Mannerism is the style of Italian painting that followed the High Renaissance, from about 1520 to 1600. It sits between that golden age and the Baroque that came after it.
The High Renaissance, the age of Raphael and Michelangelo, had taught painters to make bodies look natural and scenes look balanced. The Mannerists stretched those bodies, twisted them and packed them into crowded, shallow spaces under unreal colors, in search of elegance rather than truth to nature.
Its best known example is the Madonna with the Long Neck, begun in 1534 by Parmigianino and now in the Uffizi museum in Florence.
The Madonna, as Italians call the Virgin Mary, is seated with the Christ Child asleep across her lap and a cluster of angels pressed in at her side. Her neck and fingers are far longer than any real woman's, and the child is far too large for a baby.
Parmigianino knew perfectly well how to draw a body in proportion. He lengthened this one on purpose, and pictures like it later gave the style its name.
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None of the painters who made these pictures called themselves Mannerists. The noun was coined much later, from maniera, the Italian word for style or manner, and in their own time maniera was praise.
Giorgio Vasari, a painter who also wrote the first great history of Italian art, the Lives of the Artists, used it that way. He counted maniera among the qualities that made the painters of his own century better than those before them.
In the next century the praise turned into blame. In 1672 the Roman critic Giovan Pietro Bellori attacked the painters who came after Raphael for imitating other artists instead of studying nature. In 1792 the Italian historian Luigi Lanzi used the noun for the whole period, as a criticism.
For more than a century after Lanzi, the Mannerists were treated as the weak heirs of Raphael and Michelangelo, men who had copied the masters badly. The label grouped painters who knew one another, borrowed from the same masters and worked for the same kind of patrons.
The generation after Raphael
The style appeared in Florence and Rome around 1520, the year Raphael died…
What You'll Discover
A self-portrait painted on a curved panel.
A neck stretched to match a line of poetry.
The twisting pose borrowed from Michelangelo.
How a French king imported the style.
Why modern painters rediscovered El Greco.