A Note on Style Labels

Hall, Marcia B.

Save Cite Share

Free

A Note on Style Labels

Marcia B. Hall

After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century

The issue of style labels is a thorny one, and anyone who grasps hold of it these days is certain to come away bloodied. Many in our field have abandoned them altogether, claiming they do more harm than good. The easy confidence with which our predecessors applied them is lost and gone, victim of the worthy effort to talk about art in the terms...

Author

Marcia B. Hall

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-100105

A Note on Style Labels

The issue of style labels is a thorny one, and anyone who grasps hold of it these days is certain to come away bloodied. Many in our field have abandoned them altogether, claiming they do more harm than good. The easy confidence with which our predecessors applied them is lost and gone, victim of the worthy effort to talk about art in the terms those who were making it would have used and understood. Yet the need to categorize is universal because categories are helpful. The first to admit it would have been those writers on rhetoric who were so much studied and admired in the Renaissance, for they were the inventors of categories galore. Categories and labels assist us in talking about what we see. To be sure, we mold history according to our needs and vision and values, and taste changes accordingly. What was highly valued in the past century may no longer have the power to touch us today, but it may speak again to the next generation or the next century. If we learn nothing else from the study of art history, we must surely learn this: labels reflect our particular vision. They may, indeed, prove an embarrassment when their inadequacy is recognized by a subsequent generation. Such a case is “anticlassical,” in my view. But even though this term has been discarded today, it nevertheless tells us something valuable about the history of art history and about the 1920s when it was invented.

I believe we need to approach our material with greater humility and acknowledge that there is no such thing as “timeless” in the writing of history. Another generation will see this art differently, will discard our insights and our categories as we have discarded many of those of the past. Immortality for the historian spans about a generation at best, and our ambition should be to analyze, with as much freshness and honesty as we are capable of, what this art means to us today. Art transcends our categories and constantly reveals itself anew. This characterizes, perhaps even defines, great art.

My position on style labels, then, is this: we create them for our convenience because they correspond to configurations that we perceive. We impose them on the flow of events in accordance with what seems significant to us. There are, consequently, artists who do not fit our categories — Michelangelo is one of these — and even periods that cannot be satisfactorily labeled because no single style seems dominant among several competing strains. Such a period in my judgment is the 1520s and 1530s, following the death of Raphael, previously called Early Mannerism.

It should not be surprising to us that the premature disappearance from the scene of such an authoritative artistic force as Raphael at the height of his powers should have created a profound disturbance. In the years that followed his death, some artists continued to explore the Classic style: Andrea del Sarto, Franciabigio, and others of their generation in Florence, Jacopo Sansovino in sculpture, to name only a sample. In Rome the members of Raphael’s bottega each pursued particular aspects of the master’s style, in accordance with the kind of specialization that seems to have been practiced in his workshop. It is not unlike the situation after the death of another commanding artistic presence, Giotto in 1337, when the synthesis of the master’s vision was dismantled at the hands of pupils who each chose to develop different facets of it. The removal of Michelangelo from the Roman scene with his transfer to Florence in 1516 contributed to a loss of direction, to the fragmentation of style that followed. This “fragmentation” should not be construed as a loss of quality, though it did mean a loss of focus. I take it to be a necessary process in the ebb and flow of styles. The time from 1521 to 1538 is a period of transition, full of exciting experimentation. Depending upon your taste, you may find it more stimulating than the moments of stylistic maturity that flank it: Classic on the one side, Maniera on the other.

The solution I offer in this book differs, I regret to say, from all those previously proposed, but it attempts to simplify the problem of style periods and to reduce the labels used to a minimum: classical (meaning ancient Roman), Classic; transitional, relieflike; Maniera; Counter-Maniera; Counter-Reformation, late Maniera. It should be understood that these style periods do not correspond to time periods in a one-to-one fashion. Not every artist working in central Italy in 1515 can be forced into the category of Classic; as I will discuss in the first chapter, there is a whole competing strain that centers on antiquarianism, and there may well be others yet to be identified and separated out. By the same token, the period at midcentury is very complex, with older painters like Salviati and Vasari continuing to practice in the Maniera style while other, younger artists, sensitized to newly emerging Counter-Reformation views, seek to create a new Counter-Maniera. The end of the century offers even more rival options.

