Virgen con el Niño

Parmigianino made this small devotional panel around 1528, in Bologna, where he had fled after the troops of Emperor Charles the Fifth sacked Rome in 1527. He was in his mid-twenties and had lost the papal city where he'd hoped to build a career. The picture shows none of that upheaval. The Virgin's fingers are long and tapering, her neck a little elongated, the Child turned in a soft twisting pose, all of it the elegant, faintly artificial grace that would later be called Mannerism. The panel then stayed with one English family, the Curzons of Kedleston Hall, for nearly 240 years, until the Kimbell in Fort Worth bought it in 1995.