My Kid Could Paint That

Parmigianino, Madonna with Long Neck, 1540

This piece of work was unusual by the elongated figures in the painting. Madonna with the Long Neck is also known as Madonna and Child with Angels and St Jerome.  Many critics have analyzed Parmigianino’s Madonna with Long Neck  and called it controversial. Madonna is seated on a high standing pedestal. She’s holding the baby Jesus on her lap while clothed in beautiful looking robes. In the left of the picture, four angels crowd around the Madonna, looking peacefully on Christ.

Unlike other paintings of the Madonna, Parmigianino’s shows movement and a sense of abandon. The posture of the Madonna is carefree and relaxed. The Madonna does not have normal human body proportions. Her neck, shoulders, and fingers have all been elongated. Which makes them appear more elegant and graceful. The person viewing the painting is forced to look all around the painting because of every persons disproportional body. Even the architecture around the Madonna is out of proportion with the column that has no supporting structures behind it.

Parmigianino, Madonna With Long Neck, 1534

Madonna With Long Neck, along with a few other equally dimensionally-confusing and anatomically-impossible paintings illustrate Mannerism perfectly. In Fleming's Arts and Ideas, Mannerism is summed up by the phrase "nothing new, no one great." The giants who were Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello (oh, I missed a turtle?) and da Vinci were gone, and the freshman painters who were left weren't too keen to follow those acts.

So what did they do instead? They painted biblical scenes, like this one, with a twist (or better, a tug). Here, Parmigianino overemphasizes the leg of the angel, the torso and upper leg of the Christ child, and, like the title gives away, Madonna's long neck. The exaggeration of limbs was a popular photoshop effect, as painters thought it increased the beauty of the body part being emphasized.

What do I think? I think this painting's been skewed just a liiiiitttlllee too much, leaving each figure too slim and too long. I think the column that's supposed to parallel Madonna's neck and give the vertical line rhythm is too far to the left, smooshing those poor angels into the corner. That was another characteristic of Mannerism, off-center subjects. Some paintings do it well, but this one, not so much.

And can we talk about the miniature person in the bottom right-hand corner? What is he even doing there? Well, it turns out, he was supposed to have company. Notice the disembodied foot next to the little guy, there was supposed to be at least one other figure there. Another clue to the painting's unfinished state is the row of painted bases for more columns directly behind our bite-sized prophet. If those columns had been finished, and the swirling blue skyscape behind it, I probably wouldn't cringe at this painting so much. The columns would increase depth and create a downward-sloping, three-dimensional chevron stretching from the angel's fingers in the top left corner, to Madonna's shiny knee, and out into the void aided by those hypothetical columns. The composition would feel more angel-friendly, at the least.

Although I still think that column is too short...