Parmigianino, 'The Madonna and Child with Saints', 1526-7

This altarpiece is the greatest work that Parmigianino painted in Rome. It was commissioned by Maria Bufalini for a burial chapel in San Salvatore in Lauro. However, the political turmoil following the Sack of Rome in 1527 meant that it was never installed there and it was later moved to the parish church of Città di Castello.

According to Vasari, Parmigianino was working on this picture when imperial troops burst into his workshop, but ’seeing him [and] stupefied at this work… they let him pursue it'. Another interpretation may be that the soldiers were so perplexed by this jarring, unusual composition that they simply left him alone.

Saint John the Baptist dominates the foreground, staring at us intently. With his exaggeratedly long finger he points upwards to the Virgin and Child seated in a burst of light against dark grey storm clouds. The Virgin is represented as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, before the moon. Her body is distorted, her legs massive compared to her delicate head and neck. The Christ Child – his head strangely disconnected from his body – mischievously kicks his foot out of the painting towards us.

Saint Jerome sleeps on the ground, exhausted from his vigils in the wilderness, clutching a cross with the crucified Christ. His steeply foreshortened pose is derived from the sleeping Venus in Correggio’s Venus, Cupid and a Satyr (Louvre, Paris). Jerome’s size and scale are difficult to reconcile with that of the other figures. During the nineteenth century this picture was known as The Vision of Saint Jerome. In its odd juxtaposition of scales, compressed space, the intensity of John the Baptist’s engagement with us and the dramatic lighting, the picture does have a strangely visionary appearance. The unsettling spatial organisation is typical of Parmigianino’s self-consciously artificial style and is characteristic of the work of other contemporary artists since commonly described as Mannerists.

Practical considerations also played a significant part in the composition. Parmigianino had to arrange his figures within a compact vertical design that fitted into the awkward tall narrow space allocated for the altarpiece in its intended location. The lighting was designed to reflect the source of natural light from a high window to the right of the altar. In the darkened church the Baptist’s right arm would seem not only to curve upwards towards the Christ Child but also outwards from the painting, catching the light.

Vasari claimed that the ’spirit of Raphael had entered into the body of Francesco…’. Parmigianino’s decision to divide the composition in two and set the Virgin in front of the burst of light, and the Baptist’s pointing gesture, are based on Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City), which was then on the high altar of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. The types and poses of the Virgin and Child originate with the work of Michelangelo, particularly the Bruges Madonna, but the tempestuous drama of the image is Parmigianino’s own invention.