Mannerism

by John Shearman

"Manierismo was the extreme consciousness of elegant style for its own sake, a passion which unites the cold narcissistic nudes of Bronzino, the elaborate chiselling of Benvenuto Cellini's saltcellar, and the water-games in a duke's garden. Shearman's essay ranges across sixteenth-century music, literature and architecture as well as art: it is a model of breadth and concision." - Observer

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction, Renaissance, Italy, History

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Courtauld Institute Professor; scholar of Raphaël and Mannerism. Shearman was the son of Charles E. G. Shearman, a British army brigadier and amateur painter, and Evelyn White (Shearman). He attended St Edmund's school, Hindhead, and the Felsted School, in Essex, where his interests in studio art were encouraged by the headmaster. He became a painter of naturalistic landscapes and seascapes. Shearman entered the Courtauld Institute, University of London, in 1951, where he studied art history under Vienna expatriate Johannes Wilde (q.v.). Wilde imparted to Shearman his technique of using a variety of physical evidence to interpret art. Shearman's dissertation, written under Wilde, Developments in the Use of Colour in Tuscan Paintings of the Early 16th Century, was completed in 1957. Other émigré scholars whose lectures deeply affected Shearman at the Courtauld included Rudolf Wittkower (q.v.) and Ernst Gombrich (q.v.). Upon graduation, Shearman was immediately appointed lecturer at the Courtauld. In the next ten years Shearman devoted himself to publishing a massive quantity. An early article on the Raphael cartoons, with fellow Courtauld Institute scholar John White (q.v.) in the Art Bulletin (1958) adumbrated his later monograph on the topic. Early in his career, Sir Anthony Blunt (q.v.) assigned Shearman to catalog the early Italian paintings in the Royal Collection (the volume finally appeared in 1983). Shearman wisely decided to exclude the Raphael cartoons as too great a topic to be treated among the other works. In 1964, Shearman was awarded a research fellowship at Princeton University, which allowed him to research his subsequent books unhindered by teaching. His first published book, a two-volume catalogue raisonné on Andrea del Sarto in 1965, appeared two years after a work on the same subject by his colleague and friend, Sydney Freedberg (q.v.). A second book, on Mannerism, the result of a 1961 paper "Maniera as an Aesthetic Ideal" delivered at the 20th International Congress of the History of Art, appeared in 1967. The latter work went through eight subsequent editions. In 1966, Shearman was one of the foreign art historians who helped assess the damage to art the devastating Arno River flood in Florence. He also assisted in advising on the subsequent restorations. In 1967 he was made Reader at the Courtauld. Shearman complete the book on the Raphael Cartoons in 1972. The book analyzed how artists of as great a stature as Raphael were tempered by their patrons and theological advisers. At Blunt's retirement as Director of the Courtauld, Shearman was considered but denied the position. He acted as Deputy Director between 1974-79. In 1979 Shearman left the Courtauld for Princeton University. Among his accomplishments there were a 1983 conference celebrating the quincentenary of Raphael's birth. The conference, organized together with Marcia Hall (q.v.), focused on the subject of science in the service of art history. It was there that Shearman also announced a project to revise Vincenzo Golzio's Raffaello nei documenti, 1971, a classic of text of art history. Though the briefcase containing most of his archival transcriptions had been stolen the previous year, Shearman painstakingly repeated his research. That same year, 1983, his first wife, Jane Dalrymple Smith (Shearman), died. He married Sally Roskill (later divorced). In the 1980's Shearman served on the Pontifical Advisory Commission for the Restoration of the Sistine Chapel, reviewing the cleaning which was completed in 1994. Shearman discovered in the course of his research that the chapel's ceiling had been severely cracked before Michelangelo was commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint it in 1508. His endorsement of the cleaning project put him at odds with other Renaissance specialists, such as James Beck (q.v.). In 1988 Shearman delivered the Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His lectures, Only Connect, publis

Reviews

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous book for all the obvious reasons - viz., because it is a good book. The author is smart, and in discussing his topic, he opens a vista, not just on European art of the 15th-17th centuries, but on more universal trends...

In particular, Mannerism is (for Shearman) an excess of classicism, just as Asianism (Bembismo), was an excess of the classical ideals of Cicero or Atticism: http://www.answers.com/topic/atticist... or http://www.ucl.ac.uk/classics/staff/f...

