Why the Mannerists’ Bizarre Paintings Deserve a Second Look

Among the thousands of un-babyish babies in Italian art—a group big and bizarre enough to merit its own Tumblr—there are none quite like the infant Jesus in Parmigianino’s Madonna and Child with Angels (1534–40). Though clearly a newborn, Jesus must be well over 2 feet tall, most of that height contained in his long, skinny torso. Then there’s the infant’s lazy, almost languorous pose. He dangles precariously off of his mother’s lap; judging from the slope of Mary’s thigh, baby Jesus is about to slide to the floor. Not many people notice this accident-in-the-making the first time they see Parmigianino’s painting, probably because they’re too busy gaping at an even more bizarre feature of the work, the one that gave it its informal, better-known title: Madonna with the Long Neck.

Learning about Mannerism—the movement that arose in Italy in the early 16th century, of which Madonna of the Long Neck is a favorite example—means stumbling upon unbridled weirdness in works of art that might seem dully conventional at first glance. No wonder Mannerism remains a contentious topic for academics: There seems to be some kind of requirement that every essay on the term begin by acknowledging how fiendishly difficult it is to define. Many art historians see the movement as a transitional one, jammed uncomfortably between the High Renaissance achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael at the end of the 15th century and the extravagances of the Baroque era at the start of the 17th. They break it down by its key members (Parmigianino, Agnolo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Jacopo da Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino) and defining features: bright colors, contorted figures, indeterminate spaces, and an overpowering sense of artificiality.

It might be better to understand Mannerism by getting a sense of what it was like to be a young painter in Italy at the beginning of the 16th century. The masters of the preceding generation had produced works that represented, at that moment in time, the apex of dramatic, lifelike painting. The smothering greatness of their achievements ushered in what Susan Sontag called a “late moment” in culture—an era whose peaks are already past—“that presumes an endless discourse anterior to itself.” For the younger generation, making art in the shadows of these giants must have been intimidating, to say the least.

In our own late moment, already poised to be remembered as the “Age of the Remix,” some postmodern artists have problematized the concept of originality, choosing to reinterpret old styles and forms, rather than start from scratch. Something roughly similar could be said for the Mannerist painters who emerged in the 1520s: The High Renaissance was like an austere parent, one they imitated and occasionally parodied, but could not ignore. “The strongest impression left behind by a typical Mannerist painting,” art historian Eric Newton once wrote, “is that the artist has derived hardly anything direct from nature, but has absorbed, digested, and stylized the paintings of others.” That’s an apt way to characterize Madonna with the Long Neck: It’s as if Parmigianino is playing a pictorial version of the telephone game, copying endless copies of Renaissance masterpieces until the image has mutated into something wilder than Raphael could have ever imagined.

Much as some contemporary artists use humor to distance themselves from their historical precedents, the Italian Mannerists often presented their Renaissance homages in a lighthearted spirit. Over the centuries, many have confused this playfulness with slightness, interpreting it as a tacit admission that Mannerism was just a knockoff of what came before. Until well into the 20th century, in fact, Mannerist painters were by and large considered minor figures in the canon. More recently, art historians have tended to see inventiveness where others once saw stagnation. In a famous 1964 essay, Sontag found in Mannerism an ancestor of the modern Camp sensibility—“a love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” she wrote. New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl echoed Sontag’s point when he wrote that “we are mostly Mannerists now. Art about art, and style for style’s sake.” Mannerists may not have surpassed Michelangelo, exactly, but they found freedom in subservience, taking pleasure in an ironic form of imitation that was part homage, part parody.

The problem with irony is that some people won’t recognize it. The Florentine painter Bronzino is an excellent case in point: His reputation has gone up and down over the centuries, and his works, like Mannerism itself, are often described as “cold”—technically brilliant, but emotionless. Bronzino’s portrait of Lodovico Capponi, completed between 1550 and 1555, shows its young subject—a page in the Medici court—standing against a green curtain, so that viewers have no idea where he really is. His long, clever fingers; slightly pursed lips; and narrowed eyes make him seem menacing and faintly revolting, like a 16th-century Italian Draco Malfoy.