Mannerism: the Style between Renaissance and Baroque

Mannerism is a style in art from about 1520 to 1600, between the High Renaissance and the Baroque. It is marked by elongated bodies, twisted poses, unusual colours and cramped, sometimes confusing space. The artists wanted to show their skill and imagination rather than imitate nature.

Facts

When harmony was not enough

By the early sixteenth century the masters of the High Renaissance had reached a balance between nature and ideal that many thought unattainable. Raphael’s School of Athens was the very symbol of calm, symmetrical order. What could a young artist do after that? The answer was to twist, stretch and exaggerate: to show that one had mastered the rules so well that one could break them.

The word Mannerism comes from maniera, which the artist and writer Giorgio Vasari used for an elegant, refined personal style. As the name of a period the word often had a disparaging ring in later centuries, when Mannerism was seen as an age of decline. Only in the twentieth century did the style receive its own, fairer assessment; read more under the Mannerism period.

Florence and Rome

Jacopo da Pontormo painted the Deposition in the chapel of Santa Felicita in Florence in the 1520s, with floating figures in acid pinks and blues and no ground beneath their feet. Parmigianino made the Madonna with the Long Neck, in which the child is too large and Mary’s neck, fingers and legs are drawn out in an almost elegant, unnatural way. Agnolo Bronzino, court painter to the Medici, painted coolly polished portraits and a famous allegory of love with exaggeratedly smooth, marble-like bodies.

Playfulness shows in architecture too. Michelangelo designed the staircase and vestibule of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, with columns set inside the wall and a stair that pours out across the floor, as in the Laurenziana. These are building elements that break the classical rules in order to cause surprise.

Venice, Spain and court art

In Venice Tintoretto painted dramatic scenes with deep perspectives, flashes of light and moving bodies, quickly and with a broad brush. El Greco, born in Crete and active in Toledo from 1577, took the elongation of bodies and spiritual light furthest. His Burial of the Count of Orgaz of 1586–1588 divides the picture into an earthly and a heavenly zone with colours and forms that seem weightless. He is often counted as a Mannerist, even though his art is a world of its own.

Mannerism also flourished at princely courts. Emperor Rudolf II in Prague collected curiosities and artists, among them Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose portraits are composed of fruit, vegetables and flowers. The sculptor Giambologna made spiral-twisted figure groups meant to be seen from every side, and the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini created a salt cellar of gold and enamel for Francis I; see Cellini’s salt cellar.

How to tell Mannerism from Renaissance and Baroque

The Renaissance wants order, symmetry and calm. Mannerism wants tension, asymmetry and clever solutions, and it addresses an audience that can enjoy the tricks of art itself. The Baroque, which came after, returns to the credibility of nature but with drama, movement and strong light; compare in the guides to the Renaissance and the Baroque, and in the comparison Renaissance and Baroque.

Look for excessively long limbs, small heads, bodies that twist in a serpentine line, intense colours and pictures in which space seems squeezed together. Check the date as well: the style is a reaction to the High Renaissance, which places it in the later half of the sixteenth century, roughly between Michelangelo’s last years and Caravaggio’s debut.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which of these characteristics best fits Mannerism?