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Art Through Time · 1520 to 1600

Mannerism

Mannerism is the style of the late Renaissance, from about 1520, after Raphael's death, to about 1600: elongated figures, twisting poses, cool and strange colors, and crowded, unstable spaces. Where the High Renaissance sought balance, the Mannerists sought elegance, surprise and tension.

Its painters were Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino and Bronzino in Florence and Parma, Giulio Romano in Mantua, and, at the end, El Greco in Toledo.

When
1520 to 1600
Where
Florence and Rome
Began
After Raphael's death, 1520
Part of
Renaissance

When was Mannerism?

Mannerism begins in the years after 1520, when Raphael died and Michelangelo was still at work, and younger painters felt there was nothing left to perfect. The Sack of Rome in 1527 scattered the artists of the papal court to Mantua, Genoa, Venice and France. The style lasted until the 1590s, when the Carracci in Bologna and Caravaggio in Rome turned back to nature and began the Baroque.

The name comes from maniera, style, a word Giorgio Vasari used in praise: a painter with maniera had grace and polish. Later critics turned it into a charge of artificiality, and only in the twentieth century did it become the name of a period.

How to recognize Mannerism

  • Bodies stretched past nature. Long necks, small heads and tapering hands, as in Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck.
  • The figura serpentinata, the serpentine figure: bodies twisted in a spiral, turning in two directions at once.
  • Acid, unexpected color. Pinks, lime greens and pale blues, as in Pontormo's The Deposition from the Cross, where the figures seem to float with no ground beneath them.
  • Crowded, unstable space, with no clear center and figures pressed to the front.
  • Cool, polished portraits of courtiers, as in Bronzino's Eleonora of Toledo and Her Son, every thread of the brocade gown painted.
  • Wit and riddles. Learned allegories, and the fruit-and-vegetable faces of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Mannerism at the courts of Europe

Mannerism was a court style. In Florence, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici made Bronzino his portraitist. In France, King Francis I brought Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio to decorate his palace at Fontainebleau in the 1530s, and their elegant nudes and stucco frames became the School of Fontainebleau. In Prague, the Emperor Rudolf II collected strange and learned art, and Arcimboldo painted him as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons, his face made of fruit, flowers and vegetables.

Its last great painter came from Crete. Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco, trained as an icon painter, studied Titian in Venice and Michelangelo in Rome, and settled in Toledo in 1577, where he stretched his saints into flames of color, as in The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.

Famous Mannerist paintings

What came after Mannerism?

In the 1590s, the Carracci family's academy in Bologna and, in Rome, Caravaggio rejected its artifice for real bodies, real light and clear stories, and the Baroque began.

Mannerism painters

More Mannerism paintings

See Mannerism on the timelineEvery art movement in order