PARMIGIANO (1504-1540), Italian painter. Francesco Maria Mazzola, commonly called Parmigiano, and sometimes Parmigianino, from his birthplace, Parma, was born on Jan. I 1, 1504. Losing his father, who was a painter, in early childhood, he was brought up by two uncles, also painters, Michele and Pier-Ilario Mazzola. His faculty for the art developed very young, and he followed the style of Correggio, who settled at Parma in 1518. He did not, however, become an imitator of Correggio; his style in its maturity may be regarded as a fusion of Correggio with Raphael, and thus fairly original. Even at the age of 14 (Vasari says 16) he had painted a "Baptism of Christ," surprisingly mature. Before the age of 19, when he migrated to Rome, he had covered with frescoes seven chapels in the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista, Parma.
Arrived in Rome, he presented specimen pictures to the pope, Clement VII., who assigned to him the painting of the Sala de' Pontefici, the ceilings of which had been already decorated by Giovanni da Udine. He was in Rome during the sack of the city by the soldiers of Charles V. in 1527, and at this date he was engaged in painting the "Vision of St. Jerome"—the earliest known picture by him. It displays the influence of Correggio only in the figure of St. Jerome; the composition shows the over powering but only temporary influence on him of Michelangelo. Parmigiano left Rome shortly after for Bologna. Here he painted for the nuns of St. Margaret his most celebrated altarpiece (now in the Academy of Bologna), the "Madonna and Child, pith Margaret and other Saints." In 1531 he returned to Parma, and was commissioned to execute an extensive series of frescoes in the choir of the church of S. Maria della Steccata. These were to be cOmplet€d in Nov.
1532; and half-payment, 200 golden scudi, was made to him in advance. A ceiling was allotted to him, and an arch in front of the ceiling ; on the arch he painted six figures—two of them in full colour and four in monochrome—Adam, Eve, some Virtues, and the famous figure (monochrome) of Moses about to shatter the tables of the law. But, after five or six years from the date
of the contract, Parmigiano had barely made a good beginning with his promised work and was imprisoned in default. Promising to amend, he was released; but instead of redeeming his pledge he decamped to Casal Maggiore, in the territory of Cremona, where he died on Aug. 24, 1540, before he had completed his 37th year. He was buried in the church of the Servites called La Fontana, near Casal Maggiore.
Grace has rightly been regarded as the chief artistic endow ment of Parmigiano. "Un po' di grazia del Parmigianino" (a little or, as we might say, just a spice of Parmigianino's grace) was among the ingredients which Agostino Caracci's famed sonnet desiderates for a perfect picture. The proportions of his figures are over-long for the truth of nature ; one of his Madonnas, now in the Pitti, is currently named "La Madonna del collo lungo." Parmigiano is one of the first Italians to have practised etching; there are but a few prints extant, and they are character ized by his swift and sketchy style, which also appears in his pen drawings. These prints served as material for study to Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano, Primaticcio and the school of Fontainebleau and Andrea Schiavone (Meldolla).
The most admired easel-picture of Parmigiano is the "Cupid Making a Bow," painted in 1536 for Francesco Boiardi of Parma, and now in the Gallery of Vienna. Of his portrait painting, two interesting examples are the one of Amerigo Vespucci, in the Gallery of Naples, and the painter's own portrait in the Uffizi of Florence.
See Vasari, Vita (edit. Milanesi) v. ; Affb, Vita di F. Mazzola (Parma, 1784) ; G. Ricci, La Galleria di Parma (1896) ; L. Frohlich-Bum, Parmigianino 0920 .