome’). The venerable saint lies stretched out and asleep, with his left arm curled around his head, in the lower half of the painting’s background. He has the white beard of an older man; in fact, his entire face is that of a man of advanced age. The rest of his body looks significantly younger. The red color of his shawl is a bit of a provocation.
Is the scene unfolding around him, of him missing his lion, his dream vision?
An extremely youthful John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ, kneels in the foreground, with disheveled hair and a red cheek. He turns back on himself at an impossible angle to point out the appearance of the Virgin and Child in the top half of the painting. His muscularity is captivating, especially the muscle definition of his outstretched right arm, which resembles a pair of sharply defined mounds. His fingers are bent and articulated. The elongated phalanges (a technique very typical of Parmigianino) are stunning.
Radiantly lit, comfortably supported by clouds of clouds on a crescent moon, Virgo is a model of restraint and modesty. Her translucent pink clothing falls in folds whose monumental regularity harkens back to classical sculpture. The Christ Child could not be more different in character and general attitude. Exceptionally mature in all his nakedness, he stands between her knees and even steps outside kick outalmost as if in a chorus line. Also unlike his mother, the boy looks boldly at our gaze. There is more than a hint of eroticism in the air. (There would have been quite a bit of eroticism in the air and in print when Parmgianino was in Rome, as the show’s curator, Maria Alambritis, noted during the press preview.)
She steps down, earthbound, and places her rather large, sandaled left foot on the rock within reach. This great altarpiece, with its enormous drama, seems to balance between the sacred and the sensual; therein lies at least part of his fascination.
Parmigianino’s painting career in Rome was brutally curtailed by the sack of the city – in May 1527 the city was invaded and destroyed by the armies of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. According to his biographer Vasari, when the troops stormed the artist’s studio, they were so impressed (and perhaps intimidated) by the extravagance and intensity of his visionary painting that they spared both his work and his life.
Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London, England) until March 9, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Maria Alambritis.
