Mann mit einem Buch

When Parmigianino painted this around 1529, he was working in Bologna, where he had landed after fleeing Rome two years earlier when imperial troops sacked the city. The man here sits in that unsettled decade, one elbow on a table, a finger at his temple, an open book in his other hand, caught in the pause of a reader who has just looked up. Look at the surface and you can see how fast he worked. The brushstrokes on the forehead and the doublet stay separate rather than blending, a quickness typical of his Bologna years. For a long time no one knew whose hand it was. When it turned up in the Prague collection of the emperor Rudolf the Second, it was catalogued as a Correggio.