The stress on elegance, grace, artificiality, preciosity, novelty, the bizarre (meraviglie), invention, fantasy, caprice... the emphasis on variety and ornament... for its own sake, not as a consequence of the expressive aims... the decorative and ornamental... "It is decorative, it is an all-over interwoven consistency of emphasis" (149), polyphany as opposed to unity -- and as opposed to the dynamic energy and *structural* unity of Baroque (from Rubens to Bach) -- abundance and superabundance (over brevity) both in quantity and in density (prolixity)... the aesthetic pleasure taken in obscurity, in the recondite... and, in general, the the primacy of 'style' ('maniera') and form over content - and hence the violation of classical ('Latin) 'decorum' (Grk: Kairos) (or 'fitness to purpose'): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorum#... -- all fully illustrated (though the pictures are in black-and-white, they are well and carefully chosen):



Candlestick, by Antonio Gentili da Faenza, 1581



But what struck me most, and what may interest GR friends, is the way in which so much of this seems to anticipate the aims of modernist and postmodernist literature. So, Shearman (186): "...the idea that complexity, prolixity, and unreasonable caprice are beautiful, or that virtuoisity is something to be cultivated and exhibited, or that art should be demonstratively artificial..." is something that could be said of many a postmodern novel -- and Shearman's point is that there have been many periods of history in which these characteristics (parataxis, a chaos of the parts..., polyphany, as opposed to unity..., that 'all-over interwoven consistency of emphasis", that preciosity of the parts, as opposed to their rigorous subordination to the structural unity or composition of the whole that is the classical and Aristotelian ideal) -- in which all these characteristics were seen as virtues to be celebrated and exaggerated, and not as vices to be explained away... and that Mannerism was, perhaps, the first and greatest expression of this aesthetic in the modern period...

At any rate -- a poor attempt at a review -- but a marvelous and surprisingly relevant book.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A course I took with Prof. Graham Smith at the University of Michigan utterly changed my life. His course and Shearman's book opened the world of 16th C painting, sculpture and architecture to me and became a springboard for decades of further reading, research and travel. Shearman also headed the art history department at Harvard. His style, though erudite, is more accessible than Sydney Freedberg's.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short, but excellent look at Mannerism in the late 1500s and early 1600s. I learned lots of things that I was previously unaware of in terms of the origins and philosophical underpinnings of this art movement. What I found most interesting:
1/ Bernard Palissy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard...), whose fantastic porcelain work always amazes me, created a beautiful garden for Catherine de Medici in the Tuileries Garden here in Paris. I am not sure it survived the French Revolution, but I need to go back there and look! Apparently, he made realistic fish and just amazing fantasies and this was his primary work - public decoration and gardening - as opposed to the porcelainware. I learned further from Wikipedia that he had an interesting life escaping death as a Protestant during the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre in 1572 and dying in prison in 1590 in the Bastille having been a victim of the War of 3 Henries in 1598. Fortunately, his rusticware, as his porcelain was called, survived him and still fascinates - one of the greatest collections is at the wonderful Musée National de la Renaissance in Ecouen about 1h N of Paris.
2/ In 1589, there was an intermezzo (literally an 'intermission' but which was a spectacle all of its own and one of the primary features in the performance arts of the Mannerist period) at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence during which the central pavillion of the palace was flooded with 2m of water and a sea battle between Turks and Christians (the Battle of Lepanto which is considered to have saved the Christian West having taken place in 1571). https://www.palazzoguadagni.com/a-nav...

Shearman is a quick but very enjoyable read!

[Alessio]

A valuable read that looks at a sweeping range of sixteenth century cultural production (visual art and architecture, music, literature). Shearman is also a concise and impactful writer; this is how he characterized Dvorak and Friedlander’s reading of Mannerism: “Nothing forces us to make the effort of understanding; but reason should at least prevent us from dressing up the wicked fairy of art-history in non-period corset and costume to make her more attractive to our eyes.” Reader, I cackled.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una de las mejores introducciones a un período artístico que he leído hasta ahora. Muy informativo y crítico, haciendo un repaso del movimiento manierista en su contexto histórico, con una rápida pero intensa introducción para situarnos en el momento específico de la historia del arte, viendo su evolución a través de los años y cómo esos ideales estéticos se veían reflejados en las distintas artes: literatura, música, arquitectura, pintura y escultura. Ver de forma tan clara y bien explicada la multidisciplinariedad del movimiento ayuda mucho a asentar los conocimientos de una forma más transversal.

Me ha gustado especialmente el capítulo 4, "Una 'época más culta' y sus ideales", en el que usando como eje distintas parejas antónimas de conceptos bien vivos en el período va dando infinidad de ejemplos visuales y escritos con los que poder ver la variedad de opiniones que había en la misma época pese a que todos bebían de la misma raíz clásica.

[Johns · Rating 3 out of 5]

This small book was authored some decades ago but it is still valuable to any reader seeking a better handle on the Italian baroque period in art.