Mannerism

• 1. Introduction

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  Mannerism is the art style born from a crisis of success. By the early years of the 16th century, painters and sculptors working in the Italian High Renaissance had solved nearly every problem their craft had posed. Anatomy, light, physiognomy, emotional expression in gesture, the subtle gradation of tone - all had reached what contemporaries regarded as near perfection. Young artists looked around and found nothing left to solve. What they built in response was something stranger, more personal, and more competitive than anything that had come before.

  The questions this documentary will explore cut to the heart of what art does when it runs out of territory. What happens when a generation inherits a tradition so accomplished that imitation itself becomes the engine of invention? How did a style rooted in deliberate artifice become the first international art movement since the Gothic? And what does it mean that Mannerism is still debated - whether it is a style, a movement, or simply a period - after more than four centuries of argument among art historians?

• 2. Crisis of Perfection

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  The new style developed between 1510 and 1520, emerging either in Florence, in Rome, or in both cities at the same time. It is a telling ambiguity. The forces producing it were diffuse and atmospheric rather than tied to a single workshop or patron. What pushed young artists toward the unfamiliar was, in part, the overwhelming presence of one older master.

  Michelangelo developed his deeply original style at an early age, and it was greatly admired almost immediately. What his contemporaries most prized was his terribilità - a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur that no subsequent description quite captures. Artists learned his impassioned and highly personal manner the standard way students of the period learned anything: by copying. His Sistine Chapel ceiling provided models for the ignudi, for the Libyan Sibyl; his Laurentian Library vestibule, his Medici tombs, and above all his Last Judgment gave younger painters and sculptors an inexhaustible supply of forms to absorb and redirect.

  The admiration tipped, at moments, into something more desperate. Young artists broke into his house and stole drawings from him. Vasari recorded Michelangelo's own assessment of this dynamic: "Those who are followers can never pass by whom they follow." The sentence contains both a warning and a challenge, and many of the artists who came after him spent careers trying to prove it wrong.

  Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were given simultaneous commissions by Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini to decorate a wall in the Hall of Five Hundred in Florence. Placed side by side and set in direct competition, they embodied the patron-driven logic that shaped the entire period. Competitive virtuosity was not an accident of temperament; it was cultivated by the people writing the contracts.

• 3. Two Phases of Style

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  The early Mannerists in Florence, especially students of Andrea del Sarto such as Jacopo da Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, built their identity around what scholars later called an anti-classical stance. Elongated forms, precariously balanced poses, collapsed perspective, irrational settings, theatrical lighting: these were their tools. Parmigianino and Giulio Romano, Raphael's head assistant, were moving in similarly stylized directions in Rome. This first experimental phase lasted until about 1540 or 1550.

  Art historian Marcia B. Hall, professor at Temple University, locates the precise trigger of Roman Mannerism in a single death: Raphael's premature end marked the beginning of the movement's spread through the city. Once, the accessibility and the balance of Raphael's School of Athens had seemed like the summit of artistic ambition. After him, it no longer interested the next generation.

  The second phase is known as the High Maniera, and it differs sharply in temperament. Where early Mannerism pushed against classical forms with raw energy, the Maniera artists replaced that energy with cool intelligence. Their principal model remained Michelangelo, but their method was to quote and deliberately misquote him - to place a familiar figure from his work in an unfamiliar setting, enclosed in what art historian Sydney Joseph Freedberg described as "unseen, but felt, quotation marks." The height of artifice was the Maniera painter's fondness for deliberately misappropriating a quotation.

  Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari exemplify this strain, which ran from about 1530 to 1580. Based at courts and in intellectual circles around Europe, their figures recline in even, tempered light, acknowledging the viewer with a cool glance - if they make eye contact at all. The Maniera subject rarely displays much emotion, and critics have called this current 'cold' or 'aloof' as a result.

• 4. How a Style Travels

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  The Sack of Rome in 1527 was a catastrophe that became, incidentally, a distribution mechanism. Many of the earliest Mannerist artists who had been working in Rome during the 1520s fled the city after the sack. Seeking employment, they spread across the continent, and their style traveled with them. The result was the first international artistic style since the Gothic.

  Rosso Fiorentino, who had shared a studio with Pontormo under Andrea del Sarto, arrived at Fontainebleau in 1530 and became one of the founders of what is now called the School of Fontainebleau. In France the movement was known as the Henry II style, and it had a particular impact on architecture. The engravings produced at Fontainebleau carried the Italian style onward to Antwerp, and from Antwerp to London, Poland, and across Northern Europe. Mannerist design extended into luxury goods: silver, carved furniture, the decorative arts in general.

  Other parts of Northern Europe lacked direct contact with Italian artists, but they received the style through prints and illustrated books. European rulers purchased Italian works; northern artists continued to travel south. Francis I of France, for instance, was presented with Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. The court of Rudolf II in Prague became another significant northern center, alongside Haarlem, Antwerp, and Danzig.

  From the late 1560s onward, many buildings in Valletta, the new capital city of Malta, were designed by the architect Girolamo Cassar in the Mannerist style. These included St. John's Co-Cathedral, the Grandmaster's Palace, and the seven original auberges. Cassar's work shows how far the style's reach extended - not just through major courts but into newly founded cities at the edge of the known world.

• 5. Artists and Their Objects

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  Jacopo da Pontormo's Joseph in Egypt, painted in 1517, runs four Biblical scenes simultaneously on a single canvas. On the left, Joseph introduces his family to the Pharaoh. On the right, he rides a rolling bench while cherubs fill the space around him. Above, a spiral staircase leads one of his sons toward his mother. The final scene, also on the right, shows the death of Jacob as his sons watch nearby. The painting uses incongruous shades of pink and blue across most of the canvas, collapses any coherent timeline, and crowds the composition with competing incidents.

