Patrick Bade
The Late Renaissance and Mannerism

Patrick Bade - The Late Renaissance and Mannerism

- [Judy] Well, welcome everybody. Hello. Very dark and cold London. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening. And Patrick, over to you.

• Thank you, Judy. Yes, welcome everybody. Tonight we get to the late Renaissance and the Mannerist style, with a capital M. Now, the Mannerist style is really one of the most contentious and disputed styles in Western art. No two artist historians seem to agree on what it really consists of and how to define it. And there are even historians who say there’s really no coherent style or movement that can be described as Mannerist. But if we’re going to try to define it, you couldn’t really find a better place to start than this painting by Agnolo Bronzino in the National Gallery in London, which is just normally referred to as “Bronzino’s Allegory.” We know roughly what it’s about, but not exactly. We see all the qualities that we want to associate with the Mannerist style. It’s courtly, it was produced at one court to give as a diplomatic gift to another court. It’s extremely sophisticated, it’s bizarre, it’s arcane. As I said, it’s very difficult to work out exactly what the meaning of the picture is. It’s ambiguous, both spatially, you couldn’t really draw a map of this picture in the way that you could with most Renaissance pictures, and it’s certainly ambiguous thematically as well. I’m always very interested to stand in the room where it’s exhibited in the National Gallery and watch people’s reactions. It’s one of those pictures that people really can’t walk past.

You see them stop in their tracks and they’re fascinated, if slightly horrified by this picture. You can see it’s really glassy smooth. It’s very much a linear painting. There are no paint inequalities. You can’t see any individual brush strokes. Go back up to the first, just to identify some of the figures. In the centre is Venus, and she’s clutching in her hand the golden apple that was, she managed to bribe Paris to give her, the judgement of Paris. In her other hand, she’s holding the arrow, which is associated with her son Cupid. At the top, we have Father Time. On the right, we have figures representing pleasure and folly. And on the left we have a figure representing pain. So we know that, more or less, it’s a painting about earthly love, carnal love, and the dangers and pains associated with carnal love. We come a bit closer and we can see, perversity is undoubtedly an element in a lot of Mannerist art. This is a rather perverse embrace for a mother and a son with their open lips and with the son clutching his mother’s breast around her nipple. And here we come closer still. You can see the open-lipped kiss of mother and son. And on the left, this figure of pain, tearing its hair out. And this is thought to represent syphilis. You might be able to see on the left hand side, right down in the bottom left hand corner, you can see a plant with a little white flower on it.

And this was apparently a herb that was used to treat syphilis, which had just arrived, of course, very right, brought back by Columbus from the Americas. And it spread like wildfire because there was no resistance to it. And it got to very high places, very quickly, kings and folks. And so this painting is believed to be a painting described by Vasari, which was commissioned from Bronzino, who was the court artist in Florence to the Medici family, who are now princes, dukes. And it was commissioned as a diplomatic gift to King Francis I of France. Might not seem a very diplomatic gift because Francis I was one of the high-up people who contracted syphilis and eventually died of it. But presumably the Duke of Tuscany didn’t know this when he commissioned the picture. So on the right of the picture, you have this figure, the face of an exquisite girl, almost a child. She represents pleasure, and she’s offering a honeycomb, sweetness. But you can see under her clothing, she’s a monster and she has a sting in her tail. Now, just to go back to last week to remind you of the High Renaissance and this image, which is so emblematic of everything that the High Renaissance stands for, harmony, balance, rationality, ideal beauty. And so with this, this was painted around 1510.

And shortly afterwards we get this. This is Pontormo, the story of Joseph. And it’s everything that the Raphael is not. That harmony, balance, calm has gone. It’s very agitated. This picture, you certainly could, if you wanted to, you could do a ground plan or a map of everything in the picture, all described in a very rational way. You’d have a job trying to make a map or a ground plan of this picture with all its weird staircases that seem to be going nowhere and agitated people rushing in every direction. So complete absence of the clarity and barren of balance in Raphael. So that’s one way of looking at Mannerism, as being actually one of those pendulum swings that you very often get in Western art. That it’s actually a reaction to the previous generation, the High Renaissance. And it’s also, I think, because at the time, in the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael were regarded as having reached a pinnacle of perfection. Vasari says this very often, that they could not be surpassed, you could not go further in that direction. And the only alternative for the artists of the next generation was to do something totally different and to break the rules that had been established by the High Renaissance. If you take a broader view of the Mannerist style, it’s an international style that spreads all the way across Europe.

