Module 11 Mannerism

hi and welcome to the lecture and slideshow for module 11 where today I'll be talking about the style called mannerism and we'll be focusing largely on the works of three artists Bronzino Pontormo and parmigianino although I will include some images from another couple of Mannerist artists as well before I get started I wanted to apologize for my scratchy voice I'm a bit under the weather so some of the key points I'll be talking about today is talking about what happens to painting after the death of Raphael many art historians consider the high Renaissance to be over in 15 20 when Raphael dies one thing we see with the rise of mannerism is this emphasis on the innovation of the artist so we still see this movement which is largely taking place in central Italy we still see a preoccupation with the artist withdrawing but what seems to be the emphasis is rather than making something what completely lifelike as if it is a copy of nature there's a greater interest on showing what the artist can invent in many ways mannerism is considered a very courtly taste and one art historian has referred to it as the stylish style so this is a type of painting that's being done specifically for elite patrons now this is also a movement that we can see in sculpture and architecture but for the most part we're going to be talking about painting because that's really where it starts and where its greatest manifestation is so mannerism emerges in the 16th century after what we call the high Renaissance now I don't want to provide exact dates for this because really in general stylistic labels are hard to categorize by particular dates but this is starting after 1520 and going all the way to about 1580 although it goes through a couple of different manifestations this word mannerism derives from the Italian word mani era which means style or manner so they didn't even really have a name for it they just referred to it as the manner of a particular artist or the manner of the time it's characterized by artifice and by a conscious revelation of this sort of constructed mode of art that is the artist is compiling things and putting them together and that becomes highlighted here it's also a very intellectual style which is something I'll talk about of it today so stylistically some of the major characteristics of mannerism are imbalanced compositions unusual complexities ambiguity in space content and meaning and a movement away from naturalism and appear in harmonious balance and symmetry which we think of as characterizing the Renaissance this is a showing off of artistic and intellectual skills another stylistic trait of mannerism quite often is the use of very strange color systems and that's something we'll see especially with artists like Pontormo this is a movement that is mostly associated with Florence but there are some examples in other centers as well including Rome and some of the court centers like Parma our historians have attempted to define and explain mannerism with very little consensus and actually one of the best art historians who has dealt with mannerism in a really intelligent and cogent way is Marcia Hall who teaches here at Temple she has this fantastic book that she wrote a few years ago called after Raphael which is a real it's a really important book for a reassessment of this style of mannerism so manners are seems to be about art this idea of what art is and artfulness and it seems in some ways to be a reaction to the classicism of Raphael and Michelangelo now that's not to say that they didn't look to the antique but they started looking more to artists like Raphael and Michelangelo rather than to nature or the antique so as I said the manor is drew just as much as Raphael and Michelangelo did but sometimes their figures make it seem like they didn't you see especially some ambiguities and some attenuation of forms that is a stretching out of forms and the conclusion is that they largely drew from memory instead of from the live model it becomes a style largely under the Medici especially with Duke Cosimo de'medici and his wife Eleonora of Toledo both of whom I will talk about more shortly they commissioned lots of works from so-called Mannerist artists so the first work I'm going to show you today is this by a painter named Andrea del Sarto and this is his very famous work called the Madonna of the harpies now the state's a little bit before 1520 which as I said is considered the beginning point of mannerism but it shows some characteristics of this style ants was originally put a high altar of a church in Florence but now it can be found in a museum this is a very simple and straightforward sacra conversazione a that we've talked about so many times where you see the Madonna and Child surrounded by saints who could not possibly have been there at the same time so on the right side were seeing John the Evangelist and on the left side were seeing Saint Francis now surrounding the Virgin and Child you also see two little angels down there now this work is named for the figures of harpies which can be seen on the classicizing base that the Madonna and Child stand up so you see these little wing in female figures these are harpies they're mythological creatures we see the Madonna clothed in primary colors now often she wears a red dress with a blue cloak but here under a del Sarto has also added this yellow swath of drapery around her shoulders and then you see the red repeated also in the John the Evangelist and a bit in the wings of the Angels but it's really not balanced in terms of its color composition very much in many ways the Madonna and Child here are like a statue so they're standing up on this pedestal this classicizing base they occupy this niche that seems to suggest a little