Parmigianino

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Parmigianino

(born Jan. 11, 1503, Parma, Duchy of Milan — died Aug. 24, 1540, Casalmaggiore, Cremona) Italian painter and etcher. He painted some of his early frescoes for San Giovanni Evangelista; they were influenced by Correggio, who had recently worked in the same church. His originality is seen in his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524). His Madonna of the Long Neck (1534) is typical of his later work, which is characterized by ambiguity of spatial composition, elongation of the human figure, and the pursuit of a rhythmical, sensuous beauty beyond nature. Among the most remarkable portrait painters of his age, he was one of the first artists to develop the elegant and sophisticated version of Mannerism that influenced the next generation of painters and was one of the first Italian artists to practice etching.

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Art Encyclopedia: Parmigianino

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(b Parma, 11 Jan 1503; d Casalmaggiore, 24 Aug 1540). Italian painter, draughtsman and printmaker. Beginning a career that was to last only two decades, he moved from precocious success in the shadow of Correggio in Parma to be hailed in the Rome of Clement VII as Raphael reborn. There he executed few large-scale works but was introduced to printmaking. After the Sack of Rome in 1527, he returned to northern Italy, where in his final decade he created some of his most markedly Mannerist works. Equally gifted as a painter of small panels and large-scale frescoes both sacred and profane, he was also one of the most penetrating portrait painters of his age. Throughout his career he was a compulsive draughtsman, not only of preparatory studies for paintings and prints, but also of scenes from everyday life and of erotica.

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Biography: Parmigianino

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The Italian painter Parmigianino (1503-1540) was a pioneer of the mannerist style, within which his work shows an essentially decorative emphasis and accomplished smoothness.

The real name of Parmigianino a nickname meaning "little man from Parma, " was Francesco Mazzola. He was born on Jan. 11, 1503, in Parma. After his father, a painter, died in 1505, Parmigianino was brought up by two painter uncles. His own first works show an easy assimilation of the most sophisticated local styles, first Francesco Francia's and then Correggio's.

At the age of 19 Parmigianino was commissioned to execute frescoes for the Parma Cathedral; he painted a series of saints that rival Correggio's in their sinuous grace and gentle shadows. Soon thereafter Parmigianino extended these qualities into a personal idiom in the frescoes of the story of Diana and Acteon for a castle at Fontanellato; the figures are built up by a sketchy, pasty brushstroke that suggests an environment of fresh air but also confirms the elegant artificiality basic to mannerism, the frank embrace of the fact that painting differs in its essentials from nature.

Visually, mannerism is the intentional distortion of the proportions of the human figure and of spatial relationships. Good art for the early Renaissance was the successful imitation of nature, and this goal seemed to be achieved by High Renaissance artists. Their successors, such as Correggio, were thus able to learn it as apprentices and concern themselves rather with harmonious variations on ideal natural beauty. By the same token, the next generation could easily learn variants on ideal beauty which were already abstracted from their origins in nature and so could concern themselves with artifice and stylized distortion, as Parmigianino did.

In 1524 Parmigianino went to Rome, taking as a sample work his Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, a distortion of his own appearance meant to amuse and attract praise for its technical virtuosity. In Rome he developed an elegant style of painting Madonnas, with a harder and smoother surface.

Parmigianino fled the sack of Rome in 1527 and went to Bologna. In his Allegorical Portrait of Charles V (1529-1530), executed in Bologna, where Charles V was crowned in 1530, he produced a pioneer formulation of the absolutist state portrait. Beginning in 1531, back in Parma, Parmigianino painted his most classic statements: the almost perversely erotic Cupid Sharpening His Bow, with Cupid seen from the rear but turning with a smile, and the Madonna of the Long Neck (1534), both paintings unified by a crisp twining line. His great church commission for S. Maria della Steccata in Parma, begun (1531) with six decorative female figures, was neglected when he developed a passion for alchemy. Threatened with a lawsuit for breach of contract in 1539, he fled to Casalmaggiore, where he died on Aug. 24, 1540.

Parmigianino was an accomplished draftsman. He was also the first Italian painter to be an etcher.

Early years

Parmigianino was the eighth child of Filippo Mazzola, a painter also known as Filippo dell' Erbette,^[1] and Maria di ser Guglielmo. His father died of the plague two years after Parmigianino's birth, and the children were raised by their uncles, Michele and Pier Ilario, who according to Vasari were modestly talented artists.^[2] In 1515, his uncle received a commission from Nicolo Zangrandi for the decoration of a chapel in San Giovanni Evangelista; a work later completed by a young Parmigianino. By the age of eighteen, he had already completed a Marriage of Catherine altarpiece for Santa Maria at Bardi. In 1521, Parmigianino was sent to Viadana (along with painter Girolamo Bedoli who was to marry his cousin) to escape the wars between the French, Imperial, and papal armies. In Viadana, he painted two panels in tempera, depicting Saint Francis for the church of the Frati de' Zoccoli, and the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine for San Pietro. He also worked in San Giovanni and met Correggio, who was at work on the fresco decorations of the cupola.