The history of the debate over Mannerism in our century has been reviewed recently by Elizabeth Cropper.1Introduction, written in 1989, to the second edition of Smyth (1992). She pointed out that the trend in the literature since the 1970s to avoid discussion of Early Mannerism has continued in the recent monographs on Rosso and Pontormo. Nevertheless, a consensus seems to have developed that the term is not satisfactory to describe the style of the 1520s and 1530s.2My position on Early Mannerism is close to that enunciated by Campbell. I would suggest that the insistence in the earlier literature upon Florence as the source of innovation, at the expense of Rome, has never adequately been reconsidered and has continued to skew our vision of the period.

“Mannerism,” or “Early Mannerism,” emphasizes discontinuity with the Classic style at a time when many artists were experimenting but intending to imitate the great Classic masters. As Cecil Gould wrote in rejecting the label, what these painters had most in common was that they were the “post-peak” generation.3Gould, in his monograph on Parmigianino (1994), emphasized the lack of cohesion among the works of the painters of the 1520s and 1530s. He remarked that neither Parmigianino nor his contemporaries had any important influence on Florence or Rome. Rather, Parmigianino’s important influence was on North Italy, France, and northern Europe, 11. I therefore prefer not to use “Mannerism,” or to use it sparingly for the period of the 1520s and 1530s, and to refer to these works as transitional.

Craig Smyth’s insight that the conventions of the Maniera were derived from antique sculpture4Smyth (1992, first ed., 1963). has been the key to my interpretation of the 1520s and 1530s, where I see a significant difference between what is going on in Rome and in Florence, and between sacred art, where there were strong conventions that tended to keep it more conservative, and the new monumental secular cycles that were beginning to be commissioned in Rome, for which the model chosen was antique. I have coined the term “relieflike style” to describe what Michelangelo first, in the Battle of Cascina, and then Raphael, in his design for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, bequeathed to the painters as a new model and an alternative to the Renaissance compositional mode of central-point perspective.

There are a handful of Florentine paintings, familiar to us all since Walter Friedlaender’s essay in which he invented the term “anticlassical”5Friedlaender’s essay, “Die Entstehung des antiklassischen Stiles in der italienischen Malerei um 1520,” first published in 1925, was given a new lease on life when it was translated and published in English in 1957. and reproduced over and over again, that have come to constitute the canon of Early Mannerism: Pontormo’s Visitation in Santissima Annunziata, his Sacra Conversazione in San Michele Visdomini (Fig. 40), his frescoes at the Certosa (Fig. 39), his lunette at Poggio a Caiano, the Entombment in Santa Felicita; Rosso’s Assunta in Santissima Annunziata, his Marriage of the Virgin in San Lorenzo (Fig. 42), his Deposition in Volterra, his Moses and the Daughters of Jethro (Fig. 43). It is interesting that Herman Voss (1920), writing before Friedlaender’s essay was published, included among the eight illustrations he devoted to these painters only two of these works. On the other hand, Frederick Hartt, in the most influential book in the field, A History of Italian Renaissance Art, selected all his illustrations of the works of Pontormo and Rosso from the Friedlaender canon, adding only Pontormo’s Joseph in Egypt (Fig. 35). A less biased selection, which I have tried to present, reveals painters who are constantly trying out new solutions based on their own and their predecessors’ works.

In Rome, the importance of Polidoro da Caravaggio’s now-vanished facade decorations all’antica has continued to be neglected. Together with Raphael, Michelangelo, and the antiquities on view, they were what the young artists copied to perfect themselves in the new style. Florence had no Polidoro, nor a constant flow of newly discovered antiquities to stimulate its artists and patrons. Consequently there was a much more inward-turning, hothouse atmosphere. Bronzino, beginning in the late 1520s, distanced himself from the agitated emotion and quivering sensibility of his master Pontormo’s experiments. His cooler and more disciplined style of the decade 1527–37 provides an interim that makes it still more difficult to trace a continuity between the so-called Early Mannerism and the Maniera that emerged in Rome in the late 1530s.6Smyth in his unpublished dissertation (1955) carefully analyzed this period and referred to it as “interim mannerism.” It is more useful to study this period with these regional differences in mind than with the concept of Mannerism at the forefront.

Recent historical scholarship has moved toward a more positive evaluation of the Counter-Reformation. As Paul Grendler has pointed out, anticlerical bias among intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has obscured the links between Quattrocento humanism and the Counter-Reformation.7Grendler, especially 227, 235–41, 249. The challenge for the present generation of historians of Cinquecento art is to reevaluate the second half of the century, particularly its sacred art, from a perspective free of anticlericalism. This task is already well underway, especially among Italian and English scholars.

Federico Zeri in 1957 (Pittura e controriforma) had discerned a break in the stylistic development in Rome at about midcentury and identified it as a response to the emerging Counter-Reformation. He isolated painters who concerned themselves with making sacred art that would meet the criteria of the Decrees of the Council of Trent and of the treatise writers like Gilio, Borromeo, Paleotti, and Raffaello Borghini.

