Comparison of a Mannerist & a Contemporary Artwork

The purpose of this research is to examine one mannerist and one contemporary work of art, comparing and contrasting their shared qualities and differences, particularly in reference to the ways in which the mannerist qualities of the earlier work convey its subject and project a vital relationship between it and the contemporary work. The plan of the research will be to describe each work in turn, and then explore the connections between the patterns of ideas emergent in the works as well as the means by which the ideas are made manifest.

Parmigianino's Madonna del collo lungo [Madonna with a long neck] may not initially appear to have much resemblance to Roy Lichtenstein's Artist Studio--The Dance, and not only because the former decidedly has the flavor and composition of High Renaissance art and the latter is undoubtedly a late twentiethcentury composition, itself derived partly from a painting by Matisse. The colors of Madonna del collo lungo also have the muted but polished and lush elegance and variety that have far more in common with Michelangelo or Titian than with the starkly limited number of primary and mixed-primary colors (yellow, green, red, a spot of blue, and a gray-scale background) encasing planes of form. Shadows in Artist Studio--The Dance, are not photographically realistic as they are in Madonna del collo lungo but cartoon-like, either black fields or black-and-gray lines. In Madonna del collo lungo the clothing comprises silk and velvet, and the

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and the spirituality of the scene is suggested by the general subject matter. But Parmigianino's spirituality is not the same as the devotion that is evident in the religious paintings of the early and high Renaissance. There is a peculiarly ethereal, faraway quality to the entire composition, most evident in the inclusion of the large columns and the distant vistas. This is plainly a work of imagination, not a representation of the madonna and child of scripture or Christian tradition. In that way it is consistent with two features of mannerism, the ambiguity of context and content, which have been cited in connection with Bronzino and other 16th-century mannerists (Cantieni, 1981, p. 26; Hauser, passim). How the man with the scroll functions is altogether ambiguous; Hauser suggests that he may be in the wrong picture, "might well have been an invention of the painter of the Descent from the Cross at Volterra or the Transfiguration at Citta di Castello" Hauser, 1965, p. 203). How else, indeed, except with reference to ambiguity, can one explain the intimate scene in a grand perspective, the silks and velvets and columns typical perhaps of Renaissance Italian gentry life but hardly consistent with the Biblical tradition of th

Category: Arts - C