Madonna with the Long Neck

The Madonna with the Long Neck, begun around 1534, is Parmigianino's most famous work and a defining monument of Mannerist painting. Commissioned by Elena Baiardi for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Parma, it remained unfinished at the artist's death in 1540. The radically elongated proportions of the Virgin—her impossibly long neck and torso, the tiny head of Christ—deliberately violate Renaissance canons of proportion. The extreme elegance of Parmigianino's style—elongated necks, tiny hands, serpentine poses—represents a conscious intellectual refusal of High Renaissance harmony in favor of a sophisticated, almost mannered beauty that announces the self-consciousness of Mannerism.

The painting's extreme attenuation of form is its most striking feature: the Virgin's neck extends far beyond natural proportions, while her enormous thigh dominates the lower composition. The unfinished state—visible in the incomplete column and tiny figure of Saint Jerome—reveals Parmigianino's working process.