8 characteristics of MANNERISM in painting

The Mannerism is an artistic movement that emerged in Italy during the 16th century, being an attempt to recover the principles of classicism such as proportion, balance and harmony of the shapes, but from a more personal and idealistic point of view, deforming and exaggerating the figures and shapes. Thus, artists like Parmagino, Veronese, Tintoretto or El Greco, among other great Mannerist painters, reinterpreted the works of classical antiquity creating a new style, carrying the principles classics to the extreme demonstrating the artists mastery of techniques and their artistic abilities to create ornate compositions and contrived.

A style that we analyze in this lesson at unPROFESOR.com, offering you the Characteristics of Mannerism in painting.

As we have already pointed out, the Mannerism It is an artistic style that emerged around 1530 and lasted until the end of the 16th century. It is also called late renaissance and its name comes from the word "maniera" (way in Italian) and with which it refers to a style that stylizes and exaggerates forms, assuming a bridge between the Renaissance and the Baroque, a movement that gave a

At first, the term had negative connotations when 17th century art theorists considered that the artists of those years, between 1530 and 1600, only dedicated themselves to imitating the great Renaissance artists, if you have a talent of your own.

Image: Youtube

But we are going to focus on the pictorial field; therefore, the characteristics of Mannerism in painting are the following:

1. Figures and shapes are exaggerated, rejecting realistic proportions. The bodies are elongated and placed in positions in which torsion prevails as a way of adding drama and movement to the compositions. Characteristics that seem to have originated in a self-portrait by the painter Parmigianino. A painter who, perceiving the deformation that a convex mirror made on objects, decided to paint the painting imitating that effect.
2. Another of the elements resulting from these twisting of objects is the serpentine or spiral movement.
3. Arbitrary use of color. They move away from the naturalistic color search, resorting to artificial colors and saturated palettes.
4. The decoration becomes complex, abounding the decorative elements that come to saturate the paintings.
5. The reference painters for the Mannerists are Raphael Sanzio, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci.
6. Reality is reproduced in a distorted and under the subjective perspective of the painter, creating authentic own and original creative universes.
7. The light that is introduced in the works is artificial, unnatural and cold. Thus, artists use intense and strange colors that collide with each other, if they create ranges or pretend to be harmonious.
8. We are therefore faced with a style that seeks artificiality without there having to be a clear relationship between reality and what is represented, not existing either a spatial coherence, being also difficult to know where the characters and objects are located represented.