bit of spatial recession but she's I mean she's standing in contrapposto she's got her leg propping up this book here she's standing in this country posture supporting this wiggling Christ child it's a nice standard classicizing pyramidal composition but there's a lot of strange ambiguities like there's a haziness to the surface of the work almost like we're seeing them through a smoke screen so are we supposed to be envisioning this taking place in a church another thing that characterizes mannerism is that the compositions are almost always pushed very much to the of the picture plane so they're taking place right in front of us there's not a lot of sense of depth here so it's an interesting work and a sort of transitional work into mannerism with some emphasis on color so like if you look at the drapery of John the Evangelist there's a little bit of modeling going on here but it's seems more that under a del Sarto is interested in the saturation of this color rather than how I can show the form of the body so now I'd like to move on to the work of Jakob open tor mo who's an important Mannerist painter working largely in Florence and this is dates to 1518 again a little bit before 1520 but this is definitely absolutely full-on Mannerist work of art Pontormo is a really good example of that this is commissioned by a Florentine patron named Pierre Francesco or Guarini for his bedchamber the bet is specifically the bedchamber of a newly married couple so this was commissioned at the time that Pierre Pierre Francesco Berger Eenie married margarita actually and this was for his Palazzo in Florence and this is a strange painting for a lot of reasons especially in terms of the spatial rendering so look at this for a minute and try to understand the setting that's taking place here that is being depicted here another strange aspect of it are the figures themselves so what we're seeing here is a few various moments in the story of Joseph from the book of Genesis during his time in Egypt so what we're seeing is at the far left the largest figure over here who several figures are looking towards is Joseph in Egypt and he's surrounded by some of his brother so part of his story is that his brothers sell him off into slavery and eventually he is able to emerge from that he goes to jail for a while but then he wins favor of the Egyptian pharaoh and has made a major advisor so then when the family of Joseph is stopped is struck by famine they go to Egypt where Joseph has been organizing the collection of grain so there we see his brother surrounding him kneeling in front of him begging him as the governor of Egypt to save them from the famine but that's not the only narrative moment going on here and it's not even I'm not sure that Pontormo was making it the focal point look how much should shadow this grouping of figures is there several different narrative moments going on here it's a bit discontinuous and fragmented and quite difficult to understand so the other major focal point seems to be this area in the upper right where we see Joseph's youngest brother and we see him a number of times we actually see him on the stairs here in green and again at the top of the stairs here and then once more in the bedchamber talking to the dying father here telling him that his beloved son Joseph isn't dead so there's a lot of odd proportions and a changing scale of the figures as a way to indicate depth but it's it's just kind of strange what is the building that Joseph's father is in what is this staircase sort of attached to the wall he's up on this pedestal it's not really enclosed we had all of a sense of what kind of building it is at all what's going on with the landscape and these people are hiding behind the boulders here and maybe they're coming to see Joseph about the famine that it's not really clear you see some classicizing statues on columns and then all the sudden over on the right side you see this nude boy echoing the statues on the columns and the other side of the paint a doesn't make a great deal of sense and in the Far background you see almost a Germanic gate house something you'd see in northern Europe so a lot of these things don't make sense the space notice the punctuation of these highly saturated colors it's a bit more balanced than what we saw with Andrzej delsar coast but there's just a lot that isn't really practical or logical which is a very typical characteristic of mannerism another contour most major works that he can that he executes is for this chapel called the Caponi chapel for the Church of Santa Felicitas in Florence and we will primarily be looking at the high altar piece here you can see it in the chapel space itself and then on the right side a detail of this altarpiece the entombment often manors ultra pieces present a conundrum because this very sophisticated style of art was difficult to reach the masses is difficult to read it's difficult for the regular person to understand so this is in a chapel that is actually designed by Brunelleschi you can see the very nice classicizing architecture of the space so that those altarpiece is titled the entombment because that seems to be what's going on here but does that really fit what's been depicted here where is the tomb if this is the moment that Christ is about to be buried where is the cross for that matter there's very little setting given here and it actually doesn't make a great deal of sense what's going on with the figure see of this massive grouping of figures everybody pushed up towards the front of the picture plane but what is causing them to rise in space like that are they on a very sharp incline is there a series of risers that they're standing on I mean there's no background nothing indicating that the ground is rising very sharply