Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, called Parmigianino
Parma 1503 - 1540 Casalmaggiore
22
Profile Head Study of a Man wearing a Mask
Pen and brown ink and wash. Bears old inscription: Parmig ..and numbering in another hand: 260.
110 x 72 mm (4 1 /3 x 2 1 /2 in.)
Provenance: P. Crozat; his numbering in brown ink,
bottom right (L.3612) 1 , possibly his sale, Paris, 10
April - May 13, 1741; Private Collection, Paris.
Parmigianino’s career though abruptly ended by
fever at the age of 37 was extraordinarily influential,
especially considering that he showed a certain lack of
ambition and great difficulty in completing work. He
developed a style rich in grace and refinement which
deeply affected succeeding generations of artists,
through his paintings and engravings and particularly
through his prolific draughtsmanship; from Bedoli to
the Carracci and on to Creti: in Vasari’s estimation: his
manner has therefore been studied and imitated by
innumerable painters, because he shed on art a light
of grace so pleasing, that his works will always be held
in great price and himself honoured by all students
of design 2 . He achieved a high reputation quickly;
at the age of sixteen he completed a fresco cycle
at Fontanellato and an altarpiece of The Baptism of
1. Parmigianino, A Naked Young Man Hiding behind a Gigantic
Mask, pen and brown ink, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv.6652.
Christ for the Santissima Annunziata church in Parma.
Returning from a year in Viadana during the siege
of Parma, he received commissions to decorate the
transept of the cathedral, San Giovanni Evangelista. A
year later he left for Rome and was given patronage by
the then pope, Clement VII. Fleeing from the Sack of
Rome in 1527, Parmigianino took himself to Bologna
where he worked in the church of San Petronio and
for patrons both secular and religious. His panel
painting The Madonna of the Rose painted for Pietro
Aretino was praised by Vasari and given to the Pope.
1530 was spent in Venice and Verona; Parmigianino
returned to Parma at the end of that year and was
commissioned to execute within eighteen months the
decorations of the apse and the vault of Santa Maria
della Steccata. On the intervention of his patron,
Francesco Baiardo, Parmigianino agreed to paint an
altarpiece in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi to
commemorate Baiardo’s deceased brother in law.
This work, the Madonna of the Long Neck, remained
unfinished, like the Steccata decorations, on the artist’s
death. The Steccata commission was twice extended
before the confraternity finally sued Parmigianino for
the delays. He was briefly imprisoned before fleeing
to Casalmaggiore where he died some months later.
According to Vasari Parmigianino played the lute most
excellently and loved poetry but his chief obsession
became alchemy and would to God that he had
always pursued the studies of painting and not sought
to pry into the secrets of congealing mercury .. for then
he would have been without an equal.
At once playful and slightly bizarre, this fascinating
drawing has a remarkable vitality. With a single line
of the pen locating the iris, Parmigianino lends the eye
an expression of alarm, especially when taken with
the open mouth of the mask. The features of the mask
are realistic, with its rotting teeth and moles, wild
eyebrows and long, straggling beard, but also fantastic,
the ear being given a foliate form. The conceit is of
the face of a young man looking through the mask of
an old one. This combination of fantasy and reality
compares very closely with a drawing in the Louvre
of a naked young man with his arms and head thrust
into another mask which this time, is giant in scale
and finer in feature, and thought, hypothetically, to
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