We only get very kind of dim echoes of it in this country. When I say this country, the one I’m in at the moment, ‘til tomorrow morning, which is England, 'cause England was going through a sort of Brexit phase in the 16th century after the Reformation, was cut off from continental Europe. It was really a kind of cultural backwater. But in the more sophisticated countries of continental Europe, you find Mannerism everywhere. So we had, on the left we have an El Greco, and on the right we have a Bartholomeus Spranger, so a Greek Cypriot and a German. But they met up, they were part of the same circle in Rome in the 1570s, and they picked up elements of the Mannerist style. And it’s very controversial whether you decide, whether you want to define El Greco as a Mannerist or not. Some people wouldn’t because, in fact, I think he’s sort of bigger than that. He’s so extraordinary and he’s so outside of his time. Nevertheless, he picks up some elements of the Mannerist style and takes them to an extreme. In both of these pictures, as I said, these two artists would’ve known each other, but then they went off in opposite directions. El Greco goes westwards to Spain and Spranger goes northeast and he lands up in Prague, working for the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague. But you can see a lot of stylistic parallels between the two.

These chalky, shrill, Day-Glo colours that we’ve already seen in the Bronzino. These very, with a small m, mannered, elegant, rather athete figures with their contrapposto poses who seem to be sort of disco dancing in the foreground. And they really upstage the main subjects. You have to look twice in both these pictures. This is very typical of the Mannerist style. They don’t tell stories clearly in the way that the early and the High Renaissance did. They make things all very complicated. So in fact, the main subject of the El Greco on the left should be the martyrdom of Saint Stephen. And you can actually see it happen in the middle ground on the left hand side of the picture. And the main subject of the Spranger is the adoration of the kings. Well, the main subject should be, of course, the virgin and child who are being adored, but they are quite literally upstaged by these wonderfully camp dancing kings. So elongation, that’s another thing which is, elongation is a common feature to most Mannerist art. And it takes some very extreme forms. This is the Parmigianino, “Madonna with the Long Neck” on the left hand side and the sculpture by Ammannati. If you think how many times in that sculpture the head would go into the height of the body, that is really outrageously un-naturalistic. But I used to say to my students, studying history of art, that actually elongation can be a bit of a false friend. Yes, it’s a very common feature in Mannerism, but it’s something you’ll find, any art of any period, including, say, fashion illustration, which prizes elegance over truth, you will find the artist elongating the figures.

There are plenty of other examples at different periods in art where you do get elongation. This period of the Renaissance in 16th century, it’s fascinated by the fantastic, the grotesque, the bizarre. These artists are out to shock. They want to amaze you. And this is Giulio Romano, and this is a room at the Palazzo del Te in Mantua. And of course, you are supposed to sort of gasp with horror and amazement when you walk into this room with all this, the room apparently collapsing around you as you step into it. Bizarre, grotesque. this is Arcimboldo, who is another court artist at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague in the late 16th century. And he’s particularly famous for these wonderfully weird portraits where the, sometimes recognisable people that are entirely made up of vegetables, or fish, or shells, or other objects. And grottos, so grottos, every prince, every king, of course, had to have his amazing grotto. This one in Florence, I’m sure many of you have visited it. I was talking, somebody at the end of last week was asking questions about why the meaning of words changes, cartoon, for instance, and grotesque. And the origin of the word grotesque is that the Golden House of Nero in Rome was excavated in the late 15th century and they found these very bizarre, fantastic decorative mural paintings in the Golden House of Nero.

And it was a style that took off. It becomes particularly, that type of decoration, decorative painting, becomes very, very popular in the Mannerist period. And because it had first been seen in a building that was underground when it was, the ground level had risen so high that the Golden House of Nero was buried. And so people talked about the rooms as being grottos because they’re underground. So that’s the origin of the term grotesque. Here is a another wonderful grotto, one of the most spectacular. Actually I’ll be, I know already that I’m going to be seeing this with some of you in August of next year, 'cause this is in the Residenz, the town palace in Munich, and it dates from the end of the 16th century. And the famous gardens in Bomarzo, not far, in central Italy, not far from Rome, made for the Orsini prince. They became overgrown, they were more or less lost actually, until the mid 20th century when the undergrowth was cut away and it revealed these amazing, crazy sculptures. If you can really call 'em sculptures, they’re sort of assemblages really.

And again, they’re obviously intended to shock you in a pleasing way, to amaze you. Now, the greatest artist I’m going to talk about tonight is actually somebody who really is quite hard to fit into the Mannerist pigeonhole, and this is Antonio da Correggio, born in 1489, quite short lived, died in 1434. And he is, he has a brief period in Mantua, which is important because he picks up an influence from Mantegna, as we’ll see in a minute. And also in Florence, where he clearly came across the work of Leonard da Vinci, and he picks up certain features from Leonardo, like this beautiful soft sfumato. Sfumato, meaning smokiness, a slightly blurred quality of his painting. Now he really is a difficult artist to pigeonhole because he’s so, another person who’s completely outside of his time. He looks forward to the Baroque, and even to the 18th century, to the Rococo, in his liking for sweetie colours, these very sweet, exquisite colours. This is the “Venus, Mercury, Cupid” in the National Gallery. Yes, here is an early work by him on the right, a depiction of Jesus. And you can see very clearly the influence of Leonardo. Leonardo, Saint John, for instance, on the left, he’s adopted the typical Leonardo’s facial type, and this soft sfumato.

