MANNERISM. - The value of the term, much debated and variously limited by recent art historiography, is linked to that of "maniera".
For Vasari, who lived in the midst of Mannerism and was one of its protagonists, "maniera" is the manner maintained by painters in idealizing nature, that is, in making art. But already in the seventeenth century "maniera" means more than anything else a custom or stylistic formula, and the judgments that modern criticism too has passed on Mannerism implicitly depend on such a meaning. In time it comes to be limited between the two new facts of greater interest that occurred during the sixteenth century within the sphere of visual conception, and which proposed a new figurative poetics — apart from what happened in Venice — to Italian painters: the discovery of the Sistine ceiling (1512), that is, the revelation of a pictorial style of Michelangelo, and the affirmation of the personality of Caravaggio and of the academy of the Carracci.
This limitation in time — but Mannerism extends through many of its aspects into the first decades of the seventeenth century — is also valid for characterizing the mannerist taste initially as a "common whimsical anti-classical restlessness", which, toward the end of the sixteenth century, resolves itself into or settles into an extensive expressive convention, in which the painters of all Europe participate, almost an academization of the pictorial manners maintained by the major artists who had worked in the early years of the century. On these fundamental themes there unfolded very numerous variations, as many, one might say, as were the artists who lived in that era, so full of ferment and poetic inspirations of the most diverse origin. Whence Mannerism, having begun with the elaboration of classicizing forms or premises, which were those of humanistic culture, was destined to reflect the ideas and feelings that, becoming ever more estranged from the very ideals of humanism, profoundly unsettled the fields of the spirit from the first half of the sixteenth century onward. Characteristic exponents of the mannerist taste were: Daniele da Volterra, Fr. Salviati, G. Vasari, D. Beccafumi, Tadd. and Fed. Zuccari.
The term Mannerism, which is generally used to indicate the multiple aspects of the phenomenon mentioned above in the fields of painting, can easily be transferred also to those of sculpture and architecture, where it assumed analogous aspects. - See plate CXXVII.
Bibliography2 works
Emilio Lavagnino