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Home > What's New > Peter Weller's Cigar Paradise: Wise and Foolish Virgins
Peter Weller's Cigar Paradise: Wise and Foolish Virgins
Posted: Monday, September 22, 2003
By Peter Weller
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I am down to four Bolivar Robustos, headed to Parma, Italy, after an excursion to Trieste (see this writer's previous tidbit). I am low on smokes and going to see virgins. The girls adorn the ceiling of a church in Parma, lavishly depicted by a painter named Parmaginino (real name Francesco Massola, b. 1503, d. 1540). Interesting name, Parmaginino, which literally means "little dude from Parma." If you have visited the Ufizzi Gallery in Florence (after buying a good smoke from Tabaccaio Sotto I Portici), you may have seen one of Little Dude From Parma's trademark pieces, Madonna of the Long Neck (1534): a pretty Madonna with, not only a looonnnnggg neck, but perky breasts, rosy cheeks, large round almond eyes, blonde hair, a few androgynous folks and an itty bitty Greek god-like guy, all flowing or, in some cases, hanging around her. But the weirdest is the Baby Jesus sitting in the long necked Madonna's lap. This Baby Jesus is depicted with the face of an infant, yet the body of an N.B.A. forward. Now, the Counter Reformation in the 1560s put the kibosh on this sort of religious art, as they found it not particularly religious, nor art. Matter of fact they found it downright indulgent and decadent, which is what a lot of folks find it today.
However, Little Dude from Parma (LDFP) was brilliant. Why? Well, he was the apex of a movement called "Mannerism" that ended the Renaissance and, one might say, started modern art. But even though the genre has an "ism" attached, and is considered a movement, this is only a nineteenth century term applied to a period of painters who took a look at Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel (1508-1511) stuff and said, "Wow, Lloyd! Mich ain't interested in painting perspective, architecture, landscape or detail. He's just taking a bod and twisting the hell out it." In fact, Mich would sometimes twist a bod or two until they looked like folks doing a samba with no visible means of support. The initial group of Florentine painters who followed Mich's idea (Pontormo, Bronzino, etc.) were trashed by the eighteenth century know-it-alls, yet finally accepted by twentieth century know-even-mores who revered the later Mannerist guys like LDFP (Parmaginino, if you've forgotten. Stay attentive, class!) And, as a smart scholar named John Shearman from Harvard pointed out, Mannerism, more than any preceding movement, had a conscious "audience" reaction in mind.
Now, you may ask, what does this have to do with cigars? Well, Parmaginino, being from Parma (really?), home of the greatest ham and cheese plate on planet E, just happened to have been the impetus for this writer's sojourn to that town at the end of a four month teaching stint in Italy. And having only four smokes and no intention of finding any in Parma, I not only found great smokes and one of the most fabulous restaurants in Italy, but I also saw LDFP's capolavoro (best work) on a ceiling of a circular church called La Steccata ("the fence"). And this work taught me a lesson. And the lesson is: bring cigars. You see, the painting consists of…virgins, yessir. No, not the Virgin Mary (long neck or no) who occupied every great painter's eye from Giotto to Dalí, but six massive, adult, diaphanously draped, poised examples of purity, albeit protected by Moses and Elijah, all painted in fresco around 1539. I saw the ladies right up close and personal from a scaffold 60 feet in the air: there they were, yes, perky breasts, almond eyes, blonde hair, androgynous folk but, alas, no oversized Baby Jesus nor itty bitty Greek god.
The six ladies are actually called "The Wise and Foolish Virgins" and either of those adjectives before that noun could be considered an oxymoron, depending upon which side of the steccata you sit. The gals have flower vases on their heads and are holding lamps, and they are colorfully and whimsically…gorgeous. The parable is from the Old Testament wherein an intended groom awaits the outcome of the haggling over the dowry from the intended bride; it must be proven to the bride's father that the groom is worthy of his daughter so the groom's agent or family haggles over the dowry while the groom waits outside the wedding site. Six virgins (or more) waited with the groom (he, while puffing a great double corona) outside the appointed wedding place while the dowry bickering inside finishes. Now the dowry bickering, in this case, went on too long (that is, through two double coronas), and the virgins' lamps went out. The Wise girls had brought extra oil to relight the lamps, but the foolish ones were forced to return home for more oil. However, the groom, now ready to cash in, stubbed out his second D.C. and entered the wedding. By the time the foolish virgins returned, the door to the wedding was locked. Point being; don't go to Parma with only four robustos.
Alas, I was in luck. Alas, LDFP wasn't. He executed the Wise and Foolish girls in a masterstroke of color and whimsy, but was also run out of town for, whimsically, not finishing the entire vault of the church under contract.
