Compared to these, where the example of Raphael’s portraiture is still very present through volumetric expansion, the enveloping penetration into a real space, the refined plasticity that rounds the volumes, the memories of the sophisticated psychological game, of the intellectualistic artifice, of the chromatic refinement that was exercised at the court of Clement VII in the first half of the 1820s, before the Sack of Rome and which strongly marked the distance from the courtly, Raphaelesque classicism of the first decade, are accentuated. The psychological restlessness, the tension revealed by the dilated fixity of the gazes, which constitute the characteristics of those portraits, become quivering in the Schiava turca: these are the years in which Parmigianino concentrates on an increasingly solitary dialogue with style.
In this portrait the graphic delineation becomes predominant and the interpretation of space is rigorously theoretical: not a three-dimensional projection but rather a chromatic abstraction, a compact curtain without depth spread across the background. The articulation of space through the relationship between forms, which excludes the possibility of a priori perspective representation of a plausible space, is a concept that becomes clear at the end of the 1520s, which were the most intense for its maturation, to the point of becoming an essential element of poetics: on a formal level, in fact, this is a fact immediately confirmed by the progressive enlargement of the dimensional scale of the characters, by their isolation in the foreground and, consequently, by the progressive reduction of their number. Since this is a portrait, such considerations are obviously obvious, but if we look through Parmigianino’s catalogue starting from the years 1525-26 we immediately realise this conquest by the figures of the entire available space and their tendency towards isolation.
This is what happens, with similar procedures but different results, in Bronzino who “builds the apotheosis of the human figure” (Strinati). In Parmigianino the progressive enlargement of the figures that goes hand in hand with the decrease in their number is an evident and constant process that can become a reliable trace of a stylistic path: all the attention is concentrated on them, on their restless shiver, on the psychological disturbance that winds through the bodies enclosed in the armor of supreme formal elegance, eliminating the distraction of backgrounds or landscapes. Because unlike Bronzino, whose figures are frozen in place, Parmigianino’s are immobile but at the same time quivering with restlessness, absorbed and at the same time surprised in a start, as in the completion of an inexplicable action, which remains so even when tested by iconographic analysis.
The Schiava turca is an example of this. It owes its name, as is known, to the turban-shaped headdress. It should be noted, however, that this headdress, the net- like bungee of gold threads, was a very common hairstyle in northern Italy around 1530: yet only in Parmigianino did it provoke this exotic reference. In reality, the strange name of the portrait derives not from its attributes, but rather from a substantial hermeticism, impenetrable because it is the result of a no longer certain existential condition that makes the figure ambiguous even in its characteristics of sex and age, in a content artifice that resists interpretation with the disturbing smile: a childish smile that makes us recognize in the Schiava turca the same face as the putto of Amore che fabbrica l’arco and who with his winking grimaces makes us accomplices in his disguise in the features of a young woman. Protected within its exquisite formal refinement, this figure imposes on us its true meaning, which is to place Beauty as an absolute and cognitive value, the search for which – and conquest – is obtained only with the elimination of all other possible values, historical, ethical, religious, through an extreme process of sublimation of its own formal means.
Anna Coliva’s card, taken from Fornari Schianchi L. (edited by), Galleria Nazionale di Parma. Catalogue of the works. The Cinquecento, Franco Maria Ricci, Milan, 1998.