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…