Le Mariage mystique de sainte Catherine

Parmigianino began this small altarpiece in Rome for a burial chapel, but 1527 was the wrong year to be finishing anything in that city. In May the unpaid troops of the emperor Charles the Fifth broke into Rome and sacked it for months, and the painter, as Vasari later told it, was found still at work at his easel when soldiers burst into his rooms. The chapel it was meant for never received the picture. Look at the centre and you find the reason it holds together: the infant Christ slips a gold ring with a blue stone onto Saint Catherine's finger, and Parmigianino set that ring exactly where the lines of the figures cross. Around it the bodies twist and stretch, the fingers impossibly long, the colours sharp and acidic. He left Rome soon after and never worked there again.