Parmigianino

This small drawing of a Seated Virgin and Child has been cut to an oval and laid down on the same mount as three smaller rectangular drawings.¹ In 1971, A. E. Popham identified the drawing as by Parmigianino, perhaps for an Adoration of the Magi, and possibly a study for the left part of a composition known from a drawing in the Louvre, Paris, after which there is a chiaroscuro woodcut by Niccolò Vicentino and an engraving by Andrea Schiavone.² In particular, Popham noted that the position of the right arm in both drawings is similar. Popham’s theory is plausible, although the positions of the Virgin and Child, and even the architecture in the background are much modified in the Paris drawing. The influence of Michelangelo and Rosso Fiorentino is apparent, as are the elongated, almost unnatural proportions of the figures, both characteristic of Parmigianino’s work during his period in Rome. The subject was treated repeatedly in drawings and paintings by Parmigianino’s follower, Girolamo Bedoli.

It is assumed that the drawing is not original to the eighteenth-century album, which contains mostly French artists of that century. Felice Stampfle convincingly posited that the album most likely came with empty pages into the hands of a later collector, perhaps Hippolyte Destailleur, who used it to preserve a number of his smaller drawings, including this fragment.³

Footnotes:

1. Morgan Library & Museum, New York, inv. 2006.27:1-96, fol. 31(a), 31(b), 31(c).
2. Popham 1971, 1: 121, no. 303. For Vicentino’s print, see The Illustrated Bartsch 12: 29, no. 2; for Schiavone’s print, see The Illustrated Bartsch 16: 43, no. 8.
3. Stampfle, in Miner 1954, 209-15.