8. Jacopo Pontormo. Virgin and Child w Saints Joseph, John the Evangelist, Francis, and James, 1516-18.
This painting is executed in the style we call Mannerism, which flourished c.1515-1600. Mannerist taste delighted in the bizarre, the complex, the hyper-stylish, the distorted, and the melodramatic. Although these qualities have sometimes been condemned as decadent, Vasari viewed this stylishness as the expressive culmination of the Third or Perfection Stage in the Progress of the Arts. Having mastered all the techniques of naturalistic represention, artists were now free to creatively stretch the rules. For Vasari, who was a Mannerist, such artificiality was the true test of an artist's judgment.
According to the Mannerist concept of "Disegno Intorno (Internal Design)" each talented artist's soul was endowed from birth with his or her own unique sensitivity to beauty. Accordingly, the artist's loftiest task was to produce perfected images of things rather than merely realistic ones. Images more perfect than nature would express the inner character of their subject(s) more effectively than merely superficial "realism" would. Thus, the distortion and bizarreness of Mannerist art was understood to communicate its artist's unique intuition of Divine beauty, goodness, and truth. The bizarreness was meant to shock us out of our ordinary modes of perception and spur us to hypersensitive levels of consciousness, to divine intoxication. If Realism is like clear water, Mannerism is like sparkling wine.
For a video that, in my opinion, captures the strange "divine effervescence" of Mannerism, see The Eurythmics' "There Must be an Angel Plyaing with My Heart: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlGXDy5xFlw&ob=av3e
8. Jacopo Pontormo. Virgin and Child w Saints Joseph, John the Evangelist, Francis, and James, 1516-18.
This painting is executed in the style we call Mannerism, which flourished c.1515-1600. Mannerist taste delighted in the bizarre, the complex, the hyper-stylish, the distorted, and the melodramatic. Although these qualities have sometimes been condemned as decadent, Vasari viewed this stylishness as the expressive culmination of the Third or Perfection Stage in the Progress of the Arts. Having mastered all the techniques of naturalistic represention, artists were now free to creatively stretch the rules. For Vasari, who was a Mannerist, such artificiality was the true test of an artist's judgment.
According to the Mannerist concept of "Disegno Intorno (Internal Design)" each talented artist's soul was endowed from birth with his or her own unique sensitivity to beauty. Accordingly, the artist's loftiest task was to produce perfected images of things rather than merely realistic ones. Images more perfect than nature would express the inner character of their subject(s) more effectively than merely superficial "realism" would. Thus, the distortion and bizarreness of Mannerist art was understood to communicate its artist's unique intuition of Divine beauty, goodness, and truth. The bizarreness was meant to shock us out of our ordinary modes of perception and spur us to hypersensitive levels of consciousness, to divine intoxication. If Realism is like clear water, Mannerism is like sparkling wine.
For a video that, in my opinion, captures the strange "divine effervescence" of Mannerism, see The Eurythmics' "There Must be an Angel Plyaing with My Heart: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlGXDy5xFlw&ob=av3e