FROM PIACENZA, the Via Emilia follows the margin of the Po Valley, skirting the foothills of the Apennines. The next town of consequence is Fidenza, with a fine early cathedral. Parma follows, at the crossroads of the route from Mantua to the coast at La Spezia. Like other strategically placed cities, her history is complex. Imperial rule was followed by republican, as were the Visconti, after an interval, by the Sforza. The papacy recovered Parma in 1521, but in 1545 Pope Paul III granted it as a duchy to his nephew, Pier Luigi Farnese. The Farnese were succeeded by the Spanish Bourbons, whose contribution is particularly evident in the ducal palace of Cologno, fifteen miles north-east.
The city is divided by the river Parma. The western section has a sleepy charm. The great monuments are to the east. The Piazza del Duomo is in the historic centre. On the south side is the octagonal Baptistery begun in 1196, a masterpiece of the transitional phase when the Romanesque responds to Gothic forms. The pink Veronese marble softens the austerity of the design, with tiered loggias and canopied pinnacles. The sculptor Benedetto Antelami worked on the building, both inside and out, to spectacular effect. From the Baptistery the visitor should go to the church of San Giovanni Evangelista directly east of the Duomo. This was an early building, but was reconstructed at the turn of the sixteenth century. Antonio Allegri, il Correggio – the painter of the Parmese school – was called in. He designed the fictive frieze of the nave, and his Vision of Saint John in the cupola was in every sense a visionary work, the saint shown in a nimbus of golden light surrounded by the apostles.
The Duomo is a Romanesque structure, although the campanile is Gothic. In the right transept is Antelami’s masterpiece, the remarkable relief of the Deposition dated 1178. The cupola was decorated in 1526–30 by Correggio. A natural sequel to his work at San Giovanni, Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin was a conception of dazzling, indeed vertiginous, ambition. Trained in the tradition of Mantegna, the painter devised a language of expression that helped to inspire the baroque. The visitor should advance slowly up the nave and watch as the campaign of illusion is revealed. Very different in character is the third of Correggio’s mural schemes at Parma, in the Camera di San Paolo, ordered in 1518 by the abbess of the monastery of that name. The vault is of sixteen compartments, with ovals of pairs of putti. Below these are delicate monochrome lunettes of classical themes.
Correggio’s counterpart among the painters of High Renaissance Parma was Parmigianino. Correggio was the master of restraint, an Emilian Raphael in his ability to codify a personal canon of religious expression – he was not responsible for the ‘smirking correggiosities’ of which George Eliot once complained in Middlemarch. Parmigianino was his equal in delicacy of expression. But his line has a nervous vigour of its own. His subtle qualities are perfectly expressed in the extraordinary decoration of the Bramantesque church of the Madonna della Steccata, finished in 1539. Frescoes and stucco play equal parts in a scheme of immense sophistication, alas unfinished.
San Giovanni Evangelista: Correggio (Antonio Allegri), Vision of Saint John, dome fresco, 1522–3.
The vast Palazzo della Pilotta was begun by the Farnese. Of the original interiors the most impressive was the enormous Teatro Farnese, severely damaged by bombing in 1944. The picture collection of the Accademia, founded in 1762 by Filippo Bourbon, Duke of Parma, and enlarged when expropriated pictures were returned from Paris in 1815, was augmented by Napoleon’s widow, Maria Luisa of Austria, who ruled Parma as duchess from 1816 until 1847. Inevitably Correggio is the focus of interest. The two lateral canvasses from the del Bono chapel at San Giovanni Evangelista, the Martyrdom of Four Saints and the Deposition, are both works of charged drama. Viewed diagonally in their intended setting, the two must have seemed startlingly realistic. The Madonna of Saint Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella are rivalled among the artist’s major altarpieces only by those at Dresden. The enduring popularity of these tours de force is due to Correggio’s ability to match the intimacy of his drawings and smaller panels on a large scale. Their ostensible simplicity masks a lifetime’s absorption of ideas, visual and iconographic, Italian and of the north.
The city has much else to offer. Later churches include Ferdinando Galli Bibbiena’s Sant’Antonio Abate, with its theatrical façade. Neoclassicism is represented by the Teatro Regio, near the Palazzo Ducale, begun in 1821 for Maria Luisa by Nicola Bettoli, whose discipline of detail is impressive. The duchess also commissioned a late masterpiece by the great Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, the monument of 1840–1 to her lover, Count Neipperg, in the Steccata.
Parma’s political and artistic developments were both determined by her position on one of the major arteries of the Roman road network. To sense this, proceed onwards down the Via Emilia. Modena is the next major city, long a seat of the Este with an outstanding early cathedral and a distinguished museum. Next comes Reggio, another prosperous and confident town, with the ambitious Madonna della Ghiara, begun in 1597, in the left transept of which is an outsize masterpiece, Guercino’s Crucifixion.