are they standing on a hill so we see in the foreground the body of Christ being supported by these two figures but how on earth can this lower figure down here support the body of Christ in this way it doesn't make any logical sense is he kneeling on something he's gonna collapse it doesn't seem practical and then if you start looking at things like his clothing it doesn't really make sense either is this a pink shirt he's wearing a skin-tight pink shirt in the background you see the Virgin Mary here looking towards her dead son but what is she sitting on what's going on with the color palette here and it's a very interesting use of values here there's a lot of white being within the paint here nothing is very saturated except for maybe the red cloak of this figure here holding on to the upper portion of the body of Christ if you look at the very center here you see this whole group of hands and some of them don't even really make any sense so this is the hand of Christ in the center here you can assume that the hand gripping his wrist is that figure holding on to his torso but what about the other one it must be it must belong to this woman whose head has completely turned away from us but what is she looking at she looking towards the Virgin Mary where is her body it doesn't where there's just a lot of ambiguity here so it's very mournful and expressive if you look at the emotions being depicted on the faces of the figures but it's really confusing how can you focus on the narrative when there's so many and big.you ities when it's so unnatural the positions of the figures don't make a great deal of sense one other element that makes this rather confusing is that we're actually missing some elements in this Chapel specifically there used to be a fresco on the ceiling here but it was damaged in some construction outside the church do you see a fresco God the Father so what we could maybe try to interpret this as is that the body of Christ here has just been taken off the lap of his mother so it's a moment after the Pieta and they're looking outwards maybe getting ready to pass the body on to that fresco of God the Father so Christ being shown between his two parents and just a compared to one thing that we've looked at before on the left side you're seeing Rafael's entombment where we talked about this is actually a hybrid of three different moments the deposition from the cross the lamentation over the body by all of those figures gathered around and then the actual taking of the body of Christ into the tomb and now there's a few ambiguities in this painting but it's nothing like what we see going on with the foremost work the figures positions make sense the clothing makes sense you have a sense of setting it's not all pushed up to the foreground you can see this strong differences in what's going on with mannerism in a work that's only about 10 years after what Raphael has done here now to continue with the same theme I wanted to show you another work by another Mannerist artist in Grosso fiorentino and here we've got specifically a deposition where the body of Christ is being taken off the cross not the moment of the entombment so you can see that there are several Mannerist works that are dealing with these pivotal emotional narrative moments in The Passion of Christ now this work if you start looking at it this is another very confusing painting how is any of this actually possible we see we're also here pushing the limits of tradition and innovation in his depiction of this removal of Christ's body for the cross you see these very high-pitched colors again using a lot of whites in his colors there's not a lot of darks not a lot of dark values being given here and you see these almost grotesque figures look at the faces of the men who have climbed up here to remove the body of Christ from the cross you see this figure here on the left pointing towards the body seeming to be screaming with whatever's going on here and then this old man whose clothing and beard is caught in the wind is also rather grotesque in his depiction here now how is this man below on the ladder here on the left how is he possibly going to keep his balance while also dealing with this dead body where is the head of this figure on the right side supporting the body of Christ it just doesn't this is very highly charged dramatic moment but it doesn't make a great deal of sense so drama is being used here to create an emotionally engaging work once again we have a fairly blank background and there's a strange disposition of the figures so Mary Magdalene is not clinging to the cross as she often does but instead lunges towards the Virgin Mary standing here and then you have a massive figure of Saint John much much larger than any of the other figures around him isolated to the rites they need to catch the majority of light falling onto this works so part of its power actually comes from its strangeness and I think that is something that can be said about all manner as works of art so now I'd like to move on to a few works by the painter named parmigianino and he is largely working at the court of karma although he does go to Rome as mazar-e wrote about his time there during the sack of Rome he even wrote about this painting in particular Parma and other courts during the sixteenth century were actually very strong centers of artistic patronage they're sort of mimicking what's happening at the papal court works done at the courts are done for elite audiences and there's an emphasis on artifice and invention just like with other Mannerist paintings going on at the same time these works are meant to appeal to erudite viewers and the literati so there's much interest in antiquity still so Karin showing you a self portrait of parmigianino he was