The response of artists and patrons in Rome to the religious upheavals, beginning even as early as the 1530s, is more nuanced than was at first thought. Maria Cali (1980) made a sharp distinction between the rigid and dogmatic spirit of the Counter-Reformation and the exploratory and open Catholic Reform movement that preceded it, especially in the 1530s. She undertook to set apart the pedestrian Counter-Reformation painters (Zeri’s “painters of the Counter-Reformation”) from those she saw as preserving their expressive liberty while conforming their styles as necessary to the new demands for devout painting. I, too, distinguish between the Catholic Reform movement of the thirties and early forties — the spirituali to whom Michelangelo with Vittoria Colonna and others belonged — and the Tridentine reform. After the Reform movement had been derailed in the early 1540s, there developed a range of artistic responses to the emerging conditions, from Girolamo Siciolante’s suppression of the aesthetic, to Taddeo Zuccaro’s tempered Maniera, to Girolamo Muziano’s revival of Sebastiano del Piombo’s devout nobility.

Against the advice of one revered colleague I have retained the term Counter-Reformation, not in order to insist upon its character as a reaction to Protestantism, but because it is the only widely used term that can characterize the sacred art of the whole period with all its diversity.

Sydney Freedberg (1971) refined and extended Zeri’s brilliant insights and invented the term “Counter-Maniera” to describe this art. Intentionally parallel to Counter-Reformation, the term described the painting from which Maniera “abuses” and “errors,”8These are the terms Giovanni Andrea Gilio applied to sacred images in the Maniera style in his treatise published in 1564. See Chapter 5. had been purged, but in which it had not yet been discovered that the path of the future lay in the direct appeal to the worshiper’s emotions. In Freedberg’s careful definition of his term, Counter-Maniera excluded the most egregious artificialities of the Maniera in the interest of a more devout sacred art, but retained much from that style. It was not so much an anti-Maniera as a chastened Maniera. It was applied to the painters of the third generation of Maniera in Florence in my Renovation and Counter-Reformation (1979). Here I have applied the term “Counter-Maniera” only to sacred art. Unlike Freedberg I have included Michelangelo’s frescoes of the Pauline Chapel, otherwise stylistically orphaned, under the Counter-Maniera rubric.

This last brings up the perennial issue of what labels to use for Michelangelo. His style was constantly evolving, and although it was little influenced by other artists, it was deeply influenced by his own spiritual pilgrimage. Because he was ever the pioneer and never the follower, his style does not fully fit stylistic categories, even at any given moment. He was a major contributor to the formation and evolution of the Classic style of the High Renaissance. His adoption of an anormative figure canon, his cultivation of artificial poses, and his delight in ornaments were much imitated by his contemporaries in the 1520s, particularly in Florence but also in Rome. Returning to residence in Rome in the mid-1530s to paint the Last Judgment, Michelangelo viewed it through the lens of his personal religious reawakening, spurred by involvement with the Catholic Reform. His majestic and sober style discarded ornament and eventually rejected grace and physical beauty. This moment coincided almost exactly with the formulation of the Maniera by Perino, Jacopino, Salviati, and Vasari, and they and other younger artists drew upon the intricate poses of the nudes of the Judgment as a source and inspiration, taking from it what was quite contrary to Michelangelo’s intent. I will argue that in his immediately subsequent Pauline Chapel he abandoned the humanist principal of the imago dei, painting creatures totally dependent upon God’s Grace to achieve physical grace. Each phase generated imitators, but as he progressed in age and profundity the imitators’ approximations of his style became more and more remote. Although the example of spiritual devotion he provided in the Pauline Chapel caused some other artists to moderate the excesses of their Maniera, almost no one followed him down the path leading to the abnegation of physical beauty Thus he was a source for Maniera but never a practitioner of it. He was the pioneer of Counter-Maniera, yet his work remained its most extreme statement and even moved beyond it, to a rejection of Maniera.

From the 1540s onward the situation becomes even more complex because, among alternative styles existing side-by-side, no one dominated. At the same time that the Counter-Maniera was invented for sacred art, older artists like Salviati continued to paint secular commissions in the Maniera style, while some younger ones evolved a more conservative manner that, like the Counter-Maniera, excised some of the artificiality of the Maniera and moved away from the relieflike style. Taddeo Zuccaro s compromise bridged the Maniera and the Counter-Maniera in a way that satisfied both the patrons devoted to opulence and the reformers. It can properly be called late Maniera. For the remainder of the century, in Rome, Florence, and other parts of central Italy, a moderated Maniera flourished and continued to be used in palaces and for other kinds of secular painting.

