SAN SECONDO PARMENSE
This little country town near Parma boasts ruined fragments of a castle, the Rocca dei Rossi, with ravishing interiors behind crumbling brick walls: a collapsed archway, above, has left behind some intriguing stucco brackets. I was in neighbouring Fontanellato to see a magical small room, painted by Parmigianino; seeing a picture of this place, 10 minutes’ drive away, of course I couldn’t resist, and was well rewarded. The surviving spaces are a riot of painted decoration, with room after room of endlessly inventive grotesques painted 1540-70, celebrating the Rossi family’s struggles against their various enemies in the warfare that devastated Italy in the period. The work is exquisite, light and fun, full of allusions to history and classical sources that are lost on me; I just enjoy their beauty and the poignancy of this luxurious, proud house reduced to a fragmented, empty ruin, first by Ottavio Farnese of Parma de-fortifying it in 1550 and then by late 19th century changes.
In February 1523 the castle saw the wedding of Count Pier Maria III de’ Rossi and Camilla Gonzaga di Vescovado; above, their paired portraits by Parmigianino, now in the Prado: he with a thrusting codpiece and a distant glimpse of Rome which he had, I am sorry to say, helped the French sack in 1527, she with three of their sons clinging to her. His mother was the redoubtable Bianca Riario, daughter of Pazzi conspirator Girolamo and half-sister of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, Cosimo de’ Medici’s father; Camilla was a niece of Francesco II, Marchese di Mantova and his wife, Isabella d’Este. A detail, below left, of Camilla's Zibellino, or marten pelt, fashionable symbol of motherhood, its gold head set with gems and a single dangling pearl.
The finest rooms of all are the two earliest, from around 1530, their vaulted ceilings frescoed with ancient Roman-style stucco frames for Pier Maria III and Camilla, whose cousin Federico II di Mantova had just built Palazzo del Te, where Andrea de’ Conti made almost identical stucco decoration in the Camera delle Aquile in 1527. The room of the Caesars, above, was the count’s studiolo, where he could bask in ancient emperors’ reflected glory (himself, at the time, fighting for Emperor Charles V to restore Medici rule to Florence, and supported by the emperor against his nemesis Farnese.) The room of the Golden Ass, below, was their bedroom. The classical narrative of Apuleius’s tale (the trials of magic-obsessed Lucius, transformed into an ass) chimed with the fraught situation of the Rossi family, but the result is delightful, each perfect little composition neatly framed in stucco, and cheeky putti emerging from trompe l’oeil wooden frames.
