Mannerism’s Masks

• In Event: Mannerism/Maniera/Modernity I: Historicizing Fifty Years of Scholarship

Abstract

The style we have called Mannerism continues to elude stable definition, even consensus concerning its very existence. I would argue that it is precisely a self-conscious elusiveness in much period art that produces our historiographic conundrum. What links concepts of Mannerism as an art of angst and alienation with Shearman’s courtly “stylish style” is the masking, dissimulation, and irony that haunts so much ambitious Central Italian art from the 1520s through the 1560s. Sydney Freedberg’s evocative assessment of the implications of Mannerism’s artifice remains resonant: “there was no longer any virtue in a simple statement, indeed there were no longer any simple certitudes to state.” An analysis of Mannerism that inhabits the imbrication of style, mask, and identity in period court culture can allow us to acknowledge Shearman’s insights while recuperating the potentially destabilizing force of an art that habitually and deliberately exceeded its ostensible political and religious functions.

Author

• Stuart Lingo, University of Washington, Seattle