For The Continuing Presence of the Past: John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: If Ashbery’s assessment is correct that Parmigianino’s painting is like “a whispered phrase passed around a room,” then how has his poem, passed on to you here in a much-abbreviated form, changed the painting “into something completely different” for you?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The modernity of Ashbery’s consideration of the Mannerist painting lies precisely in this: that the painting lives, and the painter lives on, not in the image itself, but in the imaginative response that it generates in its viewers. What the modern poet John Ashbery shares with the Mannerist painter Francesco Mazzola, known as Parmigianino, finally, is the will to invent, even the necessity of invention. Both the poem and the painting continuously destroy and reconstitute themselves in their audiences in their recurring waves of arrival.