— ART HISTORY & IMAGE STUDIES —

ARTH 341 SCHEDULE REQUIREMENTS

Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe

Mannerism
The Anti-Mannerist Style

n.b. 'organic' metaphors used to describe style: "...diagnosed as symptoms of a disease..."; exaggerations of its original nature"; "signs of overbreeding, and hence sterility"

The term maniera - "making by hand" "mode" "style" "manner"

"The [sculptor] needs no model from nature, but follows a specific prototype, or the established precepts of a school. The mechanical attitude engenders conformity or, in other words, "manner".

Unoriginal - repeats manually something predetermined

When this empty stereotyping utilizes forms or formulae inherited from a style already abstract, anormative, and remote from nature, the result must necessarily be something merely decorative or ornamental.

For Walter Friedlaender (Mannerism and Anti-mannerism in Italian Painting, 1957), mannerism is 'anticlasscial'

two phases of mannerism

  1. 1520-1550 ("noble, pure, idealistic, abstract")
  2. 1550-1580 (transformation of first phase into a 'manner' - became di maniera)

An "extraordinary decline in quality" since High Renaissance

'Reform' involved returning to High Renaissance principles ["grandfather law" ]

"...the mannered Mannerism of the second phase, against whose shallowness, even in spiritual matters, the reform which set in around 1580 was directed."