Chap. 20 - Mannerism

The Visual Arts

Mannerism The High Renaissance in Italy coincided with the lives and art of three great artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Later artists studied and emulated the idealized beauty of Leonardo and Raphael, and the dynamism and grandeur of Michelangelo. However, faced with the perfection of the High Renaissance, a younger generation of painters began to explore different artistic possibilities.
This late period of the Renaissance, which lasted approximately from 1520 to 1600, is called Mannerism from the Italian maniera meaning "style" or "stylishness." To some extent, Mannerism mirrors the religious anxiety and political confusion resulting from the Protestant Reformation and the weakened authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Where High Renaissance art had been concerned with the harmonious balance of naturalism, composition, and color, art now found delight in exaggeration, artificiality, odd perspective, and jarring color.
Although Mannerism began in Florence and Rome by Italian artists, painters from Northern Europe (France, Flanders, and Germany) frequently studied in Italy where they adopted the fashionable Mannerist style. Upon returning to their native countries, they carried this style with them. Prints (such as etchings and engravings) were another important way that the Mannerist style was spread throughout Europe.
The Italian Baroque Italy in the seventeenth century was very different from the unified country we know today. Cities like Florence, Venice, Genoa, Bologna, and Naples formed small individual states with distinct local customs, traditions, dialects, and even artistic traditions. Binding these different cities and their territories together was the Roman Catholic Church, centrally located in Rome at the Vatican and ruled both temporally and spiritually by the Pope.
While most of Northern Europe had been violently affected by the Protestant Reformation, Italy remained staunchly Catholic. Recognizing the need for change and reform, the Catholic Church answered the Protestant Reformation with its own Counter-Reformation. Some Protestant sects protested the use of art in the church setting. The Catholic Church, however, which had been the greatest patron of the arts for centuries, affirmed the importance of the visual arts in propagating personal faith by depicting the lives of Christ and the saints. As a result, artistic commissions for churches and private patrons blossomed in 17th century Italy and nowhere more so than in Rome. Here and throughout Italy, Baroque artists created work that was realistic and yet believably illusionistic, personal, and intensely dramatic.
Seventeenth Century Dutch PaintingHolland (or the Low Lands) had succeeded in breaking away from Catholic Spain’s domination in the late sixteenth century. One important result was that most of Holland embraced Protestantism, and with the exception of a few cities like Utrecht, the effect in Dutch art was the elimination of most religious and mythological themes. Dutch seventeenth century painting tends to be more conservative than that of other European countries, focusing on the land and the pastimes of the Dutch people who were an increasingly prosperous merchant middle class.
Dutch artists depicted their world in direct portraits, realistic still lifes, landscapes, marine scapes, and genre paintings showing scenes of everyday life. However, some Dutch artists like Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick Terbrugghen came under the strong influence of the Italian painter Caravaggio. These painters favored dramatic, emotion-filled or colorful subjects and used Caravaggio’s theatrical lighting. Other artists followed the example set by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn whose psychological explorations of the human spirit and emotion brought new depths of expression to painting.
Seventeenth Century Flemish PaintingWhile neighboring Holland broke away from the political control of Catholic Spain in the late 16th century, Flanders (Belgium) remained under Spanish domination. Thus, the Catholic Church, which was a significant patron of the arts, continued to influence Flemish art throughout the seventeenth century. Italy also continued to exert its artistic dominance, drawing artists to study the works of its leading painters. One such visitor was Peter Paul Rubens, who traveled to Italy as a young man and was drawn to Caravaggio’s dramatic style and the brilliant colors used by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. One his return to Flanders, Rubens synthesized these various artistic traditions, creating an exuberant, dramatic and colorful style that set the tone for all Flemish Baroque painting.
Rubens led a cosmopolitan life and enjoyed phenomenal success, serving among other things as court painter to the Archduke of Austria. His vast output was made possible by a large studio of assistants, many of whom - like Jacob Jordeans and Sir Anthony van Dyck - became famous in their own right. As a result, Rubens' Flemish Baroque style continued to influence the course of art far beyond the borders of Flanders and long after he died in 1640.