Mannerism was the style that followed the High Renaissance in Italy from about 1520 to about 1600, preferring refinement and artifice to the plain imitation of nature. Its paintings show elongated figures in twisting poses, crowded or uncertain space and cool, often acid colors, and from Florence and Rome it spread across Europe. The name comes from the Italian maniera, meaning style. Giorgio Vasari used the word as praise and called the art of his own time the modern manner. Later critics turned it into a reproach for affected, second-hand art. German art historians of the early 20th century made Mannerism a period label, and today it carries no judgment.
Its first painters were young artists for whom the balance of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo seemed impossible to surpass. In Florence, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, both pupils of Andrea del Sarto, pulled that balance apart. Rosso’s Deposition (1521, Pinacoteca, Volterra) sets angular figures on ladders against a pale sky in hard planes of color. In Pontormo’s Deposition in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence (1525-1528), mourners in rose and pale blue crowd a shallow space with no cross and barely a foothold. Michelangelo’s late work, above all the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (1536-1541), became the great model for powerful, twisting bodies.
Raphael’s chief assistant, Giulio Romano, took the new manner from Rome to Mantua. There the painted walls of the Sala dei Giganti in the Palazzo Te (1532-1535) seem to collapse onto the visitor. Parmigianino came to Rome from Parma in 1524. His Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (about 1524, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), painted on a curved panel, swells his hand enormously in the foreground. The Sack of Rome in 1527 scattered these painters across Italy and beyond. Vasari tells that soldiers who broke into Parmigianino’s studio found him so absorbed in painting that they let him be. His Madonna with the Long Neck (1534-1540, Uffizi) stretches the Virgin into an impossible elegance beside columns he never finished.
From about 1530 the style settled into a polished court art, often called the maniera. Agnolo Bronzino, Pontormo’s pupil, became court painter to the Medici in 1539. His Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo with Her Son (about 1545, Uffizi) gives the duchess smooth, pale skin and a distant, composed face. Her brocade gown is rendered almost thread by thread. His Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (about 1545, National Gallery, London), sent as a gift to Francis I of France, wraps an erotic embrace in allegories still debated today. Vasari painted in the same manner, and his Lives of the Artists (1550, enlarged 1568) set out its ideals of invention, refinement and virtuoso skill.
Rosso carried the style to France in 1530. At Fontainebleau he decorated the gallery of Francis I, setting frescoes among high-relief stucco figures, and after his death in 1540 Francesco Primaticcio led the work. Engravings spread such designs to Antwerp and across northern Europe. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, long in the service of the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and Prague, portrayed Rudolf II as Vertumnus (1591, Skokloster Castle, Sweden), his face assembled from fruit, vegetables and flowers. In Haarlem, Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem favored muscular nudes in strained poses. In Utrecht, Joachim Wtewael painted small mythologies on copper until his death in 1638.
In Venice, Jacopo Tintoretto, whose rapid, rough brushwork Vasari judged extravagant, painted a Last Supper for San Giorgio Maggiore (1592-1594). Its table runs steeply into darkness, lit by a hanging lamp and Christ’s halo, while angels take shape from smoke. El Greco, born on Crete, worked in Venice and Rome before settling in Toledo in 1577. In The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586-1588), still in Toledo’s church of Santo Tomé, a row of nobles in black separates the burial from heaven. Above them crowd stretched, flame-like figures. His Laocoön (about 1610-1614, National Gallery of Art, Washington) sets the Trojan myth beneath a view of Toledo.
The Council of Trent (1545-1563) demanded religious images that were clear and decorous. In 1565 Daniele da Volterra painted draperies over some of the nudes in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which earned him the nickname Il Braghettone, the breeches-maker. After 1580 the style faded in Italy, as the Carracci in Bologna and Caravaggio in Rome turned again to the direct study of nature. By 1600 the Baroque prevailed.
