A Mannerist painting bends the rules of anatomy, space and color on purpose instead of following them, a habit that began in Italy around 1520.
These 12 paintings were made over about ninety years in Italy and Spain. Each one defies classical proportion, space or color in a way you can see for yourself.
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I kept a painting if at least one of two things holds. Either the record names who ordered it or whom it portrays: a contract, a patron, a sitter, a witness of the time. Or a restoration, a scan or a surviving drawing has shown how the painter worked, or what later hands did to it. An anonymous, unexamined panel passes neither.
12. El Greco, The Vision of Saint John (around 1608 to 1614)
Saint John stands in the foreground with his arms raised. His body stretches far past natural proportions. Behind him, naked figures reach for white garments handed out by a flying cherub. El Greco left the canvas unfinished when he died in Toledo in 1614.
The scene comes from the Book of Revelation. When the Lamb opens the fifth seal, the souls of the martyrs cry out for justice. Each receives a white robe and is told to wait. The scholar Manuel Cossío first read the picture this way in 1908, and many writers call it The Opening of the Fifth Seal.
In 1608 El Greco was commissioned to paint three altarpieces for the church of the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist, outside the walls of Toledo. The Met names Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, the hospital's administrator, as the man behind the commission.
A Met essay notes that while Rome was trying to purge display and artifice, El Greco made twisting forms, radical foreshortening and unreal colors the basis of his art. The Met counts this canvas among his most extravagant late works, with figures elongated beyond credibility.
Saint John's pose, the Met says, recalls Michelangelo's Haman, painted in a corner of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. One of the distant nudes probably recalls the ancient Laocoön group.
In 1880 Julián Jiménez, a restorer at the Prado, cut off the upper part of the canvas. The Met says the missing section has never been identified and was probably destroyed. Without it, the museum adds, the exact subject is bound to remain speculative.
Past Saint John's raised arms, the canvas ends in a cut edge. Whatever he was looking at left with that strip.
In 1905 the Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga bought the picture for 1,000 pesetas. The Met says Picasso knew it from visits to Zuloaga's studio in Paris. Scholars argue that its visionary space and dissolving forms helped shape Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which Picasso painted in 1907.
At a Glance
Artist: El Greco (1541 to 1614)
Painted: Around 1608 to 1614
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (56.48)
About This Painting
How big is The Vision of Saint John? The Met gives 222.3 by 193 centimeters, about 87.5 by 76 inches. Added strips bring it to 224.8 by 199.4 centimeters.
How did The Vision of Saint John reach New York? Zuloaga kept The Vision of Saint John until he died in 1945, and it then belonged to the Museo Zuloaga in Zumaya, Spain. In 1956 the Met bought it from Newhouse Galleries, a New York dealer, through its Rogers Fund.
What became of the other two altarpieces ordered from El Greco for the Toledo hospital church? El Greco's son, Jorge Manuel, completed the Baptism and the Annunciation. The Baptism now hangs on a side altar of the hospital church. The Annunciation was later cut in two, and its upper part is in the National Gallery in Athens.
Did The Vision of Saint John influence anyone besides Picasso? The Vision of Saint John loomed large among the German Expressionists, the Met says. Jackson Pollock later made sketches after it.
11. Giulio Romano, The Fall of the Giants (Sala dei Giganti) (1532 to 1535)
Giants fall among collapsing temples and columns. The nearest carry huge rocks on their backs, to stack up and climb to heaven. High in the vault, Jupiter hurls thunderbolts down on them. Giulio Romano frescoed the whole room between 1532 and 1535. It is the Chamber of the Giants in Palazzo Te, a pleasure palace on the edge of Mantua.