The hallmarks of Mannerism

The first reaction against Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto occurred in Florence between 1515 and 1524, during which time the painters Giovanni Battista (called Rosso Fiorentino) and Jacopo Carrucci Pontormo decisively broke away from the harmony and naturalism of the High Renaissance style. Their movement, particularly what might be called their aesthetic anarchy, attracted the sympathetic attention of some 20th-century art historians, largely because of affinities such art historians saw between their work and modern trends, particularly Expressionism. After the lead given by the German art historian Max Dvořák in his book Über Greco und der Manierismus (1921), these 16th-century nonconformists came to be known as Mannerists. Recent historians have suggested, however, that the term Mannerism can more accurately be applied to a very different style initiated in Rome about 1520. Roman Mannerism, which subsequently spread throughout Europe, is characterized by a display of the artificiality of art, a thoroughly self-conscious cultivation of elegance and facility, and a sophisticated delight in the bizarre.

The term Mannerism is ultimately derived from the Italian word maniera (literally “style”). It was in the 16th century that maniera was first consistently used in art criticism to indicate a definable quality—that of stylishness. Giorgio Vasari, who is known chiefly for his biographies of artists (some of whom were his contemporaries) but who was also an architect and painter, indeed a Mannerist himself, attributed this absolute quality of stylishness to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and, above all, to artists of his own day who had learned their styles from studying these great masters. Standing at the head of the enormous representational discoveries of the Renaissance and with an increased knowledge of antiquity, Vasari was convinced that his contemporaries were in a position to understand the secret of true artistic style. This was the maniera.

Taking Vasari’s quality of maniera as the key to Mannerism, it is possible to outline some of its hallmarks. In figure style, the standard of formal complexity had been set by Michelangelo and that of idealized beauty by Raphael. In the art of their followers, obsession with style in figure composition often outweighed the importance of the subject matter. The highest value was placed upon the apparently effortless solution of considerable artistic problems, such as the portrayal of the nude figure in complex poses. Specifically, the finished work was not supposed to betray signs of the labour that lay behind it.

While depending heavily upon ancient Roman art for many of its decorative motifs and for many of its standards of design, Mannerist style commonly exploited a certain degree of license within the classical vocabulary—what Vasari and contemporary literary theorists called “a departure from the normal usage.”

It was in the intellectualizing atmosphere of the Italian courts that Mannerism met with the greatest favour. There the conscious intricacies of Mannerist compositions and the eloquent quotations from antiquity were well appreciated; court literature of this period displayed many analogous features. Mannerism was first and foremost a connoisseur’s art—certainly not one that appealed to a churchman. It is not surprising that the later Mannerist painters were censured by the church during the Counter-Reformation for painting altarpieces that were intended to demonstrate the virtuosity of their creators rather than illustrate a religious story. Even Michelangelo was attacked, one critic calling him “the inventor of obscenities, who cultivated art at the expense of devotion.”

Factors such as these caused the style to fall into general disrepute, and, when in 1662 the French writer on architectural theory Fréart de Chambray coined the word Maniériste (translated six years later as “Mannerist” by the English diarist John Evelyn), he applied it in disparaging fashion to Vasari and his contemporaries, the practitioners of the maniera. If, therefore, Mannerism is identified with the maniera, it can be historically related to a particular 16th-century style; but if it is applied strictly to early Rosso and Pontormo, as it was by Dvořák, it has no firm grounding in the way people in the 16th century thought about painting.