Mannerism is a
period
of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian
High Renaissance around 1520.
It lasted
until about 1580 in Italy
, when a more
Baroque style began to replace it, but
Northern Mannerism continued into
the early 17th century throughout much of Europe. Stylistically, Mannerism encompasses a
variety of approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the
harmonious ideals and restrained naturalism associated with artists
such as
Leonardo da Vinci,
Raphael, and early
Michelangelo. Mannerism is notable for its
intellectual sophistication as well as its artificial (as opposed
to naturalistic) qualities.
The definition of Mannerism, and the phases within it, continue to
be the subject of debate among art historians. For example, some
scholars have applied the label to certain early modern forms of
literature (especially poetry) and music of the 16th and 17th
centuries. The term is also used to refer to some Late
Gothic painters working in northern Europe from
about 1500 to 1530, especially the
Antwerp Mannerists—a group unrelated to
the Italian movement. Mannerism also has been applied by analogy to
the
Silver Age of Latin.
Nomenclature
The word mannerism derives from the Italian
maniera,
meaning "style" or "manner". Like the English word “style,”
maniera can either be used to indicate a specific type of
style (a beautiful style, an abrasive style), or maniera can be
used to indicate an absolute that needs no qualification (someone
‘has style’).In the second edition of his
Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568),
Giorgio Vasari used
maniera in three
different contexts: to discuss an artist's manner or method of
working; to describe a personal or group style, such as the term
maniera greca to refer to the Byzantine style or simply to
the
maniera of Michelangelo; and to affirm a positive
judgment of artistic quality. Vasari was also a Mannerist artist,
and he described the period in which he worked as "la maniera
moderna", or the "modern style".
As a stylistic label, "Mannerism" is not easily pigeonholed. It was
used by Swiss historian
Jacob
Burckhardt and popularized by German
art
historians in the early 20th century to categorize the
seemingly uncategorizable art of the Italian 16th century — art
that was no longer perceived to exhibit the harmonious and rational
approaches associated with the High Renaissance. “High Renaissance”
suggested a period of harmony, grandeur and the revival of
classical antiquity and the term was redefined in 1967 by John
Shearman. The label “Mannerism” was used during the 16th century to
comment on social behaviour and to convey a refined virtuoso
quality or to signify a certain technique.
However for later writers, such as the 17th-century Gian Pietro
Bellori, "la maniera" was a derogatory term for the decline of art
after Raphael, especially in the 1530s and 1540s. From the late
19th-century on, art historians have commonly used the term to
describe art that follows Renaissance classicism and precedes the
Baroque. Yet historians differ in opinion, as to whether Mannerism
is a style, a movement, or a period, and while the term remains
controversial it is commonly used to identify European art and
culture of the 16th century.
Early mannerism
Depending on the historical account, Mannerism developed between
1510 and 1520 in either Florence, Rome, or both cities. The early
Mannerists in Florence—especially the students of
Andrea del Sarto:
Jacopo da Pontormo and
Rosso Fiorentino—are notable for elongated
forms, precariously balanced poses, a collapsed perspective,
irrational settings, and theatrical lighting.
Parmigianino, a student of
Correggio, and
Giulio Romano, Raphael’s head assistant were
moving in similarly stylized aesthetic directions in Rome. These
artists had matured under the influence of the High Renaissance,
and their style has been characterized as a reaction or exaggerated
extension of it. Instead of studying nature directly, younger
artists began studying Hellenistic sculptures and paintings of
masters past. Therefore, this style is often identified as
"anti-classical”. yet at the time it was considered a natural
progression from the High Renaissance. The earliest experimental
phase of Mannerism, known for its "anti-classical" forms, lasted
until about 1540 or 1550. Marcia Hall notes in her book 'After
Raphael' Raphael's premature death marked the beginning of
Mannerism in Rome.
Michelangelo was one of the great creative exponents of Mannerism
and it was his style which raised the standard of art to a new
level. His varied Ignudi painted in distinctive positions on the
Sistine Chapel ceiling could
have been influenced by the "
Belvedere
Torso” and which influenced other painters.
Raphael’s "Lo Spasimo di Sicilia” depicts an event in Christian
history when Christ falls while carrying the cross, sees his mother
in distress and is helped up by Simon of Cyrene. The composition is
linked by the diagonals of the soldiers’ spears and the wooden
cross. Unusually, Christ cannot be singled out immediately amongst
the gathering figures in the foreground, whereas Simon stands out
quite prominently. The spectator’s eyes look down the composition
to the drama and charge of the narrative.
