It’s a cosy tradition at the National Gallery to showcase one of its Christmassy paintings at this time of year – a Nativity, or an Adoration of the Magi perhaps. This year’s religious masterpiece is different. Parmigianino’s tall (3.5m) yet narrow painting The Vision of St Jerome is wild, quirky and gets more subversive the longer you look at it. For one thing, there is a female nude hidden in this devotional scene. Parmigianino has changed the gender and aged her – but once you see it there’s no mistaking his quotation of one of the most sensual paintings in the European canon.
The Vision of St Jerome gets its title from the sleeping figure of the hermit Jerome lying under a rocky overhang in a leafy bower by a pool. Parmigianino paints him from an unexpected angle: feet towards us, head flung back, his body at once vertical and horizontal as he thrusts his loins in your face, his body forcing itself out of the picture into 3D space.
The slumbering saint is, I reckon, a homage to Parmigianino’s elder Correggio, who like him was based in Parma, who had just created an outrageously lewd artistic miracle: Venus and Cupid with a Satyr, today in the Louvre. In it, the love goddess sleeps naked in the same pose as Jerome, seen from the same radical angle, her feet towards the picture plane, her body vertical on the canvas yet horizontal in imagination, seeming to float out of her rustic bower into the onlooker’s reality.
You can follow how a male version of Correggio’s Venus got into a Christian scene from Parmigianino’s preparatory drawings lovingly assembled for this excellent little show. At first, he drew St Jerome in a conventional way, seated, meditating. Then he must have seen Correggio’s Venus – maybe the older artist sent him a drawing as he worked in Rome. Suddenly, in a drawing lent by the Getty, Parmigianino strips his male model and pushes him on to his back, lying feet forward with his genitals right in your eyeline. Venus as a boy. Well, a muscular old man.
Why? It’s a flamboyant gesture of art for art’s sake, a masterstroke of mannerism. By the 1520s, Italian artists had been having a Renaissance for almost a century. They’d conquered perspective, proportion, the representation of the real world. Frankly they were bored. A new generation set out to turn the rules upside down. Artists such as Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and Michelangelo, now in his 50s but still youthful, experimented with the new “manner”, a flaunting of style, distortion and wilfulness. Hence mannerism.
Parmigianino is the most mannered mannerist of all. His Madonna of the Long Neck is the movement’s textbook illustration. His most famous painting today, celebrated in a poem named after it by John Ashbery, is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The young Parmigianino creates this circular painting by copying exactly what he saw in a convex mirror, faithfully reflecting its distortions, disclosing the total inadequacy of perspective as a mirror of the world: the rational pictorial “science” invented by the early Renaissance is just one way of seeing things, he proves.
Parmigianino died young to add to his artistic mystery. Yet I’d never given The Vision of St Jerome much attention – until now. This huge painting, commissioned for the church of San Salvatore in Lauro in Rome, has belonged to the National Gallery since 1826 but never been one of its stars. However, a new restoration has worked wonders. What seemed a mustard-yellow monstrosity has become sharper, brighter: a painting reborn.
Parmigianino’s provocations are also evident in a drawing connected with the figure of Mary: a female nude, perhaps based on a classical sculpture. You compare the lofty Mary in the restored painting and see that her nipples too are visible under her rose shift.
Not that it isn’t a mystical, sacred work. As Jerome sleeps, the Virgin and Child materialise above him in the night sky. Mary sits on the crescent moon in a burst of silvery cosmic light, cradling Jesus. Below them, in front of the snoozing Jerome, appears St John the Baptist who points to the divine vision.
Yet Parmigianino can’t help adding those quirks and twists. Jesus doesn’t sit on Mary’s lap. He stands tall and naked like a vision drawn by William Blake: I think he may have even inspired Blake’s radiant figure of Albion (the painting arrived in Britain in the 1790s).
Yet the most impossible figure is a twisting, muscly John the Baptist, kneeling in an animal skin loincloth, thrust forward even as he stretches his elongated right arm to point behind him. He’s as 3D as a Michelangelo sculpture. He is inside and outside the picture, exploding its illusion, his young face passionately engaging us.
John and Jerome, you notice, have elongated, spindly fingers; Jerome’s red hand is like a crab. Parmigianino deliberately distracts your eyes with such bizarreries, as if the painting is losing its reason. In fact 1520s Rome was in crisis. In 1527 the army of the Emperor Charles V attacked Rome and “sacked” it – a polite word for mass murder, looting, rape. Parmigianino hid this painting and fled the pope’s city, never to return.
The Vision of St Jerome proves that mannerism is not just a style. It is Renaissance art’s enthralling nervous breakdown.
•Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome is at the National Gallery, London, 5 December to 9 March
