The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (292 page)

 
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(1582–after 1622).
Italian painter, born in Mantua and active mainly in Rome, where he was one of the most important of
Caravaggio's
followers. He specialized in low-life scenes of taverns, soldiers in guardrooms, cardplaying, etc., and it was he rather than Caravaggio himself who was mainly responsible for popularizing this kind of work, particularly with painters from France and the Netherlands who came to Italy. In spite of his contemporary reputation, no works survive that are signed or documented as his, and several of the forty or so paintings now given to him were formerly attributed to Caravaggio, an example being the
Concert
in the Uffizi, Florence.

 
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manière criblée
(or dotted manner)
.

An early type of metal engraving in which dots were stamped with a punch over selected parts of the plate to create a textured effect in those areas, the dots showing as white against the inked background. The technique was not common after the end of the 15th cent., but there was something of a revival in the late 18th cent.

 
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Mannerism
.

Term used in the study of the visual arts (and by transference in the study of literature and music) with a confused medley of combined historical and critical connotations. Even more than with most stylistic labels, there is little agreement amongst scholars as to its delimitations, and John Shearman begins his book on the subject (
Mannerism
, 1967) with the frank admission: ‘This book will have at least one feature in common with all those already published on Mannerism; it will appear to describe something quite different from what all the rest describe.’ The word derives from the Italian
maniera
, meaning ‘style’ or ‘stylishness’, and it was popularized mainly by the writings of
Vasari
, who used it as a term of praise, signifying qualities of grace, poise, facility, and sophistication—characteristics that are indeed apparent in much of the art that he admired from his own time. From the 17th cent., however, most critics thought that Italian art of Vasari's period marked a decline from the peaks of grandeur and harmony reached during the High
Renaissance
by
Leonardo
,
Michelangelo
, and
Raphael
, and the term ‘Mannerism’ came to suggest an art characterized by artificiality, superficiality, and exaggeration, feebly plagiarizing and distorting the work of the masters. From being a stylistic label the term expanded its meaning to become a period label, so that ‘Mannerism’ came to designate the era in Italian art between the High Renaissance and the
Baroque
—that is, from about 1520 to about 1600. The term is still applied mainly to Italian art and architecture, but it is also used of art in other countries.
It was not until the 20th cent.—and particularly the period between the two world wars—that a more sympathetic attitude towards Mannerist art emerged, and the word began to be used neutrally, without the implication of decadence that it had long carried. At this time, after the revolutionary achievements of early 20th-cent. art, Mannerist art was looked at with new eyes, and the work of artists who had long been ignored or disparaged began to seem exciting and original to modern taste. The qualities associated with Mannerist art include tension, emotionalism, elongation of the human figure, strained poses, unusual or bizarre effects of scale, lighting, or perspective, and vivid—sometimes harsh or lurid—colours. Often the subject is approached in an unconventional way, with the artist drawing attention to his own learning or virtuosity. In the hands of the greatest Mannerist artists (for example
Pontormo
or
Parmigianino
) such preoccupations led to works that are not only highly sophisticated but also powerful, disturbing, and moving. The work of less accomplished Mannerists (for example Vasari as a painter) often degenerated, however, into insipid or frenzied gesturing and grimacing.
With Mannerism no longer receiving blanket condemnation, more subtle issues occupied the minds of historians, for example to what extent the term could be applied to art outside Italy (e.g. El
Greco
in Spain, Romanist painters in the Netherlands, the École de
Fontainebleau
in France, and
Hilliard
in England) or to architecture (where what might be taken in one context as playful or capricious disregard for the rules of classical architecture might in another be regarded as provincial clumsiness). While some critics wish to expand the use of the term, others wish to contract it, and still others seek to distinguish what they regard as the central elements of the style within the general period label by using the term
‘maniera’
. The following sentence from S. J. Freedberg's
Painting in Italy
: 1500–1600 (1971) in the Pelican History of Art series shows how potentially bewildering the terminology can be: ‘The first generation of Mannerism, its inventors, thus could achieve
maniera
, but this requires to be distinguished not only chronologically but in degree and in some respects of kind from the “high Maniera” or Maniera proper.’ Thus while the term ‘Mannerism’ can generally be taken to imply an elegant, refined, artificial, self-conscious, and courtly style, the shade of meaning to be attached to it varies very much according to the context and the outlook of the writer using it.

 
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(1890–1977).
American painter, draughtsman, sculptor, photographer, and film maker, born Emmanuel Radinsky . He was secretive about his early life and the origin of his pseudonym is unknown. In 1915 he began a lifelong friendship with Marcel
Duchamp
, collaborating with him and
Picabia
in founding the New York
Dada
movement. He also collaborated with Duchamp and Katherine
Dreier
in forming the
Société Anonyme
in 1920. In 1921 he settled in Paris, where he continued his Dada activities and then became a member of the
Surrealist
movement. For several years he earned his living mainly as a fashion and portrait photographer, but he painted regularly again from the mid-1930s. In 1940 he went back to America to escape the Nazi occupation of Paris and settled in Hollywood, then in 1951 returned to Paris, where he died. From the 1940s photography took a secondary place in Man Ray's activities, but it is as a photographer that his reputation is now most secure. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most imaginative artists in this field, particularly for his exploitation of the ‘Rayograph’ (also known as photogram), a photograph produced without a camera by placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing them to light, and for his development of the technique of ‘solarization’ (the complete or partial reversal of the tones of a photographic image). He gained an international reputation as one of the most prominent figures of Dada and Surrealism, and several of his ‘objects’ have became icons of the movements, but critics have often been dismissive about his paintings.