In the sheet I bought there was a welt up the middle, a definite small ridge, a chrysalis bump. All at once I saw it. The white sheet with the presence of this slit—not an opening yet, but a pre-Baroque suggestion of potential—had a link. The connection was made by my eye: La Madonna del Parto.
This white blank to be wrestled with was my version of Piero’s magnificent vision. In his painting, a fully dressed pregnant courtly Renaissance woman fingers a parting in her gown. The enormous blue gown separates from her bodice to her thighs, to accommodate the growing new life. We see the madonna brushing the long white opening which is her underslip. Piero’s depiction, as much as it announces birth, announces the act of creation. He draws us to the unborn but already existing child. He frames us fully in a geometrical and eternal shaped dress, showing us a woman who knows the whole story. The future, all hope, will arrive through the white slit in the woman’s bodice, surrounded by her blue dress. The white space is total and utterly abstract. There is no flesh, no blood. It is more profound and austere than bodies. It is Platonic, invisibly taking form, and making a claim to full existence.
I loved feeling the rag scar in the piece of paper I had chosen. It would run through the page, disturbing words with its preexistence. The image was there, opening that invisible communion with the imagination. In the slit—red pulses, black gapes, straw flickers, green pities—all in the white scar.
He paints a viewpoint about realism as much as about reality
[9]
PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR
The term provincial needs definition in the description of a city that has been inhabited continuously since 183 B.C. Time, though, is not the right lens to explore the feeling of closedness that makes so much behavior in Parma secretive. Better might be a look at reasons for realism—the open eyes that aspire to survive.
Stendhal, Marie Henri Beyle in life, was a Frenchman who lived and wrote in Italy in order to give himself freedom from the confines of his own provincial city, Grenoble. Interested in a real place suggested first by his fascination with Alessandro Farnese’s love letters and then needing a fictional setting where he could intensify the love story’s psychological and political implications, he invented a Parma, at the time of Napoleon, from many places and sources. His novel The Charterhouse of Parma elaborated on love, boredom, intrigue, and power in lives which remain fixed in a place, as politics and social rank churn up conflicts. His characters exist near the edge of conviction but respond more attentively to psychological surveillance, accepting how things are seen from the outside, until their own existences become largely political and tactical, in spite of driving personal passions and feelings. “Believe or not, as you choose, what they teach you, but never raise any objection,” the Duchess Sanseverina says as she begins making a plan for Fabrizio’s entrance into the church. (The italics are mine.)
Parma, whose name signifies a small round Roman shield, arose along the Roman thoroughfare, the Via Emilia, that gave the region its name. Settled by two thousand Roman colonists, each of whom was given twenty thousand square meters to farm, the Roman city aggregated on the land of earlier cultures, distant Paleolithic hunters, then people who lived on platforms raised above marshes, then Bronze Age farmers who belonged to a network stretching across Europe.
In the gorgeous green hills looking down into the Parma River valley, a walk today past neat vines will occasionally produce black-lacquered potsherds from the Terramare Bronze Age. Handles that seem like mild little horns, fashioned by people who knew how to plant crops twelve hundred years before Christ, will poke up, tantalizingly exposed, on clumps of recently tilled soil. Red Roman tiles and painted, glazed medieval shards occasionally reappear in the plowed furrows.
A sense of identity is tangible in a myth that is not changeable like weather but is fixed in a place like the foothills rising around the city to the south and west and the Taro to the east and the Po farther north. “I tremble as I get near my home. Mine is a tremendous fate. Never a single joy without sorrows!! My health is fair, but I have no strength. I feel as if I have no blood at all.” Giuseppe Verdi is writing about returning home to Sant’Agata, an hour outside of Parma, where he will look for peace and restoration.
Many imposing castles still dominate hills around the city; in other times they controlled the plains. Most were built by local nobles for reasons of power. A particularly harmonious one, constructed for a mistress of Pier Maria Rossi in the mid-1400s, had no military purpose, and it fits into the sky near Torrechiara like a lovely beige puzzle piece about adultery and romantic pursuit.
Battles and killing erupted irregularly in the city, century after century. Parma took part in the civil war that marked the end of the Roman republic. It took the side of Caesar against Pompey. It participated in other Roman wars, often taking the side of the probable victor. The city had to be rebuilt. There was a forum, an amphitheater, baths, and basilicas. In World War II, Allied bombs were dropped on the city center. The bombs set alight the stunning wooden Farnese Theater built in 1617–19 inside the palace constructed by the Farnese Duke Ranuccio I in 1583. The massive ellipse, a beautiful fantasy theater for mechanical war games, was rebuilt from architectural plans following the end of World War II. Between Roman times and the Allied bombs’ flames on the roof of the Farnese Palace, there are local wars, religious battles, political wars, wars that march through because of foreign invasions. The walls of the city alter as the rulers and tyrants change, but they remain defenses and there are many seas of blood. In the Dark Ages peoples including Lombards and Franks invade and settle and integrate. Weaving in and around the city, too, are the now dismantled navigli, the water canals that created a flow of merchandise and trade. The baptistery’s pink marble floated down on these watery backs. During periods of war, these channels became vulnerable and even more precious.
Power struggles between the Holy Roman Empire of Frederick Barbarossa and the Catholic Church of bishops—the Ghibellines against the Guelphs—play over the entire peninsula of Italy and condense in endless stories as Parma pivots between the church and the more secular Empire. The feuding gradually shifts focus after the 1495 battle of Fornovo, just outside of Parma, when Charles VIII, King of France, defeats the Italian League of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States. Revealing the undisciplined weakness and disarray of these groups, the battle opens up northern Italy to foreign invasions. Parma slowly becomes enmeshed in more European claims. In the coming centuries its position is affected by the aspirations of France, Spain, and the Hapsburg Empire. Its shape had been in flux earlier too, its fortunes determined by local nobles: at times they fought Italians from other locales, families like the Visconti, who turned it into a colony and sucked its citizens of taxes and resources; or, later, the Farnese, who at certain levels plowed resources back in. It bears up through natural disasters: plagues like the one in 1361, which apparently killed forty thousand people, and cyclical devastation like the locust swarms that darken the skies, scour the crops, and lead to historical famines.
It fits into the sky near Torrechiara like a lovely beige puzzle piece
There are moments when Parma is only a pawn or plum to be given away in an international treaty. Its varied histories turn the city in many directions, leaving different codes of law, different educational systems. Great amounts of life were recorded contemporaneously, some by historians and scholars, but more due to record keeping. Much was written down about religion, politics, law, business, taxes; there were ledgers of many sorts; baptismal records, death certificates, medical records, export and import receipts. There were juridical proceedings, architectural plans, personal diaries, art. The sources are considerable and persist as real stories that can be reexamined and retold. The city lies on a foundation of much local capacity for running its own business.
The local spirit for independence was occasionally victorious. Barbarossa’s troops entered the city in 1176 and were defeated by the local people of the commune, or free city s
tate. Far more often, the locals were in someone’s service, under their thumbs. Alessandro Farnese, who was to become Pope Paul III, created the dukedoms of Parma and Piacenza in 1545. Nearly five hundred years earlier, his family had left the lake near Bolsena and, as adventurers and warriors, had slowly worked their way, by controlling and defending territory, into the highest circles in Rome. He gave the city of Parma to his son Pier Luigi. It was the Farnese family that assigned the Jesuits the task of administering the college of nobles, attended by children from all over Europe. Higher learning slipped under a heavier church influence. Eight Farnese dukes ruled until the line ended in 1731. The dukedom then passed through female marriage lines to the son of the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V. After that, once again, the spirit for more local autonomy grew. The Risorgimento was an active movement.
Resources came and went. Aided by the Spanish, the city fought off the French army led by Napoleon, but in the treaty of 1802 had to give the French 1,700 horses, 2,000 cows, 10,000 units of wheat, 5,000 of barley, 20 paintings, and 8 million Parma lire. Other paintings—Michelangelo, Raphael, Mantegna, El Greco, Titian, Parmigianino—were among the prizes that left the city with the Bourbons. They went to Naples. A brilliant, sweet Leonardo stayed, a Correggio was returned after Napoleon’s defeat, to hang among others, more Parmigianinos, the swaggering Carraccis, and Bernini’s marble images of the Farnese dukes. This history is close at hand and can be touched in the museums and buildings that still stand. Then there are economic innovations and solutions, starting with the Romans, who subsidized the farmers in the foothills so that they could compete with those on the plains. There is the history of pigs—feeding them, killing them, plunging them into acid, pulling off their skins, puncturing their hearts and letting the blood flow, so that they can be butchered and hung and turned into prosciutto and other cuts cured using only salt.
Education can be traced as far back as A.D. 877, when Bishop and Count Wibodo, under Frank rule, founded a school for priests that offered grammar, rhetoric, dialectical rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, and, later, law and medicine. It soon lost its autonomy and fell under church control. The city is one of the oldest sites for higher education in the Western world; in the eleventh century it offered education to men outside the priesthood. The two hundred years of constructing the stone center of Parma, the Duomo, the pink marble baptistery, and the Bishops’ Palace began in 1059. Eleven years after the cathedral was consecrated in 1106, an earthquake destroyed large parts of it and reconstruction started.
There is a not so hidden trail of conflict among different local factions meeting as enemies and shedding blood. Two women were burned as heretics in the twelfth century, and the local people resistant to the dark side of the church rioted. On a spot of the street between the Piazza Garibaldi and the Via Repubblica a noblewoman, brilliant, nonconforming Barbara Sanseverino, whose family fell from favor because they tried to get back their property, including their palace in Colorno, was executed by Ranuccio I in 1612. The ax hit her shoulder first and a smaller hand ax was needed to sever her head. We probably meet her as the Duchess Sanseverina in Stendhal’s novel, although he said his character was a figure he took from Correggio’s Diana.
Pier Luigi, the first Farnese duke, was beaten by an angry crowd and torn apart. At the time of the Risorgimento, Charles III, the Bourbon ruler, was stabbed to death. After the reunification of Italy, the former chief of police, recognized on a train going through Parma, was taken off and lynched. Directly over the burnt umber wall in what is now a convent, a priest was executed by Napoleon’s soldiers. In 1922, on the other side of the torrente, locals repelled twenty thousand Fascists as they entered the city. On a street near our house Padre Onorio was shot by the Germans in 1943 as he tried to enter his church, which sheltered innocenti. Partisans, bound in chains, were shipped from the bus station to Bolzano and from there to Mauthausen. The struggles and eruptions of violence over the land’s government and allegiances are unending and some are selectively commemorated. Yet the present-day streets, often tucked in by wisps of fog, have a domestic, sleepy, elegant charm. Down near the grassy banks of the torrente Parma, pheasants graze in winding patterns: the females live camouflaged nearly perfectly among the tall grasses; the males strut and stand out, colored like princes.
The tenant farmers, many of whom lived in a state of famine under harsh repressive conditions close to serfdom until the 1950s, the large bulk of the population working in fields outside the city, are difficult to identify these days. Even the traders who came in from the country on Saturdays and stood in the Piazza Garibaldi wearing their felt hats, waiting to hear the week’s prices for cheese and ham, are nearly mimetic of the new prosperity in their fine suits and large new cars.
Has the vanished life lingered as part of what goes on today in the cobblestone streets? Is it remembered by people putting markups of 200 and 300 percent on their goods? Does it survive in the factories, some of the largest food-processing plants in Europe? Can we see reflections in the light industries that ship whole prefab factories to Africa and the Middle East? What histories resonate in these places? Does it gather in the large, cool caseifici where Parmesan cheese is still made in large vats, as it has been for nearly a thousand years, using the morning milk with its cream and the night milk skimmed off it? Has all the earlier language gone anywhere? Does it gather in the stories and bones and rhythms? Does it rush in the veins and persist in the genes?
