Northern Mannerism - in The Decorative Arts

In The Decorative Arts

The visual wit and sophistication of Mannerism in northern hands, which made it pre-eminently a court style, found natural vehicles in goldsmith's work, set off by gems and colored enamels, in which the misshaped pearls we call "baroque" might form human and animal torsos, both as jewelry for personal adornment and in objects made for the Wunderkammer. Ewers and vases took fantastic shapes, as did standing cups with onyx or agate bowls, and elaborate saltcellars like the Saliera of Benvenuto Cellini, the apex of Mannerist goldsmithing, completed in 1543 for Francis I and later given to Rudolf's uncle, another great collector. Wenzel Jamnitzer and his son Hans, goldsmiths to a succession of Holy Roman Emperors, including Rudolf, were unexcelled in the north. Silversmiths made covered cups and richly wrought ewers and platters, strictly for display, perhaps incorporating the large sea-shells now being brought back from the tropics, which were "cherished as Art produced by Nature". In the Netherlands a uniquely anamorphic "auricular style", employing writhing and anti-architectural cartilaginous motifs was developed by the van Vianen family of silversmiths.

Though Mannerist sculptors produced life-size bronzes, the bulk of their output by unit was of editions of small bronzes, often reduced versions of the large compositions, which were intended to be appreciated by holding and turning in the hands, when the best "give an aesthetic stimulus of that involuntary kind that sometimes comes from listening to music". Small low relief panels in bronze, often gilded, were used in various settings, as on Rudolph's crown.

Female sphinxes with extravagantly elongated necks and prominent breasts support a Burgundian cabinet of walnut in the Frick Collection, New York; soon Antwerp made a specialty of richly carved and veneered cabinets inlaid with tortoiseshell, ebony, and ivory, with architectural interiors, mirrored to multiply reflections in feigned spaces. In England the Mannerist excesses of Jacobean furniture were expressed in extreme legs turned to imitate stacked covered standing cups, and a proliferation of enlaced strapwork covered plane surfaces. Following the success of Brussels tapestries woven after the Raphael cartoons, Mannerist painters like Bernard van Orley and Perino del Vaga were called upon to design cartoons in Mannerist style for the tapestry workshops of Brussels and Fontainebleau. Painterly compositions in Mannerist taste appeared in Limoges enamels too. Moresques, swags and festoons of fruit inspired by rediscovered Ancient Roman grotesque ornament, first displayed in the Raphael school Vatican Stanze, were disseminated through engravings in an ornamental vocabulary expressed in the North less in such frescoes and more in tapestry and illuminated manuscript borders.

In France, Saint-Porchaire ware of Mannerist forms and decor was produced in limited quantities for a restricted fashion-conscious clientele from the 1520s to the 1540s, while the crowded, disconcertingly lifelike compositions of snakes and toads characterize the Mannerist painted earthenware platters of Bernard Palissy. Like the Jamnitzers on occasion, Palissy made moulds from real small creatures and plants to apply to his creations.