WEBVTT 00:00:00.908 --> 00:00:03.160 (piano music) 00:00:04.053 --> 00:00:06.645 So here we're looking at the great mannerist painting 00:00:06.737 --> 00:00:10.384 by Parmigianino, called "The Madonna of the Long Neck". 00:00:10.384 --> 00:00:12.145 It's a fun painting. 00:00:12.499 --> 00:00:12.999 It's a tall painting. 00:00:12.999 --> 00:00:15.734 It's big. And Madonna is big. 00:00:15.734 --> 00:00:18.418 She's big in funny places, too. 00:00:18.418 --> 00:00:20.842 Her head is really tiny. 00:00:20.842 --> 00:00:23.702 Compared to her hips, especially. 00:00:23.702 --> 00:00:26.016 Right, she's got really wide hips. 00:00:26.016 --> 00:00:29.531 She comes down on tiny little toes. 00:00:29.900 --> 00:00:33.259 It's always seemed to me like her body is in the shape of a diamond. 00:00:33.259 --> 00:00:36.838 In a sense, she is a landscape on which Christ sits. 00:00:36.838 --> 00:00:39.675 Christ himself is also quite large. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:39.675 --> 00:00:44.017 It's not just large. Look at the way he splays his body. 00:00:44.017 --> 00:00:47.790 This is crazy kind of torsion, with his arm falling, 00:00:47.790 --> 00:00:49.956 almost dislocated from his shoulder. 00:00:49.956 --> 00:00:54.270 There is a precedent for that way his left arm falls down. 00:00:54.270 --> 00:00:57.388 If you think about Michelangelo's "Pietà"... 00:00:57.388 --> 00:01:04.003 and Christ here as a child but perhaps echoing when Mary would hold Christ 00:01:04.003 --> 00:01:06.532 in images like the "Pietà" when Christ is dead. 00:01:06.532 --> 00:01:07.032 in images like the Pietà when Christ is dead. 00:01:07.032 --> 00:01:11.586 In fact Christ looks asleep but there's also a way that he looks dead, too. 00:01:11.586 --> 00:01:15.953 That reference in some ways explains the mass of her lap, 00:01:15.953 --> 00:01:20.348 because in that sculpture Mary is quite substantial in order to be able 00:01:20.348 --> 00:01:22.185 to support the dead body of her son. 00:01:22.185 --> 00:01:25.861 It's clear when we're looking at this that we're not in the High Renaissance anymore. 00:01:25.861 --> 00:01:26.793 So what happened? 00:01:27.101 --> 00:01:29.100 Mannerism happened. 00:01:29.100 --> 00:01:31.097 It's almost like the artists of the High Renaissance 00:01:31.097 --> 00:01:32.879 had done everything that could be done. 00:01:32.879 --> 00:01:36.498 They had perfected the naturalism that they had sought after 00:01:36.498 --> 00:01:38.326 since the time of Giotto. 00:01:38.326 --> 00:01:41.879 All of the illusionism that was at the service of the High Renaissance 00:01:41.879 --> 00:01:45.751 is here being used to distort and transform the body. 00:01:45.751 --> 00:01:49.662 It's not so much an ugly deformation as a kind of deformation that accentuates 00:01:49.662 --> 00:01:51.566 a kind of extreme elegance. 00:01:51.566 --> 00:01:53.651 Exactly. It takes that ideal beauty and elegance 00:01:53.651 --> 00:01:55.233 that was in the High Renaissance 00:01:55.233 --> 00:01:57.719 and exaggerates it. 00:01:57.719 --> 00:02:01.795 When we're thinking about Mannerism, we think about it as art taken from art, 00:02:01.795 --> 00:02:04.002 instead of art from nature. 00:02:04.002 --> 00:02:08.534 We think about the Renaissance as being based on observation of nature 00:02:08.534 --> 00:02:09.950 and the natural world, 00:02:09.950 --> 00:02:13.651 but when you look at this you think back to works of art 00:02:13.651 --> 00:02:17.685 like Michelangelo's "Giuliano de' Medici" and that long neck. 00:02:17.685 --> 00:02:19.934 Or back to the "Pietà". 