Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli

Parmigianino left Parma in 1539 having failed to deliver frescoes he was under contract to paint in the church of Santa Maria della Steccata, and he died the next year at 37. Some of the unfinished work there passed to a relative by marriage. Girolamo Bedoli had married into the Mazzola family, Parmigianino's own, in 1529 and had added their name to his, and for the next 30 years he was the painter Parma called on.

He frescoed the apse of the cathedral with the Coronation of the Virgin, finished by 1544, and worked for the Farnese, who had been handed the duchy in 1545, painting among other things an allegory of Parma embracing the boy Alessandro Farnese. Correggio and Parmigianino, both dead by 1540, remained his measure. Vasari put him into the 1568 edition of the Lives as the continuation of the Parma school.

The panel in the Brera was painted around 1550, probably for the Dominican convent in Parma. A friar in the white habit and black cloak of the order has laid his book aside and looks up at a crucifix with tears in his eyes, and the portrait presents him in the guise of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Dominicans' great theologian.