Mannerism

Mannerism is the stylish, self-conscious art that grew inside the Italian High Renaissance and pushed its elegance past the point of comfort. Emerging around 1520 in Florence and Rome after Raphael's death and the crisis of the Sack of Rome, it answered a generation that felt everything had already been achieved by exaggerating the old virtues: proportion becomes elongation, balance becomes tension, and natural beauty gives way to artifice prized for its own sake. Vasari's maniera - the 'modern style' - prized wit, invention, and virtuosity over fidelity to nature. Through prints, travelling artists, and courts from Fontainebleau to Prague, Mannerism became the first international style since the Gothic, surviving in the north into the seventeenth century before the Baroque absorbed it.

Defining characteristics

• Elongated, serpentine figures in precariously balanced or contorted poses (figura serpentinata)
• Deliberately unstable or irrational space: collapsed perspective, crowded or oddly empty compositions
• Cool, porcelain-skinned figures with aloof expressions and refined, sometimes acidic colour
• Artifice over nature: bodies modelled on sculpture and old masters rather than on life
• Virtuoso detail and convoluted iconography pitched at connoisseurs
• Theatrical lighting against dark backgrounds, with a taste for the nocturnal and bizarre

Key figures

• Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1557) — Florentine pioneer whose crowded, anxious compositions defined early Mannerism
• Parmigianino (1503-1540) — Painter of extreme elegance and elongation (Madonna with the Long Neck)
• Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) — Medici court painter of cool, polished portraits and enigmatic allegories
• Giambologna (1529-1608) — Sculptor of multi-viewpoint marble and bronze groups built on the serpentine figure
• El Greco (1541-1614) — Cretan-Spanish painter who stretched Mannerism into visionary distortion

Example works

• Madonna with the Long Neck — Parmigianino (c. 1535)
• Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time — Agnolo Bronzino (c. 1545)
• The Deposition — Jacopo da Pontormo (c. 1528)

Sources

• Mannerism - Wikipedia encyclopedia
• Northern Mannerism - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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