Mannerism: An Introduction to a Revolutionary Artistic Movement of the Late Renaissance

When researching or studying the artistic movement commonly known as Mannerism, the first thing you may want to do is toss that term out the window or into the garbage. The ultimate goal of the Mannerists had to do with creating special effects in their paintings. Mannerism is actually a fusion of two distinctly approaches to achieving this goal. Raphael was not just a Mutant Turtle, he was also one of the greatest painters of the Renaissance. One approach to Mannerism followed the style of Raphael in a way that transformed the classical beauty of the master into a study of elegance taken to an almost surreal extreme in pursuit of revealing the bizarre. The other style of painting that is covered by Mannerism pays a greater debt to another Mutant Turtle and Renaissance genius. Fellow goes by the name of Michelangelo. This style of Mannerist painting in some ways prefigured the Surrealist works of De Chirico and Magritte.

Mannerism existed as a viable artistic movement for several centuries, but today is generally categorized as a movement that reached its peak effectiveness for most of the 1500s before its decline around the turn of the 17^th century. The central aesthetic components of a Mannerist painting is high contrast between colors and the subject poses to engender a distorted effect that relies on focusing on the bizarre tensions within the artwork. As was the case with most other paintings of the period, the subjects of Mannerist paintings included recreations of religious events as well as portraits of the people of the time. Early Mannerist works predict the arrival of Impressionism several centuries later in its use of colors. The shock that arrived with the unreal use of color by Impressionist artists would not have been quite as scandalous if the critics had been schooled in the works created during the commencement of Mannerism. The use of color often took the path of instilling familiar objects with a distorted and unsettled lack of familiarity by using colors not normally associated with those objects.

Tension is heightened in many Mannerist paintings as a result of conflicting colors that sometimes create an almost hallucinatory effect. Tension could also be created within these paintings through juxtaposition of emotions and poses. Figures could be curved erotically around each other despite the fact that the subject might be a Biblical figure as well as a mythological figure.

Leading artists of the Mannerist schools include Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo, the man known better as Parmigianino than by his actual name, Agnolo Bronzino, Giorgio Vasari and Francesco de' Rossi Salviati. Each of these artists took an individualized approach to Mannerism as did their less famous peers. What almost all of them shared was a revolutionary approach to color and an obsession with grotesque details that are lent a further disquieting consequence through the use of contrasts between light and shade, as well as textural qualities of objects in the painting itself.

Mannerism also extended to the art of sculpture, but the same qualities of special effects through the curvature and connections of figures as well as the inclusion of esoteric references often placed subtly on the fringes and extremities of the sculpted figures.