Mannerism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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 High 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 (a celebration of art for art's sake opposed to naturalistic) qualities.
Many of its work belong to the fantastic art category; influential artists include Giuseppe Arcimboldo, El Greco, Quentin Massys and Giulio Romano.
The term is also applied to some Late Gothic painters working in northern Europe from about 1500 to 1530, especially the Antwerp Mannerists and some currents of seventeenth-century literature, especially poetry.
Reception
Burckhardt generally viewed the periods following the renaissance, such as Mannerism and the Baroque as "raw and deviant" (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.
