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| Parmigianino Study for figure of St Jerome ca. 1518-40 drawing British Museum |
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| Parmigianino Study for the Virgin in the Vision of St Jerome ca. 1526-27 drawing British Museum |
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| Parmigianino Study for the Vision of St Jerome ca. 1526-27 drawing British Museum |
"Parmigianino approached each project through a lengthy process of experimental drawing – those for the Vatican project survive – and it may have been this that taxed the patience of his patron, persuading the Pope to transfer the project to Giulio. Parmigianino's slowness of approach, together with the local domination that Perino del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and other Raphael pupils exercised, precluded the artist from receiving any significant work until 1526, when the widow Maria Bufalini commissioned an altarpiece for her husband's funerary chapel at San Salvatore in Lauro. The contract specified a Virgin with the Christ child in her arms, along with St. John the Baptist and St. Jerome; apparently the patron expected a rather conventional sacra conversazione. For the work that was supposed finally to launch his career in Rome, Parmigianino made a typically extensive series of preparatory designs, exploring widely different possibilities, until he arrived at a solution that fulfilled the terms of the contract in the most surprising way, essentially inventing an entirely new subject. Without any iconographic or theological precedent, and largely through a process of experimental drawing, he transformed the vision of St. John the Evangelist, who wrote in the book of Revelations of a "woman clothed with the sun and moon," into an ecstatic dream of St. Jerome, who sleeps in abandoned posture in a grassy glade. The child, no longer an infant cradled by the Virgin, seems to levitate between her legs. John the Baptist, another hermit saint whose camel-hair tunic has here been accessorized with a luxurious leopard-skin mantle, dominates the foreground. His extraordinary pose shows the deliberate primacy of art over nature in Parmigianino's work: John faces the viewer, yet his shoulders swivel backward so that he can point to the subject of his prophecies: "Behold the lamb of God."
– from A New History of Italian Renaissance Art (Thames & Hudson, 2012)
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| Parmigianino The Vision of St Jerome 1526-27 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Parmigianino Youth with Goats ca. 1523-24 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Parmigianino Figures in a Ferry Boat ca. 1518-40 drawing British Museum |
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| Parmigianino Torso in Armor, from the back ca. 1522-24 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Parmigianino Mercury with Ibis 1530s drawing Rijksmuseum |
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| Parmigianino Seated figure of Mercury ca. 1523-24 drawing National Gallery of Art (U.S.) |
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| Parmigianino Seated Figure of Mercury ca. 1525 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Parmigianino Six Standing Figures ca. 1518-40 drawing British Museum |
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| Parmigianino Young Woman carrying a Vessel late 1530s drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
The tiny Parmigianino studies below were arranged during the 18th century behind tiny windows in the blue mat at bottom. Many thousands of these blue mats were constructed uniformly in Paris for Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), the best-known early connoisseur of European drawings. Mariette interfered with the art he collected (snipping edges, centering figures, ruling borders, even retouching images). Neither were his attributions particularly trustworthy, yet somehow he retains the respect of educated posterity. The position he occupied, the privileges he exercised, the milieu that encouraged him – all of these must seem in retrospect to shine with such glamour that custodial crimes are minimized or rationalized or otherwise ignored.
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| Parmigianino Studies for a Winged Victory ca. 1531-35 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Parmigianino Seated Athena ca. 1531-35 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Parmigianino Three sketches in a Mariette mount 1530s drawings Princeton University Art Museum |