Mannerism  

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Mannerism is a period of European painting, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts of the 16th century. It lasted from the later years of the Italian Renaissance around 1520 until the arrival of the Baroque around 1600.

Stylistically, it identifies a variety of individual approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the harmonious ideals associated with Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and early Michelangelo. Mannerism is notable for its intellectual as well as its artificial qualities, in general it was a celebration of art for art's sake opposed to naturalism. Formally, it is characterized by elongated figures, such as in Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck (1534-40), as well as the figura serpentinata as in Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (c. 1545).

Many of its works belong to the fantastic art category; influential artists include Giuseppe Arcimboldo, El Greco, Quentin Massys and Giulio Romano.

The three main centres of the Northern Mannerism style were in Fontainebleau, France, especially in the period 1530-50, Prague under Rudolf II from 1576, and in the Low Countries (Haarlem and Antwerp) from the 1580s—the first two phases very much led by royal patronage.

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.

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.

Major practitioners

Architecture and sculpture

Giorgio Vasari, Giambologna, Benvenuto Cellini, Alessandro Vittoria, Cornelis Floris II., Adriaen de Vries, Bartolomeo Ammanati, Giacomo della Porta, Ludwig Münstermann, Hendrick de Keyser, Antonio Abondio

Painting and engraving

Jacopo Tintoretto, Giorgio Vasari, Pontormo, Parmigianino, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, El Greco, Rosso Fiorentino, Simone Peterzano, Francesco Primaticcio, Federico Zuccari, Virgil Solis, Hendrick Goltzius, Cornelis van Haarlem, Maarten van Heemskerck, Giovanni Stradanus, Denis Calvaert, Joachim Wtewael, Bartholomäus Spranger, Agnolo Bronzino, Antoine Caron, Frans Floris, Orazio Grevenbroeck, Domenico Beccafumi, Lelio Orsi, Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Bock der Ältere, Giovanni Battista Bracelli, Luca Cambiaso, Lorenz Stöer, Ehard Schön, Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburgh, Veronese, Joseph Heintz der Ältere

Literature

Michelangelo, Giambattista Marino, Cervantes, Hoffmannswaldau, Francois Rabelais, Ludovico Ariosto, Luis de Góngora, Baltasar Gracián, William Shakespeare, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Emanuele Tesauro, Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, Sperone Speroni, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn

Music

Carlo Gesualdo, Luca Marenzio, Giaches de Wert

Reception

Burckhardt generally viewed the periods following the renaissance, such as Mannerism and the Baroque as "raw and deviant"[1] (Der Cicerone, 1855).

For Heinrich Wölfflin, the 16th-century art now described as "Mannerist" was part of the Baroque esthetic, one that Burckhardt before him as well as most French and English-speaking scholars for a generation after him dismissed as "degenerate".

Related

1500s - aesthetics - art - Bomarzo park - fantastic art - grotesque art - style

Opposition to High Renaissance

Mannerism is usually set in opposition to High Renaissance conventions. It was not that artists despaired of achieving the immediacy and balance of Raphael; it was that such balance was no longer relevant or appropriate. Mannerism developed among the pupils of two masters of the integrated classical moment, with Raphael's assistant Giulio Romano and among the students of Andrea del Sarto, whose studio produced the quintessentially Mannerist painters Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, and with whom Vasari apprenticed.

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. In spite of the uniquely individual quality that sets him apart from simple style designations, you can detect Mannerism in El Greco's jarring "acid" color sense, his figures' elongated and tortured anatomy, the irrational perspective and light of his breathless and crowded composition, and obscure and troubling iconography.

In Italy mannerist centers were Rome, Florence and Mantua. Venetian painting, in its separate "school" pursued a separate course, epitomized in the long career of Titian.

See also

• Counter-Mannerism
• Northern Mannerism
  • Antwerp Mannerism
  • German Mannerism
  • French Mannerism
• 16th century art