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Mannerism
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[One] feature of Mannerism is the emphasis on movement, emotion and drama. In the course of the sixteenth century exaggerated elongated or muscular bodies were increasingly preferred to the ideal human proportions which the artists of the Renaissance had upheld. And Mannerist painting used both brighter and cooler colours. Mannerism spread quickly across Europe, with the Flemish artist Bartholomeus Spranger playing an important role. He came across the new style in Rome and developed and renewed it in Prague, where he worked as court painter. Through his contacts with artists in Haarlem such as Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem, the North too became acquainted with Mannerism.
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[A]s later scholars such as John Shearman have explained, Mannerism was the product of a highly refined court society that valued artifice, elegance, and erudition in all aspects of culture. It was a natural outgrowth of the idealization of the High Renaissance rather than a revolt against it--that is, it was the extreme application of the goals and principles of this earlier period.
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Mannerism's style emphasized the feeling of the painter, himself. It broke all the conventional rules of painting and laid a foundation upon which formalism and expressionism could stand. The advent of formalism denoted the first time that art had taken itself as the subject. Expressionism merely emoted the artist's subjectivity. This was not the movement of kings and aristocracy; this belonged to the intellectuals. Mannerism allowed the artist to be the harbinger of his own truth (not the pope's).
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Certain aspects of Mannerism are anticipated in the work of Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530). Although Andrea's style was rooted in the artistic ideals of the High Renaissance, such as the integration of naturally proportioned figures in a clearly defined space, his expressive use of vibrant color and varied, complex poses inspired the first generation of Mannerist painters in Florence (22.75; 32.100.89). Foremost among this group were Andrea's students Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1556) and Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540). The intense tones and gracefully choreographed figures in Pontormo's crowded Deposition in the Church of Santa Felicita heighten the emotional pitch of the picture and show a taste for elegance and artifice ... seen in the stylized head and intricately braided hairstyle of Rosso's Woman with an Elaborate Coiffure (19.76.11; 52.124.2; 49.97.233). Active at the same time as these innovative artists, Bacchiacca (1495–1557) developed an eclectic mode that combined Mannerist influences and quotations from Northern artists like Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden with older Renaissance conventions (38.178; 1982.60.11).
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Mannerism oil paintings were first to be seen in mid-16th century. In part it arose in reaction to the High Renaissance, emerging after the Sack of Rome in 1527. The event shook Renaissance confidence, humanism and rationality to their foundations, and even split religion apart. In Florence, Pontormo and Bronzino, and in Rome, Il Rosso, Parmigianino, and Beccafumi created the first Mannerism oil paintings - elegant figures elongated and contorted into uncomfortable postures. Mannerists in their oil paintings devised compositions in which they deliberately confused scale and spatial relationships between figures, crowding them into the picture plane. Often strange tunnellike spaces were created, as in the works of Tintoretto and El Greco.
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Antwerp's central place in this movement, which has led to the creation of the sub-term "Antwerp Mannerism," can be linked to its emergence as the economic capital of Northern Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Bolstered by its rich trade and cultural contacts, the port city of Antwerp attracted hundreds of artists—many of them from northern France, the Rhineland, and especially Holland—who joined the local painters' Guild of Saint Luke, established large painting and sculpture workshops, and fed an expanding market for the production and export of art. Though stylistic traits differed from artist to artist, some defining features of Antwerp Mannerist painting are dramatic gestures and figural arrangements; lavish costumes; vivid, sometimes abrasive coloristic effects; imaginative architecture that freely combines Gothic and Renaissance elements; and demonstrative technical virtuosity (The Last Supper, 17.190.18a-c). Inspired by the demand for a recognizable product, or "manner," Antwerp painters developed a repertoire of stock figural motifs, compositions, and themes. Herri met de Bles, Jan Gossaert (The Holy Family, 2001.190), Jan Wellens de Cock (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1972.118.276), and a range of anonymous masters (Adoration of the Magi, 1975.1.122), were strikingly inventive and technically ambitious.
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Mannerism