Mannerism

This study attempts to investigate the grotesque in four paintings of the artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos or El Greco as he is most commonly called. The concept of the grotesque originated from the finding of Domus Aurea in the 1480s. These grottoes had once been part of Nero’s palace, and the images and paintings that were found on its walls were to result in a break with the formal and naturalistic ideals of the Quattrocento and the mid-renaissance. By the end of the Cinquecento, artists were working in the mannerist style that had developed from these new ideas of innovativeness, where excess and artificiality were praised, and artists like El Greco worked from the standpoint of creating art that were  more perfect than perfect. The grotesque became an end to reach this goal. While Mannerism is a style, the grotesque is rather an effect of the ‘fantastic’.By searching for common denominators from earlier and contemporary studies of the grotesque, and by investigating the grotesque origin and its development through history, I have summarized the grotesque concept into three categories: between form, beyond language and beside the sublime. By applying these categories to four works of El Greco I set out to get a more nuanced and deepened understanding of the art of El Greco and the grotesque

In 1564, in honor of the death of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), an artistic extravaganza was invented by the Benedictine monk Vincenzo Borghini (1515-1580)-prior of the hospital of the innocents, humanist, and administrator of the Florentine Academy of Design (Accademia del Disegno or Florentine Academy)-and was implemented by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574)-artist, writer, and artistic director of the Academy, who engaged his Florentine assistants to work on the execution of the tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence (see Figure 1). The commission of Michelangelo's tomb was prompted by his nephew, Lionardo [Leonardo] Simoni-Buonarroti (1522-1599), and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574). The tomb was completed in 1578. Vasari designed the architectural monument, and his assistants, members of the Florentine Academy, collaborated in the following manner: The sculptures of the Fine Arts were carved by Giovanni Bandini (1540-1599), who represented the personification of architecture; Valerio di Simone Cioli (1529-1599), who represented the personification of Sculpture; and Battista Lorenzi (1527-1594), who represented the personification of Painting and the portrait bust of Michelangelo. Giovanni Battista Naldini (1537-1591) completed al fresco the burning urns, the purple-colored doorway of the tomb, the suspended canopy, and the Pietà in the center of the marble tabernacle. This latter artistic contribution is the topic of this essay.

In 1555, assisted by Cristofano Gherardi, Il Doceno (1508-1556), Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) designed and painted a mythological and cosmological theme in the Sala degli Elementi, an apartment of Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574), Duke of Florence, at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The Apartment of the Elements is dedicated to the four elements (air, earth, fire, and water), which in antiquity were considered to be the basis of the material of the world. The four elements are personified as a history painting theme on the ceiling and the walls of the chamber. Accordingly, on the ceiling is the element of Air, personified by several events: Its center depicts Saturn Mutilating Heaven and surrounding this scene are The Chariots of the Sun and the Moon, the images of Day and Night, and the virtues of Peace, Fame, Justice, and Truth. On the walls of the chamber, there are personifications of the elements of Earth (north), Fire (east), and Water (south). The frescoes on the left hand ...

La monografía de Cloe Cavero de Carondelet, Un villa toledana del Quinientos: el cigarral del Cardenal Quiroga, aborda la génesis de uno de los paisajes toledanos por excelencia, el cigarralero, del que apenas existían estudios rigurosos y profundos. El trabajo se centra en el cigarral del arzobispo de Toledo Gaspar de Quiroga, la Quinta de Mirabel. Este proceso que pertenece a una monumentalización del paisaje cigarralero por parte de las elites urbanas de la ciudad, tanto civiles como religiosas. El trabajo no sólo aborda este proceso de cambios en el paisaje, sino que analiza de forma minuciosa la mentalidad de Gaspar de Quiroga y como ésta se desarrolla en la propiedad que va a construir en la Quinta de Mirabel, tanto el conjunto de edificaciones erigidas, como en los programas iconográficos que las decoran, religiosas y laicas.

Page 1. Joe A. Thomas Fabric and Dress in Bronzino's Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo and Son Giovanni One of the most famous paintings by Agnolo Bronzino is his portrait of the Duchess Eleonora de' Medici, known as Eleanor of Toledo (Fig. ...

This poster deals with the topic of the engraving with St. Francis with a playing angel by Raphael Sadeler, whose inventor was Paolo Piazza. Thisengraving influenced not only the artistic production in the Capuchin orders, but also served many European painters as a starting point for their works.

