in art, a style that developed in Italy in the 16th century and was a transition between the High Renaissance and the baroque. Mannerist painting is characterized by the use of attenuated figures in exaggerated postures (plastically rendered, nevertheless); the unrealistic treatment of space, often for melodramatic effect; and often a seemingly arbitrary choice of thin, unharmonious, often acid colors.

Mannerism, unlike most other art styles, was not so much a rebellion against older styles as a deliberate cultivation, almost to excess, of a previous maniera (Ital., “style”), the way the human figure was treated in the work of the late Italian Renaissance masters Raphael and Michelangelo. Although their work was the impetus for Mannerism, the Last Judgment (1536–41, Sistine Chapel, Vatican) by Michelangelo overlaps with the work of some of the Mannerist painters.

Mannerism as a separate style is first definable after about 1520 in Rome, in the work of Raphael’s pupil Giulio Romano. The leading Florentine Mannerists were Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo da Pontormo; examples of their work are Descent from the Cross (1521, Pinacoteca Communale, Volterra) by Fiorentino and five frescoes of the Passion of Christ (1522–25, Carthusian Monastery, Galluzzo, Italy) by Pontormo. Parmigianino, a north Italian artist, produced one of the great exemplars of Mannerist painting, the Madonna with the Long Neck (1534–40, Uffizi, Florence), with its extreme verticality and ambiguous spatial relationships. Important, too, was the work of the Sienese painter Domenico Beccafumi, such as Birth of the Virgin (1544, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena), a typical Mannerist composition. Pontormo’s pupil, Il Bronzino, extended the Mannerist treatment to portraiture and to allegorical painting, such as his famous Allegory of Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time (c. 1546, National Gallery, London). The Zuccaro brothers, Taddeo and Federico, dominated the Mannerist style in the late 1500s.

By about 1580, Mannerism began to give way to a more realistic style. Traces of Mannerism can be seen, however, in the work of the Spanish painter El Greco.

Mannerist sculpture is exemplified in the work of the Flemish-Italian Giambologna, and the virtuoso, sometimes bizarre creations of the Florentine sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini can be described as Mannerist. One of the first applications of Mannerism to the decorative arts and to architecture is seen in the work of Giulio Romano at the Palazzo del Te, Mantua (begun c. 1525). The handling of decoration and space in Michelangelo’s plans for the Laurentian Library (1524–59, Florence) is also Mannerist.