OUT OF TIME.

Parmigianino was born Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola in Parma, in 1503, and died in exile nearby, at the age of thirty-seven, after having helped to initiate Mannerism, the tendency toward high-strung, strained expressiveness which became a dominant style in European painting for the rest of the sixteenth century. He is an Old Master for any time--like the present--when artists must contend with the crushing authority of a no longer satisfying but obdurate recent past. Today's hegemony is that of postminimalism--the longest-running aesthetic dispensation since the Victorian age. In Parmigianino's day, it was the high Renaissance of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo.

A current sparkling show, at the Frick Collection, of some fifty drawings by Parmigianino, along with a few paintings and prints, is small, but there is nothing minor about it. The show is entitled "A Beautiful and Gracious Manner." Parmigianino's contemporaries were dazzled by the seductive cachet of his drawing, which, for me, is both more and less than beautiful and gracious, because it lays such distracting emphasis on the artist as a performer. A more apt term might be "charming" or, better, in our present lingo, "cool," indicating a state of being blessed, to the verge of being cursed, with preternatural facility. Parmigianino conveys gustily passionate, sexy content--dancerly madonnas, gossamer nudes--nonchalantly, as if it were nothing much. He gives an impression of being both primitively naive and hypercivilized, and he elevates ease to the status of an ethical law: Thou shalt not toil. (Never mind that no other effect demands more dedicated practice, which consumed Parmigianino almost from the cradle. The orphan son of a painter, he was raised by painter uncles.) A peculiar pathos enters in. Parmigianino's talent overflows the requirements of his devotional and mythic subject matter, which becomes incidental to our experience of his pictures. Charm denotes such surplus goodness--more of what we like than we know what to do with. Cool is charm with overtones of awe and undertones of envy. Parmigianino suggests a banished prince, torn from his proper peers and condemned to address the likes of you and me.

At the Frick, three swift chalk studies for a painting that is not in the show, "The Madonna of the Rose" (1529-30), develop the image of a hefty baby Jesus kicking his legs while supine on Mary's lap. She keeps him in place with one forearm and brings the other arm across her body, extending a long-fingered hand upon which one of his tiny hands rests. In a way that is characteristic of Mannerism--and typical of jazz, come to think of it--the picture departs from the main features of its theme to emphasize secondary and latent content: in this case, what baby boys are like and how pleasurable it is to imagine a woman who is both superbly aristocratic and a wonderful mother. These offbeats rivet attention on the artist's improvisatory flair--the audacity of his unerring line, the summary deftness with which he handles light and shadow. You could pass a glad hour at the show perusing nothing but Parmigianino's highlights and shadings. For the latter, he often uses simple hatching with straight lines, in passages that are thoroughly convincing except when you focus on them, whereupon they seem disdainfully perfunctory. What couldn't he do?

He couldn't be comfortable with paint, which locked his drawing down into design. Disegno (the untranslatable merging of drawing with pictorial design) was the intellectual glory of the Renaissance masters, although its practice was atrophying into formula by Parmigianino's time. Something painful happened when his graphic genius was transposed into colored oils: the template of Raphael's snugly constructed space and harmonic color took over, reducing the young painter's blazing originality to passive-aggressive weirdness--long necks, spooky eyes. There are some quite miserable early paintings in the Frick show. In one, Parmigianino tries to bring his hatching trick to bear; the result is terrible. He needed a new way to paint, which would not arrive until more than a half century after his death, with the birth of the Baroque. He was simultaneously ahead of his time--indeed, ...