Parmigianino
The elegant distorter of Mannerism.
Parmigianino painted a famous self-portrait in a convex mirror while still a young man. He stretched bodies and proportions in pursuit of elegance.
Parmigianino, “the little one from Parma”, was really called Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola and was born in Parma in 1503. His father was a painter but died when his son was small, and the boy grew up with two uncles who were also painters. He was a child prodigy. As a teenager he was strongly influenced by Correggio, who was then working in Parma, and by his early twenties he was already painting frescoes in the city’s churches and in the nearby castle of Fontanellato.
Around 1524 he travelled to Rome. To show what he could do, he took with him a self-portrait painted on a convex wooden panel, reproducing his reflection in a convex mirror. The hand in the foreground becomes enormous and the room curves around him. The panel is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In Rome he studied Raphael and Michelangelo. He was there during the Sack of 1527 and then fled to Bologna. After that he returned to Parma.
His best-known work is the Madonna with the Long Neck, begun around 1534 and left unfinished. It is in the Uffizi. The Virgin is elongated and elegant, with a swan-like neck and long fingers. The Christ Child lies almost too large on her lap. In the background stands a lone colonnade and a small prophet with no clear scale. The picture is one of the clearest examples of Mannerism: the artist stretches nature to achieve a refined beauty. Parmigianino was also one of the first Italian painters to make etchings.
His last years were troubled. He received a major commission to decorate the church of Santa Maria della Steccata in Parma but dragged out the work for many years. He was imprisoned for breach of contract and fled to Casalmaggiore. Vasari writes that he became obsessed with alchemy, but how true that is is hard to know. He died in 1540, only 37 years old.
Parmigianino’s elegant, elongated figures had a great influence on court art in Europe, not least in France. His drawings and etchings were eagerly collected and copied.