Mannerism for beginners: art after Raphael

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

What do you do after perfection? After Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, younger painters in Florence and Rome felt they could not simply repeat the masters. From about 1520 they stretched bodies, twisted poses, crowded spaces and chose strange, sharp colors. Critics later called this Mannerism, from maniera, style. For a long time it was treated as a decline. Today many people, me included, love its nervous elegance.

Three layers

Historical What the works and the period show. Later tradition How critics judged the style. Modern Why it speaks to us now.

A time of crisis

Historical The 1520s were frightening. Luther’s Reformation split the Church, and in 1527 imperial troops sacked Rome. Some historians have linked Mannerism’s unease to these events. It is a tempting story, but courts also loved the style simply because it was refined and difficult.

Stretched and twisted

Historical Pontormo’s Deposition in Santa Felicita, Florence, painted in the 1520s, has figures in pale pinks and blues floating with no clear ground. Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck, begun in 1534 and left unfinished at his death in 1540, gives the Virgin an impossibly elongated neck and hands. Rosso Fiorentino painted sharp, angular faces. The aim was grace, not realism. Giorgio Vasari, himself a painter of this generation, praised a quality he called grazia, an effortless beauty beyond rules. Sculptors joined in: Giambologna’s bronzes spiral upward so that you have to walk around them to see the whole figure, and Benvenuto Cellini, goldsmith and sculptor, wrote a boastful autobiography that still reads like an adventure novel.

The cool portrait

Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, 1530s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (29.100.16). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Agnolo Bronzino, court painter to the Medici dukes, painted the elite of Florence in the 1530s and after. His sitters are cool, polished and unreadable, dressed in black silk, with hands that look carved. This young man at the Met holds a book and gives nothing away. Bronzino was also a poet, and the portrait feels like a poem about self-control.

Women at the easel

Lucia Anguissola, Portrait of a Man, about 1560. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (32.100.101). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Sofonisba Anguissola of Cremona was trained with her sisters by a father who believed in educating daughters. She became a court painter to Philip II of Spain and lived into her nineties. Her sister Lucia Anguissola painted this portrait of a man around 1560, one of only a handful of paintings attributed to her; she died young, in the 1560s. Lavinia Fontana of Bologna ran a workshop, painted altarpieces and supported her family. In 1971 Linda Nochlin asked why there had been “no great women artists”, and her answer was about access to training and institutions, not talent.

The esoteric angle

Historical Mannerist courts were full of collectors of the strange: cabinets of curiosities with coral, crystals, automata and “unicorn horns”, which were narwhal tusks. The Habsburg emperor Rudolf II in Prague, from 1583, gathered alchemists, astrologers and painters like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who made faces from fruit and vegetables. Arcimboldo had begun with series of the Four Seasons and the Four Elements for Rudolf’s father, Maximilian II, in the 1560s: heads made of flowers, fish, birds and flames, a playful picture of the old idea that a human being is a small world.

Later tradition Rudolf’s Prague became a legend of magic, with stories about John Dee, Edward Kelley and the Golem. Dee and Kelley did visit Rudolf’s court in the 1580s; the Golem tales come from later Jewish folklore.

Modern The cabinet of curiosities is alive on many witches’ shelves, including mine.

Try it yourself

Find an image of Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck in the Uffizi online. Measure, roughly, how many heads tall the figures are compared with a real person (about seven and a half). Why do you think the painter made them so long?

Before and after

Before this: Northern Renaissance.

After this: Baroque.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.