Parmigianino’s Bitch

David 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. 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