For those unfortunate enough to have missed the handsomely mounted Correggio and Parmigianino drawings exhibition, a collaborative effort by the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its equally handsome accompanying catalogue conveys its pleasures in that first virtual reality—a slim, illustrated book to be opened and examined at leisure. Although most, if not all, of the drawings on view in the exhibition and reproduced in its catalogue have been previously exhibited and published, the show provided opportunities to encounter afresh “old friends” looking fit, and I found myself as engaged as the gaggle of middle-school children a few paces ahead of me at the Met, whose appreciable excitement, intense observation, and admiring sighs came as a welcome surprise. Clearly these new friends for old masters are sufficient impetus for undertaking such exhibitions.

The exhibition offered a rare opportunity to consider side by side the graphic work of Parma’s two most famous early sixteenth-century artists. Nearly all of the drawings on view are well reproduced in the catalogue. These amply sized color photographs allow close scrutiny of the artists’ styles and skills, inviting contemplation of tonal nuances within the drawings. The catalogue text opens with brief, comparative chronologies of the lives of Antonio Allegri and Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, artists better known by the names of their respective natal towns as Correggio and Parmigianino. Three short essays follow: George Goldner and Carmen C. Bambach focus on the qualities of each artist as a draughtsman in two individual essays, while a third, written collectively by Hugh Chapman and Martin Clayton with Bambach and Goldner, is devoted to a brief but useful history of how the drawings of Correggio and Parmigianino were acquired and attributed in British and American collections.

The catalogue reinforces a tendency to view these not-quite-contemporary Parmese artists in an almost binary opposition, repeating conventional wisdom that describes Correggio’s drawings as beautiful but utilitarian, while designating Parmigianino as a consummate draughtsman. A. E. Popham framed this same idea more adroitly in the opening pages of his still indispensable Correggio’s Drawings (London: The British Academy, 1957), categorizing Correggio as a “painter-artist…less likely to be interested in the process of constructing a picture and…preserving these steps in its construction” (1). Correggio, by implication, drew only when required: The act of drawing was a limited means to an end, of less import as intellectual process than the creative moments that occurred during facture of the culminating work, usually a painting. By contrast, Parmigianino’s prolificacy suggests an internal kunstwollen and personal imperative, drawing for its own sake because “linear rhythm, the feel of pen and ink…were a joy and [he] was never happier than when, to use a current phrase, doodling…. Correggio never doodled” (2). Parmigianino’s “doodles” are thus construed as signaling intellectual impulses distinct from Correggio’s more spontaneously combustive art, a dichotomy operative only in a universe that tacitly privileges Giorgio Vasari’s model of disegno, where drawing is paramount to the process of pictorial construction.

Certainly Correggio’s drawings were utilitarian, if we mean that most of the few surviving drawings relate to commissions for paintings. Surviving, of course, is the operative word. As the catalogue notes, nearly ten times as many Parmigianino drawings survive as those by Correggio. Of the numerous drawings once attributed to Correggio, fewer than 100 are still considered autograph, and it seems no accident that most of these postdate the artist’s arrival in Parma. Those years, from approximately 1519 until Correggio’s death in 1534, are the best documented of his career and, given his age, were probably his most productive. Drawings from this period, like those connected to the Matthew and Jerome pendentive for San Giovanni Evangelista (Bambach et. al., cat. nos. 13, 13a, and 14), or the delicate red chalk studies for Eve in the cathedral’s cupola (cat. nos. 29, 30), evidence Correggio’s careful deliberations on the same figure or figural groups. What we can best determine about Correggio’s approach to drawing based on these and similar sheets is an initial presence of many more drawings, particularly when we consider that Correggio lived and worked in an age before drawings were seriously collected.

Little is known about the artist’s development before Parma, and the information that does exist is uneven. Early documented works veer from echoes of the powerfully expressive, like the atrium frescoes for Sant’ Andrea, Mantua (almost universally accepted as authentic after Popham’s discovery of a charcoal cartoon related to its Entombment roundel, published here as “Head of a Woman,” ca. 1511, [cat. no. 1]), to overtones of Francia and Venice in the Saint Francis Altarpiece (ca. 1514). The visually unfortunate Four Saints Altarpiece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (ca. 1517) is an awkward combination of Perugino and Leonardo that in hindsight promised better things to come. Beyond difficulties of attribution in situations where no anchoring, finished work exists, and the happy accidents of survival from an era before drawings acquired market value as collectibles, Correggio may have viewed his own drawing as a private activity. One need only think of Vasari’s anecdote that Michelangelo destroyed his own drawings rather than have them seen.

