A Madonna who won’t add up
Parma, around 1535. The young painter Francesco Mazzola, known as Parmigianino, was working on an altarpiece for a chapel. A Madonna with a neck like a swan’s holds a sleeping, far too large Christ Child on her lap. Her fingers are long and splayed; angels crowd into the left of the picture, while on the right a tiny prophet stands before a column that leads nowhere. The picture was still unfinished when Parmigianino died in 1540.
The Madonna with the Long Neck is a key work of Mannerism. Everything in it is beautiful, elegant and precious, and yet disconcertingly off balance.
After perfection
By around 1520 painting seemed to have reached its peak. Leonardo had died in 1519, Raphael in 1520. Michelangelo was still working, but his late work grew more restless and darker, as in the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel of 1536 to 1541. In 1527, mercenaries of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome. Many artists fled, and the confidence of the High Renaissance was shaken. At the same time, the Reformation split the Church.
Young painters did not want simply to imitate the great masters. They sought to outdo them in artifice, distorted proportions, shifted spaces and painted figures in twisting, spiralling poses: the “figura serpentinata”.
A word with a history
The term goes back to the Italian “maniera”, style or manner. In the 16th century Giorgio Vasari still used it approvingly for the elegant painting of his time. Later critics saw in it mere artificiality, an art “at second hand”. Only in the early 20th century was Mannerism reassessed as an epoch in its own right, partly because the Expressionists recognised kindred spirits in its distorted figures.
Florence and Rome
In Florence, Jacopo Pontormo painted a Deposition for the church of Santa Felicita in which the figures seem to float weightlessly in a space without ground, in bright, almost artificial colours. Agnolo Bronzino created cool, porcelain-like portraits of the Medici and the enigmatic Allegory with Venus and Cupid, whose meaning is still debated.
In sculpture, Giambologna became the master of the twisting figure. His Rape of the Sabine Women in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence spirals upwards in such a way that it has no single main view.
At the courts of Europe
Mannerism was an art of princely courts. At Fontainebleau, Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio decorated halls with stucco and painting for the French king Francis I. At the imperial court in Vienna and later in Prague, where Rudolf II collected art and curiosities, Giuseppe Arcimboldo assembled heads out of fruit, vegetables and flowers. In Toledo, the Cretan-born El Greco painted saints with flickering, elongated bodies.
Women painters of the Renaissance
In the 16th century several women painters achieved great success. Sofonisba Anguissola from Cremona became a court painter at the Spanish court and was expressly praised by Vasari. Lavinia Fontana from Bologna painted portraits and large altarpieces and ran her own workshop, with her husband as her assistant.
Why it still matters
Mannerism shows what happens when an art masters its own rules and then plays with them. Its distortions, artificiality and restlessness seem astonishingly modern. Many art historians see it as an epoch in which art reflects on itself with striking self-awareness.
Further reading
- John Shearman: Mannerism (1967).
- Arnold Hauser: Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (German original 1964).