Word: mannerists
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...simplified line and form would touch something deep in Modigliani. It was through his sculptures in particular, nearly all of them totemic busts like Head of a Woman from 1912, that he would arrive at the sign system that he carried back into painting--ovoid heads on elongated Mannerist necks, with the nose a long, sharp fuselage and the mouth a pert slot just below...
...line in the whole School of Paris, a line that stretches back four centuries to the elongated figures of Pontormo and Parmigianino. Modigliani came to Paris not only as a Jew but also as an Italian, steeped in the art of the quattrocento and the High Renaissance and their Mannerist aftermath. You find the sources of his poised, limpid line in the elegant whiplashing of Botticelli and the Madonnas of Simone Martini. And that quizzical tilt to the head that you see in his 1919 portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne? It descends from the canted heads--a sign of humility...
...Accademia's Tribune (home of Michelangelo's David), and have their names appear on a plaque below the painting as the major donor for its restoration. Mel Gibson and his wife chose Alessandro Allori's Madonna Enthroned. Says Brandolini: "There was an explosion of color because these are all Mannerist paintings. It was the first time that people walked in there, and they weren't looking at the David...
Even the eccentricities of Mannerism, the 16th century style that we generally group him within, can't fully account for him. His figures may be elongated in the Mannerist style, but the swanning courtiers in Pontormo or Parmigianino, most of them as slender as greyhounds, are nothing like El Greco's rough-cut saints, famished men with skin the color of split timber and stiff robes draped around them like crumpled fenders. And while the Mannerist palette, all that coy bump and grind of pink and yellow, is calculated sometimes to startle, the explosive oddity of El Greco is something...
...Este court shows in Dosso's major works: they tend to be playful, elaborately poetic and almost impossible to connect to the usual literary sources, as though they were suggested by highly sophisticated people dreaming up ever more obscure secular concetti. In a word, the paintings are totally mannerist; even today scholars don't agree on what they're actually about. Their oddity is deepened by the fact that Dosso made them up as he went along, adding figures and painting them out as the whim took him, rather than sticking to a preset program of images...