Mannerism

Mannerism emerged as a late current in the final phase of the Renaissance. For a long time it was unjustly condemned: the very word implies artificiality and affectation. This is how 17th-century Classicist critics understood it, as they rejected everything that was unconventional, bizarre, or fantastic. It was only in the 20th century that scholars recognized that Mannerism often contained brilliant discoveries that were ahead of their time. Mannerism also expresses the crisis of the Renaissance, in which the ideological, psychological, artistic, and literary symptoms of that crisis are condensed. Its representatives were "sad men" who lived tragic lives; the twilight of Renaissance humanism had arrived. Their ideals had failed or become distorted (Tasso, Giordano Bruno, Montaigne, El Greco, Shakespeare, John Donne).

The Renaissance utopia of the boundlessness of human knowledge and power disappeared. Yet the greatest minds of the age still wished to continue the achievements of the "great Renaissance." By this time, however, the Baroque era was already taking shape, restoring the principle of authority and the power of the churches, and seeking heavenly rather than earthly harmony. The temporary resurgence of the feudal order was inevitable. (Under James I, Shakespeare's late plays are pessimistic; even the boisterous cheerfulness of his earlier comedies disappears.) Those who continued to proclaim Renaissance ideals were bound to fail.

Mannerism appeared in Italy around 1520 and unfolded in the second half of the 16th century. In the rest of Europe it developed in the final decades of the 16th century. Around 1600 it was mostly eclipsed by the Baroque. On the fringes of Renaissance Europe—England, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe—it extended into the early 17th century.

As a complex phenomenon, Mannerism can be detected in nearly every area of intellectual life, especially in the visual arts and literature. It is particularly pronounced in aesthetics (Mannerist art theory).

Michelangelo's late works depart from the Renaissance ideal. The type of the confident Renaissance man (e.g., David), or the perfect harmony of the Pietà, belongs to the past. In the Last Judgment there is tension and anxiety, defiance and challenge, dynamic unrest and artistic intransigence—a stormy response to the emerging crisis of the Renaissance. Rejecting all iconographic constraints, Michelangelo depicts Christ as an athletic, beardless figure. This provoked great controversy, drawing both praise and condemnation.

Maniera—manner, style, mode. It referred to the elegant, refined, slightly stylized behavior and ideal of life of ladies of the social elite. Artists strove for an eccentric, individual, distinguishing style—that is, for a maniera. Vasari popularized this interpretation through his biographies: every artist possesses his own maniera, that is, an individual character. The rejection or limitation of naturalism meant overcoming nature in order to realize an ideal of beauty superior to the natural.

The emotional world of the Renaissance crisis, the loss of footing experienced by the individual liberated by the Renaissance, the compulsive defense of the rights of spirit and beauty, the attachment to humanist ideals and the disappointment in them—only the literature and art of Mannerism were able to express these at a high level. While Mannerist art probed artistic secrets for the initiated, and its theorists sought to justify this intellectually, the pathfinders of the Baroque clearly proclaimed the principle of accessibility and comprehensibility.

Zimányi Vera "Későközépkori és koraújkori egyetemes történelem jegyzet", Pécs, 1989