Is some Parmigianino better than no Parmigianino? That is the question.

It seems only yesterday that this artist formerly known as Mannerist received major museum treatment. In art years, it almost was yesterday: the landmark "Correggio & Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the Renaissance" traveled between The British Museum, London, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 2000 and 2001. The catalogue of this exhibition, with an essay by Carmen C. Bambach on Parmigianino, is still a must read for any good understanding of the relationship between the two great early-sixteenth-century talents of Parma—sometimes rivals and sometimes mentor (Correggio) and pupil (Parmigianino).

While the current show, an import from the National Gallery of Canada, lacks the rigor and thoroughness of the 2000-2001 exhibition, one may say that it never promises anything more (a tiny attempt at matching drawing to painting goes nowhere). Here is a "celebration" on the quincentennial of the artist's birth, regardless of how one might feel about the term "celebration" as an odious appropriation from the publicity industry. And while collections like the Pierpont Morgan Library opted out of lending top work in 2004 as they did in 2000/2001, there can still be lemonade in the lemons of a hit and miss show. Although I have yet to encounter a museum that admits to exhibiting so-so examples of an artist's work—after all, who would lend to such a thing?—it is difficult not to see the wide range of quality and importance in the fifty-odd drawings, the seven paintings, and the dozen prints here assembled. But perhaps it is also our modern tastes that prevent us from digesting the oil Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1522) while we can delight in the red chalk Sleeping Man (c. 1527-1530).

Parmigianino (1503-1540) produced over a thousand extant drawings and prints in addition to his paintings and frescos. He lead a tumultuous and prolific artistic life in the shadow of what might be called the greatest generation of the Italian Renaissance. His style developed first under the Emilian influence of Correggio, then by studying the work of Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome (Vasari famously maintained that "it was said that the spirit of Raphael had passed into Parmigianino's body"). An intense period of productivity under the Medici pope Clement VII starting in 1524 was cut short in 1527 by Charles V's sack of Rome and the artist's narrow escape to Bologna. Returning to Parma in 1530, Parmigianino undertook his Madonna of the Long Neck, a five-year labor and his most famous "Mannerist" altarpiece, in 1534 (a few of his fifty studies for Long Neck are here on display); he died, before its completion, at age thirty-seven in Casalmaggiore.

It may be true that Parmigianino is ripe for exhibiting now or anytime. This worthwhile but far from perfect show makes the case.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 22 Number 7, on page 57
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https://newcriterion.com/issues/2004/3/exhibition-note-1573

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