trained by his father and his uncles who were print makers as I said he travelled to Rome and he worked alongside the painter named courage Oh as a teenager who unfortunately didn't get to talk about in our course he acquires a significant reputation and is hailed as a new Raphael while he was in Rome parmigianino epitomizes this courtly ideal that I was talking about so this self-portrait is really fascinating and it's playing around with the notion of artifice and as a demonstration of his skill it's done as if it was painted in a convex mirror it allows him to play around with distortions that that would cause this is evident in the reflection of the window in the background and in the other elements of the room and especially in his two large hand in the foreground parmigianino looked out confidently towards the viewer and there's this emphasis on his head and on his hand which are the sources of his artistic inspiration he still and calm it's a very confusing background confusing because of the depiction of this being in the convex mirror and he returns to parma after the sack of Rome in 1527 he actually spent some time in bologna as well but does spend most of his career in parma and this is the work that those re talks about him taking with him to Rome as a showpiece so he can show his skill to patron one of his most famous works that he does while he's in Parma is this painting called the three foolish virgins flanked by Moses and Adam and this is done this is actually a fresco done in the vault of the main apse of the church called the madonna della staccato in karma he was commissioned to decorate the main apps and the vaults of this church and we see here a distinct interest in illusionistic effects so his style is known for its elegance and grace very much like Raphael in this detail we see how he's transformed the barrel vault of this space into a sumptuous display face so the rosettes in the coffers of this vault are actually three-dimensional so these six rows shaped things you see here but everything else here is paint you see he's painted the gilding on here then what's look like what's gold leaf to make things look more three-dimensional as well as the reds of the blues here you see fictive sculpture and decorative elements being painted so the fictive sculpture with these figures down here and then the rest of the decorative elements at the bottom here we see these three foolish virgins who are in the Bible in one of Christ's parables that they are unprepared and then across the vault unfortunately I'm not showing you those here are the three wise virgins the three foolish virgins are shown here carrying empty jars on their heads in this very poetic compositions they look like they're dancing and they're interacting with each other through this passing back and forth of their vessels on either side here you see Moses on the left with the tablets of the law and Adam on the right side showing the Apple but look how sensuous that figure of Adam is as well as the figures of Moses and the versions there's emphasis on the body and the movements of the body so we see him combining figural work with illusionistic decorative painting in the vaulting system so it's just a good example of his wide range parmigianino is also known for his portraits and here I'm showing you a portrait of John Galliano San Vitale who was the countif from tanah lot oh this is see the state's 215 24 and was commissioned by the sitter this is a more static and formal example of his work and it shows his wide range that he is able to meet the different needs of different patrons portraits are opportunities for self-promotion so looking at this think about the way that the sitter is promoting himself he's shown us very well dressed and in the background we see armor and weapons being depicted here so obviously he gets some of his power through his military prowess we see him with a very self-confident countenance and a good sense of calmness he seated in this chair in an indoor space but we see him seated in front of his windows he'll the nature outside then another very interesting thing here is he's holding in his hand a strange bronze medal showing the number seven and two and we actually have no idea what they need at all it must have been something personal to him did you see a little bit of landscape as I said we see evidence here of Galeazzo of john galliano san vitale wanting to be shown as the perfect courtier and one way that was done but was by something called sprezzatura which had been codified through Baldassare Castiglione the book of the courtier and this idea of sprezzatura is being able to very carefully construct an appearance but doing so with very little work so it's sort of like studying nonchalance you see him confident but relaxed with grace and ease but at the same time is somewhat unapproachable and there are some spatial ambiguities evident in this painting he has a rather frozen stare which is in contrast to the naturalism of the depiction of the objects so there's this idea of artifice in portraiture and in his pose now this work is probably parmesan you those most famous work and it's traditionally referred to as the Madonna the long neck this was begun around 1534 and it remained unfinished after parmigianino his death was commissioned by a woman named Ellen of ird for her family chapel in the Church of Santa Maria dei servi in the city of Parma it's a very interesting painting where we see the Virgin and Child is the centerpiece here but notice the elongation of the forms especially of this sleeping Christ child now he's quite large he's not very much of a Christ child if you're looking at in here I mean he's the size of like a four five year old he's a very big baby and the same is true of his mother I