Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [68]
One suspects that many painters of the maniera (Mannerist) period produced erotica, for which there was a rising demand at the time. Certainly Francesco Mazzola, or Parmigianino, as he is known (1503–40), did so. He made vast numbers of drawings of everyday scenes, including love-making, and many survive. His religious scenes sometimes appear frigid or, worse, frigidly sentimental, but his brilliant Cupid, now in Vienna, is a lubricious piece of work, calculated to appeal strongly to both sexes. Parmigianino was a prodigy who died young, and we cannot say where his alarming talents would have taken him if he had lived. Nowhere, perhaps. His last major work, and his most celebrated, is a Virgin and Child attended by a group of beautiful female angels. The Child is an elongated four-footer and the Virgin’s head is so far from her shoulders that this oil on panel (Uffizi) has always been known as the Madonna of the Long Neck.
Parmigianino came to maturity in Parma under the shadow of the great Antonio Allegri (1489–1534), known as Correggio after the town where he was born. He does not fit into a schematic presentation of the painters of the early sixteenth century because his work projects the future. We know so little about him (Vasari says he was miserly and virtuous and led a frightened life of devotion) that we cannot tell what he aimed to do. So his works have to speak for themselves. At one time he was ranked alongside Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian as a member of the Big Five of the Renaissance. Today his position is more precarious but rising again. He was not a Mannerist, painting real people from nature. But he was sui generis, an original. He did things no one had thought of doing before, either because they could not be done or were not worth doing perhaps. He painted the female nude with extraordinary skill and grace, and used his extensive interest in mythology, as was right for a man of the Renaissance, to present naked women in interesting situations. His Io (now in Vienna) shows an ecstatic woman in the act of being seduced by Jupiter, who appears as a furry cloud. It is painted as well as it could be, in the circumstances, but it requires a strong effort of imagination to find it erotic, which presumably was Correggio’s intention. He decorated part of the Convent of San Paolo in Parma with an elaborate umbrella vault, in which ovular glimpses of busy putti appear over semicircular classical statuettes. It is entirely original and done with ingenuity, and it gave ideas to successive generations of artists right into the eighteenth century. It was commissioned by a bluestockinged intellectual abbess, Giovanna da Piacenza, which explains its incongruity in a house of nuns.
Later, Correggio, who was obviously conscientious and very hardworking, as well as superlatively gifted and skilled, won a prize contract to fresco the dome, apse and choir vault of Parma Cathedral. For the dome he chose the Assumption of the Virgin and worked it out in immense detail, with huge supporting apostles, tiers of clouds and hundreds of swirling figures carrying the Virgin upward. The immense work, which might have daunted even Michelangelo himself, is of course meant to be seen from beneath the dome at floor level, and Correggio used a range of illusionistic tricks and special perspectives to create his visual effects. The technical ingenuity and inventiveness are overwhelming, and the scheme made later artists marvel and seek to imitate. But it requires a willing suspension of disbelief, indeed of mirth, to get by, and one of the cathedral canons, when it was first unveiled, said it “looked like a dish of frogs’ legs.” More generally