Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (c1523-24), Parmigianino
Fri 17 Jan 2003 19.50 EST First published on Fri 17 Jan 2003 19.50 EST
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Artist: Il Parmigianino (1503-1540), real name Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, who got his nickname from his home town, Parma. According to his 16th-century biographer Vasari, Parmigianino threw away his talent because he became obsessed by alchemy. It is a cautionary tale. Parmigianino was recognised as a prodigy when young; arriving in Rome with this self-portrait as a calling card, he was immediately given papal commissions. Vasari compares him, in ability, looks and personality, to Raphael. The other model he emulated in his stylistic innovations - stretched bodies, dramatic distortions, psychological introspection - was Michelangelo. But he was unlucky enough to be making his name in Rome when the city was sacked in 1527; he fled.
Eventually Parmigianino returned to Parma a star, and was awarded an important fresco commission. But his fascination with alchemy was absorbing his money and time. He was sued for not fulfilling his fresco contract; he descended into melancholy and became anti-social. It was because of this mental collapse, Vasari implies, that he succumbed to a fever at the age of 37.
Parmigianino, Vasari suggests, might have been one of the greatest artists. As it is, he is remembered as one of the outstanding figures in the Michelangelo-influenced, anti-classical, emotional manner of 16th-century painting, exemplified by The Madonna of the Long Neck, found in his studio after his death.
Subject: "In order to investigate the subtleties of art," reports Vasari, "he set himself one day to make his own portrait, looking at himself in a convex barber's mirror."
Distinguishing features: This painting stunned Renaissance Italy. It shows the artist at the age of about 21, romantic, his unkempt face unmanly, even feminine. It emphasises the fantastic nature of his talent, of his right hand that draws and makes a world. As a celebration of the artist as a young man, it has much in common with self-portraits by Dürer and Raphael: the painter looks at us, at the mirror, boldly - this is the artist as hero. But what makes the painting unique is its gimmick. Spectacularly, Parmigianino has not only studied himself in a convex mirror but reproduced what he sees.
The painting is not on a flat canvas but on a section of a wooden sphere that reproduces the shape of a convex mirror. Vasari says Parmigianino got a woodworker to construct it to the exact dimensions of the glass he used to paint the self-portrait. In it, we see a world as freakish as Parmigianino's huge right hand - the hand that creates this world and dominates the room, whose window and ceiling have become rounded and spiralling. The theatre of Renaissance perspective space has been replaced here with a mad, mannerist cinema.
In painting the mirror, rather than subsuming its visual information into a more generalised, ideal self-image, Parmigianino makes a radical statement about what art is, what it can do, about the nature of the world. Italian art of the 15th century was entranced by the orderly, coherent space it was possible to map on a flat canvas using single-point perspective. But Parmigianino sees reality - specifically, his own reality, as he is this painting's subject - as chaotic, shifting, distorted and, as Vasari says of this painting, "bizarre". This is a painting that flirts with the monstrous, the unruly and the occult.
Inspirations and influences: Caravaggio's Medusa (c1598) is another painting exploiting a convex surface - this time a shield - to stunning effect.
Where is it? Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna