'Character in Search of a Play: Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Dignitary'

Five College Renaissance Seminar with Monika Schmitter, University of Massachusetts Amherst

As projections of white, privileged, and often male subjectivities, Italian Renaissance portraits simultaneously fascinate and disquiet contemporary viewers who encounter them in museums and in reproduction, as well as artists who continue to use them as models and foils for their own work. But what if some of these portraits imply a critique within themselves? This paper argues that in his Portrait of a Dignitary (c. 1535), the sixteenth-century artist Parmigianino undermines the genre of portraiture by using irony to question the values that the work might at first seem to celebrate. As a portrait about portraiture, Parmigianino’s painting exposes the tensions and constraints of the regime of representation in which he lived.