Northern Mannerism is the form of Mannerism found in the visual arts north of the Alps in the 16th and early 17th centuries.[1] Styles largely derived from Italian Mannerism were found in the Netherlands and elsewhere from around the mid-century, especially Mannerist ornament in architecture; this article concentrates on those times and places where Northern Mannerism generated its most original and distinctive work.
The three main centres of the style were in France, especially in the period 1530–1550, in Prague from 1576, and in the Netherlands from the 1580s—the first two phases very much led by royal patronage. In the last 15 years of the century, the style, by then becoming outdated in Italy, was widespread across northern Europe, spread in large part through prints. In painting, it tended to recede rapidly in the new century, under the new influence of Caravaggio and the early Baroque, but in architecture and the decorative arts, its influence was more sustained.[2]
The sophisticated art of Italian Mannerism begins during the High Renaissance of the 1520s as a development of, a reaction against, and an attempt to excel, the serenely balanced triumphs of that style. As art historian Henri Zerner explains: "The concept of Mannerism—so important to modern criticism and notably to the renewed taste for Fontainebleau art—designates a style in opposition to the classicism of the Italian Renaissance embodied above all by Andrea del Sarto in Florence and Raphael in Rome".[3]
The High Renaissance was a purely Italian phenomenon, and Italian Mannerism required both artists and an audience highly trained in the preceding Renaissance styles, whose conventions were often flouted in a knowing fashion. In Northern Europe, however, such artists, and such an audience, could hardly be found. The prevailing style remained Gothic, and different syntheses of this and Italian styles were made in the first decades of the 16th century by more internationally aware artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair and others in Germany, and the misleadingly named school of Antwerp Mannerism, in fact unrelated to, and preceding, Italian Mannerism.[4] Romanism was more thoroughly influenced by Italian art of the High Renaissance, and aspects of Mannerism, and many of its leading exponents had travelled to Italy. Netherlandish painting had been generally the most advanced in northern Europe since before 1400, and the best Netherlandish artists were better able than those of other regions to keep up with Italian developments, though lagging at a distance.
For each succeeding generations of artists, the problem became more acute, as much Northern work continued to gradually assimilate aspects of Renaissance style, while the most advanced Italian art had spiralled into an atmosphere of self-conscious sophistication and complexity that must have seemed a world apart to Northern patrons and artists, but enjoyed a reputation and prestige that could not be ignored.[5]
France received a direct injection of Italian style in the form of the first School of Fontainebleau, where from 1530 several Florentine artists of quality were hired to decorate the royal Palace of Fontainebleau, with some French assistants being taken on. The most notable imports were Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo di Gaspare, 1494–1540), Francesco Primaticcio (c. 1505–1570), Niccolò dell'Abbate (c. 1509–1571), all of whom remained in France until their deaths. This conjunction succeeded in generating a native French style with strong Mannerist elements that was then able to develop largely on its own. Jean Cousin the Elder, for example, produced paintings, such as Eva Prima Pandora and Charity, that, with their sinuous, elongated nudes, drew palpably upon the artistic principles of the Fontainebleau school.[6]
Cousin's son Jean the Younger, most of whose works have not survived, and Antoine Caron both followed in this tradition, producing an agitated version of the Mannerist aesthetic in the context of the French Wars of Religion. The iconography of figurative works was mostly mythological, with a strong emphasis on Diana, goddess of the hunting that was the original function of Fontainebleau, and namesake of Diane de Poitiers, mistress and muse of Henry II, and keen huntress herself. Her slim, long-legged and athletic figure "became fixed in the erotic imaginary".[7]
Other parts of Northern Europe did not have the advantage of such intense contact with Italian artists, but the Mannerist style made its presence felt through prints and illustrated books, the purchases of Italian works by rulers and others,[8] artists' travels to Italy, and the example of individual Italian artists working in the North.
Much of the most important work at Fontainebleau was in the form of stucco reliefs, often executed by French artists to drawings by the Italians (and then reproduced in prints), and the Fontainebleau style affected French sculpture more strongly than French painting. The huge stucco frames which dominate their inset paintings with bold high-relief strapwork, swags of fruit, and generous staffage of naked nymph-like figures, were very influential on the vocabulary of Mannerist ornament all over Europe, spread by ornament books and prints by Androuet du Cerceau and others—Rosso seems to have been the originator of the style.
