Previous articleNext article FreeParmigianino’s BitchJames Grantham TurnerJames Grantham TurnerUniversity of California, Berkeley, USA Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDavid Ekserdjian rightly drew our attention to the erotic, sometimes openly genital element in the drawings of Parmigianino (Francesco Mazz[u]ola, 1503–40), in a pioneering 1999 article and in his 2006 monograph, and since then important examples from private collections have seen the light in exhibitions.1 Eroticism seems an intrinsic part of that artist’s vitality and inventiveness, an intuition already expressed by the fictional Pietro Aretino in Lodovico Dolce’s 1557 dialogue on painting: Parmigianino “gave his creations a certain loveliness [vaghezza] which makes whoever looks at them fall in love with them [inamorare]”; moreover, this is especially true of his drawings, “every one of which brings astonishment to the eyes of the beholder.”2 I will argue here that the same distinctive combination of astonishment and amorous response characterizes a drawing not normally grouped with Parmigianino’s better-known erotica. In an earlier work I explored the “eros of drawing” in Parmigianino, the “mischievous sexual impulse” that erupts not only in scenes from classical mythology (Priapus and Lotis, Jupiter and Antiope, Mars and Venus) but in spontaneous nude studies where, as the bodies pile up or press closer together on the sheet, they “grow” a furtive caress, an open vulva, or a startling erection. The studio context is often captured in these “backstage” drawings, which may show recognizable, individuated apprentices (garzoni) relaxing after modeling a pose and indulging in lewd gestures.3In addition to these moments of titillation recorded in (and for) the studio, Parmigianino occasionally depicts the aroused couple, notably in his drawings and etching titled Seated Lovers (where the woman’s elongated hand fondles, and conceals, the man’s genitals) and in two drawings after one of the Giulio Romano–Marcantonio Raimondi Modi, to which he has added his own distinctive twist.4 Ironically, Parmigianino’s version of backward seated intercourse is more erotic but less explicit than Giulio’s original. The Modi prototype shows part of the erect penis where the drawings show only buttocks brushing against thighs, but the figures themselves—now apparently both male—express more tenderness; in the Budapest variant the younger interrupts the business of intercourse and spirals around to kiss his partner passionately, revealing more of his slender buttocks, long back, and push-up shoulders (recognizable in other drawings after this garzone). Aspects of this seated couple recombine in the heterosexual Lovers.I propose that another scene of unorthodox mutual gratification can be added to this loose canon (fig. 1). Hugo Chapman refers to this Louvre drawing as a “memorable study … of a dog attaching itself in an amorous fashion to the leg of a young man.” Other scholars, evidently not dog owners, describe the youth as “running,” or “removing,” “fleeing,” and “fending off” the animal; in the words of the Louvre’s own title, this is a “Young boy pushing away a dog who mounts on his leg” (Jeune garçon repoussant un chien qui lui monte sur la jambe).5 Though his leg is certainly being mounted in the sexual sense, he is not a boy but a relatively mature apprentice/garzone, with luxuriant curls, distinctive large cheekbones, full lips, long straight nose, high-set eyes, heavy lids, and emphatic semicircular brows. Nor is this “a dog,” as her loose teats can be seen against the young man’s calf. As in the Modi drawings, the conventional male/female distinction has been blurred, though it is in fact quite common for bitches as well as neutered dogs to adopt the male position when copulating with cushions, fur coats, and human legs.Figure 1. Parmigianino, Pet Bitch Making Love to Studio Assistant, 1530s? Pen and red-brown ink over gray-brown ink; cut down to 7⅜ × 4½ in. (18.7 × 11.2 cm). Paris, Louvre.Comparison with other drawings shows that both human and animal have been precisely individuated. Parmigianino depicts the same assistant grinding colors in a vivid red-chalk drawing now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, while similar hyacinthine locks and aquiline profile can be seen in a Chatsworth drawing for which he probably modeled.6 As for the bitch herself, two other portraits of this proud animal are known, though not always recognized as such. All three of these drawings record her peculiar mix of hauteur and absurdity, together with a slight mismatch between the ample barrel-like body and the bony, underscaled rear legs. In another Louvre sketch she is depicted from behind, her back still slightly humped, with a hangdog expression that could be read as embarrassment (fig. 2). Foreshortening emphasizes the scrawny rear, but the sideways turn of the head suggests an incipient move to establish eye contact with the viewer behind her—a canine version of the over-the-shoulder look in Parmigianino’s better-known Cupid Carving His Bow.7 The posture is chosen to reveal her apparent hermaphroditism, with full nipples and a vulva so distended that it hangs down like testicles: the over-short cropped tail (identical to that in fig. 1) is