Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome

The towering canvas is stupefying – not for nothing is it said that soldiers invading his studio during the sack of Rome were so amazed that they let Parmigianino continue painting. Here, too, we see his preparatory drawings, evidence of the artist toiling to achieve his masterpiece

Parmigianino. The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, 1526-7 (detail). Oil on poplar, 342.9 × 148.6 cm. © The National Gallery, London. Presented by the Directors of the British Institution, 1826.

The National Gallery, London 
5 December 2024 – 9 March 2025

by TOM DENMAN

The only time I have had an out-of-body experience, when I was 11 years old, I saw myself from above. I was lying on the grass, twisted on my side. I could see the ambulance beside me, along with the paramedics feeding me the minty gas that induced the hallucination. In what was the most extreme warping of the senses I have known, I was both on the ground and in the sky, in my body and outside it. In The National Gallery, in one of the smaller rooms to the side of the entrance hall, is a tall, thin painting that reminds me of this event in my own life, centuries after the work was made. Its proportions, compared with those of other altarpieces, make it appear as if vertically, virtually stretched, which is also the effect of the artist’s characteristic elongation and distortion of the figures it depicts. A white-bearded man writhes on the grass in the middle ground of a composition that corkscrews upwards. With one arm tossed behind his head, he is in the throes of a rapturous dream – brought on by the use of the scourge and crucifix in his opposite hand, the former typically used to thrash oneself, as a reminder of Christ’s suffering, and to deaden the flesh in order to release oneself from it and commune with the incorporeal spirit.

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola (1503-40), better known as Parmigianino after his birthplace of Parma in northern Italy, had come to Rome in 1524, in search of fame and fortune. Commissioned by a noble widow named Maria Bufalini for her husband’s burial chapel, Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome (1526-27), otherwise known as “The Vision of Saint Jerome”, was his most prestigious project yet. The immediate emotional register is one of stupefaction. The towering canvas overwhelms, practically assails the viewer. It is hard to contemplate this work; one is struck by it instead. I guess this is why Giorgio Vasari, writing in the mid-16th century, said that it “stupefied” the soldiers who – during what has come to be known as the Sack of Rome, when the armies of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, invaded the city – broke into Parmigianino’s studio; so much so that they allowed the 23-year-old painter to carry on working on it. Vasari might well have made up this story, but even as an embroidered response to the picture – or as a wonderfully imaginative piece of art writing – it makes plausible fiction.

Parmigianino. The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, 1526-7. Oil on poplar, 342.9 × 148.6 cm. © The National Gallery, London. Presented by the Directors of the British Institution, 1826.

A scantily clad, youthful man sets the painting in motion. He is John the Baptist, identifiable by his scraggy beard and long, crook-like reed cross. He kneels in the foreground, his whole body, sinuous and muscly, twisting upwards as he engages our attention with his white-rimmed eyes and flexed finger, pointing at the celestial realm above. The dreamer on the opposite bank of a stream can be recognised as Saint Jerome by the red cardinal’s hat beside him, set within the jaws of a human skull – typically a reminder of the mortality of all things on Earth, including his career as papal secretary, even if this latter was in the service of something believed to be transcendent and immortal. The Madonna and her son loom above the two men, upon a crescent moon that mirrors the curvature of the top of the canvas to suggest a distinct, spiritual sphere. The whole composition is blasted by colour: the luscious vegetation of the earthly lower half, Christ’s alabaster skin, the intense chiaroscuro of the clouds surrounding him and his mother and the explosion of light behind them.

Parmigianino. Study for a Composition of the Virgin and Christ Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome below (recto), 1526–7. Pen and brown ink, with brown wash, heightened with white (oxidised), over red chalk on paper, 25.8 × 15.6 cm. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The room is rather like a side chapel in a church, dedicated to the altarpiece, except instead of pews and sepulchres there are drawings, evidence of the artist toiling to achieve his aim – and this aim, it seems, always was to bowl us over. Parmigianino’s challenge is to maintain the composition’s energetic thrust from the lower level to the upper, without Jerome’s repose being in any way soporific. He intensifies the upsweep of John’s body, sometimes showing him with both arms aloft; sometimes having him face Jerome directly – which is too much like he is trying to wake him up, as if to snap him out of the very vision to which he is meant to be calling his attention. Sometimes John addresses the group above, but this cancels out the dialogue between the two saints, potentially giving the altarpiece the hieratical, lifeless composition Parmigianino is seeking to avoid. Three drawings focus only on Jerome, contorting him, making him more and more muscular – even exposing his genitals, as if searching the depths of his vitality – giving him a lively dynamism in spite of his apparent slumber.

Parmigianino. Figure study, 1525–7. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, with white gouache heightening, 21.6 x 24.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California. Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Of the few drawings pertaining to the altarpiece that survive, none matches the final, ingenious solution, one that is fitting to the title the work was given in the late 19th century (when it became recognised as “The Vision of Saint Jerome”). We see the scene through the eyes of Jerome who is experiencing ecstasy – synonymous with the experience of mystic visions and deriving from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside oneself.” John, who in the drawings addressed Jerome within the discrete realm of the picture, has now broken the fourth wall, which isn’t really the fourth wall any more because the whole scene extends beyond the picture, enveloping our viewing of it: John addresses us and we are Jerome, disembodied, stupefied. Rather than simply presenting the Madonna and Child according to a well-honed formula – a formula which, at the time of Martin Luther’s questioning of Catholicism’s use of such images, was a point of contention among Roman theologians – Parmigianino strengthens the vision’s realism by inserting it in an immersive, mystical narrative.

The painter’s love of optical distortion is epitomised in his iconic Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c1524), which he brought with him to Rome as an effective calling card, showing off his inventiveness to prospective patrons. In a 1974 poem dedicated to this self-portrait, the poet and art critic John Ashbery wrote: “The time of day or the density of the light / Adhering to the face keeps it / Lively and intact in a recurring wave / Of arrival.” The light in The Vision of Saint Jerome is not realistic enough to be compared to actual light, but Ashbery’s suggestion that an image’s vivacity might be held together by a “recurring wave of arrival” is resonant in the work’s undulating composition, which brings to mind the twists and turns of a Solomonic column: in Saint John’s forward lean, his front knee seeming to protrude from the picture, as he swivels his torso the other way; in Jerome’s endless writhing on the riverbank, which seems to float upwards like a magic drawbridge; in Christ’s forward step – his hovering foot parallel with John’s knee – counterposed by his elbow propped on his mother’s lap. It might be said that Parmigianino has relayed the convexity of the mirror in metaphysical terms.

Parmigianino. Drapery Study for the Madonna in the Vision of Saint Jerome; about 1526-7. Black and white chalks on laid paper, 23.2 x 16.1 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

It is a painting of thresholds, between wakefulness and sleep, body and spirit, sensible and ineffable, sacred and profane – in Christ’s sensuality, itself at the threshold of childhood and adolescence – this and that side of the stream, the world of the picture and the world of the people looking at it. And the picture’s enduring power is grounded in the way it takes us to what could be, for many of us, the most relatable threshold of all: between self and other. It bids that we step out of ourselves, out of our lives and our bodies. Beauty and wonderment are the fruits of our doing so, as well as a decentring of the self, and the opportunity to look at our existence as we know it – for many of us harried by professional worry – from an external and everchanging vantage point, up in the air.