Poet-Ruler, The So-Called Schiava Turca; The Poet's Pen or the Painter's Brush

A Possible Poet-Ruler, The Schiava Turca; The Poet's Pen or the Painter's Brush

La Turca

Francesco Mazzola, known as Parmigianino, Schiava turca, ca. 1531–1534. Oil on panel. Galleria Nazionale di Parma. Photograph © Ministry of National Heritage, Culture, and Tourism

Francesco Mazzola (1503–1540), called Parmigianino after Parma, the Northern Italian city of his birth, was one of the most prolific and celebrated artists of the sixteenth century. Known as "Raphael reborn," he mastered the arts of painting, drawing, and printmaking and was renowned for his portraits. Today his exquisite portrait of an unknown woman called the Schiava Turca (Turkish Slave) is an icon of Parma. The painting, which has rarely been seen outside its home institution, the Galleria Nazionale di Parma, traveled to the United States for the first time for its presentation at The Frick Collection and is presently at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The showing at the Frick marked the museum's third collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture (FIAC), a series of loans focused on the female portrait in the Renaissance. The collaboration previously featured Raphael's La Fornarina (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini) and Parmigianino's Antea (Naples, Museo di Capodimonte).

Parmigianino painted the Schiava Turca in the early to mid-1530s. The sitter wears an extravagant, almost theatrical costume comprised of a ball-shaped headdress, voluminous sleeves, and a striped garment with a plunging neckline. She holds an ostrich-feather fan in her left hand. In the early eighteenth century, when the portrait was in the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, the style of the woman’s costume inspired a cataloguer to invent the title Turkish Slave by which she has since been known. He likely mistook her headdress for a turban, associated her feather fan with the exotic East, and interpreted the small gold chain tucked into the slashes of her right sleeve as a reference to captivity.

Her costume, however, is not Turkish, and is certainly not that of a slave. Her sumptuous garments of silk, accessories of gold, and a fan made from imported feathers and ivory reveal her elite social status. Her turban-like headdress, called a balzo, was worn by Italian Renaissance women of high standing and identifies her as a member of the Northern Italian courts.

For centuries the Schiava Turca has eluded interpretation and, to date, no proposed identity for Parmigianino’s mysterious woman has been convincing. Scholars even have suggested that the portrait does not depict an actual person but rather an ideal woman invented by the artist for the delectation of male viewers.

At the center of the sitter’s headdress is a gold ornament depicting the winged horse, Pegasus. Classical myths tell how Pegasus struck the ground of Mount Helicon with his hoof, thereby creating the Hippocrene spring, whose water was the source of poetic inspiration sacred to Apollo and the Muses. In Renaissance Italy, Pegasus was the quintessential emblem of poetic inspiration. (Pietro Bembo, the most significant poet of Parmigianino’s time, adopted Pegasus as his personal device in the 1540s.) Poetry was often associated with portraits of women through the Petrarchan tradition, in which the poet Petrarch competed against the painter Simone Martini to determine what best captured female beauty — the poet's pen or the painter's brush. Because the Schiava Turca wears the poetic emblem of Pegasus, scholars have emphasized her connection to poetry, although the precise nature of this relationship remains to be clarified.

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A Possible Poet-Ruler, The Schiava Turca; The Poet's Pen or the Painter's Brush

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