  Agnolo Bronzino became a court painter for the Medici family in 1539, and the milky porcelain complexions of his sitters became one of the most recognizable signatures of the Maniera. In his Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, Cupid and Venus pause mid-embrace as if caught in the act. Father Time pulls back a curtain to expose them; a figure combining a girl's face with a serpent's body fills one corner; a man contorts in agonizing pain. Scholars have proposed readings ranging from a warning about syphilis to a courtly game.

  Benvenuto Cellini's gold and enamel Salt Cellar, completed in 1540, features Poseidon and Amphitrite in positions he described as uncomfortable, their proportions deliberately elongated. Cellini was originally a goldsmith, and this object was his first sculpture. His bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa was designed with eight angles of view - a Mannerist characteristic that insists the work be experienced in the round rather than from a single vantage point.

  Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Vertumnus is a portrait of Rudolf II built entirely from vegetables, flowers, and fruits set against a flat black background. The joke communicates a dual message: the humor of power, with the emperor concealing a dark inner self behind his public image, and simultaneously a serious forecast of good fortune during his reign. Humor of this kind had been virtually absent from Renaissance painting.

• 6. Lavinia Fontana and the Wider Circle

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  Lavinia Fontana, born in 1552 and died in 1614, has been acknowledged as the first female career artist in Western Europe. She was appointed Portraitist in Ordinary at the Vatican. Her style reflects the influence of the Carracci family of painters and the colors of the Venetian School. She was known particularly for portraits of noblewomen and for her depictions of nude figures, which were unusual for a woman working in that period.

  El Greco, born on Crete and working in Spain, attempted to express religious emotion through exaggeration of an intensity that set him apart from any recognizable school. His style drew on Byzantine elements, the influence of Caravaggio and Parmigianino, and Venetian coloring, combining them in a way that modern scholars have characterized as so individual that he belongs to no conventional category. His acid palette, elongated and tortured anatomy, irrational perspective, and obscure iconography are the qualities most closely associated with his Mannerist credentials.

  His Laocoön, painted in 1610, depicts the mythological priest who warned the Trojans about the wooden horse. Rather than setting the scene in ancient Troy, El Greco placed it near Toledo, Spain, in order to, as the source describes, "universalize the story by drawing out its relevance for the contemporary world." The hazy sky and blurred landscape in the background demonstrate the atmospheric sfumato technique that recurs across the movement.

  Joachim Wtewael, who lived from 1566 to 1638, continued painting in a Northern Mannerist style until the very end of his life, ignoring the arrival of Baroque art entirely. His mythological scenes and cabinet paintings executed on copper make him perhaps the last significant artist to remain committed to the movement's principles.

• 7. Beyond the Canvas

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  In literature, the word "Mannerism" has been applied to figures as varied as Miguel de Cervantes, Torquato Tasso, Veronica Franco, and Clément Marot. In English letters, it is most commonly associated with the Metaphysical poets, of whom John Donne is the most famous. The Baroque writer John Dryden's complaint about Donne's amorous verse - that he "affects the metaphysics" and "perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts" - captures precisely the tension between Mannerist intellectual complexity and the directness favored by the generation that followed.

  The madrigal, meanwhile, became the vehicle for musical Mannerism in Italy. As music historian Tim Carter observed, the madrigal "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 polyphonic music produced in France in the late 14th century - highly florid and contrapuntally complex - has also been described using the term, though this period is now more commonly known as the ars subtilior.

  Mannerism entered the theatre through the commedia dell'arte, as argued in Paul Castagno's study The Early Commedia dell'Arte (1550-1621): The Mannerist Context. Castagno was the first scholar to define a theatrical form as Mannerist. The character of Arlecchino became emblematic of the mannerist discordia concors - the union of opposites. At one moment he would be gentle and kind; in the next he would become a thief acting out violently. His movements could be graceful, then clumsily trip over his feet. This inner contradiction mirrored the way Benvenuto Cellini would dazzle his patrons by draping his sculptures, unveiling them with lighting effects and a sense of the marvelous.

• 8. Afterlife and Return

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  The term "Mannerism" itself carries a complicated history. The word derives from the Italian maniera, meaning style or manner. Giorgio Vasari, who was himself a Mannerist artist, called the period in which he worked "la maniera moderna" - the modern style. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt later used the label, and German art historians in the early 20th century popularized it to categorize 16th-century Italian art that no longer seemed to fit the harmonious ideals of the High Renaissance. John Shearman redefined the term "Mannerist" in 1967, following Fritz Grossmann's exhibition of Mannerist paintings at Manchester City Art Gallery in 1965.

  Before the 20th century, the term carried negative connotations. It described art seen as artificial, affected, and mannered in the pejorative sense. Robert Venturi applied it more generously to architecture of the 1960s and 1970s that broke modernist norms while acknowledging their existence: "Mannerism for architecture of our time that acknowledges conventional order rather than original expression but breaks the conventional order to accommodate complexity and contradiction and thereby engages ambiguity unambiguously."

  The 20th-century revival of Neo-Mannerism took a different path through the work of artist Ernie Barnes. His style, influenced by both the Jewish Community and the African-American Community, featured subjects with elongated limbs and exaggerated movement. The exhibition known as "The Beauty of the Ghetto" toured major American cities between 1972 and 1979. When it appeared at the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., in 1974, Representative John Conyers entered a statement about its positive message into the Congressional Record. One of Barnes's recurring visual motifs was the closed eyes of his subjects - a deliberate image, he explained, of how blind people are to one another's humanity.