Work in Fontanellato and travel to Rome

In 1524, he traveled to Rome with five small paintings, including the Circumcision of Christ and his Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, seeking patronage of the Medici pope, Clement VII. Vasari records that in Rome, Parmigianino was "celebrated as a Raphael reborn". In January 1526, Parmigianino and his uncle, Pier Ilario, agreed with Maria Bufalina from Citta di Castello, to decorate the church of San Salvatore in Lauro with an altarpiece of the Vision of Saint Jerome (1526-27, National Gallery, London). Within a year, the Sack of Rome caused Parmigianino, and many other artists, to flee.

Return to Bologna and Parma

He resided in Bologna for nearly three years. In 1528-29, he painted a Madonna with Saint Margaret and Saints (Pinacoteca, Bologna). In 1528, he painted Madonna of the Rosa (Dresden) and Madonna with Saint Zachariah (Uffizi). By 1530 Parmigianino had returned to Parma.

In 1531, Parmigianino received a commission for two altarpieces, depicting Saint Joseph and Saint John the Baptist, from the unfinished church of Santa Maria della Steccata. The brotherhood overseeing the church advanced him salary and promised him the supplies and materials; however, by 1535, the project was unfinished. In December, he nominated Don Nicola Cassola, a Parman cleric at the Roman Curia, to act as his legal representative. Parmigianino authorized him to collect the 50 gold scudi from Bonifazio Gozzadini for the Madonna with St. John the Baptist and St. Zacharias.

In 1534, it was decided that the Madonna dal Collo Lungo (the Madonna with the Long Neck) would hang in the chapel of the family of Elena Baiardi.

Parmigianino had probably expected to succeed Correggio in the favour of the church. However, in April 1538, the administrative offices commissioned initially Giorgio Gandini del Grano, then Girolamo Bedoli, to decorate the apse and choir of the duomo.

It is believed that at this time, he became a devotee of alchemy. Vasari hypothesizes that this was due to his fascination with magic. Scholars now agree that Parmigianino's scientific interests may have been due to his obsession with trying to find a new medium for his etchings.^{[citation needed]} As a result of his alchemical researches, he completed little work in the church. He was imprisoned for two months for breach of contract after the Confraternita decided unanimously to ban him from continuing in their church. He was replaced between 1539 and 1540 by Giulio Romano, who also promptly withdrew from the contract.

Parmigianino died in Casalmaggiore on the 24 August 1540 at the age of 37 years. He is buried in the church of the Frati de' Servi "naked with a cross made of cypress wood on his chest".

Works

Parmigianino was also an early Italian etcher, a technique that was pioneered in Italy by Marcantonio Raimondi, but which appealed to draughtsmen: though the techniques of printing the copper plates require special skills, the ease with which acid, when substituted for ink, can reproduce the spontaneity of an artist's hand attracted Parmigianino, a "master of elegant figure drawing".^[3] Parmigianino also designed chiaroscuro woodcuts, and although his output was small he had a considerable influence on Italian printmaking. Some of his prints were done in collaboration with Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio.

List of works

Madonna with the Long Neck (1534-40, Oil on wood, 216 x 132 cm, Uffizi, Florence)
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, c.1524; Oil on wood, diameter 24.4 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Vision of Saint Jerome (National Gallery, London)
Cupid (c.1523-24; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna[1])
Madonna and Child (1525, Galleria Doria-Pamphili, Rome[2])
Portrait of a Man with a Book (Attributed, York City Art Gallery)
The Circumcision (Detroit Institute of Arts)
Portrait of a Young Woman (Antea) (Capodimonte Museum, Naples)
Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (Capodimonte)
The Conversion of Saint Paul (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna)
Saint Roch and Donor (Gamba Chapel San Petronio Bologna)
Allegorical Portrait of Charles V (New York)
The Annunciation (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York))

Gallery

Notes

^ "Il Parmigiano". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Il_Parmigiano.
^ Vasari, Giorgio (Bull, George, translator) (1988). Lives of the Artists: Volume 2, pp. 185-99. Penguin Classics. ISBN 0140444602.
^ Michelle Leicht, "Correggio and Parmigianino", exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001 (on-line review)

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Parmigianino

Parmigianino, Cecil Gould. ISBN 1-55859-892-8
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, London : Phaidon Press, Ltd., 1995 ISBN 0-7148-3247-2
Parmigianino and European Mannerism Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna in English

External links

Parmigianino Gallery at MuseumSyndicate

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Parmigianino
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror(c.1524); Oil on wood, diameter 24,4 cm ; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Birth name	Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola
Born	January 11, 1503(1503-01-11) Parma
Died	August 24, 1540 (aged 37) Casalmaggiore
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting
Movement	Mannerist