Jesus among the Doctors

~During his first Wanderjahre in the early 1490s, Albrecht Dürer traveled to Colmar to meet Martin Schongauer (ca. 1445–1491), an innovative engraver whose fine lines and dense...

Renaissance artists sometimes produced works intended primarily to serve as demonstration pieces. They may have wished to display both their skills in technique and craftsmanship, and their intellectual concerns and abilities. A noteworthy example of this type of work, from the very end of our period, is Parmigianino’s Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (fig. 112). Vasari writes that Parmigianino took this panel, and others, with him to Rome, where Pope Clement VII and his court were …