LONDON — It was probably in 1524 that Parmigianino, a prodigiously talented young painter who would forever after be known to the world by that mellifluously polysyllabic nickname of his (it means “the little one from Parma”) travelled the 300 miles from his hometown in the north to Rome, accompanied by his uncle. He would spend the next three years of his life in the Eternal City, where the reputations of artists could be established and then just as quickly broken like a biscuit.
He took with him on that journey a painting he had made, which he called “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” That extraordinary work, with its enigmatic distortions, warpings, and elongations, provoked the poet John Ashbery into writing a long and compellingly enigmatic reverie of a response by the same name. The poem was published in 1975, more than 400 years after Parmigianino was plotting to show this appetite-whetting work to potential clients as a calling card, one of a trio of works — the other two were religious in theme — that accompanied him to Rome.
Ashbery scooped all three of the major book awards for his poem: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Parmigianino did pretty well too, once he reached Rome, though it all almost ended in disaster when the barbarians surged in.
In Rome, he was commissioned by Maria Bufalini, a wealthy widow from a noble family, to create an altarpiece for her late husband’s burial chapel in the church of San Salvatore in Lauro. This great altarpiece is the object of our attention at the National Gallery today, newly restored and accompanied by nine preparatory drawings, many of which relate directly to the evolution of the painting. Others show Parmigianino learning his trade at lightning speed, practicing the ability to evoke luscious foliage, for example. He drew furiously and compulsively, lifelong, leaving at least 1,000 finished drawings at the time of his death at the tragically young age of 37.
We do not know where exactly in the chapel the altarpiece would have been displayed, but what is noticeable immediately is how constraining the dimensions were within which Parmigianino would have had to work. This altarpiece, held in such a fierce embrace by its gilded frame, is extraordinarily tall and narrow. Looking at it is almost entirely a top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top — barely at all a side-to-side — experience. This strange narrowness only adds to its visual impact, heightening the intensity of one’s seeing. We climb its rock face. It bears down on us.
Its title — not of Parmigianino’s choosing, it has to be said — is “The Vision of Saint Jerome” (also called “Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome”). The venerable saint lies, sprawled and sleeping, left arm curled around his head, in the lower half of the painting’s background. His has the white beard of an elder man; in fact, his entire face is that of a man of great age. The rest of his body looks considerably younger. The red color of his wrap is a bit of a provocation.
Is the scene that unfolds around him, missing his lion, his dream vision?
An extraordinarily youthful John the Baptist, Christ’s forerunner, kneels in the foreground, all tousled hair and flushed cheek. He twists back upon himself, at an impossible angle, to point to the emergence of the Virgin and Child in the upper half of the painting. His muscularity is captivating, and especially the muscle definition of his extended right arm, which resembles a couple of crisply defined hills. His fingers are bent and articulated. The elongated phalanges (a technique very typical of Parmigianino) are amazing.
Radiantly lit, comfortably buoyed by puff balls of cloud on a crescent moon, the Virgin is a model of restraint and modesty. Her diaphanous pink clothing falls in folds whose monumental regularity harks back to classical sculpture. The Christ child could not be more different in character and general demeanor. Exceptionally mature in all his nakedness, he stands between her knees, stepping out, in fact kicking out, almost as if in a chorus line. Unlike his mother, too, the boy brazenly meets our gaze. There is more than a whiff of the erotic in the air. (There would have been a fair bit of erotica in the air and in print when Parmgianino was in Rome, as the show’s curator, Maria Alambritis, noted at the press preview.)
She is stepping down, earthbound, her quite large, sandaled left foot placing itself on the rocky outcrop that is within convenient reach. This great altarpiece, with its tremendous drama, seems to be poised between the sacred and the sensual; therein lies at least part of its fascination.
Parmigianino’s painting career in Rome was brutally curtailed by the sacking of the city — in May of 1527 it was invaded and laid to waste by the armies of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. According to his biographer, Vasari, when the troops burst into the artist’s studio, they were so impressed (and perhaps cowed) 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) through March 9, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Maria Alambritis.
