The title, shared with its final poem, comes from the painting of the same name by Late Renaissance artist Parmigniano. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the only book to have received all three awards. Ashbery said "It's not really about the Parmignianino painting...it was merely a pretext for a lot of reflections and asides that are tenuously connected to the core as tey ar4e in many of my poems which...tend to spread out from a core idea."