mean she seems fairly normal in proportion in the upper half of her body except for that very elongated neck but then if you look at the widening after her waist she has these massive massive hips and she establishes this very broad base through her body of the figure of Christ now anytime you see a sleeping Christ that should recall to you the notion of a pietà the dead Christ on his mother's lap and I think that's actually furthered here by something I've never really noticed before but I'm seeing today this strap across the Virgin's chest now that's very much like the strap on Michelangelo's pietà which parmigianino would have seen in Rome in the Vatican so this is a well-known image the Virgin and Child presented in a manner that's calculated to unsettle viewers just a little bit the long neck may be a reference to this tradition of the Virgin as a great ivory tower or column and that's sort of echoed by this column that you see in the background there is a bit of a rawness ISM in this painting but it must be read appropriately so for example you see the way the drapery just hugs the body of the Virgin Mary especially on her breast and on her stomach as well that emphasis on her breast is probably intended to be a reference that she is the mother of Christ that she provides the nourishment for Christ and therefore also nourishes the faithful now you also have this very interesting group of figures over here to the left and who are they supposed to be exactly are they supposed to be angels why does this one come and hold this classicizing jar and have why is her or his leg completely bare now the interesting thing about this jar is if you look closely you can see that there's actually a cross painted on it seems like this angel or whatever it is is supposed to be is presenting this to the Virgin now it's probably supposed to be a reference to Christ's impending sacrifice on the cross but also is making reference to the patron so the woman who commissioned this is named Ellen of ird Ellen ah is the Italian form of the name Helen and Saint Helen was said to have discovered the true cross in Jerusalem so it's probably also making reference to her there's a lot of inconsistencies of the space as well though this huge massing of figures here in front of this curtain in the background if you follow this column down you'll see that in fact it's part of a series of several columns although only one has been painted in full height and you've got this little tiny figure doesn't really make sense where he's standing he's probably supposed to be representing a prophet again with mannerism this is something that would be very difficult for an uneducated worshipper to understand how all of these things are working together so with a column and the neck and the cross and the fact that I forgot to mention that the patrons father also was known to have written poetry about them virgin as the allegorical representation of the church so perhaps the Prophet is supposed to be making reference to that as is this architecture in the background but how on earth is a normal who were supposed to know any of this the subject of the painting here is it is as much art as it is the Virgin and Child so it's very elegant refined and there are some distortions but it's definitely looking to proceeding artists as models as well so if you look at the faces of the figures and their hairstyles and very much recall some of the works of Leonardo for example well this one the rest of the time today is talking about the painter named on yellow branzino and branzino was a student of Jakob open Norma who talked about earlier on in this lecture branzino becomes very popular with the Medici family specifically the Grand Duke Cosimo the first de Medici and his wife Eleonora of Toledo especially for portraits but also for devotional works so here I'm showing you two different portraits of Cosimo the first that's done that are done by branzino on the left side we see the Duke shown in Armour meant to express his control over the state and that's the total emphasis here the Cosmo doesn't even look out towards the viewer it's more a study of a military mind than of the figure himself now on the right side I'm showing you a portrait that's actually in the Philadelphia Museum of Art of Cosimo here as the figure Orpheus who goes down to the underworld you see the three-headed dog Cerberus here to go and save his wife from the underworld now look at what a drastically different depiction of the Grand Duke this is of course we have an actual representation of the man versus a sort of mythological one well look at this emphasis on the body this very sensual representation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany it's a really fascinating way to depict the figure I've also mentioned his wife Eleonora of Toledo so I wanted to show you a portrait of her and their son Giovanni here she is as important a patron of him as her husband so it's very important to talk about her and this portrait is just one of the most beautiful portraits I think that it's done during the Renaissance we see Eleonora here having much more of a connection to the viewer then Cosimo's portrait did you can see branzinos interest here in surface detail look at the rendering of her garment I mean he had to have taken a stencil in order to try to represent this fabric as well as he did it's just incredible the way it lays across her body you can see the wrinkles of the drapery it really seems like the dress is its own character in this painting and then you see also this very sumptuous depiction of the curls that make most of her jewelry of her necklace of her hairpiece and her earrings the way that he captures the light on the surface of the painting she's practically imprisoned in this dress