Spencer Alley: Walter Friedlaender on Early Mannerism

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Walter Friedlaender on Early Mannerism

Rosso Fiorentino
Pietà
ca. 1537-40
oil on panel transferred to canvas
Louvre, Paris

Rosso Fiorentino
Assumption of the Virgin
1517
fresco
Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, Florence

"The relation of this new artistic viewpoint to the problem of space is especially interesting and important. An upholder of the normative, who feels in a classic way, will take for granted an unambiguous, constructed space in which equally unambiguous fixed figures move and act. It is not familiar visual space dissolved in light and air, for the most part optically judged, that the adherents of the normative strive for, but a space which expresses or should express a higher reality purified of everything accidental. However, the figures of the rhythmic anticlassical painter [i.e. the early Mannerists – Rosso, Pontormo, and Parmigianino – active from about 1520 to 1550] function otherwise, for in themselves they express neither an established rule of nature, nor any unambiguous rationally understood space. In a word, for them the problem of three-dimensional space vanishes, or can do so. The volumes of the bodies more or less displace the space, that is, they themselves create the space. This already implies that an art of purely flat surfaces is as little involved here as one which is perspective and spatial. A certain effect of depth is often achieved through adding up layers of volumes of this sort, along with an evasion of perspective. In the struggle between picture surface and presentation of depth in space, which is of such vital importance throughout the whole history of art, this is a particularly interesting solution. A peculiarly unstable situation is created: the stress on the surfaces, on the picture planes, set behind each other in relief layers, does not permit any very plastic or three-dimensional volumes of the bodies to come through in full force, while at the same time it hinders the three-dimensional bodies from giving any very flat impression."

Rosso Fiorentino
Allegory of Salvation
ca. 1521
oil on panel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Rosso Fiorentino
Descent from the Cross
1521
oil on panel
Volterra Cathedral

Jacopo Pontormo
Capponi Deposition
ca. 1528
oil on panel
Church of Santa Felicità, Florence

Jacopo Pontormo
Joseph in Egypt
1515-18
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

"Yet even in cases where a strong effect of depth is desired or is inevitable, the space is not constructed in the Renaissance sense as a necessity for the bodies, but often is only an incongruous accompaniment for the bunches of figures, which one must read together "by jumps" in order to reach the depth. In such cases the space is not adapted to the figures as in high classic art, but is an unreal space, just as the figures are "anormal," that is, unreal. This is accompanied by another important difference from quattrocento art. In the fifteenth century the landscape responds to real facts and to effects of depth (partly obtained through perspective means); the bodies, on the other hand, often remain unreal and relatively flat. In the High Renaissance we see this contradiction resolved in favor of a common harmony of figures and space. In anticlassic Mannerism the figures remain plastic and have volume even if they are unreal in the normative sense, while space, if it is present at all apart from the volumes, is not pushed to the point where it produces an effect of reality. . . . The whole bent of anticlassical art is basically subjective, since it would construct and individually reconstruct from the inside out, from the subject outward, while classic art, socially oriented, seeks to crystallize the object for eternity by working out from the regular, from what is valid for everyone."

– from an essay by Walter Friedlaender originally published in 1925, translated in 1957 and published by Columbia University Press in Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting