Antwerp Mannerism

Antwerp Mannerism. A term coined by Max J. Friedländer in 1915 to describe a style characteristic of various painters working in Antwerp from about 1500 to about 1530. The style has little to do with Italian Mannerism, although Italianate buildings often feature in Antwerp paintings of the time. Rather, as James Snyder writes (Northern Renaissance Art, 1985), the style ‘marks the final stage of many latent features of earlier Flemish painting…Details of costume are elaborated and ornamental effects are exaggerated…The result is indeed mannered if one thinks of it as a style gone to seed and losing contact with naturalism…The actors, which they are, resemble ceramic figurines with elegant curlicues breaking the drapery contours; their heads are reduced to cute caricatures of wrinkled old men, foppish pages, and demure maidens…They tiptoe and prance agilely along their carpeted stages before theatrical backdrops of lofty architectural ruins through which we catch glimpses of distant Disneyland towers and romantic landscapes.’ As this description suggests, the term is sometimes used mildly pejoratively, but pictures in the style (almost always on religious subjects) can be lively and charmingly artificial as well as merely overwrought. Most of the artists associated with Antwerp Mannerism are anonymous, but the identified practitioners include Jan de Beer (c.1475–1519/28) and (in his early work) Jan Gossaert. The stylistic features described above, although most highly developed in Antwerp (a major centre for the international art trade), were not confined to the city; indeed they were broadly characteristic of Netherlandish art as a whole at this time.