and it's covered in pomegranate motifs that's within golden features are which is a symbol of fertility now the fact that she has Giovanni with her is another symbol of that this is about dynasty this is about the Medici continuation of rule in Tuscany so her clothing and her jewels emphasize her social position and then her seated position in the shape of her face recalled the Mona Lisa although I mean it's quite a different depiction here however it is definitely looking to models like Leonardo's here the marriage of Cosimo de Medici and Eleonora of Toledo no Toledo is in Spain brought the Medici into alliance with Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles v but the emphasis here really is on the elegance of the figures of the fabrics and then look at the elongation of her fingers it's just it's all about elegance all the time and this is very much what mannerism is all about Bronzino doesn't just do portraits for the Medici though I wanted to show you a series of paintings done for this chapel in the palazzo vecchio or the palazzo della signoria in florence dating to about 1540 now this is a Leonora's private chapel but for the most part we can really consider Cosimo the first the actual patron here cos 0 moves into the palazzo della signoria which I've talked about before as the city hall of Florence rather than living in the Medici Palace it becomes known in this period as the Palazzo Vecchio because of the fact that it's no longer of the Republican government of the Signoria of Florence and sometimes also referred to as the palazzo do call it the Duke old pal as the Dukes Palace of Florence and moving into this symbolizes his control over the city so he has the whole building remodeled on the interior and redecorated the living quarters of the space the entrance to Eleonora in apartments and this new remodeling was through the former chapel and so he had a smaller one built and decorated vibrance you know for a Leonora's private devotion the subject matter here refers to redemption but it also has much to say about dynasty just like any other medici portrait will do so we have an altarpiece here on either side of this altarpiece you see frescoes depicting the Annunciation and then on the side walls we have paintings depicting scenes from the life of Moses but I want to start now with the altarpiece itself here's a more detailed view of this so what we're seeing here again this very common subject for Mannerist artist we see a lamentation over the body of Christ and branzino here is most definitely looking to Michelangelo's Vatican pietà for the composition we also see him quoting Michelangelo's Last Judgement with these angels at the top holding the instruments of Christ's passion outs very much acknowledging past artists because he's also quoting his teacher Pontormo with this male figure supporting christ think back to the Caponi chapel that we talked about near the beginning of this lecture remember that figure that doesn't make sense the way he's supporting the body here it makes a bit more sense physically but the thing is the reason for inclusion is to cite these earlier artists it becomes this sort of game for an educated viewer so Eleonora is well connected she has probably been to st. Peter's and to the Sistine Chapel so she would recognize the references to Michelangelo's work surely she saw punt or most frescoes in Santa fille cheetah which is not very far away from her residence so it's this gaining this ability for the artist to show his knowledge but also to recall the knowledge of the patron so that's another reason that mannerism is very much a courtly art for people who would no earlier art object but it's interesting to think about whether this would be understandable for the everyday viewer is the person cleaning the palace going to be able to sight to understand these citations probably not now what's really interesting about this painting among other things is that this is actually the second version of this work the first version was considered to be so good that Cosimo actually sent it as a gift to a collector in France this one's actually a bit more dark the Virgin is wearing a much darker cloak than the one that is in France today but look at the gestures of the figures everybody everybody has this elegant gesture it's it's what was rhetorical where their emotion is expressed through gesture so that the viewer can understand it better now I'm going to look at this painting that makes up the right side while we thought in that first view that I was showing you here this is part of the scenes from the life of Moses we're seeing the crossing of the Red Sea these are very large-scale side wall frescoes it's very rare to have Moses imagery in a Christian Chapel but the Sistine Chapel has that as part of its decoration and that's where I've legitimizes it but there are some strange things going on here it is a Mannerist work so that makes sense and there are lots of idealized nude figures now that's not always considered appropriate for a Christian space which is something in the later sixteenth century that we really see go away but looking look at these figures the very central figure for example is hardly wearing any clothing at all you see this other figure to the left side here with a nude torso a figure seated here turning away from Moses and then this seated figure here almost completely nude again it's like branzino is trying to show us his ability to find all of these poses to formulate all of these different positions of the body looking almost to Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina cartoon showing his ability to recall earlier works but also his ability to depict the naturalistic human form there's some other really strange things going on here