MANNERISM. — The meaning of the term, much debated and variously delimited by recent art historiography, is connected with that of “manner.”
For Vasari, who lived through the height of Mannerism and was one of its protagonists, “manner” is the method adopted by painters in idealizing nature, that is, in creating art. But as early as the seventeenth century, “manner” came to mean chiefly a stylistic custom or formula, and the judgments that modern criticism has also passed on Mannerism implicitly derive from this meaning. Over time, it came to be confined between two new events of major significance that occurred during the sixteenth century in the sphere of visual conception, and that proposed a new figurative poetics to Italian painters — apart from what took place in Venice: the unveiling of the Sistine vault (1512), that is, the revelation of Michelangelo’s pictorial style, and the emergence of the personality of Caravaggio and of the Carracci academy.
This temporal limitation — although Mannerism extends in many of its aspects into the first decades of the seventeenth century — is also valid for characterizing the Mannerist taste initially as a “common, capricious, anti-classical restlessness” which, toward the end of the sixteenth century, resolves itself into or settles into an extensive expressive convention, in which painters throughout Europe participate, almost an academization of the pictorial modes employed by the major artists who had worked in the early years of the century. On these fundamental themes countless variations unfolded, as many, one might say, as there were artists who lived in that era, so full of ferment and
The term Manierismo, which is generally used to indicate the manifold aspects of the phenomenon mentioned above in the field of painting, can readily be extended also to sculpture and architecture, where it assumed analogous forms. - Vedi tav. CXXVII.