The competitive spirit which was spurred on by the patrons
encouraged the artists to show off their virtuoso painting. When in
Florence Leonardo and Michelangelo were each given a commission by
Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini to decorate a wall in the “Hall of Five
Hundred”. These two artists were set to paint side by side and
compete against each other fueling the incentive of being as
innovative as possible. Later on in Rome Raphael was commissioned
to paint “The Transfiguration” by Cardinal Gioulio di Medici who
had been appointed as arch bishop of Narbonne in the south of
France. At this time Raphael was also busy painting the
Stanze, various altarpieces,
painting versions of
Madonna and child and being the
principal architect in Rome after the death of Bramante which gave
him little time to do “The Transfiguration”. Therefore the cardinal
commissioned Sebastiano del Piombo who was great Venetian colourist
and a friend of Michelangelo to paint “The Raising of Lazarus”.
This spurred Raphael on to complete the commission.
This period has been described as both a natural extension of the
art of
Andrea del Sarto,
Michelangelo, and Raphael, as well as a decline of those same
artists' classicizing achievements. In past analyses, it has been
noted that mannerism arose in the early 1500s alongside a number of
other social, scientific, religious and political movements such as
the
Copernican model, the
Sack of Rome, and the
Protestant Reformation's increasing
challenge to the power of the Catholic church. Because of this, the
style's elongated forms and distorted forms were once interpreted
as a reaction to the idealized compositions prevalent in High
Renaissance art. This explanation for the radical stylistic shift
c. 1520 has fallen out of scholarly favor, though the early
Mannerists are still set in stark contrast to High Renaissance
conventions; the immediacy and balance achieved by Raphael's
School of Athens, no longer seemed interesting to young
artists.
Indeed, Michelangelo himself displayed tendencies
towards Mannerism, notably in his vestibule to the Laurentian
Library
, in the figures on his Medici
tombs, and above all in his Last
Judgment
.
High maniera
The second period of Mannerism is commonly differentiated from the
earlier, so-called "anti-classical" phase.
Subsequent mannerists stressed intellectual conceits and artistic
virtuosity, features that have led later critics to accuse them of
working in an unnatural and affected "manner" (
maniera).
Maniera artists held their elder contemporary Michelangelo as their
prime example; theirs was an art imitating art, rather than an art
imitating nature.
Freedberg argues that
the intellectualizing aspect of maniera art comes in the artist
expecting his audience to notice and understand this visual
reference, the familiar figure in an unfamiliar setting surrounded
by "unseen, but felt, quotation marks." The supreme artifice comes
in the Maniera painter's love of deliberately mis-appropriating a
quotation, for example Bronzino including the figure of a woman
after the
Medici Venus
(similar to the one illustrated at right) in a religious picture
depicting
Christ's
resurrection.
Agnolo
Bronzino and
Giorgio Vasari
exemplify this strain of Maniera that lasted from about 1530 to
1580. Based largely at courts and in intellectual circles around
Europe, Maniera art couples exaggerated elegance with exquisite
attention to surface and detail: porcelain-skinned figures recline
in an even, tempered light, regarding the viewer with a cool
glance, if at all. The Maniera subject rarely displays an excess of
emotion, and for this reason are often interpreted as 'cold' or
'aloof,' and is often called the "stylish" style or the
Maniera.
Spread of mannerism
Mannerist centers in Italy were Rome, Florence and Mantua. Venetian
painting, in its separate "school," pursued a separate course,
represented in the long career of
Titian. A
number of the earliest Mannerist artists who had been working in
Rome during the 1520s fled the city after the
Sack of Rome in 1527. As they spread out
across the continent in search of employment, their style was
distributed throughout Italy and Europe. The result was the first
international artistic style since the
Gothic.The style waned in Italy after 1580, as a
new generation of artists, including the
Carracci brothers,
Caravaggio and
Cigoli,
reemphasized naturalism.
Walter
Friedlaender identified this period as "anti-mannerism", just
as the early mannerists were "anti-classical" in their reaction to
the High Renaissance.
Outside of Italy, however, mannerism continued into the 17th
century. In France, where Rosso traveled to work for the court at
Fontainebleau, it is known
as the "
Henry II style" and it had a
particular impact on architecture.
Other important continental centers
include the court of Rudolf II in Prague
, as well as
Haarlem
and Antwerp
.
Mannerism
as a stylistic category is less frequently applied to English
visual and
decorative arts, where local categories such as "Elizabethan" and "Jacobean" are more common.
Eighteenth-century Artisan Mannerism is one exception.
Early theorists
Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari's opinions about the
"art" of creating art come through in his praise of fellow artists
in the great book that lay behind this frontispiece: he believed
that excellence in painting demanded refinement, richness of
invention (
invenzione), expressed through virtuoso
technique (
maniera), and wit and study that appeared in
the finished work, all criteria that emphasized the artist's
intellect and the patron's sensibility. The artist was now no
longer just a craftsman member of a local Guild of St Luke. Now he
took his place at court with scholars, poets, and humanists, in a
climate that fostered an appreciation for elegance and complexity.
