Bishop Saint in Bust-Length (Cartoon for an Altarpiece)

Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This boldly executed drawing is the only extant cartoon (full-scale drawing) on a monumental scale that can be definitively assigned to Parmigianino. One of the great masters of Italian Mannerism, Parmigianino was born and trained in Parma and worked in Rome and Bologna in the 1520s before returning to his native city. In size and design, the present drawing is close to the broadly painted bishop saint praying at left in the artist’s Madonna of Saint Margaret, originally painted in 1529–30 for the convent church of Santa Margherita, Bologna, and now in the local Pinacoteca Nazionale. Here, Parmigianino’s rapid brushwork with wash is similar to that in his mature oil paintings. The motif of the flamelike praying hands lit from below is among the most distinctive of his stylistic devices. (Carmen C. Bambach, 2001, revised 2014)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art