00:02:19.934 --> 00:02:23.119 That makes a lot of sense - the idea that this is art that is self-referential, 00:02:23.119 --> 00:02:25.119 that is referring to its own traditions. 00:02:25.119 --> 00:02:27.650 The respect for human anatomy, 00:02:27.650 --> 00:02:31.384 portraying that naturalistically - that's not important to Mannerists. 00:02:31.384 --> 00:02:35.237 In fact, I think there is a letter from one Mannerist artist to another Mannerist artist 00:02:35.237 --> 00:02:36.962 where he says something like: 00:02:36.962 --> 00:02:39.885 "Take a left hand and put it on a right arm." 00:02:39.885 --> 00:02:43.248 It's like a willful complicating of the body. 00:02:43.248 --> 00:02:47.320 ...and setting up relationships between forms that are absurd. 00:02:47.320 --> 00:02:51.030 Look at the relationship between the vase that's being held by the angel 00:02:51.030 --> 00:02:54.147 in relationship to his/her thigh. 00:02:54.147 --> 00:02:58.244 Look at the relationship between the massive Virgin Mary 00:02:58.244 --> 00:03:01.468 and the prophet in the lower-right corner 00:03:01.468 --> 00:03:04.219 that is presumably impossibly far away, 00:03:04.219 --> 00:03:07.800 but somehow just a tiny figure at the feet of the Virgin. 00:03:07.800 --> 00:03:13.285 And look at the way the Virgin holds her hand to her chest, 00:03:13.285 --> 00:03:16.996 with these impossibly long, almost boneless fingers. 00:03:16.996 --> 00:03:21.569 There's a way in which the gesture fails to mean anything. 00:03:21.569 --> 00:03:23.970 It means gesture... and drama... 00:03:23.970 --> 00:03:26.553 as opposed to a specific intent of the figure. 00:03:26.553 --> 00:03:29.503 There's a kind of dramatizing here. 00:03:29.503 --> 00:03:30.349 For its own sake. 00:03:30.349 --> 00:03:31.100 Exactly. 00:03:31.100 --> 00:03:34.308 ...with that kind of willful compression 00:03:34.308 --> 00:03:36.579 that creates a sense of almost the impossible. 00:03:36.579 --> 00:03:38.462 If you look at the columns on the right, 00:03:38.462 --> 00:03:41.466 there's actually a colonnade that's so deep in space, 00:03:41.466 --> 00:03:43.070 it's seen at such an oblique angle, 00:03:43.070 --> 00:03:45.302 that it almost seems like a wall or a single column. 00:03:45.302 --> 00:03:47.130 If you look closely at the base, 00:03:47.130 --> 00:03:49.834 you can see the alternating light and shadow 00:03:49.834 --> 00:03:51.530 that passes between those columns. 00:03:51.530 --> 00:03:54.112 There is ambiguity and that's a large part, 00:03:54.112 --> 00:03:55.950 because that part of the painting is not finished. 00:03:55.950 --> 00:03:59.068 So Mannerism seems to be this intense reaction 00:03:59.068 --> 00:04:01.696 to the perfection of the High Renaissance. 00:04:01.696 --> 00:04:04.551 You have the Renaissance building itself 00:04:04.551 --> 00:04:06.917 into a kind of extreme naturalism, 00:04:06.917 --> 00:04:11.731 and then it seems to be a flailing reaction against those strictures. 00:04:11.731 --> 00:04:15.283 Or a sense that there was nowhere to go except to do something really different. 00:04:15.283 --> 00:04:19.734 All these ideas were very much a part of a culture of the court. 00:04:19.734 --> 00:04:24.846 It's important to recognize that there was a very specific, learned audience 00:04:24.846 --> 00:04:26.120 for these kinds of paintings. 00:04:26.120 --> 00:04:29.879 These were not made for the artists' own wild interests. 00:04:29.879 --> 00:04:33.799 This was considered a kind of high intellectual game. 00:04:33.799 --> 00:04:36.718 (piano music)