[MUSIC PLAYING] BETH HARRIS: So here, we're
looking at the great Mannerist painting by Parmigianino
called "The Madonna with the Long Neck." It's a fun painting. STEVEN ZUCKER: And
it's a tall painting. It's a big painting. BETH HARRIS: It's big. And Madonna is big. She's big in funny places too. If you look at her head,
her head is really tiny. STEVEN ZUCKER: Compared
to her hips, especially. BETH HARRIS: She's got
really, really wide hips, and then she comes down
on these tiny little toes. It's always seemed
to me like her body is in the shape of a diamond. STEVEN ZUCKER: In a
sense, she's a landscape on which Christ sits. BETH HARRIS: Christ,
himself, is also quite large. STEVEN ZUCKER: It's
not just large, but look at the way
he splays his body. There's this crazy
kind of torsion with his arm falling, almost
dislocated from his shoulder. BETH HARRIS: There is a
precedent for that way that his left arm
falls down, if you think about
Michelangelo's "Pieta." And Christ here, as a
child, but perhaps echoing when Mary will hold
Christ in images like the "Pieta"
when Christ is dead. And in fact, Christ
looks asleep, but there's also a way
that he looks dead, too. STEVEN ZUCKER: So that reference
actually, in some ways, explains the mass of her lap. Because in that sculpture,
Mary is quite substantial in order to be able to support
the dead body of her son. BETH HARRIS: It's
so clear when we're looking at this that we're
not in the High Renaissance anymore. STEVEN ZUCKER: So what happened? BETH HARRIS: Mannerism happened. It's almost like the artists
of the High Renaissance had done everything
that could be done. They had perfected
the naturalism that they had sought after
since the time of Giotto. STEVEN ZUCKER: So all
of the illusionism that was at the service
of the High Renaissance is here being used to distort
and to transform the body. It's not so much
an ugly deformation as a kind of deformation
that accentuates a kind of extreme elegance. BETH HARRIS: Exactly. It takes that ideal
beauty and elegance that was in the High
Renaissance, that was there, and exaggerates it. And one way of thinking
about Mannerism is to think about it as
art taken from art, instead art from nature. We think about the Renaissance
as being based on observation of nature and the natural world. But when you look at
this, you think back to works of art like
Michelangelo's "Giuliano de Medici" and that long
neck, or back to the "Pieta." STEVEN ZUCKER: That makes a lot
of sense, the idea that this is art that is
self-referential, that is referring to
its own traditions. BETH HARRIS: The respect
for human anatomy, and for portraying that
naturalistically, that's not important to Mannerists. In fact, I think there's a
letter from one Mannerist artist to another
Mannerist artist, where he said something
like, take a left hand and put it on a right arm. It's like there's a willful
complicating of the body. STEVEN ZUCKER: And
setting up relationships between forms that are absurd. Look at the relationship
between the vase that's being held by the angel in
relationship to his/her thigh. Look at the relationship
between the massive Virgin Mary and the prophet in
the lower right corner that is presumably impossibly
far away, but somehow just a tiny figure at
the feet of the Virgin. BETH HARRIS: And look too at
the way that the Virgin holds her hand to her chest with
these impossibly long, almost boneless fingers. There's a way in which the
gesture fails to mean anything. STEVEN ZUCKER: It means
gesture, as opposed-- BETH HARRIS: And drama. STEVEN ZUCKER: --as opposed to
a specific intent of the figure. BETH HARRIS: There's a
kind of dramatizing here. BOTH: For its own sake. STEVEN ZUCKER: Or that
kind of willful compression that creates a sense of
almost the impossible. If you look at the
columns on the right, there's actually a colonnade
that is so deep in space and seen at such
an oblique angle that it almost seems like
a wall or a single column. But if you look
closely at the base, you can see the alternating
light and shadow that passes between
those columns. But there is ambiguity,
and that's in large part because that part of the
painting is not finished. So Mannerism, it seems to
be this intense reaction to the perfection of
the High Renaissance. You have the Renaissance,
in the sense, building itself into a
kind of extreme naturalism, and then it seems to be
almost a kind of flailing reaction against
those strictures. BETH HARRIS: Or a
sense that there was nowhere to go, except to
do something really different. STEVEN ZUCKER: Now
all of these ideas were very much a part
of a culture of court. And I think it's important
to recognize that there was a very specific,
very learned audience for these kinds of paintings. And so these were
not things that were made for the artist's
own wild interest. This was considered a kind of
high intellectual almost game.