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Updated: May 4, 2025
He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look down. Of such minds are mannerists in Art; in the world, tyrants of all sorts.
Ariosto's Alcina belongs to a different family of magnificent witches. Cremona, at this epoch, had a school of painters, influenced almost equally by the Venetians, the Milanese, and the Roman mannerists. The Campi family covered those grave Lombard vaults with stucco, fresco, and gilding in a style only just removed from the barocco.
Writers who are not mannerists, but who seize the appropriate tone of their subject, appear to feel a conviction of what they attempt to persuade their reader.
But all authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence has in some respects been mischievous.
But is then the bad of this age worse than the creations which some time ago raised Casanova to celebrity? or the empty emptier than that cold copying of the misunderstood antique, which gives the whole of the last age the appearance of one great botch in the history of the arts? Were not quaint mannerists even then the phenomena of promise?
Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse which formerly might have reconciled us to its efflorescence. Mannerists of genius can glitter alluringly, pedantic ones are deterringly boring. The Pigtail is the dried-up Rococo, trimmed according to academic rules.
If at the close of the sixteenth century the mannerists sought to startle and entrance the world by empty exhibitions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a braggadocio display of meaningless effects crowding their compositions with studies from the nude, and painting agitated groups without a discernible cause for agitation the crime surely lay with the patrons who liked such decoration, and with the journeymen who provided it.
In the great Gallery are exhibited no less than twenty-three pictures by GUERCINO: but to speak the truth, though, in looking at some of his productions, he appears an extremely agreeable painter, as soon as you see a number of them, you can no longer bear him. This is what happens to mannerists. The dark shades at first astonish you, afterwards they disgust you. N deg. 65. Remuald.
The painters of the close of the sixteenth century are called "Mannerists," which means that they adopted or imitated the manner or style of some great master who had preceded them and this was done in so cold and spiritless a way that it may be said that true artistic inspiration was dead in Italy.
The Pope in Rome, and Lorenzo in Florence, led art to the verge of paganism; Savonarola would have kept it on the confines of purism; it was divided and fell, passing through the various steps of decadence, the mannerists and the eclectics, to rise again in this nineteenth century with what is after all its true aim, the interpretation of nature, and the illustration of the poetry of a nation.
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