Parmigianino (Le Parmesan) / La Vierge au long cou - Antea

Today I'm going to tell you a love story, or rather what I suppose to be a love story, what I think to be the desperate declaration of love of a young painter, full of talent but without any fortune, to the one who is going to haunt him for the rest of his life. Parmigianino, the Parmesan, and for the Mannerism, the Caravaggio, the Caravaggio will be a little later, for the Baroque, the most talented of all. He was 21 when he produced his first masterpiece, Autoportrait in a Convex Mirror, and 37 when he brutally died of an unknown cause, leaving unfinished his last painting, La Vierge au long coup, perhaps the most severe. In the meantime, he produced what I consider to be one of the two or three most beautiful paintings, or rather the most beautiful portrait of Italian Mannerism, La jeune femme au renard, dite Antea. Dite Antea because it would have been identified by some experts as being Antea, a very well-known Roman courtesan in Italy at that time. This assumption is ridiculous, in my humble opinion. First of all, look at this face. It's that of a very young girl, 14, 15 years old, barely. Look at these clothes afterwards. They are not those of a prostitute. This simplicity, sewn to the opposite of any ostentation, flamboyant the little nobility, even the great bourgeoisie. Parmigiano, hidden keys in all these paintings. Look at this unmeasured, anatomically unlikely shoulder, as if to signify that the burden of this young girl is very heavy for her. Also look at the toles of foxes placed on this shoulder, whose open mouth, just above the belly, and not to mention the sex, threatens you with its pointed teeth. Not a touch. The burden of this young girl is an arranged marriage. In a few days, a few weeks, tonight maybe, she will be taken without softness and without the shade of a feeling by the old beard to which her parents sold her against a particle, a piece of land, a minable extension of their fortune. Look again at this face, cut in two. The right half, in full light, reflects the joy of living, the confidence. But the left half, in the shade, reveals the anxiety, the uncertainty of the young girl. What will she be made of tomorrow? We do not know everything about the love life of Parmigiano. But I have the absolute intuition, What is this intuition based on? Well, it's simple. Several years after the young woman with the fox, or Antea, Antea, call her whatever you want, Parmigiano painted his last painting, probably the most famous, I have already said, the Virgin with the long neck. I have already said it here too. And there, emerging behind the Madonna, hidden in the middle of the angels, what a pretty Minoan, let's see this drawing, that of Antea, with exactly the same hairstyle, the same shade and the same light, on the half serene, half anxious face. I repeat, we do not know anything about the love life of Parmigiano. But, by throwing in a brilliant cry, a painting bridge between Antea and the Virgin with the long neck, he confides to us all the suffering of an impossible love, all the pain of the past life, to dream of a young girl promised, then deliver to another.