Parmigianino, Figure study, 1525-7, pen and brown ink, brown wash, with white gouache heightening, 21.6 x 24.3cm, The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California (Inv. 84.GA.9) [© Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program]

IN May 1527 Rome was not a safe place, as Charles V’s mutinous imperial troops brutally sacked the city.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in The Lives of the Artists recounts how Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, known as Parmigianino after his home city, had moved to Rome three years before and how his talent saw him “celebrated as a Raphael reborn”.

And as Vasari’s account goes, after troops broke into the artist’s studio and discovered the young man working on his altarpiece commission, Parmigianino (1503-1540) was allowed to carry on with it.

Whatever the veracity of that tale, he would survive and flee to Bologna; and the painting also survived, to resurface long after the artist’s death.

Parmigianino, 1526-7, The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, oil on poplar, 342.9 x 148.6cm [© The National Gallery, London]

Acquired by the National Gallery in 1826, the imposing The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, also known as The Vision of St Jerome, is the centrepiece of a free exhibition which opened this week as part of the gallery’s bicentenary celebrations.

Described by curators as unprecedented for its time, Parmigianino’s 3.4-metre painting broke new ground, not only with its portrayal of Jerome and John in exaggerated and unusual forms, elongated and tightly cropped for the narrow poplar panel, but also with a modern and fresh take on the madonna and child, almost floating above the two men.

The asymmetry of the painting is startling as a solution to its narrowness.

The oil is back on public view for the first time in a decade, following conservation and cleaning, and with a new frame.

Parmigianino’s numerous drawings were a mainstay for him during his short life and the preparatory and other works in this exhibition show his versatility with chalks and pen and ink and his speed and vitality of technique.

The most complete of the preparatory works is here courtesy of the British Museum, but important drawings on display include those from the Uffizi in Florence, Getty museum in LA, the Ashmolean in Oxford and Charles III’s collection.

*Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome, Room 46, until March 9 2025.

A radical change to the landscape tradition

Full-Scale Study for The Hay Wain, c 1821, oil on canvas, 137 x 188cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London [© V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London]

A WALL note explains that a show on The Hay Wain by John Constable (1776-1837) in the gallery’s bicentenary year is particularly apt because 1824 “was hugely significant” for his international reputation with the painting at the Paris Salon receiving a gold medal from Charles X.

It was presented to the National Gallery in 1886.

In the current exhibition** curators Christine Riding and Mary McMahon have brought together an important and fascinating range of works, with references up to the present, to help explain how important an influence one painting can have.

It was new and fresh and hailed by many as a radical change to the landscape tradition; but they note it didn’t sell at that first showing in 1821 at the Royal Academy.

Sketch for The Hay Wain, c 1820, oil on canvas laid to paper 12.4 x 17.8cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, Paul Mellon Collection [© Yale Center for British Art]

The painting shows the River Stour, where Essex and Suffolk meet, and Flatford Mill which Constable’s father owned and worked.

Exhibited with it here is a full scale, in fact larger, study for it from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and small oil sketch from the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut.

Two earlier oils, The Wheat Field (1816) and Willy Lott’s House (1802) are also US loans, from the Clark Institute in Massachusetts. In all there are more than 30 works on display including Constable cloud studies from the V&A and Courtauld Institute, and fine oils from the Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service.

But this show has been given a far wider and political relevance with a timeline featuring such reworking of Constable’s masterpiece by artists including Kenneth Steel (a 1950 British Rail poster) Peter Kennard (who added cruise missiles) and Frank Auerbach (a colourful drawing) and more.

There’s even room for a Thomas Rowlandson 1810 cartoon, a JMW Turner watercolour, and oils by Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland, William Blake, and others.

**Discover Constable & The Hay Wain, The Sunley Room, until February 2 2025.