A number of areas in the decorative arts joined in the style, especially where there were customers from the court. High-style walnut furniture made in metropolitan centers like Paris and Dijon, employed strapwork framing and sculptural supports in dressoirs and buffets. The mysterious and sophisticated Saint-Porchaire ware, of which only about sixty pieces survive, brought a similar aesthetic into pottery, and much of it carries royal cyphers. This was followed by the "rustic" pottery of Bernard Palissy, with vessels covered in elaborately modelled relief animals and plants. Painted Limoges enamel adopted the style with enthusiasm around 1540, and many workshops produced highly detailed painting until about the 1580s.
Apart from the Palace of Fontainebleau itself, other important buildings decorated in the style were the Château d'Anet (1547–52) for Diane de Poitiers, and parts of the Palais du Louvre. Catherine de' Medici's patronage of the arts promoted the Mannerist style, except in portraiture, and her court festivities were the only regular northern ones to rival the intermedios and entries of the Medici court in Florence; all of which relied heavily on the visual arts. After an interlude when work on Fontainebleau was abandoned at the height of the French Wars of Religion, a "Second School of Fontainebleau" was formed from local artists in the 1590s.
Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor (reigned 1564–1576), who made his base in Vienna, had humanist and artistic tastes, and patronised a number of artists, mostly famously Giambologna and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose fantasy portraits made up of objects were slightly more serious in the world of late-Renaissance philosophy than they seem now. At the end of his reign he devised a project for a new palace and just before he died the young Flemish painter Bartholomeus Spranger had been summoned from Rome, where he had made a successful career. Maximilian's son, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor was to prove an even better patron than his father would have been, and Spranger never left his service. The court soon transferred to Prague, safer from the regular Turkish invasions, and during his reign of 1576–1612 Rudolf was to become an obsessive collector of old and new art, his artists mixing with the astronomers, clockmakers, botanists, and "wizards, alchemists and kabbalists" whom Rudolf also gathered around him.[9]
Rudolf's artistic preferences were for mythological scenes with nudes as well as allegorical propaganda pieces which extolled the virtues of himself as ruler. A work combining the elements of eroticism and propaganda is Minerva triumphs over Ignorance (Kunsthistorisches Museum), which shows Minverva (the Roman goddess of war, wisdom, arts and trade) with exposed breasts and a helmet treading down Ignorance, symbolised by a man with the ears of an ass. Bellona, another Roman goddess of war, and the nine Muses surround Minerva. The propaganda message is that the empire is safe with Rudolf at the helm so that the arts and trade can flourish.[11]: 68–69 The Flemish sculptor Hans Mont also worked for Rudolf and designed the triumphal arch for Rudolf II's formal entry into Vienna in 1576.[12]
Works from Rudolf's Prague were highly finished and refined, with most paintings being relatively small. The elongation of figures and strikingly complex poses of the first wave of Italian Mannerism were continued, and the elegant distance of Bronzino's figures was mediated through the works of the absent Giambologna, who represented the ideal of the style.
Prints were essential to disseminate the style to Europe, Germany and the Low Countries in particular, and some printmakers, like the greatest of the period, Hendrik Goltzius, worked from drawings sent from Prague, while others, like Aegidius Sadeler who lived in Spranger's house, had been tempted to the city itself. Rudolf also commissioned work from Italy, above all from Giambologna, who the Medicis would not allow to leave Florence, and four great mythological allegories were sent by Paolo Veronese.[13] The Emperor's influence affected art in other German courts, notably Munich and Dresden, where the goldsmith and artist Johann Kellerthaler was based.
Rudolf was not very interested in religion, and "in the Prague of Rudolf II, an explosion of mythological imagery was produced that had not been seen since Fontainebleau".[14] Goddesses were usually naked, or nearly so, and a more overt atmosphere of eroticism prevails than is found in most Renaissance mythological works, evidently reflecting Rudolf's "special interests".[15]
The dominating figure was Hercules, identified with the emperor, as he had earlier been with earlier Habsburg and Valois monarchs.[16] But the other gods were not neglected; their conjunctions and transformations had significance in Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism that were taken more seriously in Rudolf's Prague than any other Renaissance court.[17] It seems, however, that the painted allegories from Prague contain neither very specific complicated meanings, nor hidden recipes for alchemy. Giambologna frequently chose, or let someone else choose, a title for his sculptures after their completion; for him it was only the forms that mattered.[18]
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![Hans von Aachen, Allegory of Peace and the Arts, 1602.[19]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Allegorie_des_Friedens_und_des_%C3%9Cberflusses_by_Hans_von_Aachen_001.jpg/1280px-Allegorie_des_Friedens_und_des_%C3%9Cberflusses_by_Hans_von_Aachen_001.jpg)
