(piano music)

So here we're looking at the great mannerist painting

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

It's a fun painting.

It's a tall painting.

It's big. And Madonna is big.

She's big in funny places, too.

Her head is really tiny.

Compared to her hips, especially.

Right, she's got really wide hips.

She comes down on tiny little toes.

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

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

Christ himself is also quite large.

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

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

almost dislocated from his shoulder.

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

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

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

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

in images like the Pietà when Christ is dead.

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

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

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

to support the dead body of her son.

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

So what happened?

Mannerism happened.

It's almost like the artists of the High Renaissance

had done everything that could be done.

They had perfected the naturalism that they had sought after

since the time of Giotto.

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

is here being used to distort and transform the body.

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

a kind of extreme elegance.

Exactly. It takes that ideal beauty and elegance

that was in the High Renaissance

and exaggerates it.

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

instead of art from nature.

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

and the natural world,

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

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

Or back to the "Pietà".

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

that is referring to its own traditions.

The respect for human anatomy,

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

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

where he says something like:

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

It's like a willful complicating of the body.

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

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

in relationship to his/her thigh.

Look at the relationship between the massive Virgin Mary

and the prophet in the lower-right corner

that is presumably impossibly far away,

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

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

with these impossibly long, almost boneless fingers.

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

It means gesture... and drama...

as opposed to a specific intent of the figure.

There's a kind of dramatizing here.

For its own sake.

Exactly.

...with that kind of willful compression

that creates a sense of almost the impossible.

If you look at the columns on the right,

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

it's seen at such an oblique angle,

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

If you look closely at the base,

you can see the alternating light and shadow

that passes between those columns.

There is ambiguity and that's a large part,

because that part of the painting is not finished.

So Mannerism seems to be this intense reaction

to the perfection of the High Renaissance.

You have the Renaissance building itself

into a kind of extreme naturalism,

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

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

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

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

for these kinds of paintings.

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

This was considered a kind of high intellectual game.

(piano music)