The coat-of-arms of Vasari's
Medici patrons
appear at the top of his portrait, quite as if they were the
artist's own.
The framing of the woodcut image of Mannerist artist
Giorgio Vasari's
Lives of the Artists
(
illustration, left) would be called "
Jacobean" in an English-speaking context. In
it, Michelangelo's Medici tombs inspire the anti-architectural
"architectural" features at the top, the papery pierced frame, the
satyr nudes at the base. In the vignette of Florence at the base,
papery or vellum-like material is cut and stretched and scrolled
into a
cartouche (
cartoccia). The
design is self-conscious, overcharged with rich, artificially
"natural" detail in physically improbable juxtapositions of jarring
scale changes, overwhelming as a mere frame: Mannerist.
Gian Paolo Lomazzo
Another literary source from the period is
Gian Paolo Lomazzo, who produced two
works—one practical and one metaphysical—that helped define the
Mannerist artist's self-conscious relation to his art. His
Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura
(Milan, 1584) is in part a guide to contemporary concepts of
decorum, which the Renaissance inherited in
part from Antiquity but Mannerism elaborated upon. Lomazzo's
systematic codification of aesthetics, which typifies the more
formalized and academic approaches typical of the later 16th
century, controlled a consonance between the functions of interiors
and the kinds of painted and sculpted decors that would be
suitable. Iconography, often convoluted and abstruse, is a more
prominent element in the Mannerist styles. His less practical and
more metaphysical
Idea del tempio della pittura ("The
ideal temple of painting", Milan, 1590) offers a description along
the lines of the "four temperaments" theory of the human nature and
personality, containing the explanations of the role of
individuality in judgment and artistic invention.
Some mannerist examples
Jacopo da Pontormo
Jacopo da Pontormo's
Joseph in
Egypt stood in what would have been considered contradicting
colors and disunified time and space in the Renaissance. Neither
the clothing, nor the buildings—not even the colors—accurately
represented the
Bible story of
Joseph.
Rosso Fiorentino & the School of Fontainebleau
Rosso Fiorentino, who had been a
fellow-pupil of Pontormo in the studio of Andrea del Sarto, brought Florentine
mannerism to Fontainebleau
in 1530, where he became one of the founders of the
French 16th century Mannerism called the "School of
Fontainebleau".
The
examples of a rich and hectic decorative style at Fontainebleau
transferred the Italian style, through the medium of engravings, to Antwerp
and thence
throughout Northern Europe, from London to Poland, and brought
Mannerist design into luxury goods like silver and carved
furniture. A sense of tense controlled emotion expressed in
elaborate symbolism and
allegory, and
elongated proportions of female beauty are characteristics of his
style.
Agnolo Bronzino
Mannerist portraits by
Agnolo Bronzino are
distinguished by a still elegance and meticulous attention to
detail. As a result, Bronzino's sitters (
at left) have
been said to put an uncommunicative abyss between subject and
viewer, concentrating on rendering of the precise pattern and sheen
of rich textiles.
Alessandro Allori
Alessandro Allori's (1535 - 1607)
Susanna and the Elders (
at right) uses
artificial, waxy eroticism and consciously brilliant still life
detail, in a crowded contorted composition. The viewer is brought
so close to the subjects as to almost feel claustrophobic—like a
third
elder leering at the
scene of a young, seemingly paralyzed Susanna being groped and
assaulted by the two lecherous predators.
Jacopo Tintoretto
Jacopo Tintoretto's
Last Supper
(at right) epitomizes Mannerism by taking
Jesus and the table out of the middle of the room. He
showed all that was happening. In sickly, disorienting colors he
painted a scene of confusion that somehow separated the
angels from the real world. He had removed the world
from
God's reach.
El Greco
El Greco attempted to express the
religious tension with exaggerated Mannerism. This
exaggeration would serve to cross over the Mannerist line and be
applied to
Classicism. After the
realistic depiction of the human form and the mastery of
perspective achieved in high Renaissance Classicism, some artists
started to deliberately distort proportions in disjointed,
irrational space for emotional and artistic effect. There are
aspects of Mannerism in El Greco (
at right), such as the
jarring "acid" color sense, elongated and tortured anatomy,
irrational perspective and light of his crowded composition, and
obscure and troubling iconography.
Benvenuto Cellini
Benvenuto Cellini created the
Cellini Salt Cellar of gold and
enamel in 1540 featuring
Poseidon and
Amphitrite (earth and water) in elongated
form and uncomfortable positions. It is considered a masterpiece of
Mannerist sculpture.
