The second of Andrea's important pupils,
Rosso Fiorentino, began in
a not dissimilar spirit of expressive rebellion. His highly
unconventional “Madonna with SS. John the Baptist, Anthony Abbot,
Jerome and Stephen” for Santa Maria Nuova (1518; Uffizi) displays an
aesthetic anarchy bolder than anything by
Pontormo, and by the 1520s
he was creating works of savage emotionality (e.g., the
Volterra
“Deposition,” 1521). In 1523
Rosso journeyed to Rome. There he was
overwhelmed by three experiences: Michelangelo's ceiling in the
Sistine Chapel, the late style of Raphael, and the art of the newly
arrived
Parmigianino.
Parmigianino brought with him from Parma three sample pictures to
display his virtuosity to Roman patrons. His style,based originally
upon that of
Correggio, already possessed much of the attenuated
elegance for which he became famous. In Rome
Parmigianino was hailed
as the new
Raphael and specifically as a painter capable of
reproducing the sophisticated grace of
Raphael's late “St. Michael”
(Louvre).
Raphael had died in 1520, but his most authoritative late
work in the Vatican stanze (papal apartments) was continued and
developed by his foremost pupils,
Giulio Romano (who left for Mantua
in 1524) and
Perino del Vaga. Their Roman styles rely upon a direct
though refined use of the art of classical antiquity as a source of
inspiration and upon an ingenious exploitation of different levels
of pictorial reality within a single decorative scheme. The
underlying artificiality of their manner was reinforced by the
latent academicism of
Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling nudes.
Rosso's encounter with the latest painting Rome offered resulted in
a radical realignment of his style. His “Dead Christ with Angels”
(c. 1526; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), a subject that he would
earlier have been inclined to treat with exceptional angularity of
form, is executed with a new feeling for rarefied beauty. Emotion is
now expressed less overtly, and his handling of paint is less
aggressive.
Rosso,
Parmigianino, and
Raphael's pupils undoubtedly
influenced each other during the mid-1520s, but in 1527 Rome was
sacked, and the artists of Pope Clement VII's court became
scattered.
Parmigianino fled to Bologna, returning after four years
to his native Parma, where he continued to develop his personal form
of mannered beauty (e.g., “Madonna of the Long Neck,” Uffizi).
Perino
found employment with the ruling family at Genoa, and
Rosso
visited a number of Italian cities before settling in France.
The sophisticated Mannerism that evolved in Rome before 1527 became
the chief formative influence upon the styles of a number of
important younger artists.
Vasari and
Francesco
Salviati had passed
their period of apprenticeshipin
Andrea del Sarto's Florence. They
parted in 1527 but resumed their close acquaintance in Rome (1531),
and it wasthe Roman style that influenced their subsequent
development.
Vasari,
Salviati, and Jacopino del Conte, who worked
with
Salviati on the frescoes for San Giovanni Decollato, Rome,
attempted to combine the formal and narrative artifice of the late
Raphael decorations with the complex figure style of
Michelangelo.
The result in
Vasari's case is undeniably eclectic, but
Salviati
created an individual maniera of enormous facility and inventiveness
(e.g., “Peace,” Palazzo Vecchio, Florence). The Raphaelesque element
in the Roman style was reinforced by Perino's return to Rome in about
1538.
Salviati's career was unsettled—he worked in Florence, Rome, Venice,
and France—but
Vasari returned to Florence to the court of the
Medici duke Cosimo I, who had replaced in 1537 the unpopular (and
assassinated) Alessandro de' Medici. Cosimo and his Spanish wife,
Eleonora de Toledo, whose formal Iberian tastes influenced the
artistic life of the court, shrewdly embarked on an ambitious series
of propagandistic projects to consolidate his political position.
Vasari became the “stage manager” for much Medicean propaganda. His
success as a painter and architect after 1555 was considerable, but
his most important contribution to Mannerism was undoubtedly his
advocacy of Mannerist ideals in his Lives , first published in 1550
and revised and extended in 1568. As
Vasari realized, the most
important painter in
Cosimo's court was Il
Bronzino, a pupil of
Pontormo.
Bronzino had, from the first, reduced the emotional content that had
been an important feature of
Pontormo's style, and, during the 1530s
in Florence, he began to establish a reputation as a court portrait
painter. His mature portraits are elegant, perfectly finished,
ingenious in detail, and aloofly formal, reflecting the Spanish
etiquette of
Cosimo's court.
Bronzino was adopted as favourite
artist by Eleonora, receiving the commission to decorate her small
private chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio. The resulting frescoes are in
no sense spiritually expressive, but they are brilliantly stylish,
with references to antiquity, which displayed the erudition of both
artist and sitter, and to Raphael and Michelangelo.
Bronzino was
later influenced by the teachings of the Counter-Reformation,
adopting a more modest narrative style, but his underlying aesthetic
art remained a sense of maniera.
A number of later Mannerists responded similarly to the
Counter-Reformation—Santi di Tito is particularly important in this
respect—but it was only with Federico Barocci that the ideals of
Mannerism were abandoned in favour of an all-pervasive piety in
religious painting. Barocci's attractively fluent and softly
coloured style, based largely upon
Correggio, may be considered as
an exceptional precursor of the Baroque style. Barocci abandoned his
Roman Mannerism as early as 1575, but the majority of his
contemporaries in Rome and Florence continued to develop the
eclectic aspects of the original maniera.
Daniele da Volterra and
Pellegrino Tibaldi painted in an explicitly Michelangelesque manner,
while Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) and Federico Zuccari, at
the end of the century, investigated the complex intellectual
conceits of the Raphael studio style. Zuccari—a painter, designer,
and theorist—is the most representative figure of this late
phase, and his travels (to Rome, Venice, Spain, England, France, and
Antwerp) underline the internationalism of late Mannerist style.
Outside Florence and Rome, many of the major Italian cities
succumbed to the spreading influence of Mannerism after 1527. Siena,
under the lead of
Domenico Beccafumi, developed a bizarre form of
emotional Mannerism, but only Venice maintained a steady, independent
Mannerism. Venice was certainly receptive to Mannerist influence—as
seen in the works of Titian after 1530,
Tintoretto, and
Veronese—but,
with the exception of Andrea Meldolla (Schiavone), Venetian painting
continued to be dominated by non-Mannerist ideas in colouring and
expression.
Vasari's disparaging remarks about
Tintoretto's lack of
good design show clearly that the differences between
Romano-Florentine and Venetian painting remained fundamental.
The early and High Renaissance style as developed in Italy did not
immediately dominate all European painting. A few northern artists
adopted Renaissance motifs but used them in a piecemeal manner
without full comprehension of Italian compositional methods. After
1520, however, northern and Spanish artists came increasingly to
understand and adopt Mannerist ideas, and highly individual schools
of Mannerism began to appear in various centres outside Italy.
Regional styles of considerable decorative flamboyance resulted from
the fusion of the intricacies of the late Gothic style with the
complexities of Mannerism.
