When was the mannerist period

If the harmonious and idealistic representations of the High Renaissance expressed the supreme confidence of man, who saw himself as the measure of all things in the first few decades of the 16th century, this certainty was soon shattered. For the Protestants, the papacy had become the epitome of universal moral and religious decadence. The chief bone of contention was the sale of so-called 'indulgences', with which the faithful could buy forgiveness from the Pope.

The money from this lucrative business flowed into the magnificent new building of St Peter's Basilica in Rome. The rapid growth of the Reformation movement demonstrated the need for fundamental reforms within the Church. But there was a high price to be paid for it.

Bloody wars were waged throughout Europe in the name of faith for over years. The unity of the church broke down, its authority was increasingly called into question. The insecurity that this produced was intensified by the most recent scientific discoveries, which put the world out of joint in the truest sense of the word. Copernicus had established that the sun rather than the earth was the still centre of the universe, around which all the stars and planets, including the earth, revolve.

This heliocentric view of the world entirely contradicted the Church's view of itself, and its claims to domination, since the idea that the representative of God did not sit at the centre of cosmic events was far from attractive. In addition, the spectacular circumnavigation of the world by Ferdinand de Magellan and Christopher Columbus' discovery of America bore out the suspicion that the earth was round not flat, nor was central Europe the centre of the world.

The Copernican change in the conception of the world is reflected in the Italian art of the period. Painters - like many of their contemporaries - lost their faith in ordered harmony. They were of the view that the rational laws of art based on equilibrium, were no longer sufficient to illustrate a world that had been torn from its axes.

To this extent, the art of this period Mannerism - is the art of a world undergoing radical change, impelled by the quest for a new pictorial language. Mannerism reflects the new uncertainty. Reaction Against the Perfection of the Renaissance. The young generation of artists sensed that they could not develop the style perfected by Old Masters like Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael any further.

These great masters had succeeded in painting pictures which looked entirely natural and realistic, while at the same time being perfectly composed in every detail. In their eyes, the painters had achieved everything that could be striven for according to the prevailing rules of art. For this reason the Mannerists sought new goals, and - like many of the avant-garde artists of Modernism hundreds of years later - they turned against the traditional artistic canon, distorting the formal repertoire of the new classical pictorial language.

Even the great Michelangelo himself turned to Mannerism, notably in the vestibule to the Laurentian Library, in the figures on his Medici tombs, and especially in his Last Judgment fresco painting in the Sistine Chapel.

Jacopo Pontormo combined the influences of his teachers Andrea del Sarto and Leonardo with impulses from Raphael's late work, as well as the painting of Michelangelo, arriving at a pictorial language which, for all its realism, still seems other-worldly. In his painting The Visitation of Mary , S.

Michele, Carmignano , showing the encounter between Mary and Elisabeth, the women seem like supernatural beings. They barely touch the floor. Their bodies are lost in the voluptuous folds of their metallically gleaming drapery. They stand in the air like flickering flames. The eye trained in Renaissance painting was taught that there are other ways of seeing beyond the purely naturalistic. More than any artists before them, Mannerist painters stressed the individual way of painting, the personal vision and pictorial understanding of things.

They discovered the symbolic content of visual structure, the expressive element of painting. They consistently resisted equilibrium. So the circular and pyramidal compositions typical of the Renaissance disappeared. Classical compositional patterns were unbalanced by surprising asymmetrical effects.

Painters abandoned the basic structural model that stabilized the painting. Thus, for instance, the pictorial structure - based upon central perspective, focusing the viewer's gaze on a single point - is now replaced by a dynamized pictorial space of undefined depth.

Mannerism developed in Italy and became a formative influence on the styles of several Italian painters who were active during the first half of the 16th century, such as Pontormo , Tintoretto and Giulio Romano. From this moment and on Mannerism spread throughout central and northern Europe with several northern painters, such as Hendrik Goltzius and Hans von Aachen , came to Rome to study and practice the mannerism style. Thanks to its high level of international popularity Mannerism lasted for the whole century, until when Caravaggio and his paintings brought this problematic style to an end, leading to the rise of Baroque.

Learn more about the movement in History of Mannerism. Skip to main content. Log in Sign up Home. Contact us. Your Benefits Join as an Artist F. Mannerism is an artistic style and movement that developed in Europe from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance , around the s, to the end of the 16th century when Baroque started to replace it.

In that period, after the death of Raphael , art experienced a period of crisis. The work of the Renaissance masters Leonardo , Michelangelo and Raphael was credited with having arrived at a formal perfection and an ideal beauty difficult to overcome. Renaissance artworks were perfectly composed up to the last detail, thanks to artists having mastered anatomy, light and perspective.

This led young artists to believe that there was nothing worth pursuing in art, that had not been achieved yet. From this point of view, Mannerism was born with the aim to develop a new kind of art that worked in a new direction, without pretending to imitate nature anymore, but instead was turned against the traditional artistic canon.

This new style over the years became a distortion of the Renaissance perfection and an exaggeration of the previous movement's qualities.

Even Michelangelo himself turned to Mannerism in the last years of his activity, especially in his Last Judgment fresco painted in the Sistine Chapel between and Additionally, the virtuosity, the technical artificiality over the composition and the exaggerated representation of moods and intense subjects of Mannerism reflected the Italian and European historical and social period of the 16th century.