Mannerism

Mannerism role-model: Laocoon, an ancient Greek sculpture (Roman copy), rediscovered in 1507; now in the Vatican. The artists of Mannerism greatly admired this piece of sculpture.

Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when the Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century.

Quotes

• I considered that the painter’s personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one’s personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction..
  • Georges Braque from an interview with Dora Vallier in 1954, as quoted in Letters of the Great Artists – From Blake to Pollock (1963) by Richard Friedenthal, translation: Daphne Woodward, p. 265

• Mannerism came so late into the foreground of research on the history of art, that the depreciatory verdict implied in its very name is often still taken to be adequate, and the unprejudiced conception of this style as a purely historical category has be.
  • Arnold Hauser. The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999. Chapter 5. The Concept of Mannerism

• Certainly Mr Eliot in the twenties was responsible for a great vogue for verse-satire. An ideal formula of ironic, gently "satiric", self-expression was provided by that master for the undergraduate underworld, tired and thirsty for poetic fame in a small way. The results of Mr Eliot are not Mr Eliot himself: but satire with him has been the painted smile of the clown. Habits of expression ensuing from mannerism are, as a fact, remote from the central function of satire. In its essence the purpose of satire — whether verse or prose — is aggression. (When whimsical, sentimental, or "poetic" it is a sort of bastard humour.) Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.
  • Wyndham Lewis Notes to Kenneth Allott, as quoted in Contemporary Verse (1948) edited by Kenneth Allott

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Mannerism on Wikipedia
• Media related to Mannerism on Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of mannerism on Wiktionary