The paucity of drawings before Parma only underscores the dilemma of understanding Correggio. Within the past twenty-five years, scholarly attempts to address this issue propose that a trip to Rome, ca. 1518–19, just prior to Correggio’s arrival in Parma, might have constituted a defining moment in the artist’s career, a determinant factor in the his development. The quandary is one that Anton Raphael Mengs, still the most perceptive of Correggio’s critics, comprehended and articulated in the 1770s: How do we account for the enormous difference between Correggio’s early “dry style” and the fully resolved and realized work of his mature “grand style” in Parma? George Goldner’s catalogue essay acknowledges the difficulty. While identifying Correggio’s early stylistic debts to Francesco Francia, Amico Aspertini, and Andrea Mantegna, as well as the artist’s increasing engagement with a Leonardesque sfumato technique, Goldner frequently refers to Correggio’s “probable journey” and concludes that Correggio “seems to have visited Rome around 1518, but the impact of that trip is not fully evident until a few years later in the frescoes of San Giovanni Evangelista” (13).

This proposition, not original to Goldner, becomes problematic only when repetition elevates its authority. It also runs counter to the evidence; the drawings themselves show scant sign of anything securely related to Rome in either style or subject matter. Instead, they highlight an interesting conundrum directly related to the history of collecting Correggio’s drawings. No sixteenth- or seventeenth-century source claimed Rome for Correggio. Vasari’s biography in the Vite was the first to comment on the artist in conjunction with Roman artistic practice. As a result of his personal acquaintance with some of Correggio’s contemporaries—fellow artists as well as patrons—Vasari was in a position to know, despite any polemics ascribed to him today. Yet by disconnecting Correggio from a Roman experience, Vasari opened the door to the inevitable opposing view, instigated by Padre Sebastiano Resta at the turn of the eighteenth century. Resta was an avatar of a new profession, a cadet-branch noble and cleric who collected drawings and then “gifted” his collections, assembling and bestowing albums in expectation of charitable, yet nonetheless monetary, exchange. Based on his collections, Resta composed letters and a small manuscript arguing that Correggio sojourned twice in Rome, once ca. 1519–20 and again in 1529. Thus Vasari’s comment was raised to the level of debate, and Mengs’ excellent question still remains.

The drawings of Parmigianino, born in 1503 and younger than Correggio by more than a decade, suggest that he was an artist on the cusp of a different generation regarding perceptions of both the act of drawing and its role within an artist’s enterprise. Beyond any personal predilection on the part of the artist, the sheer quantity of Parmigianino’s drawings, as well as their diversity of subject matter and degree of finish, correspond with Vasari’s verbal picture of drawing practices among artists active in Rome before the sack of the city in May 1527. Parmigianino certainly traveled to Rome, arriving in the company of his uncle sometime in 1524. Unable to secure the kinds of lucrative commissions for which he undoubtedly hoped, Parmigianino astutely parlayed his drawings into the burgeoning Renaissance art business of reproductive prints, a commercial endeavor he apparently took some pains to continue in Bologna, where he attempted to reestablish himself after 1527. Whatever the kernel of truth lodged in Vasari’s wonderful tale of the drawings Parmigianino thrust at the ill-intentioned German soldiers in exchange for his safety during the Sack of Rome, there can be little question that drawings did “save” his life: Parmigianino’s graphic output was the wellspring of the artist’s reputation, the unadulterated source of Vasari’s admiration in the Vite, and the delight of collectors from the origins of that activity in the sixteenth century. In the capable hands of Bambach, Parmigianino’s graphic achievement is judiciously detailed, and, while it is clear that Parmigianino’s drawings might indicate a greater self-consciousness of his activity as an artist, there is room to think that this was not merely a matter of temperament, but perhaps a reflection of his time and place as well.

But who could possibly grump at the pleasures of Correggio and Parmigianino so beautifully reproduced? Forget the hyperbole of the museum directors’ foreword, that despite the admiration they arouse, “no major exhibition has ever been dedicated to these artists” (7), followed by the authors’ acknowledgments that the avowed purpose of the exhibition and its catalogue is to update Popham’s pioneering work. Enjoy the plates, marvel at Popham on your own, and read Diane DeGrazia’s introductory essay to Correggio and His Legacy (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1984), which remains unrivaled for its insight and intelligence.