for example if you look at the left side look at this pair of figures that are actually grasping each other's wrists you see this nude torso that I talked about but he's really turned in an interesting position what doesn't actually make a lot of sense he looks back down towards this nude woman who has one bare breasts and is grabbing the other it doesn't make a lot of sense for what's happening happening here it's not really necessary it's just branzino filling the composition with interesting forms on the right side we see the figure of Moses who almost shrinks into the background with the other figures emphasized especially these nude forms and branzino is very much depending on Michelangelo's depiction of Moses for the tomb of julius ii for his own work here the story here of the crossing of the Red Sea where the Israelites are able to man are able to cross the Red Sea after Moses has cleared it of waters and then we see Pharaoh's army all drowning in it the story seen as a prefiguration of christ's purging of sin but it could also be representative of the return of the medici family from exile they've been exiled from florence for a good period of time and work a point of the Grand Duke's of tuscany once their relatives were made pope and it could be showing what's gonna happen to their opponents so it could have some dynastic components especially if you look at the figure on the right side here behind moses look at that face that is very much a portrait and here it can be considered a portrait a portrait of Eleonora and look at her she is pregnant so again there's this emphasis on dynasty overall the figures are fairly flat except for those nude forms we're very seriously modeled here and there's a lot of decorative surface features that we see bronzed you know very interested in depicting so it's a fascinating painting with religious connotations absolutely but also dynastic medici connotations another fascinating work by a bronze you know commissioned by causing her the first is this work referred to generally is that as an allegory with Venus and Cupid now this was commissioned specifically to be sent to Francis the first the King of France this painting is overtly erotic which is very much catering to the tastes of the King of France Francis the first in the foreground them two main figures we see are an INT wined Venus and her son Cupid now look at their forms his position doesn't make a great deal of sense I mean if you tried to kneel in that position it would probably be really really uncomfortable he grabs the head of Venus and pulls her in for a kiss while he's fondling her breasts she's holding the golden apple in her hand that she won during the mythological story of the judgment of Paris but it also can be read as representing the orb of rulership behind them you see this young boy who is very playful this is about to shower them with rose petals and then there's a lot of very interesting mythological and allegorical figures included besides them so for example at the upper right you see the figure of Kronos who is pulling back this curtain that serves as the Brett as the background of Cronus is the god of time and this is also the sheet on which Mina's kneel so it doesn't make a great deal of sense what he's doing in the upper left you have this figure generally referred to as either fraud or oblivion and this female figure is represented as a head that is an empty shell I mean there's no back on her head here at all it's very much like a mask which you see echoed at the bottom right here you see these two masks lying on the ground here which are probably representing the idea of deceit because masks are deceiving the male figure over here underneath this figure of either fraud or oblivion is perhaps meant to be pain or something called morbo Gallico which was one name for syphilis you see the way he's screaming and pains fate his face is contorted he looks awful and then on the final figure that I haven't talked about yet this beautiful female face is probably supposed to represent either pleasure or fraud so she's got this beautiful face but has the body of a dragon you can see behind the figure of this boy and has a tail with a stinger that she's holding on to so with one hand she's holding on to this stinger on her tail with the other she's offering Venus and Cupid this honeycomb so it's kind of confusing there's a lot going on and there's a lot for the patron or the viewer to find as he or she looks at this painting repeatedly so it's a very artificial language which was appropriate to the high levels of the courts I want to talk about one more work by Bronzino to show that he's not just working in private settings or for private easel paintings he's also working on large-scale frescoes in public places like this martyrdom of st. Lawrence that we're seeing here that you can find in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence this is the Medici family church it's right down the street from their family palace they commissioned the architecture they commissioned several paintings within it including this one which was commissioned by the Grand Duke Cosimo the first mannerism as I said becomes about purely artistic concerns and that's actually also echoing what's going on in Florence at this time which included the creation of the artists Academy founded by Cosimo and mazar-e in 1563 so this painting is a massive fresco it's huge like I never understood how big it was until I went the sod in person it takes up almost an entire wall and what we see here is an academic recreation of a Roman city so see how classicizing the architecture is but it's very piecemeal - sort of pasted together spatially it doesn't make a lot of sense it actually reminds me almost o Verena is a stage says that