La Vierge au long cou

Parmigianino took this commission in 1534 for a chapel in Parma, and promised to deliver it in five months. He never did. He was still working on it when he died in 1540, and you can see where he stopped. Down in the lower right a small figure stands beside a row of columns that lead nowhere, and near him is a single bare foot, all that got painted of another saint. The Madonna herself is stretched impossibly long, her fingers, her neck, the sleeping child sliding across her lap, far larger than the crowd of angels pressed in at her side. This deliberate elegance, pushed past what the body can really do, is what later got called Mannerism, and Parmigianino was one of the painters who defined it.