Parmigianino was one of the most prolific draftsmen of the Italian Renaissance, and he explored ideas extensively on paper before painting. His process of invention was complex, and often a single drawing can relate to more than one painting, or vice versa. Two drawings — both head studies in red chalk — have been connected to the Schiava Turca: one at the Louvre and a second from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. The first, which appears to have been drawn from a live model, resembles the Schiava Turca in the turn of the head, the smiling expression, and, to some degree, the facial features. The second depicts a woman with highly idealized features and an aloof expression unlike those seen in the painting and the Louvre drawing. Like the subject of the Schiava Turca, however, the woman in the École des Beaux-Arts drawing wears a balzo* that includes a circular ornament at its center (although it is left blank).
Portrait of Antea, Parmigianino, 1524-1527. Oil on canvas, 54 in x 34 in, National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples
Recent research conducted in preparation for the Frick's exhibition has related a third drawing to the Schiava Turca: Parmigianino's compositional drawing of a Bust of a Woman, in the Devonshire collection at Chatsworth (not borrowed for the exhibition, but illustrated at right and in the accompanying catalogue). The pen-and-ink drawing, which had not previously been linked to any specific project, shares the bust-length format of the Schiava Turca (although the woman in the drawing poses with her head facing in the same direction as her body). In the drawing, the woman wears a balzo-like headdress decorated with a wreath of laurel leaves. In the classical tradition, laurel leaves are used to crown accomplished poets. As it shows the artist experimenting with the standard iconography of poetry, the drawing may record an early idea for the Schiava Turca. In the end, Parmigianino’s use of an ornamental badge of Pegasus to mark the Schiava Turca as a poet is a more subtle (indeed, more poetic) solution.
Interpreting the Schiava Turca as a portrait of a poet suggests that the woman represented was an actual person. A good candidate for the sitter would be a writer of high social standing who lived in the area around Bologna or Parma in the early- to mid-1530s and one who perhaps was associated with the circle of Pietro Bembo. Although no documentary evidence is known that would connect the portrait to a specific female writer, one possibility is Veronica Gambara. Gambara was an accomplished poet with close ties to Bembo and other notable figures of Northern Italian courts including Isabella d’Este and Pietro Ariosto. Parmigianino had ample opportunity to meet Gambara, who ruled Correggio—a city twenty miles from the artist’s native Parma—from 1518 until her death in 1550. She is known to have visited Parma when he was there in the early 1520s, and both poet and artist lived in Bologna from 1528 to 1530. She was also close friends with the artist Antonio Allegri, called Correggio, Parmigianino’s former master.
No portraits of her are known to survive. One problem with identifying the Schiava Turca as Veronica Gambara might be her age, as she was around fifty years old in 1534, about the time that the Schiava Turca was painted, and the subject of the painting is seemingly a much younger woman. An important comparison, however, is Titian’s well-known portrait of Isabella d’Este (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which was painted contemporaneously with the Schiava Turca. Titian’s portrait presents Isabella as a young woman even though, when it was painted, she was about sixty years old. If the mysterious subject of the Schiava Turca cannot be positively identified as Gambara, at least the interpretation of her as a poet may bring us closer to discovering her identity.
*Editor's Notes:
1. Balzo refers to a fashionable early 16th century headdress in Italy which was similar to the snood. Balzo was described as a large gathered bag, often made of woven strips of fabric, fan cy gold material and lace, or other materials, worn over the hair. From the front it could look more like a roll worn over the hair, as the greater portion of its bulk was above the head.
Balzo is a term found in both 15th and 16th century sources and can be applied somewhat generically to the shape current at the time. Balzo in its original 15th century form is large and bulbous, not symmetrical, and back heavy. In both centuries Balzo was decorated extensively, ornamented with jewels or enameled pieces, and in the 16th century it was also made of wire. (http://www.fashion-glossary.com/cms/glossary/glossary-h/7065-heart-cut-shape.html)
2. Veronica Gambara (1485-1550) was one of the most celebrated lyric poets of early sixteenth-century Italy. Equally significant to Gambara’s literary repute was her political standing as the dowager Countess of Correggio – a role she assumed upon her husband’s death in 1519 and held to the end or her life. Gambara’s early amorous poetry in the Petrarchan style led her to be hailed by Pietro Bembo as “the voice […] that honors Brescia,” while the poetry she composed throughout her governing years was deeply engaged in the political discourses of her time.
Though she never published a collected edition of her poetry, Gambara produced an extensive oeuvre of vernacular verse that has been extensively anthologized. This book presents the first complete bilingual edition of Gambara’s verse, with critical notes that illuminate her sophisticated literary interplay with the Petrarchan and Classical traditions. The critical introduction sheds light on the unique interrelationship between Gambara’s cultural currency and her political power, as she drew on her literary talent to participate in the political arena to emerge as one of the first women poet-rulers of the Early Modern Italian tradition. (From Veronica Gambara, Complete Poems. A Bilingual Edition; Critical introduction by Molly M. Martin. Edited and translated by Molly M. Martin and Paola Ugolini)
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