Parmigianino (1503 to 1540) was an Italian painter from Parma, born Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, and one of the leading painters of Mannerism. He is remembered for the Madonna with the Long Neck, the stretched, swan-necked Virgin now in the Uffizi, and for a self-portrait painted at 21 on a rounded panel that bends a whole room around him. He died at 37, with the Madonna still unfinished.
People type his name to find out why that Madonna looks the way she does. The answer starts with a hand.
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Around 1524 Parmigianino painted himself as a convex mirror shows a face, and he did it on a wooden panel he had shaped into a curve, about 24 centimeters across. His face sits calm in the middle. His right hand swells in the foreground until it is bigger than his head, and the straight beams of the room behind him bend into arcs. He carried the panel to Rome as a calling card for Pope Clement VII.
It did not buy him the pope. Clement received the picture and the great commissions never came, so the little panel went on to a poet, Pietro Aretino, then through the hands of a medalist and a sculptor to an emperor in Prague. When it reached the Habsburg collections in Vienna in 1777, the catalogue gave it to Correggio.
What You'll Discover
Where his nickname comes from.
Who walked into his studio.
Why her neck is so long.
What the alchemy story leaves out.
What lay on his chest in the grave.
Where his paintings hang today.