Parmigianino

Primarily employed as a painter and also working as a printmaker, Parmigianino was nonetheless a draftsman above all, one of the most prolific and influential of his age. As observed by A.E. Popham, author of the magisterial three-volume catalogue of Parmigianino’s drawings, the artist “was never happier than when, to use a current phrase, doodling,”¹ and, among Renaissance artists, only Leonardo da Vinci has a larger extant corpus of drawings than Parmigianino. He was born Girolamo Mazzola in Parma (the source of the nickname under which he came to be known), the son of a minor painter who died when Parmigianino was only two years old. His early training likely came from his uncles, also provincial painters of no note, but his greatest early influence was Correggio, under whom he might have also had formal training. From the beginning of his career, Parmigianino adopted the red chalk that was Correggio’s favored medium (see 1980.55), but he used pen and ink or black chalk with equal facility, as can be seen in the present sheet. Although drawn before Parmigianino’s 1524 move from Parma to Rome, the drawing demonstrates that he had already begun to develop the gracefully elongated figures that distinguish his works from Correggio’s and that foreshadow the Mannerism of his maturity.²

As has long been recognized, the drawings on both sides of the present sheet are related to Parmigianino’s frescoes in the camerino of the Rocca Sanvitale at Fontanellato, a small castle outside Parma. The commission is not documented, but it is universally dated to the time soon before Parmigianino’s departure from the city. As is generally the case, because Parmigianino was such a prolific draftsman (and because so many of his drawings survive), the preparatory studies allow us to trace the evolution of the project. The Morgan drawing, as well as a related drawing in Berlin,³ show that while the mythological subject matter was envisioned from the start, the organization of the scenes of the walls and vault were not predetermined. The Berlin drawing, that is, presents the narratives of Actaeon and the Rape of Europa on the walls of the room, with putti in a frescoed frieze above. It is possible that the room’s architecture was not yet determined—or else, as Popham suggested, Parmigianino may have made the Berlin drawing early in the history of the project but then changed his mind to model the room more closely on Correggio’s Camera di San Paolo in Parma. The camerino at Fontanellato would eventually share with Correggio’s room a vault with a fictive pergola and the story of Actaeon.

The verso of the Morgan sheet, a sketch of Diana splashing Actaeon with water, was likely drawn after the Berlin sheet. At this point, Parmigianino imagined that the figures would be in the spandrels of the vault. As Kliemann and Rohlmann note, however, the spandrels would not have accommodated the figures easily, and the spatial arrangement would have been unclear.⁴ By the time that Parmigianino drew the other side of the sheet, now considered the recto, he had decided to move the mythological narratives into the lunettes, with the putti in the pendentives and the pergola stretching upward across the vault. He retained the motif of Diana splashing Actaeon in the lunettes, but in the final fresco Actaeon has already begun his metamorphosis and has the head of a stag.

The putto at the lower left of the recto appears, more or less unchanged, in the spandrel between the lunettes with Diana splashing Actaeon. This figure, with his right arm across his body, seems related to the putto sketched at the lower right of the Morgan sheet. None of the putti in the fresco is as animated as the latter, however, so it might represent an earlier scheme that was replaced by the standing putti otherwise in the drawing and the fresco. The putto at the center of the sheet, in turn, is closely related to one in the corner spandrel above the lunette with two hunters chasing a nymph: although the most carefully worked of the figures in the drawing, he would still change in the painting, having his right arm raised. Moreover, the hares that accompany this putto—seemingly carried over from similar animals in the putti and garlands of the slightly earlier frescoes at San Giovanni Evangelista⁵—would be eliminated from the Fontanellato vault, though Parmigianino would then insert them into the Circumcision (Detroit Institute of Arts) that he would paint around the same time in 1523. In sum, the constant revision and reworking of compositions and figures seen in a drawing like this are entirely typical of the restlessly inventive artist.

—JJM

Footnotes:

1. Popham 1957, 1:2, echoed by Vaccaro in Béguin, Di Giampaolo, and Vaccaro 2000, 61.
2. Popham 1957 is the standard against which all other Parmigianino drawing scholarship is measured, but, for more recent introductions to his work as a draftsman, see Béguin, Di Giampaolo, and Vaccaro 2000, as well as the essay by David Ekserdjian in Ottawa and New York 2003–4.
3. The Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, drawing, KdZ 489, is many times published; see Popham 1971, 1: no. 12; Béguin, Di Giampaolo, and Vaccaro 2000, 70; Ottawa and New York 2003–4, no. 9; Kliemann and Rohlmann 2004, 271–72.
4. Kliemann and Rohlmann 2004, 270–72.
5. Ekserdjian 2006, 94.