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(piano music)

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So here we're looking at the great mannerist painting

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by Parmigianino, called "The Madonna of the Long Neck".

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It's a fun painting.

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It's a tall painting.

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It's big. And Madonna is big.

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She's big in funny places, too.

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Her head is really tiny.

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Compared to her hips, especially.

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Right, she's got really wide hips.

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She comes down on tiny little toes.

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It's always seemed to me like her body is in the shape of a diamond.

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In a sense, she is a landscape on which Christ sits.

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Christ himself is also quite large.

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It's not just large. 
Look at the way he splays his body.

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This is crazy kind of torsion, with his arm falling,

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almost dislocated from his shoulder.

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There is a precedent for that way his left arm falls down.

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If you think about Michelangelo's "Pietà"...

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and Christ here as a child but perhaps echoing when Mary would hold Christ

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in images like the "Pietà" when Christ is dead.

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in images like the Pietà when Christ is dead.

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In fact Christ looks asleep but there's also a way that he looks dead, too.

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That reference in some ways explains the mass of her lap,

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because in that sculpture Mary is quite substantial in order to be able

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to support the dead body of her son.

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It's clear when we're looking at this that we're not in the High Renaissance anymore.

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So what happened?

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Mannerism happened.

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It's almost like the artists of the High Renaissance

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had done everything that could be done.

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They had perfected the naturalism that they had sought after

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since the time of Giotto.

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All of the illusionism that was at the service of the High Renaissance

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is here being used to distort and transform the body.

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It's not so much an ugly deformation as a kind of deformation that accentuates

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a kind of extreme elegance.

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Exactly. It takes that ideal beauty and elegance

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that was in the High Renaissance

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and exaggerates it.

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When we're thinking about Mannerism, we think about it as art taken from art,

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instead of art from nature.

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We think about the Renaissance as being based on observation of nature

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and the natural world,

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but when you look at this you think back to works of art

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like Michelangelo's "Giuliano de' Medici" and that long neck.

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Or back to the "Pietà".

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That makes a lot of sense - the idea that this is art that is self-referential,

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that is referring to its own traditions.

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The respect for human anatomy,

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portraying that naturalistically - that's not important to Mannerists.

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In fact, I think there is a letter from one Mannerist artist to another Mannerist artist

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where he says something like:

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"Take a left hand and put it on a right arm."

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It's like a willful complicating of the body.

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...and setting up relationships between forms that are absurd.

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Look at the relationship between the vase that's being held by the angel

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in relationship to his/her thigh.

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Look at the relationship between the massive Virgin Mary

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and the prophet in the lower-right corner

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that is presumably impossibly far away,

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but somehow just a tiny figure at the feet of the Virgin.

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And look at the way the Virgin holds her hand to her chest,

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with these impossibly long, almost boneless fingers.

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There's a way in which the gesture fails to mean anything.

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It means gesture... and drama...

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as opposed to a specific intent of the figure.

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There's a kind of dramatizing here.

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For its own sake.

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Exactly.

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...with that kind of willful compression

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that creates a sense of almost the impossible.

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If you look at the columns on the right,

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there's actually a colonnade that's so deep in space,

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it's seen at such an oblique angle,

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that it almost seems like a wall or a single column.

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If you look closely at the base,

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you can see the alternating light and shadow

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that passes between those columns.

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There is ambiguity and that's a large part,

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because that part of the painting is not finished.

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So Mannerism seems to be this intense reaction

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to the perfection of the High Renaissance.

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You have the Renaissance building itself

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into a kind of extreme naturalism,

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and then it seems to be a flailing reaction against those strictures.

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Or a sense that there was nowhere to go except to do something really different.

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All these ideas were very much a part of a culture of the court.

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It's important to recognize that there was a very specific, learned audience

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for these kinds of paintings.

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These were not made for the artists' own wild interests.

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This was considered a kind of high intellectual game.

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(piano music)