What was mannerism

Painters - like many of their contemporaries - lost their faith in ordered harmony. They were of the view that the rational laws of art based on equilibrium, were no longer sufficient to illustrate a world that had been torn from its axes.

To this extent, the art of this period Mannerism - is the art of a world undergoing radical change, impelled by the quest for a new pictorial language. Mannerism reflects the new uncertainty.

Reaction Against the Perfection of the Renaissance. The young generation of artists sensed that they could not develop the style perfected by Old Masters like Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael any further.

These great masters had succeeded in painting pictures which looked entirely natural and realistic, while at the same time being perfectly composed in every detail. In their eyes, the painters had achieved everything that could be striven for according to the prevailing rules of art. For this reason the Mannerists sought new goals, and - like many of the avant-garde artists of Modernism hundreds of years later - they turned against the traditional artistic canon, distorting the formal repertoire of the new classical pictorial language.

Even the great Michelangelo himself turned to Mannerism, notably in the vestibule to the Laurentian Library, in the figures on his Medici tombs, and especially in his Last Judgment fresco painting in the Sistine Chapel.

Jacopo Pontormo combined the influences of his teachers Andrea del Sarto and Leonardo with impulses from Raphael's late work, as well as the painting of Michelangelo, arriving at a pictorial language which, for all its realism, still seems other-worldly.

In his painting The Visitation of Mary , S. Michele, Carmignano , showing the encounter between Mary and Elisabeth, the women seem like supernatural beings. They barely touch the floor. Their bodies are lost in the voluptuous folds of their metallically gleaming drapery. They stand in the air like flickering flames. The eye trained in Renaissance painting was taught that there are other ways of seeing beyond the purely naturalistic.

More than any artists before them, Mannerist painters stressed the individual way of painting, the personal vision and pictorial understanding of things. They discovered the symbolic content of visual structure, the expressive element of painting. They consistently resisted equilibrium. So the circular and pyramidal compositions typical of the Renaissance disappeared.

Classical compositional patterns were unbalanced by surprising asymmetrical effects. Painters abandoned the basic structural model that stabilized the painting. Thus, for instance, the pictorial structure - based upon central perspective, focusing the viewer's gaze on a single point - is now replaced by a dynamized pictorial space of undefined depth. Note: Much pioneering work on the attribution of works painted during the 16th century Mannerism era, was done by the art historian Bernard Berenson , who published a number of highly influential works on the Italian Renaissance.

In Parmigianino's painting of the Madonna dal Colla Lungo , Uffizi Gallery, Florence the immediate foreground and the distant background appear without transition, almost fragmentarily juxtaposed. The pictorial weights are unevenly distributed. On the left hand side of the picture, the painter places a cramped band of angels, while spatial depth opens up on the right-hand side, its only focus being a brightly-lit row of columns, behind which there stretches a broad, dark landscape.

And yet the painting does not break down into two parts. The painter uses overlaps the Madonna's artificially billowing cloak restrains the vanishing gaze into the depths and witty formal analogies to hold the painting together. Thus, for example, he produces a compositional reference between the column in the background, Mary's gleaming knee and the extended leg of the angel in the foreground.

Slender, elongated limbs, splayed, twisting and turning bodies, contradicting all the traditional laws of proportion, are a characteristic of Mannerism. Parmigianino - of the Parma School of painting - was another painter who gave his Madonna unusually long limbs.

Particularly striking is the gracefully curved, swanlike neck, which gave the painting the title Madonna dal Colla Lungo , or The Madonna with the Long Neck , Uffizi.

The painter intensified the idealized features of Raphael's organic figure drawing into a stylised elegance, which contemporaries admired for its grace.

This confident and exaggerated artificiality, its contrivance, its structures, gave Mannerism, or 'manierismo', its name. In the 17th century, however, the concept received the negative connotations that attach to it even today. Instead, artists were more interested in creating an interesting composition and expressing an emotion. A few of the Mannerists also used unorthodox colors, like in this painting above by El Greco, entitled Madonna and Child with St.

