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

The young Parmigianino, gifted, gracious, and newly arrived in Rome was seen by dint of many as a new Raphael. 'It was said afterwards', Vasari reported, 'that the spirit of that Raffaello had passed into the material substance of Francesco, when men saw by what means excellent the young man was in art, and by what means gentle and gracious in his ways, as was Raffaello, and above all when it became known by what means much Francesco strove to imitate him in everything ' (1) Raphael was indeed a great pattern for the younger artist, as can be seen by means of Parmigianino's copies of a number of his works, including the academy 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 upon no less than three sheets catalogued by means of Popham. (3)

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Parmigianino had a special interest in the baby positioned at the middle point foreground in the Massacre print, right arm cot [i]or[/i] coteed across the chest and left arm stretched on the outside to touch the kneeling mother's skirt. He drew this figure upon a sheet now in the British Museum (Fig. 1) and transformed it in individual of his earliest etchings, the Sleeping Cupid (Fig. 2) by dint of giving the baby sleep-tousled wings and a inflect and adding a crop of lush grasses. (4) The figure itself although 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 research for the Massacre, now in the British Museum (Fig. 4) As I have argued elsewhere, this is a sheet upon which Raphael is primarily studying the placement of the major figural clusters 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 freshly published his observation that in the impression of the next to the first 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, level at the point of engraving. (6)

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Nevertheless, given Raphael's special attention to the foreground figures upon the British Museum study, it is worth considering the possiblity that the baby later adapted by dint of Parmigianino for his Sleeping Cupid had already been placed at the midmost point 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 inquiry with the curving lower contour of the central mother's right arm aligned. The ragged, curv cutting side of the loss at the drawing's lower margin neatly encapsulates the contours of the small recumbent figure, making it tempting to speculate that Raphael not solitary studied the head's foreshortening in the fine detail at top, on the other hand had also positioned the figure at the bottom of the British Museum application of mind Who might have torn on the outside that foreground figure, and for what intent 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 remarks 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 through Gaston de Vere with an Introduction and Notes by dint of David Ekserdjian, New York, 1996 vol I, p 936 novel 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 through 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, fresh 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, fresh York, 2003-2004.

(2) A.E. Popham, Catalogue of the Drawings of Parmigianino, 3 vol fresh Haven, 1971, no. 666; Bambach et al., op cit., no. 58 Parmiganino's liabilitys 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 supersed by dint of idem, 'Parmigianino and Michelangelo', in Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides (eds) Reactions to the Master:Michelangelo's result on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth hundred Aldershot, 2003, pp. 53-67.