Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola (11 January 1503- 24 August 1540), also known as Francesco Mazzola, or more famously as Parmigianino, was a painter, draftsman, and etcher of a family of artists in Parma, where he worked among other artists such as Correggio. He was the most influential painter of the Mannerist method during his twenty-year career.

Works

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Early studies such as Female Heads, a Griffin, and Finials, when Parmigianino was around nineteen, reveal an innately talented draftsman composing a sequence of gracefully superimposed images. Parmigianino designed the hauntingly beautiful woman?s face for the stucco medusas that supported his first independent commission, a ceiling fresco in the castle of Fontanellato outside Parma. The finials, which crown the medusa like a diadem, are quick pen notations for the room?s corner decorations. The medusa?s dual rendering in full face and profile invokes Leonardo da Vinci?s recommended method for drawing sculpture, while the use of red chalk evinces a precocious mastery of the medium introduced by Leonardo and preferred by Parmigianino?s mentor, Correggio.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As he was to do in so many of his Roman works, Parmigianino united the achievements of central and northern Italian art, attempting to rival, in small scale, the innovative nocturnes of both Raphael and Correggio.The picture?s pen and ink composition drawing, fluidly brushed with brown washes and highlighted in white, demonstrates how Parmigianino habitually pursued his graphic explorations even up to the moment of painting.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~