THE winter exhibition at the National Gallery, based on a newly conserved painting from the Trafalgar Square collection (NG33, The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, known since the 19th century as “The Vision of Saint Jerome”), opened in time for the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The central figure of the Virgin in the painting (1526-27) has iconographical elements drawn from Revelation 12 as she stands on a crescent moon.

First widely observed as a feast in the Anglo-Saxon calendar of the early 11th century, and originally absorbed from Byzantium, the doctrinal claim for the Virgin’s immaculate conception did not readily find acceptance in the Church of Rome until 1854. At the Norman Conquest, it was contested in England, and, much later, the mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans were at loggerheads over whether the divinity of Christ required that his mother had been immaculately conceived. Only with the election of a Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV in 1471 did the feast enter the Roman calendar, on 8 December.

Girolamo Francesca Maria Mazzola was born in Parma in 1503 and is known as Parmigianino — a diminutive of his birthplace — because of his precocious skill as a young artist. He became a big cheese among Mannerist artists of his day and was hailed as Raphael Redivivus. The sheer grace and loveliness of his figures as well as his sensitive use of colours, evident in his paintings and in more than 1000 surviving drawings, suggest that this was well-deserved praise.

The altarpiece, which came into the collection of the National Gallery in 1826, was originally commissioned by a widow from Umbria, Maria Bufalini. She had been married to Antonio Caccialupi, an ecclesiastical lawyer in Rome. On his death, she engaged Parmigianino, then aged just 22, but already the darling of Pope Clement VII, for an altarpiece for the family chapel in the Church of San Salvatore in Lauro, in the heart of Rome.

Latino Orsini (1411-77), Archbishop of Urbino, had rebuilt the church when he moved in next door in the city centre once he had been made a cardinal (1448). Paul II granted the church to a Venetian order of secular canons of San Giorgio in Alga, literally St George of the seaweed, who had first established a community house in the Lagoon between the Giudecca and Fusina in the late 14th century. The community was especially celebrated for its learning and library.

Cardinal Orsini worked energetically in the 1471 conclave to ensure that Francesco della Rovere was elected as Pope Sixtus IV, and, in turn, was rewarded with the household office of Camerlengo.

Parmigianino’s contract for the Caccialupi altarpiece (dated 3 January 1526 and translated in the catalogue) specified that the Forerunner and the Doctor of the Church be included below the figures of the Virgin and Child. It gave no further direction, apart from referring to two side paintings (panels or frescoes) of the Virgin’s parents, Anna and Joachim, and of the Conception/Nativity of the Virgin. Presumably, the widow felt entitled to commemorate her own namesake.

The church itself was gutted by fire in 1591 (long after the Parmigianino painting had been moved elsewhere); so it is not possible to determine where it had first been intended or why it was such a narrow and angular composition. It seems never to have been put into the church for which it was commissioned.

Parmigianino’s biographer, Giorgio Vasari, who was later so scathing about the young painter’s eagerness to abandon the brush for the mercury to make money from engraving, reported that, when the Imperial troops of Charles V sacked the city of Rome (6 May 1527), they were stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of the young artist absorbed in painting the Virgin.

The altarpiece, three and a half metres tall, is certainly imposing and weighs nearly 100kg. Parmigianino fled the city, and his uncle took the picture to the refectory of the church near by, Santa Maria della Pace, built by Pope Sixtus IV, widely known for its Marian devotions.

Pilgrims visiting the church were offered plenary remission of their sins on the Marian feasts of the Purification, the Annunciation, the Visitation, 5 August (Our Lady of the Snows, commemorating the dedication of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in 435), the Assumption, the Nativity, the Presentation, and the Conception, and on the Saturdays of Lent. The altarpiece remained in Rome until 1558, very much an object of pilgrimage.

The curators have assembled eight preparatory drawings (there are more, illustrated in the catalogue) showing how the young artist played fast and loose with iconography and tried out various compositions. When it came to painting, he worked without any underdrawings and scarcely changed his mind, playfully introducing adolescent surprises.

Only the Virgin, imperious and somewhat distant, rises above the rest. Breaking free of her knees, the boy Christ steps towards us in unashamed nakedness, pointed out by a very muscular John, who wears a leopard skin, more Bacchus than Baptist. At his belt is a dipping bowl or a krater.

The Florentine Alessandro Allori (1535-1607) similarly garbed his seated Forerunner in an oil-on-copper roundel (with Christie’s, lot 110, 4 December 2024), while, more famously, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s late paintings of the seated Baptist was transformed into a Bacchus by changing his reed cross into a thyrsus (The Louvre).

But it is the figure of St Jerome that is most troubling, as he reels back in what seems to be post-coital stupor, his cardinal’s robe accentuating rather than concealing his tumescent member. The Getty drawing alongside one of drapery (HM The King, RCIN 900883) makes all too clear how Parmigianino reached this pose.

The vision usually associated with the Doctor of the Church is that of the last trump. Here, it is as if he has been blinded by the Virgin of the Apocalypse, although he still grasps a flagellum and a crucifix. His scarlet garolo is caught in the skull’s jaw at his side on the verdant river bank. Of his lion there is no sign and no need, as the waters of life flow quietly between him and John the Baptist.

“Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome” is at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2, until 9 March. Phone 020 7747 2885.

www.nationalgallery.org.uk