ART SUNDAY - PARMIGIANINO

“Style is the dress of thoughts.” - Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield

Art Sunday today is dedicated to Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino, as he was born in Parma. He became Italy's most influential Mannerist painter in his brief twenty-year career. His father and uncles taught him the techniques of painting, and by age sixteen he had already completed an altarpiece for a local church. Beginning in 1520, the celebrated Renaissance artist Correggio became his primary inspiration. Scholars believe that the younger artist may have assisted Correggio with his frescoes at a church in Parma, where Parmigianino may also have completed his own frescoes.

In 1524 Parmigianino visited Rome to present a self-portrait to Pope Clement VII. There the young artist experienced Raphael and Michelangelo's art firsthand, and his style became more grand, elegant, and noble. Following the Sack of Rome in 1527, Parmigianino escaped to Bologna, but within three years he had returned to Parma, where he received a commission to paint frescoes in another church. At this time, according to some accounts, Parmigianino became a devotee of alchemy, transforming himself into a lunatic and completing little work at the church. He was imprisoned after nearly a decade of slow progress but escaped. Scholars believe that Parmigianino was the first Italian artist to make etchings, and his work significantly influenced the art of printmaking.

The term mannerism is derived from the Italian “maniera”, meaning simply “style,” mannerism is sometimes defined as the “stylish style” for its emphasis on self-conscious artifice over realistic depiction. The sixteenth-century artist and critic Vasari (also a mannerist himself) believed that excellence in painting demanded refinement, richness of invention, and virtuoso technique, criteria that emphasized the artist’s intellect. More important than his carefully recreated observation of nature was the artist’s mental conception and its elaboration. This intellectual bias was, in part, a natural consequence of the artist’s new status in society. No longer regarded as craftsmen, painters and sculptors took their place with scholars, poets, and humanists in a climate that fostered an appreciation for elegance, complexity, and even precocity.

Parmigianino’s “Madonna dal Collo Lungo” (Madonna with Long Neck), painted 1534-40 (Oil on panel, 216 x 132 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) is a typical mannerist work. It was painted for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi at Parma. It is the masterpiece of the culminating period in the art of Parmigianino, done almost the same time as the frescoes of the Steccata at Parma. The painter worked upon the picture for six years, but this notwithstanding, it remained unfinished. It is a work of intense if somewhat aloof poetical feeling, this effect mainly arising from the splendid abstraction of the forms, so smoothly rounded under the cool and polished colour.

The painting takes its subject from a simile in medieval hymns to the Virgin which likened her neck to a great ivory tower or column. Appropriate to the traditional understanding of the Virgin as an allegorical representation of the Church, this imagery was also exploited in poems. Thus the exaggerated length of the limbs of the Virgin and her son, as well as the presence of columns in the background of the painting, are not contrived merely for their decorative value, but clearly signal the painting's religious meaning.