The whole complex alien history makes my mind swim. I can sample it, feel its amazing weight, and be awed by the time contained in it, but when describing life here and what it feels like, I look to my own ideas of feeling and existence. I live in a present, this present.
In his novel Stendhal has the Duchess Sanseverina discourage the noble Fabrizio from going to America, where he wants to begin his life again. The tone of her voice, her way of reasoning, make me feel as if Stendhal had written his story today. She discourages Fabrizio by implying that Parma, with its knowns, offers far more than can a myth of freedom. “ ‘What a mistake you are making. You won’t have any war, and you’ll fall back into a café life, only without smartness, without music, without love affairs,’ replied the Duchessa. ‘Believe me, for you as much as for myself it would be a wretched existence there in America.’ She explained to him the cult of the god Dollar, and the respect that had to be shown to the artisans on the street who by their votes decided everything.” (Italics are mine.)
In that fiction about Parma, written more than 150 years ago, I can second the truths. The character who discourages and explains how boring life will be outside of Parma is still vividly alive. That someone else’s country is always a schematic simplification and a fiction needs little elaboration. The respect for each and every individual inherent in democracy is seen as a burdensome obligation in a Parma where rights are social and money a focus belonging to a class.
Stendhal as an artist can delineate the psychological spaces of an Italian province far better than I ever could. The present borders in Parma begin in some senses in Sanseverina’s statement: Believe me, for you as much as for myself. The basis for authority seldom resides in a self where liberty is also a right to happiness. Or better, there are so many voices giving advice and creating obligations that in the end many a life suffocates, and when it revives, it has decided against making its unknown arc.
I made a move in coming to Parma that seemed at the time not too much more than an airplane ride across the Atlantic. My mind was not that different because of my family’s few generations of university degrees. Parma runs rings around certain aspects of Midwestern sophistication. But its culture was different. The Duchess tells Fabrizio in the same speech, “They will forgive you a little amorous intrigue, if it is done in the proper way, but not a doubt.” I was raised to believe almost the opposite of that sentence.
Parmigianino, a mannerist who painted at the time of Correggio, and partially decorated one of the major churches in Par
ma, the Steccata, rendered a self-portrait looking in a convex mirror. It remains one of the most famous and intriguing self-portraits ever painted. The subject addresses at one level a young man’s preoccupations with art and with mannerist perceptions. But it covers much more. The portrait depicts a young man with a brilliant spirit, overcome by a sweet, overpowering sadness. The hand of the painter, distorted by the mirror, spreads across the front of the painting and sets up a weak and sensitive barrier. The emotions depicted in the young man’s face suggest levels far beyond the intellectual and technical notion that art is a poor mirror or imitation of life. Parmigianino hints that revealing the reality he perceives is an impossible task—beyond showing us its complex fixity. His sadness and wisdom feel like positions I can recognize in many people I know here. It is a self-conscious checkmate. There is nowhere to go. The hand is society, precedent, others. One is never acting alone.
Parmigianino, following in Correggio’s and Giovanna’s footsteps, lived in perilous times, when the surge from the Renaissance became dangerous. The self, which was emerging as an idea, got caught, suddenly not allowed to draw the conclusions that were overturning orthodoxy. Parmigianino paints, ever so sweetly, a painful, fully conscious distance between knowing and being. The hand blocks and the life sees that. That distorted hand which seems nearly detached from his body is as large as he himself.
Once we perceive that the room Parmigianino has painted can only become minimally plausible if we consider ourselves looking out from inside his eyes, we find ourselves in an undeniable double bind. I don’t know what his constraints were—patrons, a political, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual view of the world that couldn’t be shown—but without saying what it is, we understand that the young man is as open as he can and shall be. We could fantasize about the situation forever.
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