juxtaposed to that over-long appendage as an anatomical curiosity.Figure 2. Parmigianino, Pet Bitch Viewed from the Rear, 1530s? Pen and gray-brown ink; 5¼ × 6¾ in. (13.3 × 17.2 cm). Paris, Louvre.The same features appear in a magnificent double portrait with a man long thought to be Parmigianino himself; though that identification is disputed, there can be no doubt that the animal is the same, since the distended genital is again on display (fig. 3).8 Grotesqueness is here neutralized by grave and affectionate humor. Unlike the first two drawings presented here, this one has received acute attention. The large and perhaps pregnant belly, held vertically to display the dugs, has been linked to the Diana of Ephesus and therefore to the fertility of the artist’s invention, while the serious facial expression shared by the bitch and her handler has been interpreted as creative melancholia. Maria Loh, though accepting the self-portrait theory without question, analyzes “the insistent juxtaposition of the two faces and bodies” most perceptively: drawing on contemporary physiognomists, she proves that this specific breed of hound was celebrated for nobility and wisdom, and brilliantly interprets “the melding of the painter’s hands with the dog’s mitts at the heart of the image” and the parallels of the two heads gazing off to the right (“even the floppy cap on the man’s head drops down on the back of his head like the dog’s ears”). To this I would add that the bitch’s unusually pale eye, like that of a Weimaraner, exactly matches the man’s left eye. Loh also makes the connection to the “humping” scene (fig. 1), recognizing the same pet in both, and hinting that the ductus graphicus itself enacts a happy conjunction “as the two figures merge together in a field of ink lines.” Loh sells her own argument short, however, when she asserts that the youth “turns around to push the animal off his body” and adopts the Louvre’s inaccurate caption, “Young Boy Pushing Back a Dog Who Is Jumping on the Boy’s Leg.”9Figure 3. Parmigianino, Pet Bitch Held Upright by a Seated Man (the Artist?), 1530s? Pen and brown ink on foxed paper; 12 × 8 in. (30.4 × 20.3 cm). London, British Museum.Remarkably, figure 3 is Parmigianino’s only full-length portrait in the grand manner; even the Emperor Charles V and the beloved “Antea” receive only three-quarter-length treatment. The man’s seated posture limits him to a sturdy supporting role, but the lady rises to the occasion. The forepaws dangle with the right aristocratic nonchalance, and the rear legs, if a little short in proportion, are nonetheless placed with a hint of balletic elegance, one slightly in front of the other. The imperturbable dignity of this bitch-princess, her head held high and gazing into the distance with a noble, philosophical expression, recurs even when she is caught in the act of mounting the garzone’s calf. The front legs are still elegantly limp-wristed as they grip the young man’s knee to tighten the embrace. The rear legs are still placed in a dance-like step, so that they frame the hanging foot of her partner.A number of Parmigiano’s impromptu sex-themed drawings have been altered by later pen-strokes or erasures, in an attempt to make them more decent. In a subtler way, the same is true of this leg-mounting drawing (fig. 1). It was constructed in two distinct stages, the heavier inking added in the interests of modesty. The model was originally nude, not “fleeing” but striking an elegant walking-and-turning pose frequently used by Parmigianino; one leg remains vertical and firmly braced, back and arms pivot to form various attractive contrappostos, while the trailing leg is lifted to suggest purposeful motion. Ganymede, Saint Christopher, a huntsman approaching the death scene of Actaeon, a servant carrying a dead hare, an excited bystander—the garzone could have been interrupted while posing for any of these compositions.10 And the alluring pose might have filled others with the impulse acted out by the hound. The model’s shapely buttocks and smooth back can be clearly seen under the thicker and redder pen-strokes that denote breeches and waistband, while on the left side, above and below the intimately placed muzzle that savors the young man’s crotch, the artist has not even attempted to render fabric. The garzone’s right hand rests lightly on the pet’s head, with no indication of fending off, pushing away, or repoussant in either sense. His leg is lifted to accommodate her, not to run away. His hooded eyes and seraphic smile express contented indulgence rather than repulsion, irritation, or embarrassment (common feelings when dogs mate with legs in company, though some owners now make videos to post on YouTube). And his left hand? Under a somewhat half-hearted cover of vertical hatching it can be clearly made out, the thumb on the left and the forefinger on the right, curling round a bulbous oval protrusion. Too large to be part of the hand itself, we see here another tumid erection, captured in drawing for the ribald delight of the whole studio—and of future collectors including Vasari and the kings of France.11In Lodovico Dolce’s terms, the core response to Parmigianino’s drawings combined inamorare or “amorous attachment” and an equally agreeable “astonishment.” In