Parmigianino and Raphael: a note on the foreground baby from the Massacre of the Innocents

Apollo, Jan, 2004 by Lisa Pon

The young Parmigianino, gifted, gracious, and newly arrived in Rome, was seen by many as a new Raphael. 'It was said afterwards', Vasari reported, 'that the spirit of that Raffaello had passed into the body of Francesco, when men saw how excellent the young man was in art, and how gentle and gracious in his ways, as was Raffaello, and above all when it became known how much Francesco strove to imitate him in everything ...' (1) Raphael was indeed a great model for the younger artist, as can be seen by Parmigianino's copies of a number of his works, including the School of Athens. (2) He also closely studied engravings the Urbinate made in collaboration with Marcantonio Raimondi, especially the Massacre of the Innocents (Fig. 3): Parmigianino drew motifs from this composition on no less than three sheets catalogued by Popham. (3)

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Parmigianino had a special interest in the baby positioned at the centre foreground in the Massacre print, right arm folded across the chest and left arm stretched out to touch the kneeling mother's skirt. He drew this figure on a sheet now in the British Museum (Fig. 1), and transformed it in one of his earliest etchings, the Sleeping Cupid (Fig. 2), by giving the baby sleep-tousled wings and a bow, and adding a crop of lush grasses. (4) The figure itself though, with its extreme forshortening of the head, is taken directly--albeit in reverse--from the foreground baby in the Massacre.

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Raphael had sketched that baby's for-shortened head at the top of the earliest surviving compositional study for the Massacre, now in the British Museum (Fig. 4). As I have argued elsewhere, this is a sheet on which Raphael is primarily studying the placement of the major figural groups across the foreground, particularly the exact positions of the fleeing mother and soldier in pursuit at the right. (5) Other figures and architecture in the background came later. Philippe Rouillard has recently published his observation that in the impression of the second state of the Massacre with the fir tree now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, there are pentimenti of the feet of the foreshortened baby, indicating that its exact position had not been fixed, even at the point of engraving. (6)

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Nevertheless, given Raphael's special attention to the foreground figures on the British Museum study, it is worth considering the possiblity that the baby later adapted by Parmigianino for his Sleeping Cupid had already been placed at the centre foreground of the Massacre composition. Fig. 5 is a detail from the digital superimposition of the engraved Massacre of the Innocents with the fir tree and the British Museum study, with the curving lower contour of the central mother's right arm aligned. The ragged, curved edge of the loss at the drawing's lower margin neatly encapsulates the contours of the small prone figure, making it tempting to speculate that Raphael not only studied the head's foreshortening in the fine detail at top, but had also positioned the figure at the bottom of the British Museum study. Who might have torn out that foreground figure, and for what purpose, cannot now be determined.

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This note derives from my presentation at the Raphael Symposium that took place at the National Gallery in 2002, and I am grateful to the other participants for their helpful comments and suggestions. A particular thankyou to Hugo Chapman for granting me special access to works at the British Museum, and also to Bryony Wicks for invaluable bibliographic assistance.

(1) Giorgio Vasari, Lives of Ne Painters, Sculptors and Architects, translated by Gaston de Vere with an Introduction and Notes by David Ekserdjian, New York, 1996, vol. I, p. 936. Recent important additions to the Parmigianino literature include Lucia Fornari Schianchi and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (eds.), Parmigianino e il Manierismo Europeo, exh. cat., Galleria Nazionale, Parma, and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2003; the symposium essays edited by Lucia Fornari Schianchi and published in conjunction with the same exhibition; Carmen Bambach, Hugo Chapman, Martin Clayton, George Goldner, Correggio and Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the Renaissance, exh. cat., British Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001; Sylvie Beguin, Mario di Giampaolo, and Mary Vaccaro, Parmigianino: I Disegni, Turin, 2001; and David Franklin, The Art of Parmigianino exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Frick Collection, New York, 2003-2004.

(2) A.E. Popham, Catalogue of the Drawings of Parmigianino, 3 vols., New Haven, 1971, no. 666; Bambach et al., op. cit., no. 58. Parmiganino's debts to other artists have been studied in ibid., pp. 18-20, 78-80, and David Ekserdjian, 'Parmigianino and Michelangelo, Master Drawings, vol. XXXI, 1993, pp. 390-94, which is superseded by idem, 'Parmigianino and Michelangelo', in Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides (eds.), Reactions to the Master:Michelangelo's Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century, Aldershot, 2003, pp. 53-67.