Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Parmigianino, precociously gifted draughtsman and virtuoso of fluent, swirling brushwork, arrived in Rome from his native Parma in the mid-1520s, when the city was still mourning Raphael’s death. He was immediately heralded as a “Raphael reborn”.At the age 23 he received a prestigious commission for a monumental “Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome”, for the church of San Salvatore in Lauro. He was, according to Giorgio Vasari, in “the frenzy of working” on it in 1527 as rampaging imperial troops broke into his studio. “Stupefied” by the painting, the soldiers briefly paused their Sack of Rome, and left Parmigianino alone. Retitled by the Victorians as “The Vision of St Jerome” to explain why the saint is depicted fast asleep, this luscious, eccentric altarpiece was part of the London National Gallery’s founding collection. Now, newly restored and on show for the first time in a decade, it is the focus of an erudite, small (and free) Christmas exhibition, and astounds again. The flamboyant colours and burst of mystical light around the Virgin are scintillating, the four bizarrely distorted characters each play a starring role in a brilliantly imaginative, unorthodox drama. Perched on surging clouds is Mary in a diaphanous rose-pink gown, blue cloak and jewel-strewn hair, with her porcelain-smooth toddler Jesus, swaying his hip, mischievously kicking one foot at the viewer — both excessively elongated, over-elegant figures. Below, St Jerome, head thrown back, lies on a tangle of leaves in a steeply foreshortened pose, and a half-nude, sensualised Baptist, wearing a leopard pelt, kneels but coils forwards, curving an impossibly long arm to direct our gaze heavenwards. The reborn Raphael knew he had to distinguish himself from the original. He did so with an idiosyncratic, compelling mannerism, disrupting the classical harmony and perfect geometric proportion with which Raphael had brought Renaissance naturalism to its apogee. Parmigianino’s most famous painting is the “Madonna with the Long Neck” (1534-40) at the Uffizi, Florence. London’s Madonna looks like her sister. Instead of Raphael’s spherical forms, Parmigianino favoured extended ovals and sinuous contours. Instead of equilibrium, “St Jerome” is a tumultuous, asymmetrical composition of odd angles, crowded space, uncertain narrative. Is the whole scene a dream of the slumbering Jerome? Or did the inventive Parmigianino devise the saints’ contortions to fit their figures into the tall narrow design specified for San Salvatore?Exploring the painting’s conception and creation, the National Gallery has gathered eight preparatory studies, all things of beauty, each characterised by Parmigianino’s rhythmic linearity, and an appealing mix of spontaneous expression and search for precision. The nude drawings are the exhibition’s revelation; it is as if Parmigianino, stripping layers of clothing from his figures, confirms the vibrant underlying sensualityIn the Ashmolean Museum’s tiny whirlwind of a pen-and-ink drawing “The Virgin and Child”, arabesque curves and swoops for both the figures and the clouds swell and overlap, as Parmigianino tests his initial idea of buoyancy and intertwined bodies, Mary reaching to steady the Child, balancing him on her thigh.Those forms, detailed and expanded, fill the British Museum’s pen, wash and red chalk double sheet, “Study for a Composition of the Virgin and Christ Child”, the only extant complete studies. On the recto, Parmigianino devises the two zones, Mary and Jesus in Heaven, saints beneath on Earth; Raphael’s comparable arrangement in “Madonna of Foligno” (1511-12) was the template. But it didn’t work for Parmigianino: to fit into the panel, the saints had to be reduced and cramped, the result lacked conviction and interest. So on the verso, the young artist tried again: the Baptist is enlarged and acquires his distinctive curling arm, unifying and wrapping round the composition; Jerome becomes a tilting torso.The Getty Museum’s red chalk “Studies of Saints” and a pair of pen-and-wash drawings pursue the problem of Jerome. In the chalk drawing — sumptuous in its dense hatching and soft shadows — he leans back, still awake, watching a forcefully gesturing Baptist; doodled pairs of heads repeat the youth versus age theme. The ink drawings depict first a partially reclining, twisting form, then a carefully rendered nude turning at head, hips, knees, feet, like a corkscrew. This pose was adopted for the painting, where a rippling red cloth half covers Jerome’s body; the sketch is more explicit and eroticised, with white heightening emphasising powerful muscles. The nude drawings are the show’s revelation; it is as if Parmigianino, stripping layers of clothing from his figures, confirms the vibrant underlying sensuality that animates and disquiets in “St Jerome”. The languorous “Seated Semi-nude Female wearing Drapery”, the most exquisitely finished of the works on paper, its delicate gradations of black and white chalk paralleling the painting’s contrasts of light and shade, is clearly a study for the Madonna in “St Jerome” — and as clearly secular in inspiration, recalling colossal classical statues, the drapery evoking carved stone rather than fabric. After “St Jerome”, Parmigianino fled embattled Rome for Bologna, where he developed his style of refined artifice in yet more sexually charged religious paintings. “The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine” (1529, National Gallery room 9) casts Mary and the saint as swan-necked fashionable young women in body-clinging gossamer silk, one with nipples showing, gossiping in a curtained interior. Parmigianino here restages Correggio’s painting of the same subject outdoors — where baby Jesus similarly places a ring on Catherine’s finger — into a curious, chaotic composition featuring a second pair of figures conversing in an inner room, a male head profiled in one lower corner, Catherine’s wheel of torture cropped in the other. As with “St Jerome”, it can be read both as a saint’s dream, and as Parmigianino’s own weird vision. Following Pesellino last year and Piero della Francesca in 2022, Parmigianino: The Vision of St Jerome is the National Gallery’s welcome third Christmas exhibition devoted to an Italian master of sacred painting. If Parmigianino lacks his predecessors’ spiritual gravitas, he is an intriguing, consummately assured artist whose short career — he died of fever aged 37, the same age of death as Raphael — bears continuous reinterpretation. Vasari thought him “melancholy and strange”. Ernst Gombrich suggested he was among “perhaps the first modern artists” in his desperation “to create something new and unexpected”. The National Gallery also has “Portrait of a Collector”, auctioned in the 19th century as Parmigianino’s self-portrait. It isn’t — though perhaps metaphorically it is. Displayed in room 12, the fur-clad Collector sulks and sneers among Giovanni Battista Moroni’s portraits of affluent youths putting their best faces forward. He poses before a spot-lit pseudo-antique bronze relief of Venus and Mars, the cavorting figures depicted in Parmigianino’s own self-consciously serpentine style. This sculpture segues into an eerily unnatural landscape: acrid, glowering skies, hyper-bright green tree, unusually depicted in small, unblended brushstrokes. It’s a sinister reverie — surrealism four centuries early — by an artist who did not paint conventionally devout images, but always hints that the supernatural may be the real. 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