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Mannerism's Masks Description
The style we have called Mannerism continues to elude stable definition; some scholars have associated it with angst and neurosis, while others have read it as a confident and untroubled ornament of courtly culture. I would argue that it is precisely a self-conscious elusiveness in much “Mannerist” art that produces our historiographic conundrum. Masking, dissimulation, and irony haunt much ambitious Central Italian art from the 1520s through the 1560s, engendering a poetics of style that frequently appears calculated to exceed, even at times to destabilize, its ostensible political and religious functions. Speaker
Stuart Lingo is an Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Division of Art History. Image
Detail of Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, and Jealousy, c. 1550, oil on panel, 192 x 140 cm, Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Museum |
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