Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/340

 318 P A R P A E church of S. Maria della Steccata. These were to be com pleted in November 1532; and half-payment, 200 golden scudi, was made to him in advance. A ceiling was allotted t3 him, and an arch in front of the ceiling ; on the arch he painted six figures two of them in full colour, and four in monochrome Adam, Eve, some Virtues, and the famous figure (monochrome) of Moses about to shatter the tables of the lav. But, after five or six years from the date of the contract, Parmigiano had barely made a good beginning with his stipulated work. According to Yasari, he neglected painting in favour of alchemy he laboured over futile attempts to &quot; congeal mercury,&quot; being in a hurry to get rich anyhow. It is rather difficult to believe that the various graphic and caustic phrases which Yasari bestows upon this theory of the facts of Mazzola s life are altogether gratuitous and wide of the mark ; nevertheless the painter s principal biographer, the Padre Affo, undertook to refute Yasari s statements, and most subsequent writers have accepted Affo s conclusions. Whatever the cause, Parmi giano failed to fulfil his contract, and was imprisoned in de fault. Promising to amend, he was released ; but, instead of redeeming his pledge, he decamped to Casal Maggiore, in the territory of Cremona. Here, according even to Yasari, he relinquished alchemy, and resumed } tainting ; yet he still hankered (or is said by Yasari to have hankered) after his retorts and furnaces, lost all his brightness, and presented a dim, poverty-stricken, hirsute, and uncivilized aspect. A fever carried him off on 24th August 1540, before he had completed his thirty-seventh year. By his own desire, he was buried naked in the church of the Servites called La Fontana, near Casal Maggiore. Grace Las always and rightly been regarded as the chief artistic endowment of Parmigiano, grace which is genuine as an expression of the painter s nature, but partakes partly of the artificial and affected in its developments. &quot;Un po di grazia del Parmigia- uino &quot; (a little, or, as we might say, just a spice, of Parmigianino s grace) was among the ingredients which Agostino Caracci s famed sonnet desiderates for a perfect picture. Mazzola constantly made many studies of the same figure, in order to get the most graceful attainable form, movement, and drapery the last being a point in which he was very successful. The proportions of his figures are over-long for the truth of nature the stature, fingers, and neck ; one of his Madonnas, now in the Pitti Gallery, is cur rently named &quot;La Madonna del collo lungo.&quot; He used to ponder long over a picture, and construct it in his head before he began actual work upon it ; lie then proceeded rapidly, with a resolute pencil, his great exercise in drawing standing him in good stead. His pictures were executed with diligence and finish, although he was not on the whole a sedulous worker. Neither expression nor colour is a strong point in his works ; the figures in his composi tions are generally few the chief exception being the picture of Christ Preaching to the Multitude. He was good at portraits and at landscape backgrounds, and famous for drawings ; lie etched a few plates, being apparently the earliest Italian painter who was also an etcher ; but the statement that he produced several woodcuts does not seem to be correct. The most admired easel-picture of Parmigiano is the Cupid Mak ing a Bow, with two children at his feet, one crying, and the other Itughing. This was painted in 1536 for Francesco lk&amp;gt;iardi of Parma, and is now in the gallery of Vienna. There are various replicas of it, and some of these may perhaps be from Mazzola s own ban 1. Of his portrait-painting, two interesting examples are the likeness of Amerigo Vespucci (after whom America is named) in the Studj Gallery of Naples, and the painter s own portrait in the L ffizi of Florence. One of Parmigiano s principal pupils was his cousin, Girolamo di Michele Mazzola ; probably some of the works attributed to Francesco aye really by Girolamo. (W. M. R.) PARNASSUS, a mountain of Greece, in the south of Phocis, rising over the town of Delphi. It had two pro minent peaks, Tithorea and Lycoreia, besides smaller ones, Hyampeia, Nauplia, &c. Parnassus was one of the most holy mountains in Greece, hallowed by the worship of Apollo, of the Muses, and of the Corycian nymphs, and by the orgies of the Bacchantes. The Delphic oracle, the Castalian fountain, and the Corycian cave were all situated among the clefts in its densely wooded sides. PARNELL, THOMAS (1679-1718), has a place in literature among the minor Queen Anne poets. He was a man of some private fortune, being the head of an English family settled in Ireland, and inheriting landed property both there and in Cheshire. Born in Dublin in 1G79, and educated at Trinity College, he took orders and obtained various preferments in the Irish Church. But both as a landowner and a clergyman he was an absentee, and spent most of his time in London, where he was patronized by Harley, and received into the intimate friendship of Swift and Pope. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club, and co-operated in burlesquing the &quot;Dunces&quot; and defending the Tory ministry, at the same time attaining some repute in the London pulpits as a preacher. An easy-going wit, with interests mainly in literature and society, he made his peace with the Whigs on the accession of George, but still continued his alliance with Pope. When Pope published ! his Homer, Parnell produced a translation of the Battle of the Frogs and Mice (1717), and indirectly defended Pope I against, his critics in the accompanying &quot; remarks of Zoilus &quot; j on the principles of translation. After his death in 1718 he died on his way to a living in Ireland Pope published I a collection of his poems. They are nearly all translations j and adaptations. The best known of them, The Hermit, is original ; all that Parnell did was to trick out a tale from the Gesta Romanorum with reflexions in the &quot; elevated diction &quot; of the period. &quot; His praise, &quot; Johnson of his diction ; in his verses there is more happiness than pains ; he is sprightly without effort, and always delights, though he never ravishes ; everything is proper, yet every thing seems casual.&quot; PARNY, EVARISTE DESIRE DE FORGES, YICOMTE UE (1753-1814), was born in the Isle of Bourbon on Gth February 1753. He was sent to France at nine years old, was educated at llennes, and in 1771 entered the army. He was, however, shortly recalled to Bourbon, where he fell in love ^with a young lady whom he celebrated poetically as Eleonore. His earlier biographers state her to have been called Esther de Baif, while the later give her the name of Mcllle. Troussaille. His suit was not favoured by the lady s family. He returned to France, published his Poesies Erotiques in 1778, was saluted by Voltaire on his last visit to Paris as &quot; Mon cher Tibulle, &quot; and acquired at once a reputation for graceful and natural verse-writing which, though he lived many years and pro duced much inferior work, never entirely left him. He had some fortune, and he established himself near Paris. The Revolution impaired his means, but did not otherwise trouble him ; indeed he obtained an appointment under it. In 1796 (he had published much else, but nothing of importance). appeared the Guerre des Dieiu, a poem in the style of Voltaire s Pucelle, directed against Christianity, and containing some wit, but much more that is simply dull and indecent. It commended itself to the times, however, and the author is said to have afterwards amplified it into a Christianide, the manuscript of which the Government of Louis XVIII., according to the story, bought for thirty thousand francs and destroyed. Parny devoted himself in his later years almost entirely to the religious or anti-religious and political burlesque. Under the consulate and the empire he turned his wrath from Christianity to England, and produced in 1805 an extra ordinary allegoric poem attacking George III., his family, and his subjects, under the eccentric title of &quot; Goddam ! Goddam ! par tin French-dog.&quot; The body of the poem is quite worthy of its title. Another and longer poem called Les Rose-Cruix, though less extravagant, is still less read able; arid indeed all Parny s later work is valueless except
 * is sometimes overpraised on the supposition that it
 * says with justice, &quot;must be derived from the easy sweetness