Parmigianino's Antea: A Beautiful Artifice
An Exhibition Review by Beth Gersh-Nesic
Girolamo Francesco Marie Mazzola,
known as Parmigianino (Italian 1503-1540)
Antea, ca.1531-1534
Oil on canvas
136 x 86 cm
© Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
Antea, Antea, Antea—so beautiful, so mysterious, so strange. With your child-like face and womanly body, you seem to be a distorted reflection in a warped mirror—out of proportion not by accident but by design. Your head is too small, your body is too large, your right shoulder is too wide and your skirt billows out on the left side inexplicably. And the dead marten draped just above your puffy right sleeve gives me a fright. (This furry talisman may be a magical fertility charm in some books, but those spiky teeth say something nasty to me.)
Who are you, Antea? Are you a bride, the artist's mistress, a serving girl or a celebrated courtesan? The Frick Collection's Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Christina Neilson, has ably assembled all these theories and dismantled each one, concluding at the end of her exquisitely illustrated catalogue essay that Antea may not be a "who" but a "what." Here is the story:
Was Antea a bride, for her exceedingly elaborate trappings parallel those found in portraits of the betrothed who display their wealthy backgrounds, luxurious trousseaux and socio-political connections? Probably not. Although Neilson points to similarities in other bridal portraits, she also explains that courtesan portraits often include the same iconography. The sumptuousness of this beauty's attire and jewels, especially the necklace she fingers near her heart and slightly exposed breast, most likely appeal to erotic fantasies and not material matrimonial transactions. The marten, too, sometimes seen adorning proud mothers surrounded by several children (as in Parmigianino's Portrait of Camilla Gonzaga, Countess of San Secondo, with Three Sons, ca. 1538-39), may also refer to the softness of a woman's sex compromised by its potential danger.
Was Antea a servant, because she wears a white apron on her golden dress? No, the elaborate auxiliary front panel was fashionable at the time.
Was she a lover? Not substantiated. In 1671, Giacomo Barri, a painter and printmaker, identified the sitter in his written records The Painter's Voyage of Italy (after he had seen the painting in the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma) as the lover of the artist and as a well-known sixteenth-century Roman courtesan. This identification was repeated in the Palazzo's inventory around 1680. Neilson doubts the accuracy of this attribution because it lacks adequate corroboration.
Instead of hunting for a definitive identity, Neilson veers off this tantalizing path to nowhere and comfortably leads the reader instead into the world of Renaissance conceptual thinking—the preference for the ideal, perfection and platonic visualization. This platonic take on reality, Neilson convincingly argues, may indicate that Parmigianino's Antea may not portray a known human being, but an idea that "invites us to dwell on the nature of love, desire and art," bodied forth as an enigma, a visual riddle and a splendid device.
Girolamo Francesco Marie Mazzola, better known as the little fellow from Parma ("Parmigianino"), was born in 1503 and died in Casalmaggiore at the age of 37. Celebrated early on for his altarpieces and frescos, he was active in his native Parma as well as Bologna, Florence and Rome. At the end of his life, he investigated alchemy. Some sources emphasize this obsession, but that may be overstated. Above all, Parmigianino was a major contributor to Mannerism, an intellectual movement that challenged Renaissance perfection with its weird colors, proportions and compositions.
In her catalogue essay, Neilson provides ample evidence to facilitate an appreciation of major influences on Parmigianino's work as well as the artist's own originality. Parmigianino owed a good deal to the great High Renaissance artists Raphael (1483-1520), Correggio (1489-1534) and Titian (1485-1576). Neilson's research also decodes and qualifies the meaning of objects in Renaissance art, thankfully pointing out that iconography can vary in different contexts.
Parmigianino's Self-Portrait (ca. 1524) may be familiar to today's students of art history. Its Raphaelesque elegance meets distortion in a depiction of the artist's face reflected in a concave mirror. The small, round oil on panel records the young artist's features framed by a page-boy haircut as disproportionately small in size in comparison to his enormous hand which dominates the foreground. A play on reality versus perception, this self-portrait prepares us to contemplate Antea as other than a faithful rendition.
Therefore, Antea should not be received as the likeness of a specific woman but as the embodiment of the ideal, a category Neilson describes as "a subject whose identity was not unknown, but unimportant." Antea testified to the skill of the painter in competition with the skill of the poet, a challenge set down by the Renaissance poet Petrarch and then repeated in a sonnet by Andrea Baiardi, father of Francesco Baiardi, the original owner of Antea.
While I agree with Christine Neilson's conclusion that Antea is about the idea of desire, I was disappointed to learn very little more about the Mannerists' strategy which disrupts the contemplation of perfection in High Renaissance art through exaggeration, strange juxtapositions, weird colors and odd spatial relationships. These jarring devices, such as Antea's longer right shoulder or odd expanse on the lower right side of dress (as we face it) which Neilson reads as a sign of rotation in mid-motion, remind the viewer of the Mannerist artist's self-consciousness as he creates art that is about art itself.
To my mind, Antea's distortions signify the artist's invention of another reality. Cyber avatars have nothing on this conceptualizing of existence in metaspace—they're just virtually hooking up and shopping! With Antea, we meet up with the nature of desire and it is breathtaking with a bracing bite.
"Parmigianino's Antea: A Beautiful Artifice" is on view from January 29 through April 27, 2008 at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street near Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10021 (Telephone: 212-288-0700; Website). The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is $15.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens, $5.00 for students and "pay as you wish" on Sundays from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Please note: Children under ten are not admitted to the Collection, and those under sixteen must be accompanied by an adult.
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From your Guide: Beth Gersh-Nesic, is an art history professor, author, art critic and the director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service which offers tours, lectures and workshops in various venues, including museums, galleries, artists' studios and arts organizations.
