What Manner of Art is This?
Mannerism is a term often misused and confused when speaking of art — but actually it’s the simplest in so many ways…
During the decline of the High Renaissance, patrons began favouring a particular style of art that dispensed with serious symbolism, focussing instead on the technical skill of the artist in producing objects of graceful, sometimes whimsical, beauty. It became a kind of contest among gifted sculptors and painters to produce something more perfect, more impossibly graceful, than their contemporaries.
Thus, subjects for figurative art were being selected for their potential to present something that was dramatically eye-catching and offered excess of visual pleasure without needing intellectual engagement. There was also a conscious effort to be as far removed as possible from the darker narratives of the earlier, then derided, Gothic.
Artists began eying the competition, looking to the work of others and trying to ‘out-do’ them in terms of pure style and demonstrated skill. In turn, this led to idealisation, exaggeration, and often distortion where figures were posed in ways that were no longer naturalistic (or indeed, humanly possible). Key formal elements and signifiers were stylised in order to emphasise.