There are many variations and copies of this engraving. Piazza's original, which served as a model for the engraving, was probably discovered in the Olivetti Rason collection in Florence.

This oeuvre has a rich symbolic. The Cell of st. Francis was imbued with prayer and daily contemplation. The inventor of the graphic sheet, Paolo Piazza, knew the daily life of prayer from his own experience, because he was a Capuchin brother, religiously named Cosma da Castelfranco. The depiction of Saint Francis in a monastery cell with a playing angel was innovative in its time.

Previous depictions were devoted to other topics from Francis's legend, especially the saint's miracles. A great merit in the new Franciscan iconography belonged to Paolo Piazza, whose copper engravings published by the engraver Raphael Sadelere had a great response and influence on the visual arts of his time.

God's presence in the graphic theme is manifested especially in iconography - symbols of the Eucharist (grapes), Christ's sacrifice (cross, monstrance, lamb of God), symbols of chastity and purity threatened by evil (a dove that a cat is waiting for), goodness and love (Madonna, sugaring dove) and mementa mori (human skull and hourglass). Actually, even the angel playing the viola is the result of the saint's longing prayer for pleasant music that would encourage him in his illness.

An interesting comparison with Albrecht Dürer's graphic St. Jerome in his cell. It is not only the adaptation of the compositional scheme and external analogies, but also the internal symbolism. The link between St. Jerome and St. Francis could be Venice.
In the Capuchin monastery in Prague, there is a baroque painting, which from Sadeler's graphic model St. Francis comes out with a playing angel, which is a clear legacy of Capuchin fine art.

Jacopo Da Ponte, conosciuto anche come Jacopo Bassano, è stato un pittore influenzato dal Manierismo e dallo stile di Tiziano. Il dipinto raffigurante "San Giovanni Battista nel deserto", datato 1558, è conservato presso i Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa.

Set upon dolphin-form feet, and carved with swirling mythological figures, the sixteenth-century wedding chest, or cassone, in the Kerry Stokes collection can be examined through various lenses. Serving ceremonial, utilitarian and decorative functions within their lifetime, cassoni are unique historic artefacts and important documents for the history of taste and collecting.

This essay positions the Kerry Stokes cassone within a history of this object-type, reflecting on its various functions and analysing its decoration. New details are also brought to light regarding its original owners along with its relationship with a near-identical chest in Kiev.

In 1923 with the proclamation of the Republic began a new era. One of the main issues of this period has been to provide the legitimacy of the new regime. Corresponds to the specified purpose education has tried to take advantage of the functional direction. The secular nature of the winning educational institutions, described the principles of the new regime and the real salvation were stated to be realized by obedience to political power and these principles. In this way, both have tried to create a Turkish nation and commitment to the political power of the shaped by a "manners" the emphasis is prominent. Keywords: education, early republican period, national education, the new regime. Özet 1923'te Cumhuriyet'in ilanı ile yeni bir dönem başlamıştır. Bu dönemin temel meselelerden biri, yeni rejimin meşruiyetini sağlamak olmuştur. Belirlenen amaca uygun düşecek şekilde eğitimin işlevsel yönünden yararlanılmaya çalışılmıştır. Laik bir nitelik kazanan eğitim kurumlarında, yeni rejimin ilkeleri anlatılmış ve asıl kurtuluşun siyasal iktidara ve bu ilkelere itaat ile gerçekleşeceği belirtilmiştir. Bu sayede hem bir Türk milleti yaratılmaya çalışılmış hem de siyasal iktidara bağlılık ile şekillenen bir " terbiye " vurgusu öne çıkmıştır. Anahtar Kelimeler: eğitim, erken cumhuriyet dönemi, milli eğitim, yeni rejim.

The third section addresses the artistic decoration of the palazotto, both interior and exterior, its iconographic
programme, representative role, and ties with a main residence. Particular attention is given to cases where the
decorative programme was conceived as an ensemble. This session examined the ways in which a satellite’s
decorative programme was distinct from that of the main residence, and to what extent it related to the particular
function of the palazotto. Michele Danieli addressed these issues in a paper concerning the Farnese court in
Parma. The decoration of the chateau Troja in Prague was presented twice, first in a paper by Martin Mádl and
again during the excursion day in Prague. Additionally, Jakubec’s introductory paper closely examined the rich
stucco and painted decoration of another Czech example, villa Kratochvíle.

