16th C Mannerism Part 2 of 3 Pontormo, Parmagianino and Bronzino

So Pantormo also is a painter who is a mannerist painter, and if you were to compare this against Giotto's Lamentation, I think that you can see that Pantormo is a little bit more dramatic and a little bit more over the top, and really, of course, it's 220 years of experiences behind Pantormo in terms of depiction, and so he's changing and becoming more and more surreal and more and more abstract than Giotto. Pantormo's deposition is a sort of lamentation scene. Literally, Jesus is being deposed or taken down off of the cross, and if you look at the main figure of Jesus, you'll see that there is the sort of anatomical distortions that we saw that were evidenced in Michelangelo's painting as well, and we saw that, for instance, the small head and the sort of elongated torso, but the figure of Jesus that's in the center of this picture is actually kind of twisting and turning, and the body itself is this complete kind of taffy-like pull. There's another little figure that's down at the base of the painting that I think is also important. The painting at the base or the figure at the base, just for a second, try to do that with your own body. For instance, he's on his toes, and try to bend your spine at that spot. It's almost impossible to do that, and he's looking back over his shoulder, so his neck seems to be located closer to his right-hand shoulder, so in a way, what Pantormo is doing is he's doing this sort of weird distortion of the figure that doesn't make a lot of sense, but when we first see it, we don't really pay attention to what it is, and sort of, we don't question it. It seems completely realistic to us. In the center of the painting, Pantormo plays a little bit of a game with the hands as well. If you were to look at Jesus's hands, and that's being held there in the center, and you look at the other hands as well, whose hand belongs to who is kind of at question here, and we're really not sure what's going on. Then there's another element which is kind of a mannerist or kind of bizarre element in this painting. Get near the top, look at the clothing that they're wearing. It's almost like they're wearing t-shirts that dissolve into flesh tone. Are they wearing muscle t-shirts that are sort of tights? How does the drapery actually attach their body? What are they wearing? You can see the anatomy beneath some of the drapery, so all of this is a depiction of a deposition off the cross, but there's these weird sort of almost surreal elements to it that we're not really sure which are real and which are not. The last surreal element that I wanted to kind of talk about is where are these people standing, and what are they standing on? The space is ambiguous. It's a little bizarre. It's a little strange, and that's a hallmark of mannerism as well, is that we don't really know what the geography or location of the figures are in. I love talking about this artist because in some ways his name really matches what's going on in the painting. His name is Parmigianino, and he is a little cheesy. It's kind of a weird cheesy depiction of the Madonna and Child, and a full extension of that concept that we had talked about that was the throne of wisdom kind of scene, but in this instance we have, in terms of a formal point of view, the space is dislocated. It's weird. We don't even know who those figures in the background, where are they standing? They're kind of bunched up almost like they're on a line trying to get to into a doorway or something, but we don't see where their legs are and where they're standing. We have this figure of Mary who's seated on something, but what is she seated on? We don't even see a throne. It almost seems like she is spilling down this sort of weird architecture that we don't know what it is, and then what you also see is the baby Jesus is this sort of weird taffy-like construction of his form or his figure. Some other things that I think are in tying with this in terms of the formal elements are basically they're in some sort of weird architecture, but there's a drapery and then there are steps down, and then it leads back into a space that is, is it a landscape? Is it a building? Is it architecture? Now let's take this up in terms of a little bit more of the content of the image. I guess it's sort of iconographic, but also the, the, the literal content of it. So if we zoom in a little bit and we'll start at the base, this figure in the lower right-hand corner is probably a quotation from what Michelangelo was doing where he, the sybils and prophets that we saw in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, there's this figure who is reading a scroll but looking away from the scroll, and maybe it's a sort of riffing or improvising on the Annunciation kind of schema or idea. And as we move up, I can't tell, and I don't know if you can, if that is one column or a series of columns that flow into one another. Then if you look at the amphora, that jug that's being carried there, it's the vessel, like the holy vessel, but it's got this weird spike. It looks like, almost like the spike is about to be thrust down into Jesus's foot. Then you also see Mary's body, that wet drapery style that's meant to depict the form and depict her womb as the holy vessel, and there's sort of echoing of the amphora form to her belly, and her breasts are clearly defined, but in a way that's kind of eroticized. It's, it's kind of weird. We move up the painting a little bit, and one of the other things that I think you'll