Girolamo Francesco Mazzola was born in Parma (hence the tag ‘Il Parmigianino’), and died in 1540 aged 37. At some point he dropped the ‘Girolamo’, maybe round about when he painted ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a startling little picture in which the smoothy-chops young artist demonstrates a mastery of optical distortion, his face polished, his non-painting hand thrust towards the viewer like a fish foregrounded on a slab.
Parmigianino attracts attention for two or three reasons. There’s the oddity: such furtive or chill characters, each portrait a study in black-eyed wariness or Parmesan complacency. Then there’s the homoerotic aspect: he drew male couplings, presumably for private amusement or circulation, and painted at least one sensationally come-hither Cupid. By Vasari’s characteristically unreliable yet indispensable account, Parmigianino ended up a melodramatic ham. Apparently he became obsessed with alchemy and grew a beard.
David Ekserdjian, an art historian who rarely strays from the confines of academic exegesis, regards Parmigianino as a heady mixture worthy of ponderously detailed examination. Personal comment isn’t altogether excluded. The racy drawings, for example, prompt the following: ‘Often their humour is redolent of the rugby club or the pub, not the academy,’ he writes, but mostly he chunters along, arguing steadily. (‘Freely executed first ideas in chalk are by no means unknown in his practice.’)
This is not a work of popular scholarship. Handsomely produced, amply illustrated, undoubtedly a milestone in Parmigianino studies, the book is primarily concerned with attribution and therefore cautious in tone. Which makes the occasional value judgment disproportionately obtrusive. Not just the odd thumbs down when effects under discussion are ‘not entirely felicitous’ but a jarring squeak when the author makes so bold as to describe a patch of distant hill village as a ‘cubist townscape’ under a ‘seemingly endless sky’.
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