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture at 50
Museum of Modern Art, NY, Nov 11, 2016

I will start with an instance of the distant reception of Complexity and Contradiction. The first issue of the Australian journal Transition, launched in 1979, opened with a long essay by architect and critic Philip Drew on “Mannerism in Contemporary Architecture”. His essay began by recounting the ready-to-hand formula of a mannerist art responding to a fifteenth-century worldview thrown into crisis before making the equally conventional leap to what he cast as the “mannerist” trajectory of modern architecture after its first heroic flourish. In this setting, mannerism abounds on the modern stage: the brutalist turn, the work of Archigram and Stirling and, later, Isozaki, the projects of Team Ten and the LCC. That Venturi attracts Drew’s attention is obvious, since he explicitly invokes the architecture of sixteenth-century Italy and seventeenth-century England, and, too, widely cites references to Elizabethan metaphysical poetry as read through the eyes of its modernist “New” critics. The modern mannerism Venturi would appear to embody is, as Drew puts it, “the style of a cultivated international elite,”  drawing on popular culture but rendering it rarefied. His article is, admittedly, a blunt instrument, and it appeared in a review making its first tentative gestures toward a world of architectural debate located here rather than there. But it tracks an observation made widely before and since. To quote Drew: “The effect of Venturi’s argument is to legitimate the adoption of a mannerist aesthetic in contemporary architecture.” Drew is wrong, of course, or at least mostly so. But as a document of a mediated reception of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and of the first generational rejection of the enthusiasm with which it was greeted in the 1960s, it is informative. The pages of Transition explore the question of Australia’s relationship with the postmodern in the issues that follow, where the question of modernism’s legacy immediately becomes a matter of the postmodern, and where postmodernism quickly distils to a question of a so-called Venturian postmodernism—the postmodernism that takes the final polemical chapter of Complexity as its springboard—which, in turn, was posed, again and again, as a question of a contemporary mannerism. Again and again, the named names of contemporary architecture across the early 1980s who made it to Australia and were cornered by the young and hungry correspondents of Transition were asked for their stance on postmodernism, and whether they considered themselves mannerist.

1979 was hardly the moment to start getting excited about mannerism, but the now-beleaguered concept had enjoyed something of a renewal in the history of art and in the history of letters across the 1950s 1960s. Read ungenerously Venturi was doing little more than scratching an itch that had formed in the minds of a good number of critics and historians anxious to understand, through history, the role of art in society in the wake of the Second World War and the role, in turn, of the individual therein. Beyond the intellectual trajectory through Friedländer and Pevsner, who together gave the category critical credence—first in the study of painting, then in architecture—the most widely read attempt to understand a mannerist recurrence in the architecture of the twentieth century was Colin Rowe’s article on the theme, published in the Architectural Review in 1950. Denise Costanzo has detailed the exchanges (and echoes of exchanges) between Rowe and Venturi on this theme. Venturi’s own notes show his attention to Rowe’s treatment of ambiguity in the modern uptake of the cinquecento case. But while Rowe’s article in AR was prominent in architectural culture, he was one of many processing this art historical legacy for the twentieth century. A session of the International Congress for the History of Art held in New York in 1961 laid out the state of the field as it had been revived since the War—a document, too, of the rearranged institutional landscape on both sides of the Atlantic following a wave of intellectual migration from Central Europe. And from this session, the two major synthetic studies of the period were published by the end of the decade, by John Shearman and Craig Hugh Smyth. James Ackerman had likewise published his Michelangelo and Palladio in these years—all available as Penguin paperbacks. It is stretching things to invoke a mannerist moment in which Venturi was an active participant—feeding back into an organised discussion in the history of art. But it is hard to sustain the idea of his interest in mannerism as a consequence solely of a direct encounter with its exemplary works in Rome. Indeed, his encounter of Roman architecture was mediated by the seminars organised for American academicians by Bruno Zevi through the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica—and Zevi’s own account of the parallels of mannerism to the modern age are among the least nuanced we can encounter, where, in his catalogue essay for Michelangiolo Architetto, the Reformation parallels the Holocaust; and the crisis of classicism recurs in the crisis of Reason.

...

A selection of papers will be published.

A special issue of the Journal of Architecture on the modernist historiography of mannerist and baroque architecture, with contributions by Dirk De Meyer, Maarten Delbeke, John Macarthur, Andrew Leach, and Bart Verschaffel—based on a session of the 2009 meeting of the European Network of Avant-guard and Modern Studies at Ghent, Belgium.