The following appeared, in Polish, in the Opinion section of Poland’s WesPrzyj Nas newspaper. It reviews a book by Grzegorz Jankowicz on both Parmigianino’s painting and Ashbery’s poem inspired by same. Thank you, Google Translate, for making it possible to post here in English.
Grzegorz Jankowicz
"Life in the sphere. Parmigianino, Ashbery and the art of transformation "
Jagiellonian University Publishing House, 2020
The latest book by Grzegorz Jankowicz juxtaposes two works with which the author has been fascinated for over a dozen years. Both have the same title: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The first is the mesmerizing painting of Parmigianino, known to all connoisseurs of sophisticated weirdness (let us recall that one of its owners was Rudolf II); the second is John Ashbery's award-winning and critically acclaimed poem, written 450 years later.
Jankowicz devoted the first part of the book to historical information: it seems that he has read and synthesized everything there is to read in this field. From this part we can learn, for example, that Parmigianino, disappointed with painting, gave it up in favor of alchemy and died poisoning himself with mercury vapor during an alchemical experiment. We may also learn that Ashbery first encountered the painting of an Italian in an album bookstore in Provincetown. When he tried to find the bookstore years later, he couldn't. So he decided that it only existed so that he could know the image.
Nevertheless, Jankowicz's book is not only about the history, nor only about the relationship between Ashbery's poem and Parmigianino's painting. The problems that Jankowicz raises for himself are philosophical. The title metaphor of the sphere has two different meanings here: Parmigianino wanted to live in a sphere in order to hide from the dangerous world; Ashbery, on the other hand, was afraid of living in a sphere and the isolation that came with it. The philosophical implications of these two contradictory desires are determined by Jankowicz's considerations. The subject matter of his book is also largely determined by the intellectual climate of the Parmigianino era, who was in love with contemplating pagan images. In this case, it is all about the myth of Narcissus, which is analyzed in different ways in this book, it opens and closes it. The issues of fascination, vision, the "truth" of the self-portrait, the horror of mirrors that emerge from it, lead to many very interesting questions, for example: should vision be considered a blessing or a curse, since it puts the body to sleep and kills? Or how is self-knowledge at all possible when it is always mediated by volatile and variable matter?
The book Życie w kuli excellently shows the possibilities of living philosophical thought, the starting point of which is not philosophy but art, creations of the imagination. The only problem with it is that, being a work of art and thus a mirror, after reading it leaves the reader with doubts as to whether he is himself or Jankowicz.