Martina and St. The second element sometimes seen in Mannerism is symbolism. Mannerist artists would use visual allegories and complex meanings in order to appeal to a specific, wealthier audience, instead of making art for everyone. If you can leave aside their obsession with stretching the human body, in some ways the Mannerist artists seemed to be ahead of their time. But in the end, El Greco sparked no real changes in the world of art—and with the Baroque art movement of the 17th century, classical realism returned once more.

Some scholars further divide Mannerism into two periods. Early Mannerism, which expressed an anti-traditional approach and lasted until , was followed by High Mannerism where a more intricate and artificial style appealed to more sophisticated patrons, becoming a kind of court style. Later, the use of the term Mannerism to denote a particular period of art history was pioneered by Luigi Lanzi, a 17 th century art historian and archeologist.

The period would become a forebear to the Baroque period. The development of Mannerism began in Florence and Rome around , reflecting a "perfect storm" of circumstances affecting the art world at the time. In , Martin Luther's Wittenberg Theses , which denounced church practices and called for reform, launched the Protestant Reformation.

Because of this, the serene and classical idealizations of beauty characteristic of the High Renaissance no longer seemed tenable. This iconic self-portrait shows the artist, aged twenty-one, reflected as he looks into what appears to be a mirror. His distorted hand, extenuated, fills the lower part of the image, inviting the viewer in to the intimate scene.

Beautiful, almost angelic, his gaze is introspective and focused with a still intensity. The fabrics of his clothing, the multicolored patches of expensive fur, the lacy frill of his sleeve, and the white of his neckline are rendered with a subtle play of light that seems precise though the brushstrokes are almost impressionistic.

The artist intended this as a tour de force , as it was one of the paintings he took with him to Rome when seeking the patronage of Pope Clement VII.

The work was remarkably innovative, as he painted the image on a convex panel. Supposedly he had a carpenter make a wooden ball that was then sawed in half, so that the work would resemble a barber's mirror. Most Renaissance artists regarded the mirror as a tool for observation and normalized images painted from reflections.

But Parmigianino kept the distortions in order to create a complex play upon the nature of perception itself. The self-reflexivity in the work was remarkably modern.

Art critic Michael Glover wrote, the result is "one of the most inscrutable portraits in the entire Western canon. Stork and Yasuo Furuichi stated, his "interest in psychological introspection, belief in a shifting impermanent visual reality, experimentation in the dark sciences of alchemy, wit, and youthful desire to demonstrate his artistic prowess all find their expression.

His influence extended to print making and he has been called the "father of etching. This altarpiece depicts a swirl of stricken and grieving figures as they lower the dead body of Christ, his pale elongated torso depicted in a serpentine curve that extends through the lower center of the work.

The Virgin Mary, dressed in blue, faints in the upper right. Though the work is thought to be the deposition from the cross, the artist has innovatively left out the cross, and has also added a number of figures, including the man whose face glimpsed at the far right, thought to be a self-portrait of the artist. Because the painting's composition emphasizes the swirling gestures of figures and robes, each face is like a still point of isolation, its white shocked expression echoing the face of the dead Christ.

This work marked the arrival of the Mannerist style with its unusual color palette, its elongated figures in distorted poses, and its creation of an unrealistic pictorial space. Pontormo's influence was, perhaps, greatest upon Bronzino, though he also influenced Vasari and El Greco, as well as other lesser-known artists of the time like Morandini, Naldini, and Salviati.

This work focuses on the Madonna, whose extenuated limbs and monumental scale fill the center of the canvas. A nude infant Jesus reclines on his mother's lap while angels crowd around them. Mary's expression is also nontraditional. As she holds elegant but overly long fingers to her heart, looking down with a slight smile, she seems bemused and distanced. A dissonance results between the haunting religious image and its portrait of what could be a fashionable but emotionally disconnected aristocrat.

The angels are much more animated, but evoke the curiosity and liveliness of ordinary children more than a divine presence. The architectural setting, while conveying a 'classical' effect, is not classically rendered with linear perspective, and an unsettling ambiguity results. To the right of the column, the very small figure of St.

Jerome, his limbs elongated, holds out a scroll while looking back over his shoulder.