Parmigianino

At about 21, Parmigianino painted himself as seen in a barber's convex mirror. His face sits calm and boyish at the centre while the room curves away and his hand, nearest the glass, swells huge in the foreground, a young painter showing off exactly how strange and clever he could be. He carried the little picture to Rome to announce his arrival.

Born Francesco Mazzola in Parma in 1503, he became one of the defining artists of Mannerism, the style that prized elegance and artifice over natural proportion. His Madonna of the Long Neck stretches the Virgin's body and fingers into an impossible, swan-like grace, beauty tuned past the point of anatomy.

His later years turned odd. He grew absorbed in alchemy, the search to turn base metals into gold, and left commissions unfinished. A fresco project in a church near Parma dragged on until the monks had him briefly jailed for breach of contract. He died in 1540 at only 37, and one early account describes him at the end as unkempt and half-wild, more interested in his furnaces than his brushes.