ABSTRACT
Vasari vividly describes how Parmigianino, once gentle in appearance, turned into a bearded savage with long unruly hair, wasting time over alchemical furnaces when he should instead have been racking his brains to devise beautiful inventions for his brush. The most notorious episode involves the decoration in the church of S. Maria della Steccata in Parma. The details of Parmigianino’s ill-fated commission to decorate S. Maria della Steccata are amply documented. The interstices of the Steccata vault presented a challenge for Parmigianino to display his inventive skill, his ideas evolving slowly over the course of an elaborate design process. The preparatory designs for the Steccata maidens cannot be placed in any definitive chronological sequence but bespeak nonetheless the ongoing efforts of Parmigianino’s pen to describe and perfect his beautiful inventions. The verse testifies to Parmigianino’s interest in Petrarchan poetry and provides an interpretative framework with which to understand better the Steccata project.
