ART ADS - Virgin Mary with the long neck by Parmigianino

Hi, welcome again to our ArtHuts. Today we do a very high jump directly through the 1500s, the Maniera, the Manor, the Manorist time, and we're talking about Parmigianino. His name was Giuseppe Francesco Mazzola, but the nickname was Parmigianino because he was born in Parma, but he moved soon in Rome looking for some prestigious commissions by the papal court, and he was a very good drawner, he was an excellent one, a terrific one, so he became very famous, even because he took with him from Parma this self-portrait, I'm showing you, this self-portrait of himself looking at a mirror, so something that is very, very peculiar and not so naturalistic, something that is maybe extravagant we can say, but he became very famous, but he had to leave, to escape from Rome like every other artist during the sack of the city, and he came back to Emilia Romagna, to Parma, when he died in the countryside because he arrived in Parma, he had very prestigious commissions, but then he was accused by homosexuality and perhaps it was true, so he had to go away and he died in 1540, that's the date of today. He left unfinished this canvas, the Madonna of the Long Neck, that now you can see in the Uffizi Gallery, because he was commissioned for an altar inside the Church of the Servites in Parma, and he was put there even if unfinished, but he was bought by the Gran Principe Ferdinando, the Prince Ferdinand of Medici, so he took this canvas and he put it here inside his collection, so now it's inside the Uffizi Museum, and it's pretty unknown, so a few people, a few tourists stop in front of it, but it's fantastic. I show you how this kind of mannerist painter has just destroyed the harmony of Raphael, for example, you see the Madonna, the Virgin Mary is in the central part of the painting, but the painting you can divide it in two by this figure, but in one side you see it's packed with angels, they have six angels, there are five here, and another here, you see the face unfinished here, the other one, this is pretty empty, just this column, there is actually a series of columns, something that is connected with the Temple of Salmon, the bright Temple of Salmon, and this little, very little figure that we think, scholars think it's Saint Jerome, because he defended, he was a defender of the virginity of the Virgin Mary in his speeches, in his books. You can see here, I'm trying to show you here, near his feet, there's another foot here, and scholars say that maybe Pierma and Parmigianino wanted to realize the figure of Saint Francis, we have a drawing, a sketch of this painting, and there's a Virgin Mary, these two saints, so maybe there could have been two saints here, Saint Jerome and Saint Francis. You see this figure, the Virgin Mary is very long, very gracious, the neck is longer than usual, like the column here, just a parallelism here, the hand is very long, the baby is very long, it's longer than a newborn, you can imagine, he has maybe seven, eight years old. Long is the leg of his angel, this is a quote by Correggio, the former master of Parmigianino, long is the vase here that this angel is offering to the Virgin Mary. Long is the foot, they're just getting out from these pillows, like reaching us, and the Virgin Mary is seated on an invisible throne, you can't see any seats here, just this beautiful blue mantle, and this baby, I always thought as a looker, not as an art historian, I always thought it was a dead baby, a dead boy, because it's so white, and it's just abandoned over the legs of the mother. It's just a quote again of Michelangelo, actually because this is just specular of the Pietà of Michelangelo inside the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, you see even this lace here, this in the vest is similar, okay, specular to the one used by Michelangelo, so Parmigianino knew very well his models, his masters, but he wanted to exaggerate, to go beyond, okay, that's the modernist in a subtle way, so you can admire this painting in the Uffizi Museum. Tomorrow we will go outside again, we will explore a very beautiful location near Parma, so we remain off of Tuscany, and I will talk about this man, Gino Magnani, he's a collectioner, okay, so in Magnano Traversevolo he collected a very important paintings, and sculptures, and furnitures, so see you tomorrow, bye!