Michael Murphy - Late Renaissance Rome & Jesuit Cultural Policy

            Towards the end of the Renaissance the refined structure and symmetry of the High Renaissance masters began to give way to Mannerism, a movement that exaggerated Renaissance ideals of elegance and beauty while embracing elaborate compositions and the artificiality of art. While usually thought of as a part of the Renaissance, Mannerist art may also be considered to be a reaction against the Renaissance, a part of a continuing cycle of the embrace and rejection of classicism in Western art.
 
            Raphael’s Deposition of the Christ shows the stylistic

Raphael's Deposition of Christ

elements that would ultimately lead to Mannerism. The altarpiece was painted for the Baglioni family chapel in memory of Grifonetto Baglioni. Grifonetto had plotted the murder of some of his other family members, but failed to kill Gian Paolo Baglioni, the family patriarch, and sought refuge with his  mother, Atalanta. Atalanta turned him away, but came to regret her treatment of her son after he was killed by Gian Paolo, and commissioned the altarpiece in his memory. The painting’s composition is unbalanced and tense compared to the symmetry of other High Renaissance works, with a higher concentration of figures the right-hand corner than in the left. The figures themselves are posed in exaggerated positions, their bodies elongated. The painting’s beauty was so much admired by Scipione Borghese that he had it ‘forcibly removed” from its chapel and placed in his villa, now the 
Galleria Borghese.
 

Bronzino's Mannerist depiction of St. John the Baptist

            Bronzino’s painting of John the Baptist is a prime example of Mannerism. The Baptist’s curly-haired visage is soft, beautiful, and impassive, fitting of the Mannerist style but breaking the biblical description of John as living in the wilderness. The figure is identifiable, however, by the hide draped over his shoulders shared by nearly all depictions of the saint. At a glance, the influence of the Renaissance maters is clear in the naturalistic modeling of the Baptist’s muscles. Upon closer inspection, however, the figure’s anatomy breaks down, revealing the exaggerated artifice typical of Mannerist painting. Bronzino paints his figure in a nearly impossible position, arms and legs contorted in unnatural positions. The positioning of the saint’s limbs disguises a torso that is noticeably elongated, and the whole composition has an air of uncanny elegance.

Depiction of the martyrdom of James Intercisus; the "A" corresponds to an identifying inscription

            In the late sixteenth century, the Council of Trent, part of the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation, passed several decrees on art, which sought to restrain the decorative and extravagant treatments of religious subjects in art, restricting depictions of traditional but not strictly biblical scenes. The Mannerist style in particular was thought to be particularly elaborate and confusing, and art as a whole began to move towards simpler, more easily recognizable compositions. The martyr portraits of Santo Stefano Rotondo show this emphasis on clarity to a great extent; each image portrays the – often gruesome – deaths of several martyrs, labeled with letters corresponding to inscriptions identifying the martyr and the emperor who ordered their execution. These frescoes, painted by Niccolò Circignani with help from Antonio Tempesta, exhibit a drive to educate the public on Church history; this is fitting, given that in 1578 the church was home to the Jesuit Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum. The Jesuits are known for their emphasis on education, and Circignani’s portraits, which may seem distastefully blunt to modern viewers, served this purpose well.

            While Mannerism became a dominant style in much of Italy, Venice was instead dominated by a tradition begun by Giovanni Bellini and lead by artists such as Titian. This Venetian school was typified by the primacy of color over line, but otherwise maintained the High Renaissance ideals of balance and symmetry. Titian’s Venus of Urbino is known as one of the best known works of the Venetian school, featuring a composition using color not only as a means of enhancing the painting but as a means of achieving balance in the image. The reclining nude woman sets a diagonal sloping from right to left across the image, balanced by the line the viewer’s eye traces between the red of the couch the Venus rests on and the red of her maid’s skirt in the image’s background. With this painting, Titian not only popularized the reclining female nude as a separate subgenre, but exemplifies the Venetian school that would, ultimately, have a great influence on the future of Western painting, and certain aspects of the movement provided the precedent for the Baroque movement that would come to replace Mannerism.

Titian's Venus of Urbino