Late Mannerism

Late Mannerism is an art movement of the 1580–1610 period. The gallery holds 37 works in this movement, including works by Paolo de Matteis, Hans Werl and Sebastiano Conca. Browse Late Mannerism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Late Mannerism is the closing phase of the artificial, virtuosic style that dominated Italian and European painting through the sixteenth century. Mannerism itself emerged in Florence and Rome around 1520, when Jacopo da Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino — both trained in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto — broke from the balance and naturalism of the High Renaissance in favour of elongated figures, compressed space, and unstable, theatrical compositions. The term derives from the Italian *maniera* ("style" or "manner"); the painter-biographer Giorgio Vasari, himself a practitioner, called his era the *maniera moderna*. The art historian S. J. Freedberg later divided the century into four phases — First Maniera, High Maniera, Counter-Maniera, and Late Maniera — and it is the last two, roughly the 1560s through the 1590s, that constitute Late Mannerism.

By the 1540s the style had hardened into the courtly "High Maniera" of Agnolo Bronzino, Francesco Salviati, and Vasari — polished, intellectualised art made for an aristocratic elite, antithetical to the raw expressiveness of Pontormo and Rosso. Late Mannerism pushed this self-conscious refinement further: cool enamel-like surfaces, crowded and ornamental compositions, serpentine *figura serpentinata* poses, acid colour, and a cultivated artificiality prized for its own sake. In sculpture the impulse found its purest form in Giambologna, whose spiralling marble groups invite viewing from every angle.

After about 1570 the central-Italian *maniera* lost vitality, and the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63) drove a sober "Counter-Maniera" that replaced complexity with clarity and devotional directness. Scipione Pulzone, among the most esteemed painters in Counter-Reformation Rome, exemplified this pious restraint — our collection holds his *Lamentation* — while Federico Barocci of Urbino tempered Mannerist grace with tender emotion and luminous colour, anticipating the Baroque; our *Saint Francis* is his. Beyond Italy, the style flourished north of the Alps, above all at the Prague court of Emperor Rudolf II, where Bartholomeus Spranger and Giuseppe Arcimboldo produced elegantly erotic and ingeniously allegorical works, while El Greco carried Mannerist distortion to visionary extremes in Spain.

Late Mannerism thus bridges the Renaissance and the Baroque. Its courtly portraiture and ceremonial elegance survive in works such as our portraits of Henry III of France and the soldier Konrad von Bemelberg, even as its excesses provoked reaction. Around 1600 the Carracci and Caravaggio rejected its artifice in favour of renewed naturalism, drama, and clarity — yet the expressive licence, spatial daring, and emotional intensity of late Mannerist art fed directly into the Baroque that displaced it.