During the second decade of the 16th century, Andrea del Sarto had emerged as the foremost practitioner of High Renaissance naturalism in Florence. The subtle and ambiguous emotional tension present beneath the harmony of Andrea’s forms and colours was greatly accentuated by one of his pupils, Jacopo da Pontormo. In Pontormo’s Visdomini altarpiece (1518), the tension approaches the breaking point; the composition is vertical and lacking in a sense of space; and a host of similar but clashing centres of action create an impression of agitation. Pontormo persisted with this expressive style, becoming increasingly influenced by the angular forms of Albrecht Dürer’s German engravings and by the more tortured aspects of Michelangelo’s figure style. Vasari made it quite clear that Pontormo’s development was in direct contradiction to the later ideals of Mannerism.

The second of Andrea’s important pupils, Rosso Fiorentino, began in a not dissimilar spirit of expressive rebellion. His highly unconventional “Madonna with SS. John the Baptist, Anthony Abbot, Jerome and Stephen” for Santa Maria Nuova (1518; Uffizi) displays an aesthetic anarchy bolder than anything by Pontormo, and by the 1520s he was creating works of savage emotionality (e.g., the Volterra “Deposition,” 1521). In 1523 Rosso journeyed to Rome. There he was overwhelmed by three experiences: Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, the late style of Raphael, and the art of the newly arrived Parmigianino.

Parmigianino brought with him from Parma three sample pictures to display his virtuosity to Roman patrons. His style, based originally upon that of Correggio, already possessed much of the attenuated elegance for which he became famous. In Rome Parmigianino was hailed as the new Raphael and specifically as a painter capable of reproducing the sophisticated grace of Raphael’s late “St. Michael” (Louvre). Raphael had died in 1520, but his most authoritative late work in the Vatican stanze (papal apartments) was continued and developed by his foremost pupils, Giulio Romano (who left for Mantua in 1524) and Perino del Vaga. Their Roman styles rely upon a direct though refined use of the art of classical antiquity as a source of inspiration and upon an ingenious exploitation of different levels of pictorial reality within a single decorative scheme. The underlying artificiality of their manner was reinforced by the latent academicism of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling nudes.

Rosso’s encounter with the latest painting Rome offered resulted in a radical realignment of his style. His “Dead Christ with Angels” (c. 1526; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), a subject that he would earlier have been inclined to treat with exceptional angularity of form, is executed with a new feeling for rarefied beauty. Emotion is now expressed less overtly, and his handling of paint is less aggressive. Rosso, Parmigianino, and Raphael’s pupils undoubtedly influenced each other during the mid-1520s, but in 1527 Rome was sacked, and the artists of Pope Clement VII’s court became scattered. Parmigianino fled to Bologna, returning after four years to his native Parma, where he continued to develop his personal form of mannered beauty (e.g., “Madonna of the Long Neck,” Uffizi). Perino found employment with the ruling family at Genoa, and Rosso visited a number of Italian cities before settling in France.

The sophisticated Mannerism that evolved in Rome before 1527 became the chief formative influence upon the styles of a number of important younger artists. Vasari and Francesco Salviati had passed their period of apprenticeship in Andrea del Sarto’s Florence. They parted in 1527 but resumed their close acquaintance in Rome (1531), and it was the Roman style that influenced their subsequent development. Vasari, Salviati, and Jacopino del Conte, who worked with Salviati on the frescoes for San Giovanni Decollato, Rome, attempted to combine the formal and narrative artifice of the late Raphael decorations with the complex figure style of Michelangelo. The result in Vasari’s case is undeniably eclectic, but Salviati created an individual maniera of enormous facility and inventiveness (e.g., “Peace,” Palazzo Vecchio, Florence). The Raphaelesque element in the Roman style was reinforced by Perino’s return to Rome in about 1538.

Salviati’s career was unsettled—he worked in Florence, Rome, Venice, and France—but Vasari returned to Florence to the court of the Medici duke Cosimo I, who had replaced in 1537 the unpopular (and assassinated) Alessandro de’ Medici. Cosimo and his Spanish wife, Eleonora de Toledo, whose formal Iberian tastes influenced the artistic life of the court, shrewdly embarked on an ambitious series of propagandistic projects to consolidate his political position. Vasari became the “stage manager” for much Medicean propaganda. His success as a painter and architect after 1555 was considerable, but his most important contribution to Mannerism was undoubtedly his advocacy of Mannerist ideals in his Lives, first published in 1550 and revised and extended in 1568. As Vasari realized, the most important painter in Cosimo’s court was Il Bronzino, a pupil of Pontormo.

Bronzino had, from the first, reduced the emotional content that had been an important feature of Pontormo’s style, and, during the 1530s in Florence, he began to establish a reputation as a court portrait painter. His mature portraits are elegant, perfectly finished, ingenious in detail, and aloofly formal, reflecting the Spanish etiquette of Cosimo’s court. Bronzino was adopted as favourite artist by Eleonora, receiving the commission to decorate her small private chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio. The resulting frescoes are in no sense spiritually expressive, but they are brilliantly stylish, with references to antiquity, which displayed the erudition of both artist and sitter, and to Raphael and Michelangelo. Bronzino was later influenced by the teachings of the Counter-Reformation, adopting a more modest narrative style, but his underlying aesthetic art remained a sense of maniera.

A number of later Mannerists responded similarly to the Counter-Reformation—Santi di Tito is particularly important in this respect—but it was only with Federico Barocci that the ideals of Mannerism were abandoned in favour of an all-pervasive piety in religious painting. Barocci’s attractively fluent and softly coloured style, based largely upon Correggio, may be considered as an exceptional precursor of the Baroque style. Barocci abandoned his Roman Mannerism as early as 1575, but the majority of his contemporaries in Rome and Florence continued to develop the eclectic aspects of the original maniera. Daniele da Volterra and Pellegrino Tibaldi painted in an explicitly Michelangelesque manner, while Cavaliere d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) and Federico Zuccari, at the end of the century, investigated the complex intellectual conceits of the Raphael studio style. Zuccari—a painter, designer, and theorist—is the most representative figure of this late phase, and his travels (to Rome, Venice, Spain, England, France, and Antwerp) underline the internationalism of late Mannerist style.

Outside Florence and Rome, many of the major Italian cities succumbed to the spreading influence of Mannerism after 1527. Siena, under the lead of Domenico Beccafumi, developed a bizarre form of emotional Mannerism, but only Venice maintained a steady, independent Mannerism. Venice was certainly receptive to Mannerist influence—as seen in the works of Titian after 1530, Tintoretto, and Veronese—but, with the exception of Andrea Meldolla (Schiavone), Venetian painting continued to be dominated by non-Mannerist ideas in colouring and expression. Vasari’s disparaging remarks about Tintoretto’s lack of good design show clearly that the differences between Romano-Florentine and Venetian painting remained fundamental.

The early and High Renaissance style as developed in Italy did not immediately dominate all European painting. A few northern artists adopted Renaissance motifs but used them in a piecemeal manner without full comprehension of Italian compositional methods. After 1520, however, northern and Spanish artists came increasingly to understand and adopt Mannerist ideas, and highly individual schools of Mannerism began to appear in various centres outside Italy. Regional styles of considerable decorative flamboyance resulted from the fusion of the intricacies of the late Gothic style with the complexities of Mannerism.