these scenes from the life of a favorite studio mascot, that effect is also the subject. In figure 1 the amorous is depicted as mutual, shared by two persons in the familiar setting of the workshop. Yet they are of different species, and—perhaps even more surprisingly—they both adopt a role contrary to their natural or assigned gender, confusing male and female, active and passive.Notes1. David Ekserdjian, “Unpublished Drawings by Parmigianino: Towards a Supplement to Popham’s Catalogue Raisonné,” Apollo 150, no. 450 (August 1999): 3–41; David Ekserdjian, Parmigianino (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), chap. 4 (“Mythology and Eroticism”); Andrea Bayer et al., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), no. 96; Barbara Furlotti, Guido Rebecchini, and Linda Wolk-Simon, Giulio Romano: Arte e desiderio/Art and Desire in the Renaissance, exh. cat. (Mantua: Palazzo Te; Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2019), no. 21.2. Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (1968; repr., Toronto: Renaissance Society of America, 2000), 182.3. James Grantham Turner, Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 57, 84–85, 174–91, 284–85, 293–97, 296–97, 311–12, 357–58, 438n131, figs 1.24, 1.43, 3.41–55, 6.7, 6.11, 6.15–16, 6.29–30, 7.35–37.4. Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, 110, 224–26; one drawing after Modi 10 was first published in Ekserdjian, “Unpublished Drawings,” 38–39 (but not exhibited until 2019 in Mantua [see n. 1 above] as “Paris, private collection”), another in Zoltán Kárpáti, The Alchemy of Beauty: Parmigianino Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. (Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), no. 20.5. Hugo Chapman in British Museum curators’ comments on no. 1858,0724.6 (fig. 3); Achim Gnann, Parmigianino: die Zeichnungen (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2007), 88 (“abzustreifen”), cat. no. 188 (“Laufender Junge”); Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, 184; Louvre, curators’ comments on inv 6474r (fig. 1); Dennis Geronimus, “Northern Exposure: Pontormo, Dürer and the Humor of the Body,” in Rire en images à la Renaissance, ed. Francesca Alberti and Diane H. Bodart (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 392–93 (recognizes “quite possibly the same dog” as in fig. 3, “seemingly a regular presence in Parmigianino’s studio,” but assumes the garzone is “caught in the awkward predicament of attempting to extricate himself”).6. V&A museum no. D.989-1900, and compare Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings (London: Phaidon, 1994), no. 723. Gnann, Parmigianino, cat. no. 990 (following A. E. Popham, Catalogue of the Drawings of Parmigianino [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971], no. 272), links the color-grinding assistant to the Chatsworth study but not to this bitch scene.7. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (made for the libertine connoisseur Francesco Baiardo, who presumably would have appreciated the hound drawings too). The identifying features of the bitch in my figs. 1–3 have not been examined hitherto; Popham remarks that fig. 2 (Louvre inv 6449; Catalogue, cat. no. 429) shows “perhaps the same animal as that in the London drawing” (my emphasis), but most scholars refer each image generically to Parmigianino’s affection for animals or to hounds of a quite different species in earlier drawings and frescoes (e.g., Gnann, Parmigianino, 88, cat. no. 187).8. Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, 184, asserts that this cannot be a self-portrait (contrary to the inscription by a sixteenth-century hand). Gnann, Parmigianino, 88, gives more detailed reasons for doubting the resemblance, but without addressing the positive evidence in Popham, Catalogue, cat. no. 256. The main problem is that the forehead in fig. 3 is high (as also in the profile woodcut that Vasari added to his Life in 1568), whereas in the later Chatsworth self-portrait drawing, where hair and beard are longer and more unkempt, the hairline itself is much lower (Jaffé, Devonshire Collection, no. 711).9. Maria Loh, Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 32 (“the physiognomist would read the calculated pairing as a comment on the qualities of good judgment, fortitude, and magnanimity that were commonly found in the hound dog [il cane bracco], a breed that is said to have resembled the ancient philosopher Plato”), 34–40, incorporating earlier observations by Ulrich Pfisterer, Maurizio Fagiolo, and others (241nn99–100).10. Compare Louvre rf 580 and rf 584; Oxford, Ashmolean, WA1949.163; Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 358D-4; Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, 185, fig. 197.11. Gnann, Parmigianino, 88, asserts that fig. 1 came from Vasari’s Libro de’disegni, but his entry (no. 188) notes this with a question mark, as argued only by one earlier scholar; the royal provenance by way of the great seventeenth-century collector Everhard Jabach is secure, however. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 40, Number 4Summer 2021 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716326 Views: 733Total views on this site © 2021 Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.