I'd come to Parma to feast on LDFP's virgins and an LDFP exhibit at the Palazzo Pilotta, a behemoth sixteenth century castle/museum in the center of town. Now, as I said, it was the end of a four-month teaching commitment with Syracuse University in Florence and my second time ever in Parma, a city situated between Bologna and Milan. Right off the train from, ugh, Florence (see this writer's previous column on that din of humidity) I light up one of the four remaining Bolivars and walk across the piazza della Stazione, where, on the opposite side from the train station, is a large bottega selling the ham (prosciutto da Parma) and cheese (Parmigiano Regiano), both of which are startlingly more scrumptious in Parma than even in Rome, not to mention L.A. Scoring a bottle of '97 Brunello di Montalcino for a pittance, I make my way with ham, cheese and wine toward the monolithic Palazzo Pilotta's courtyard, in which await my dear Venetian/Cleveland buddies Tommaso and Caterina. We go in, me lugging wine, cheese, ham and only three smokes.
Now LDFP was a follower of one of my favorite guys, a break-through High Renaissance artist, also from Parma, named Corregio (Antonio Allegri, b. 1489, d. 1534) who, after copping a few tricks from Leonardo da Vinci, turned into a remarkable master on his own. Corregio was a painter of such extraordinary sensuality and composition and of such impact that, indeed, the exhibit not only included most of LDFP's oeuvre, but several of Corregio's works, including "The Danae", based on the myth of Jupiter turning himself into a rain of pure gold and falling all over Danae, starkers in her bed. Many, including Rembrandt, painted this myth. If the story gets your motor running, believe me, it was the intention. As Jupiter had a very jealous wife, when the god fancied some nymph (who, more often than not, had no reciprocal fancy for him -- I mean, he wasn't even human), Jupe would turn himself into an item of the nymphs fancy. (As in another gorgeous Corregio work, showing Io making love with a cloud -- Jupiter in disguise. Thus, the nymph would see an object of desire falling out of the atmosphere -- clouds, gold, silk or whatever -- and think, "Wow, shopping! Right from the sky." In my girlfriend's case, Jupe would have metamorphosed into shoes. But Corregio's Danae (usually in Rome at the Villa Borghese museum) was present along with several of LDFP's other works, including a painting of a beauty resembling Gwyneth Paltro, oddly titled the Turkish Slave. (Rosy cheeks, albeit turban replacing blonde locks.)
These paintings were labeled profane. No, not as in dirty or pornographic, although I am sure some Church contemporaries would have thought so (even though popes and cardinals collected these works). But "profane" meant narrative or allegorical subjects: like myth, or anything else outside the realm of scripture, thus appealing to a secular or humanist sensibility. Let's face it: a lot of the stuff was pretty racy. For example, four of Corregio's great profane works were painted for a famous tobacco (probably cigars) and horse connoisseur named Federico II Gonzaga of Mantua, a big shot in a long line of big shots, who, when decorating a love house for his girlfriend, Isabella Boschetta (Isabelle "Little Forest"… love that name), told Corregio, adamantly: "I DON'T WANT ANY SAINTS AND STUFF ON THE WALL MAKING ME FEEL GUILTY!" Indeed, the trysting house was an old stable turned into a men's hang (cigar club?) called "Palazzo Te" designed inside and out by another horn dog named Giulio Romano. Indeed further, Federico II's mother, an astute art collector and humanist named Isabelle D'Este of the notable Este family from Ferrara (these cities always had weddings to further politics…maybe a good idea today…let's see…Dubya's daughter and Chirac's…nah…). Mama Isabelle warned bubba Federico, who was already married to the daughter of a Greek scion, "If you shame this family, Bubba, go smoking those stinky cigars in that house you built for that #$%@*, I will LEAVE TOWN." Whereupon Federico replied, "Mom…there's the door." Mom left town for a year. The Palazzo Te in Mantua is a must-see if you are in Italy, as Mantua is, like Parma, elegant, medieval and off the beaten track. Yet. I have found no cigars in Mantua. Although I did in Parma. Well…
I lug the ham, cheese and wine through the LDFP and Corregio exhibit, after which I light up the second of my three remaining robustos, and the Wise and Foolish Virgin moral is really resonating. (Why didn't I load up before Trieste!?) Parma does not strike me as the heater Mecca, and I am desperate enough to begin combing the streets for the bitter Toscano cheroots. However, Catarina and Tommaso are not yet sated on the art front, thus we make our way to the Convent of St. Paul to feast upon more Corregio, in this case the "Camera (room) di San Paolo". Here, in the early sixteenth century, the abbess of the convent, one Giovanna da Piacenza, used monastery funds to decorate her private apartment. Shame on Giovanna, but did she care? And yet this created a stink with the church, particularly concerning the subject matter the abbess chose to depict on the ceiling of her bedroom. May I say that, considering it is a convent, there is…let me think…no…not one item of a religious nature in that bedroom. Profane? You bet. But, Giovanna was also a humanist, a student of Greek and Roman history and enamored of myths. So here we have a ceiling like an umbrella vault, of which the ribs are fictive (painted to look real) bamboo?!…yes, bamboo! And this motif is set into a square room, containing a stunning decorative visual homage (in flesh tones, green and monochrome) to rams' heads, fictive architecture and nudes of cupids, virtues, goddesses, graces -- some in very dicey postures. The room is a stunner. But the ceiling was also considered profane enough to have the entire abbey cloistered (closed in) by orders of Pope Clement VII upon the death of the abbess in 1524. The place remained completely unseen by the populace at large for 200 years.
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