Standing in front of ‘The Vision of Saint Jerome’ is like slipping down a water slide. The most important painting by sixteenth century Italian maestro Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, aka Parmigianino, is an exercise in sinuous, surreal psychedelia, and it’s stunning.
He painted it at just 23, a commission for a nobleman’s burial chapel. John the Baptist kneels before you at the bottom of the altarpiece, dressed – though barely – in furs. He’s twisting his body, his impossibly long limbs and fingers, to point you towards the scene at the apex. There, the Virgin Mary and Christ child – both monumentally huge – perch on a crescent moon, lit by blinding rays of sunlight. You are dwarfed by the painting, the colossal figures; the looming, circuitous composition not only dominates you, but forces you to follow its curving course. It forces your line of sight to spiral upwards, towards the heavens. Incredible.
But there in the foreground, a man lies, seemingly asleep in a densely overgrown forest, cradling a crucifix, a cracked skull at his feet. This is Saint Jerome, but is he dreaming? Is this whole scene a vision? A figment of his imagination?
History seems to have lost the answers to that question. But that sense of mystery only adds to the genuinely imposing, moving power of the painting. Newly conserved and re-framed, and flanked by excellent preparatory sketches, this painting is one of the UK’s most mesmerising works of renaissance art. I’m no Christian, but in all Parmigianino’s dazzling artistry I almost saw the light.
