Seated Virgin Reading with the Christ Child and the Infant St John

Author: Surya Stemerding

Harprath (1971) recognized this sheet as an early preliminary study for Parmigianino’s most famous work, the Madonna with the Long Neck, now in the Uffizi (fig.). He painted it in 1534-35 for Elena Baiardi Tagliaferri as an altarpiece for her family chapel in Santa Maria dei Servi in Parma. Although the contract of 1534 stipulated that the artist would complete the painting within five months, it was not installed in the chapel until after his death. It was almost finished at that time, with just a few areas in the background left incomplete.^[1]

It can be seen from the fifty surviving preliminary studies how the remarkable composition of this exceptional altarpiece slowly but surely took on its eventual form.^[2] From a symmetrical visual arrangement borrowed from conventional sacra conversazione scenes, Parmigianino developed his own composition step by step, with many variations in both the placement and make-up of the figure group in the foreground and in the architectural background. This resulted in the extraordinarily original frontal elegance of the Virgin, with an unusually large Christ Child asleep on her lap. There is little still to be seen of that end result in the Rotterdam drawing, although the artist has already started on an initial design for the colonnade. The seated Virgin is turned to the right with her head in profile as she reads a book she holds up in front of her. The young John the Baptist with the lamb is seated at her feet. He is present in most of the following preliminary studies, and was only abandoned towards the end of the design process. In front of and between the background columns are two figures who are probably Sts Francis and Jerome. They occupy prominent positions in all the other design variants. The Christ Child is depicted beside the Virgin in each early stage of the design. It was only late in the process that Parmigianino experimented with the reclining Christ on his mother’s lap in a prefiguration of the Lamentation after his death on the Cross.

It is clear that the Rotterdam drawing has a place in the long series of design studies from its affinity with two other early studies that are now in Parma and Venice.^[3] The former is the only other drawing in which the Virgin is holding a book, and is regarded as preceding the Rotterdam study. There she is still frontal, and the architectural background is missing. A drawing on the back of the Venice sheet is the earliest to have background columns.^[4] The close relationship of the Rotterdam drawing to the Parma sheet is apparent from the block on which the Virgin is seated and the Child’s pose, with one small foot on the large block and the other on his mother’s lap. The reclining saint in the background of the Rotterdam drawing is more prominent in the Parma sheet. Grant Lewis has observed that the Rotterdam drawing is the only study for the painting in which the light enters from the right and, curiously, John the Baptist is lit from the other direction.^[5]

The drawing itself is a small, irregularly cropped fragment laid down on a slightly larger sheet prior to the addition of the Virgin’s head above the eyebrows. Ragghianti Collobi (1972) believed that he recognized the hand of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in this, and suggested that the drawing was once part of his Libro de’ Disegni. The crude sketch on the back of the secondary sheet was added by another draughtsman.