Looking into Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait.
Is Parmigianino’s famous Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror a “witty visual conceit, typical of its century” or a “troubling tête-à-tête, in which seeing means giving oneself over to hallucinations,” or even yet another variation on the beautiful youth Narcissus admiring his own reflection?1 Vasari had no doubt that the self-portrait was a cosa rare (rare thing) which was achieved by a special dispensation to a turner to make “a ball of wood” divide it in half in order “ to make it the same shape and size as the mirror” all of which Vasari sees as a form of counterfeiting (contrafare per suo capriccio). Vasari goes on to say: “Now everything that is near the mirror is magnified, and all that is at a distance is diminished, and thus he made the hand engaged in drawing somewhat large, as the mirror showed it, and so marvellous that it seemed to be his very own.”2 Vasari characterised Parmigianino’s counterfeiting as as a way of amusing himself; but other commentators see a more darker motivation in which Narcissus borders on the megalomaniacal invoking Vasari’s statement that Parmigianino died a madman, “a wild and melancholic mind.”3 Whilst there is certainly a sinister undercurrent in this self-portrait we should guard against interpreting it in the light of Vasari’s Lives since he distorted the facts to suit his own view of the artists.
1Respectively, Cecil Gould, Parmigianino, (Abbeville Press, 1994), 53; Bonnet, The Mirror, 226; Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 136.
2Vasari, “Life of Parmigianino” quoted in Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 133.
3Bonnet, The Mirror, 226.
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