also see is, again, where are these figures standing, and then look at Mary's neck and her egg-like head that seems to be floating on it, but the anatomy is slightly inaccurate, slightly wrong, and so is the anatomy of the hands. What I'm suggesting to you is that what Parmigianino is doing is not through a lack of skill. It's actually, he's purposefully doing these sort of weird distortions and playing with the anatomy of the figures and playing with the space, because he is playing literally with the manners having to do with good anatomy and perspective, and even possibly good Christian taste and Catholic taste in painting. This painting by Agnolo Bronzino, and Bronzino is so named because his skin was very bronze or very dark, is also one of the most mysterious or enigmatic paintings that we'll study this semester, and again, a lot of people find this painting a little creepy and a little strange, and I do too, and mannerism, I guess, completely ties in with that whole sort of weird riffing on strangeness and creepiness. There's no document that completely explains the iconography or the symbolism of this painting, so we will go into that in just a minute, but first, I guess, we approach it, again, from a formal point of view, which is the space is ambiguous. We don't know where this is taking place, and we don't know if there's any kind of architecture or actually foreground, middle ground, and background associated with it. It's almost like a collage of figures, and we don't know where the spaces are that they're inhabiting. The second thing is the anatomy of these figures is completely distorted and strange, and the most distorted anatomy is actually that of the figure on the far left-hand side, Cupid, with the wings hanging off the back. He has his butt towards the picture plane, and then this weird twisting as his arms wrap around his mother Venus's figure, and then his head is pointed in the completely opposite direction. None of that would work if you really tried to do that. I guess if you had an extra vertebra in your spine, that would do it. The same thing is true with, there's a figure in the lower right-hand corner that has two hands going two opposite directions and whose body terminates in something that looks like a lizard. We'll address that again in a second, and then in the upper left-hand corner, there are these weird mask-like things that are both meant to look like real people, live things, but they're also masks at the same time, so that'll tie in with what we're looking at and some of the distortions. Start at the bottom of the painting and discuss some of the things that we see here in terms of iconography. Now, this is an allegory, and we don't really know what the allegory is supposed to mean, but basically it might be an allegory about love, lust, and erotic behavior and its comparison to classicism. So there is no guidebook exactly what it's supposed to be about, but basically what we see is Cupid's feet are crushing this dove, which is a symbol of peace. In Venus's hand, she's holding one of the golden apples of the sun, which is probably a symbol of this, one of the trials of Hercules, and also a symbol of how real love is. We have these two masks, and the two masks that we're looking at are actually, sort of, one is a satyr and one is a real person, and it might represent having something to do with duality or have to do with theater. Above that, we see this sort of weird Cupid figure and these weird animal feet. The Cupid figure is actually belonging to another figure that is actually scattering roses, and he is stepping on some sort of thorns that are thrusting through his feet, which might be a depiction of the fact that even though there is a scattering of love on this and flowers and things like that, that it's a depiction also of the trials and the terrible things that happen when you are trying to make love. We move up the figure, and it's been suggested that this is an allegory about the two sides of erotic versus genuine love or platonic love. On the left-hand side of the picture, we see this figure who's literally kind of green and rotting, and he's screaming. It could be a depiction of what's called envy, but it also could be a depiction of syphilis, of the diseases and the ravages that happen with physical, erotic, and carnal love. On the right-hand side, it's a chimera creature with a beautiful face and a honeycomb in the wrong hand and a thorn in the other hand, which could represent how love is sort of two-sided and two-handed. And, of course, we have got this figure that's throwing these sort of weird petals on the scene. And Venus is kissing his mother and holding her breast, and she is removing a quiver literally from his equipment that holds the arrows because he shoots arrows of love. And what that might depict or might mean is that she's sort of removing the barb or removing the actual love from erotic love, but there are other points of view on that. Upper left-hand corner, we see this weird mask-like thing, which could be the two-facedness or the falseness of love, and then a figure of Father Time revealing all of these follies and all of this weird stuff with this long muscular arm. One last interesting little thing, which I just kind of like to talk about, especially for my painting students, is if you look at the poses of the hands, the two middle fingers are brought together in most of the hands, and it makes it a more interesting pose for the hands, and that's a kind of mannerist pose for hands. That's an interesting little detail.