What happened? In this twist on Renaissance art, Parmigianino distorts human anatomy to absurd effect.
Parmigianino, Madonna with the Long Neck, 1534–40, 216.5 x 132.5 cm (Uffizi, Florence)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] Here we’re looking at the great Mannerist painting by Parmigianino called the “Madonna with the Long Neck.” It’s a fun painting.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:12] And it’s a tall painting.
Dr. Harris: [0:14] It’s big, and Madonna is big. She’s big in funny places, too. If you look at her head, her head is really tiny.
Dr. Zucker: [0:21] Compared to her hips, especially.
Dr. Harris: [0:24] Right. She’s got really, really wide hips, and then she comes down on these tiny little toes. It’s always seemed to me like her body is in the shape of a diamond.
Dr. Zucker: [0:33] In a sense, she’s a landscape on which Christ sits.
Dr. Harris: [0:37] Christ himself is also quite large.
Dr. Zucker: [0:40] It’s not just large, but look at the way he splays his body. There’s this crazy kind of torsion, with his arm falling, almost dislocated from his shoulder.
Dr. Harris: [0:50] There is a precedent for that way that his left arm falls down. If you think about Michelangelo’s “Pietà” and Christ here as a child, but perhaps echoing when Mary will hold Christ in images like the Pietà, when Christ is dead. In fact, Christ looks asleep, but there’s also a way that he looks dead, too.
Dr. Zucker: [1:12] So that reference actually, in some ways, explains the mass of her lap, because in that sculpture, Mary is quite substantial in order to be able to support the dead body of her son.
Dr. Harris: [1:22] It’s so clear when we’re looking at this that we’re not in the High Renaissance anymore.
Dr. Zucker: [1:26] So what happened?
Dr. Harris: [1:28] Mannerism happened. It’s almost like the artists of the High Renaissance had done everything that could be done. They had perfected the naturalism that they had sought after since the time of Giotto.
Dr. Zucker: [1:38] So all of the illusionism that was at the service of the High Renaissance is here being used to distort and to transform the body. It’s not so much an ugly deformation as a kind of deformation that accentuates a kind of extreme elegance.
Dr. Harris: [1:51] Exactly. It takes that ideal beauty and elegance that was in the High Renaissance that was there and exaggerates it. One way of thinking about Mannerism is to think about it as art taken from art instead of art from nature.
[2:04] You know, we think about the Renaissance as being based on observation of nature and the natural world. But when you look at this, you think back to works of art like Michelangelo’s “Giuliano de’ Medici” and that long neck, or back to the”Pietà.”
Dr. Zucker: [2:19] That makes a lot of sense, the idea that this is art that is self-referential, that is referring to its own traditions.
Dr. Harris: [2:25] The respect for human anatomy and portraying that naturalistically, that’s not important to the Mannerists. I think there’s a letter from one Mannerist artist to another Mannerist artist where he says something like, “take a left hand and put it on a right arm.” It’s like there’s a willful complicating of the body.
Dr. Zucker: [2:43] And setting up relationships between forms that are absurd. Look at the relationship between the vase that’s being held by the angel in relationship to his or her thigh.
[2:54] Look at the relationship between the massive Virgin Mary and the prophet in the lower right corner that is presumably impossibly far away, but somehow just a tiny figure at the feet of the Virgin.
Dr. Harris: [3:08] Then look, too, at the way that the Virgin holds her hand to her chest with these impossibly long, almost boneless fingers. There’s a way in which the gesture fails to mean anything.
Dr. Zucker: [3:21] It means gesture as opposed to a specific intent of the figure.
Dr. Harris: [3:27] There’s a kind of dramatizing here.
Dr. Zucker: [3:29] For its own sake, or that kind of willful compression that creates a sense of almost the impossible. If you look at the columns on the right, there’s actually a colonnade that is so deep in space, that’s seen at such an oblique angle, that it almost seems like a wall or a single column.
[3:45] But if you look closely at the base, you can see the alternating light and shadow that passes between those columns. There is ambiguity, and that’s in large part because that part of the painting is not finished.
[3:57] So Mannerism seems to be this intense reaction to the perfection of the High Renaissance. You know you have the Renaissance, in a sense, building itself into a extreme naturalism, and then this seems to be almost a flailing reaction against those strictures.
Dr. Harris: [4:11] Or a sense that there was nowhere to go except to do something really different.
Dr. Zucker: [4:15] Now, all of these ideas were very much a part of a culture of the court, and I think it’s important to recognize that there was a very specific, very learned audience for these kinds of paintings. These were not paintings that were made for the artist’s own wild interest. This was considered a kind of high intellectual…almost game.
[4:33] [music]