Toward the end of the century some new solutions were found that set the stage for the Baroque style. Once again, labels fail in a situation of transition. Sixtus V (1585–90) embarked upon a program of decoration that demonstrated a new decorum for paintings according to their site and function. The demands of spokesmen for the Counter-Reformation, like Gilio, for distinctions between private and public, secular and sacred art, were finally met with a definitive codification that would largely put to rest the unease many patrons and artists had felt about the role of classical antiquity in Christian imagery and the suitability of “pagan” motifs in that setting. The urgency with which these decorations were executed took its toll, however. The team of thirty painters working at the same time resulted in works that epitomized the maniera ammanierata deplored by the Seicento critics.9The term is Malvasia’s: Felsina pittrice, Bologna, 1678, 1, 358. He saw the decline beginning earlier, around the time of Ludovico Carracci’s birth in 1555, and names as its instigators Salviati, the Zuccari, Vasari, Andrea Vicentino, Tomaso Laureti, and the Bolognese painters Samacchini, Sabbatini, Calvaert, the Procaccini, and the like. These are paintings that interest us not for their aesthetic quality but for the iconodule idea they were intended to demonstrate. Maniera as a style had been exhausted and new stylistic solutions were needed.

The discovery of the affective answered the call for an art that would lead worshipers to devotion, rather than distracting them with inappropriate worldly thoughts. Federico Barocci, drawing upon the emotional appeal of Correggio’s paintings, led the way toward an acceptable sensuousness, replacing the sensuality of certain Maniera images, which the Decrees of the Council of Trent had explicitly condemned as lascivious.

Caravaggio, bringing to Rome an artistic sensibility developed in northern Italy and an intrinsically rebellious nature, introduced novelties of chiaroscuro and of figure type that created a rival realism to the revitalized Classicism of the Carracci and of the native Roman school. Thus the situation at the end of the century was rife with new potential. None of these new styles chose to revive the relieflike style that had thrived particularly in the second quarter of the century, although that other invention of Roman antiquarianism, the wall treated as surface, fared much better and would have a very long life.

I offer here a rethinking of what has been called Mannerist painting and of what followed and coincided with it. I have been able, I believe, to reconcile some of the competing interpretations by addressing questions previously neglected and then raised in the past generation, and on the basis of this new research to pursue issues left unresolved when, around 1970, the Mannerism debate was abandoned. What followed in the second part of the Cinquecento makes better sense when some of these issues have been clarified.

My view of the historian’s task is that it is less a matter of tying up all the ends than it is a matter of identifying strands and tracing them as far as present knowledge permits. The strands are there to be followed up by future historians, but the fabric does not come apart when we trace a thread farther or identify a pattern in the weave that has not been seen before; rather, another element of its richness is appreciated. It is not the historian’s task to cut and shape that fabric into a garment of her making, because the pattern of the garment itself becomes confused with the pattern of the fabric and distracts attention from it. And, as beautiful as the garment may be, it will become outmoded and dated, and it will have to be taken apart or discarded by a future generation.

1 Introduction, written in 1989, to the second edition of Smyth (1992). »

2 My position on Early Mannerism is close to that enunciated by Campbell. »

3 Gould, in his monograph on Parmigianino (1994), emphasized the lack of cohesion among the works of the painters of the 1520s and 1530s. He remarked that neither Parmigianino nor his contemporaries had any important influence on Florence or Rome. Rather, Parmigianino’s important influence was on North Italy, France, and northern Europe, 11. »

4 Smyth (1992, first ed., 1963). »

5 Friedlaender’s essay, “Die Entstehung des antiklassischen Stiles in der italienischen Malerei um 1520,” first published in 1925, was given a new lease on life when it was translated and published in English in 1957. »

6 Smyth in his unpublished dissertation (1955) carefully analyzed this period and referred to it as “interim mannerism.” »

7 Grendler, especially 227, 235–41, 249. »

8 These are the terms Giovanni Andrea Gilio applied to sacred images in the Maniera style in his treatise published in 1564. See Chapter 5. »

9 The term is Malvasia’s: Felsina pittrice, Bologna, 1678, 1, 358. He saw the decline beginning earlier, around the time of Ludovico Carracci’s birth in 1555, and names as its instigators Salviati, the Zuccari, Vasari, Andrea Vicentino, Tomaso Laureti, and the Bolognese painters Samacchini, Sabbatini, Calvaert, the Procaccini, and the like. »

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()