Digression

This by way of work in progress, or perhaps digestion in progress.

I am now taking my turn with the book at reference 2, first noticed at reference 1, and was interested to come across a painting by Parmigianino called 'Self portrait in a convex mirror', a painting which I have now looked up. Parmigianino being best known to me as a late Renaissance painter of ladies with rather long necks.

The painting was done on a convex wooden panel about nine and a half inches across - so comfortably fits full size on a desktop computer screen. It was also the subject of a long poem by one John Ashbery, a poem which can be found at reference 4. Ashbery is a big cheese in the world of poetry in the US and this poem was a big part of what propelled him to his present eminence. I have a download but I have yet to make much of it.

Instead, I have been worrying about the frame, with frames and the hanging of pictures being important to my mind. Pictures do not exist in vacuo. One version of the framed picture turned up by Bing is included above. 

Then another, rather different photograph from the late nineteenth century.

Then another, a presumably more recent photograph from the same stable, that is to say reference 6. Perhaps the inner core detaches from the background plate of the first snap. And then, fashions in such matters do change of the years. We must not forget the need to shock and awe the punters.

So a self-portrait taken from a convex mirror, rendered first on a circular convex panel and rendered here unframed on a flat screen, nowhere near the sort of wall on which it was presumably once intended to be hung. Perhaps a papal wall. Painted at a time when the artist was very young and perspective was new and exciting. The artist was also a noted draughtsman and etcher.

All in all a complicated conceit, of a sort that I believe rich or arty people of the time were fond. But for this person present, very much work in progress.

PS: I have now got as far as consulting Canaday of reference 6. Real name Francesco Mazzola, called Parmigianino for his birth in the cheese town. In later life became obsessed with alchemy and rather neglected what he was good at. Died fairly young (for his time) at 37.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/to-pictures.html.

Reference 2: Curtain Call - Antony Quinn - 2015.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait_in_a_Convex_Mirror.

Reference 4: https://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/John-Ashbery-Self-Portrait-in-a-Convex-Mirror.pdf.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashbery.

Reference 6: https://www.khm.at/. Kunst Historisches Museum Wien.

Reference 7: The lives of the painters: Volume One: Late Gothic to High Renaissance - John Canaday - 1969.