A cure for melancholy: Parmigianino, Dickens, Schubert

My grandfather used to say, ‘Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad.’ It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help. I sit in my library, while the rain beats down on the windowpanes at either side, and the garden is so vaporous I can scarcely see the winter-flowering prunus bravely setting out her pink blossoms, and I fill my mind with the better things of long ago. I have been studying Parmigianino, a tiny man (as his name implies), a perfectionist, one of the greatest draughtsmen who ever lived, who ended his brief life, aged 37, virtually on the run from the fierce clerics of the Parma church Santa Maria della Steccato. They had paid him handsomely for work he had hovered over for years without completing. When he was young and fresh and hopeful, he had painted, as a gift for Pope Clement VII, to ingratiate himself, an astonishing tour de force, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, showing him as a beautiful, beardless 20-year-old. It is now one of the glories of the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.

It is fun to get to know a painter so well that you recognise his models when they pop up incongruously. His best-known work is the ‘Madonna of the Long Neck’, in the Uffizi, featuring some of his regulars. The enchanting girl on the Virgin’s left he used again, as Anthea, in the solemn painting now in Naples, and a wicked boy just below her makes a characteristic appearance between the lubricious legs of Cupid in another Vienna masterpiece, this time as a putto, where he is torturing another putto and making him scream.