we talked about before so we see quotations of classical sculptures but also um works by Michelangelo because Michelangelo was considered this father figure of the Academy but this is one of the best examples I think of the Mannerist preoccupation with very strange poses look at these figures the way that branzino has depicted them and as many contortions as he possibly can so if you look at the lower right here we see a river GaN figure this reclining nude who has this jar of water doesn't really make sense to be in the scene of a Saints execution remember we looked at this subject as well with Titian but then look at these other figures you see the governor who's overseeing this contorted this very interesting posture pointing down to Lawrence Lawrence himself is in this very rhetorical gesture as are the attendants around the governor and look at this figure who's stoking the fire why on earth would you stoke a fire like that that has got to be the least practical way to get your job done that I've ever seen you and the figures here gathering wood to add to the fire adding to the fire here I mean these almost look like citations from Michelangelo's Last Judgement especially this figure picking up wood that crazy rippled muscular back showing muscles that don't even really exist Lawrence our central figure is shown almost as a River God himself in this reclining position he's perfectly elegant and he's not in any pain this is a really fascinating painting with all of these nude figures because as I said this is just in a church now this takes this painting is done after what's called the Council of Trent where the Catholic Church got together and decided on some standard criteria of doctrine and what was appropriate for the church including what art should look like after the Council of Trent you see a huge reduction in nude forms and religious paintings but not here and in the foreground as I mentioned there's also allegorical figures there's the River God here as well as this grouping of women each of them representing a different allegorical idea so it's very confusing in the middle ground there are also a series of portraits included you can see over here in front of this temple for example all of these paint figures to look out towards the viewer are different portraits of contemporaries but in this work I think the really important thing to notice about this work is the Bronzino is emphasizing the limitless supply of poses that are available in the imagination of the artist sure bronze you know drew from the live model sometimes but this is all about what the artist can invent not what he can put together based on posing models but what his mind can come upward and I wanted to show you one example of Mannerist sculpture before we end today this is by a French artist actually I'm showing you his Italian eye his name John Bologna who is a sculptor working in Florence in the later sixteenth century and this is his work called the rape of the se vines dating from 1570 nine to fifteen eighty three and this is placed in the loggia della signoria right in front of the Palazzo della signoria in Florence so on the right side you can see the rest ocation of the facade of that palace this is an excellent example of manner of sculpture because it's all about pulling you around the image and endlessly there's really not a primary point of view manner of sculpture wants you to move around it in order for you to understand it but really you never do it's an exceedingly complicated composition on a very narrow base now what's really fascinating about this work and why I think it's such a good example of mannerism is because it's created completely as an academic piece John Maloney is like I'm gonna make this sculpture of entwined figures in preposterous poses to show my invention it was done without a subject and then after it was finished a group of Renaissance humanists got together and talked about what it might be what they settled on was the story of the rape of the see buying women by the Romans so one of the stories of the foundation of Rome is that after Romulus founded the city it's great he's got a little bit of a population but hey we don't have any women so how are we gonna populate our city so they invited the say binds to a feast and then kidnapped all of their women and that's what we're supposedly seeing here causing a son saw it after John bolonia had executed it and decided that he wanted it from the low Jo which is why it's displayed there today so it's just a really interesting comment I think on the possibilities of art at this point in time that art is about the artist that's a huge change if you think back to somebody like Giotto or even Masaccio who are working completely at the behest of a patron this is an example of an artist creating for an academic environment like those of you who are Judeo majors you create a work because you're assigned to do it in class the same sort of thing and then it became very highly prized after it was done so this is an example of an artist creating an object to explore formal issues for himself just to solve compositional problems for no other reason than that no patron involved so it's a very transitionary moment with mannerism as well this emphasis on artifice on the invention of the artist lots of different stylistic characteristics that I talked about today so I will end my lecture here for today I hope you learned a great deal about mannerism and I will see you next time for our final lecture on module 12 we will talk about the Baroque artist Caravaggio thank you

Channel: TempleRenMasters

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Keywords: Mannerism

Id: JcA7oQRZfQ4

Length: 49min 43sec (2983 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2013