18 PARMIGIANINO (Francesco Mazzola) Italian, 1503­1540 Saints John the Baptist, Jerome, and Two Other Saints Red chalk 15.1 x 22.1 cm (5 15/16 x 8 11/16 in.) Cat. II, no. 28; 87.GB.9 This drawing is generally connected with Parmigianino's famous altarpiece the Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome (the so­called Vision of Saint Jerome) in the National Gallery, London. Parmigianino was working on the altarpiece in Rome in 1527 when the city was occupied by the army of Charles V prior to its sacking. The sixteenth­century artist biographer Giorgio Vasari reports that the soldiers entered the painter's studio, admired the picture, but then left Parmigianino in peace to pursue his work. Since there are many differences between this drawing and the painting, it is now believed that the drawing is for the composition of an earlier altarpiece, either lost or never executed, that must have been similar in several respects to the London picture. The style of the drawing certainly suggests an earlier dating, toward the beginning of the 1520s, as does the presence on the other side of the sheet of a study for one of the dogs in the fresco The Story of Diana and Actaeon, on the ceiling of a room in the Rocca Sanvitale at Fontanellato (near Parma), painted in about 1523. Parmigianino was a leading painter of the Mannerist style (see no. 14) and is well known for the somewhat unsettling emotional intensity of his paintings, with their elongated figures, compact space, and chilly effects of light. 24 ITALIAN SCHOOL