Mannerist

Mannerism is a style of European art of roughly 1520 to 1600 that arose as a reaction to the harmonious balance of the High Renaissance and is characterised by artifice, refined elegance and a deliberate sensuous distortion of the human figure. The name derives from the Italian maniera ('manner', 'style'). Mannerists elongated the proportions of bodies, gave them unnatural, spiralling poses (figura serpentinata), crowded complex compositions, and employed tense, sometimes artificial colours and packed, congested space. In place of clarity and balance they prized invention, wit and intellectual play addressed to the connoisseur. The leading masters were Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino and Agnolo Bronzino, and in sculpture and the decorative arts Benvenuto Cellini and Giambologna. Mannerism reflected the spiritual crisis of the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, unsettling Renaissance ideals. Long regarded as decadent, it was reassessed in the twentieth century as a distinctive, sophisticated and psychologically charged artistic language that preceded the Baroque.