Icarus

Mannerism-inspired piece

This piece was inspired by the Mannerist movement in art history. This is the most traditional of the pieces in this series that I’ve created… and it owes much of its aesthetic choices to the works of El Greco. The long, contorted limbs of the figures and the vibrant colors in the works of El Greco are so incredibly novel for the time that he inhabited. Icarus’s form follows the delicate serpentine form, or the figurative serpentinata, that was so popular in mannerist pieces. The figure is painted by hand, while the background is formed from collage, put through filters in photoshop.

 

 

The Oxford University Press on smarthistory.org offers this beginner’s guide to Mannerism, as it is a complicated genre:

Mannerism is a confusing term, subject to radically different interpretations but generally used to describe the art in Italy which directly succeeded that of the Renaissance and preceded the Baroque. Its first widespread use, in the seventeenth century, was pejorative, implying an over-elaborate distortion, an imbalance, and a neurosis first discerned in the later work of Michelangelo and in the followers of Raphael.

Citations:

 

El Greco. Holy Trinity. 1577-1579. Artstor, library.artstor.org/asset/SCALA_ARCHIVES_1039779206

Pontormo, Jacopo da, Italian, 1494-1556/7. Descent from the Cross (Deposition; Entombment). 1525-1528. Artstor, library.artstor.org/asset/AHSC_ORPHANS_1071313527

El Greco. Saint Peter in Tears. c. 1590. Artstor, library.artstor.org/asset/SCALA_ARCHIVES_1039778922

Oxford University Press, “A beginner’s guide to Mannerism,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed March 25, 2019, https://smarthistory.org/a-beginners-guide-to-mannerism/.