Image:Angelo Bronzino 037.jpg|Bronzino,
Portrait of Bia
de'MediciImage:AlloriSusanna.jpg|Alessandro Allori,
Susanna and the eldersImage:Elgreco.christ.200pix.jpg|El
Greco,
BaptismImage:Persee-florence.jpg|Benvenuto Cellini,
Perseus with the head of Medusa
Mannerist architecture
- Main article: Renaissance
architecture#Mannerism
An example
of mannerist architecture is the Villa Farnese
at Caprarola in the rugged country side outside of
Rome
. The proliferation of engravers during the
16th century spread Mannerist styles more quickly than any previous
styles.
A
center of Mannerist design was Antwerp
during its
16th century boom. Through Antwerp,
Renaissance and Mannerist style
were widely introduced in England, Germany, and northern and
eastern Europe in general. Dense with ornament of "Roman"
detailing, the display doorway at Colditz Castle (
illustration,
left) exemplifies this northern style, characteristically
applied as an isolated "set piece" against unpretentious vernacular
walling.
Mannerism in literature and music
In English literature, Mannerism is commonly identified with the
qualities of the "Metaphysical" poets of whom the most famous is
John Donne. The witty sally of a Baroque
writer,
John Dryden, against the verse
of Donne in the previous generation, affords a concise contrast
between Baroque and Mannerist aims in the arts:
He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires,
but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign;
and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice
speculations of philosophy when he should engage their
hearts and entertain them with the softnesses of
love.
(italics added)
The rich musical possibilities in the poetry of the late 16th
century and early 17th provided an attractive basis for the
madrigal, which quickly rose to
prominence as the pre-eminent musical form in Italian musical
culture, as discussed by
Tim
Carter:
"The madrigal, particularly in its aristocratic guise, was
obviously a vehicle for the ‘stylish style’ of Mannerism, with
poets and musicians revelling in witty conceits and other visual,
verbal and musical tricks to delight the connoisseur."
The word Mannerism has also been used to describe the style of
highly florid and
contrapuntally
complex
polyphonic music made in France
in the late 14th century. This period is now usually referred to as
the
ars subtilior.
See also
Notes
References
- Apel, Willi. 1946–47. "The French Secular Music of the Late
Fourteenth Century". Acta Musicologica 18: 17–29.
- Briganti, Giuliano. 1962. Italian Mannerism,
translated from the Italian by Margaret Kunzle. London: Thames and
Hudson; Princeton: Van Nostrand; Leipzig: VEB Edition. (Originally
published in Italian, as La maniera italiana, La pittura
italiana 10. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961).
- Cheney, Liana de Girolami (ed.). 2004. Readings in Italian
Mannerism, second printing, with a foreword by Craig Hugh
Smyth. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 0820470635. (Previous edition,
without the forward by Smyth, New York: Peter Lang, 1997. ISBN
0820424838).
- Freedberg, Sidney J. 1971. Painting in Italy,
1500–1600, first edition. The Pelican History of Art.
Harmondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin Books. ISBN 0140560351
- Freedberg, Sidney J. 1993. Painting in Italy,
1500–1600, 3rd edition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300055862
(cloth) ISBN 0300055870 (pbk)
- Friedländer, Walter.
1965. Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting.
New York: Schocken. LOC 578295 (First edition, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1958.)
- Shearman, John K. G. 1967. Mannerism. Style and
Civilization. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Reprinted, London and New
York: Penguin, 1990. ISBN 0140137599
- Smyth, Craig Hugh. 1992. Mannerism and Maniera, with
an introduction by Elizabeth Cropper. Vienna: IRSA. ISBN
3900731330
- Summerson, John. 1983. Architecture in Britain
1530–1830, 7th revised and enlarged (3rd integrated) edition.
The Pelican History of Art. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin.
ISBN 0140560033 (cased) ISBN 014056103X (pbk) [Reprinted with
corrections, 1986; 8th edition, Harmondsworth and New York:
Penguin, 1991.]
Further reading
- Gardner, Helen Louise. 1972. The Metaphysical Poets,
Selected and Edited, revised edition. Introduction.
Harmondsworth, England; New York: Penguin Books. ISBN
014042038X.
- Hall, Marcia B . 2001. "After Raphael: Painting in Central
Italy in the Sixteenth Century", Cambridge University Press. ISBN
0521483972.
- Pinelli, Antonio. 1993. La bella maniera: artisti del
Cinquecento tra regola e licenza. Turin: Piccola biblioteca
Einaudi. ISBN 8806131370
- Sypher, Wylie. 1955. Four Stages of Renaissance Style:
Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700. Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday. A classic analysis of Renaissance, Mannerism,
Baroque, and Late Baroque.
- Würtenberger, Franzsepp. 1963. Mannerism: The European
Style of the Sixteenth Century. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston (Originally published in German, as Der Manierismus;
der europäische Stil des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts. Vienna: A.
Schroll, 1962).