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  Parmigianino in Arts and Ages: 500th Anniversary The show (room No. 244) includes over 140 exhibits - Parmigianino's etchings and drawings, alongside porcelain, majolica and enamels from the Hermitage collection of applied art. Three Parmigianino drawings are loaned by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. 2003 marked five hundred years from the birth of Francesco Mazzola called Parmigianino, acclaimed as the foremost representative of mannerism, a style which was born in Italy about 1520 and determined European art for the subsequent century. The middle of the 16th century inaugurated in Italy an important change in conscience. Parmigianino was one of the most original artists and a magnificent figure of Italian cinquecento, whose life embodied the complexity of his age. Along with Raphael, Parmigianino's works were most often reproduced in Italian prints during the 16th century. His etchings and drawings made him famous throughout Europe, and masters of applied art continued to reproduce images from his works for a few centuries. The history of perception and interpretation of Parmigianino's achievement is an important aspect of the history of European culture during five hundred years. Modern art historians hail Parmigianino as the "Prince of Mannerism " . His fantastic ruins and landscapes inhabited by day-dreaming maidens, sweet babies and dignified old men conceal within them a strain, which forebodes an imminent tragedy. The ambiguous mystery of his works where luxury betrays a craving for asceticism and serenity is full of suppressed laments has a magnetic effect. The first section of the exhibition focuses on the artist's own drawings and etchings. The drawings showed in the exhibit attest to the graphic talent of Parmigianino, who was able to sketch a complicated figure with just a few thin lines, outline a magnificent composition of any complexity, create a fantastic image or captivate a moment of reality by a few touches of hand. Parmigianino was one of the first to take up the avant-garde art of etching in the early 16th century. The second section centers around the history of perception and interpretation of Parmigianino's art. Soon after he died, Giulio Bonasone created a series of engravings reproducing Parmigianino's best works. The legerity and gentleness of Parmigianino's style delighted the Venetians Jacopo Bassano and Paolo Veronese, who carefully studied his etchings and adopted the fluid smoothness of his lines. The dramatic revelations of Tintoretto and El Greco were anticipated in the Parmese master's drawings. While the Venetians assimilated Parmigianino's high emotions, the school of Fontainbleau in France was inspired by the refined complexity of his compositions and the elegance of his drawing techniques. In Prague, Parmigianino was admired by Emperor Rudolf II and his court painters. In Antwerp, Munich, London, Toledo, Amsterdam and all other centers of international mannerism, his engravings and drawings were fastidiously studied and copied, so that by the late 16th century Parmigianino boom overwhelmed Europe. The passion was inherited by the age of baroque. The center of Parmigianino's cult was Bologna, where the brothers Domenico and Guerchino Carrachi and other masters cited him in their creations. Due to the Bologna school's tremendous authority, appreciation of Parmigianino became a sign of spiritual aristocratism, and since the 17th century even small drawings of the great master were carefully preserved by art collectors. Rubens copied Parmigianino, while Van Dyck in his self-portrait of dandy even reproduced the style of the Italian artist's Vienna self-portrait. Parmigianino's Cupid Sharpening His Bow may have inspired the composition of Velazquez's Venus at Her Mirror. In the 17th century, Parmigianino became a painter of kings, though he never was a court painter. Acknowledging Parmigianino as its master, rococo praised his light and elegant style. The Parmese master's melancholy was dear to the age which concealed beneath apparent nonchalance a feeling of doom. The name of Parmigianino is a myth of European culture, whose tragic mystery has been casting its spell for five centuries. |
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