And here again, Leonardo on the left, and Correggio really taking up the Leonardo-esque facial type and the soft modelling on the right hand side. Amongst his most important works are a series of erotic paintings commissioned by Federico II, Duke of Mantua, who you see in the middle here, painted by Titian. The series of paintings show the loves of Jupiter, and I think, probably, the Duke of Mantua associated himself with, he was a notorious womaniser and it got him in the end. He’s another person who contracted syphilis and died of it. But he, as I said, he commissioned these paintings from Correggio, the different loves of Jupiter. And again, I mean, to just recap on this theme that’s cropped up a couple of times in connection with Donatello, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, saying how, because same sex relationships are so honoured and so freely depicted in Classical art without any kind of Judeo-Christian censorship. You can see that Jupiter, his bisexuality is actually being celebrated. I mean, most of the loves of Jupiter are, of course, for mortal women. And he has this very clever trick, could be very useful to any seducer, to transform himself into any form, swan, an eagle, or whatever in order to seduce his victims. But on the left hand side, this is the male love of Jupiter, that at one point he falls in love with a beautiful boy called Ganymede.

And so the subject on the left is the rape of Ganymede. Rape in the sense that Jupiter transforms himself into an eagle and he carries off this beautiful boy to enjoy his body and to, and he appoints him, of course, as his cup bearer. And here this is the head of Io, this is Jupiter and Io. He impregnates her in the form of a cloud. And so if this were not in the context of this lecture, and you’d never seen this picture before, I wonder what, how you would date it, where you would put it. As I said, it doesn’t, it could be an 18th century picture. It could even be a Klimt, and an early Klimt. The painting is in the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna, and Klimt certainly knew it very well, and it had a big impact on him. This is a painting by Klimt called, “De Liebe,” love, which is very clearly indebted to Correggio. But Correggio arrives in Parma in 1516, and he remains there 'til his death in 1534. So the bulk of his work is painted in Parma. And in particularly, he paints three domes, which all survive.

And Parma is one of my absolute favourite trips to do. I do it every October, go there for the, principally for the Verdi Festival. They always put on several different operas by Verdi, well-known ones and obscure ones. And it’s such a fantastic combination of Verdi, food, wine, and glorious, sensuous art. It’s a real, it’s a week of utter, almost debauchery, you could say. Starting with this little dome, which is called the “Camera di San Paolo.” And this is the first of the three domes, and it was commissioned by a rather naughty nun. There’s been quite a lot of research done recently on convents in the 15th and the early 16th century, where the nuns, particularly aristocratic, wealthy ones, they could shut themselves, they didn’t shut themselves off entirely from the world. They could receive visitors, they could even receive male visitors. And they led a wonderful life. I think being a nun, the beginning of the 16th century, a well-heeled nun, was a pretty good thing to do. You could eat well. They enjoyed all the arts. They commissioned music. They performed music. And so this little room, which is very, very profane, I mean, there’s, it’s all Classical imagery. There’s nothing remotely Christian about the imagery in this room. And it was commissioned by the abbess of a nunnery in Parma. She was called Giovanna Piacenza. Now towards the end of her life, there was, unfortunately, a big crackdown on the, what was seen as the rather licentious lives of these wealthy nuns. That is in part, goes in hand in hand, of course, with the Counter-Reformation, and an attempt to sort of clean up the Catholic church.

What you see on the left hand side is actually a 19th century picture showing Giovanna Piacenza with Correggio in this room that she’s commissioned. You’ve got this steep di sotto in su perspective, and these playful little cherubs. So this is clearly indebted to Mantegna’s “Camera degli Sposi,” which he would’ve been familiar with when he was in Mantua before he came to Parma. And it’s just so delightful. It’s just, I could very, I could live the life of a nun in this room, being fed wonderful pasta, and glorious, of course it’s one of the great eating places of the world, Reggio Emilia, Parma, and Bologna. And here are these naughty, delightful little babies. You think, well, what have these got to do with nuns and convents? So that’s quite small, that room. And he upgrades to a rather larger, more impressive dome in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista. And this is John the Evangelist, ascending to heaven. And so he really is incredibly original with these domes, with their illusionism, and their steep perspectives. He’s the first artist to do this thing, which of course the Baroque artists so love, to make you feel that actually the roof of the church has exploded and you can see right up to heaven. And this finds a full, amazing fruition in this, my god, this is the Dome of Parma Cathedral. And it is simply one of the most staggering, amazing works of art in the Western tradition. Where does this come from? It’s so new, it’s so inventive. Of course, you’ve seen other things like it, but they’re all much later.

They’re all from the Baroque period in the 17th century. It was quite controversial when he painted it. The Catholic church was disapproving, for various reasons. One was that there was a big reaction, with the Counter-Reformation, against the over sophistication of Mannerist art and the fact that the stories were not told simply. Now, if I did, if you didn’t know and I didn’t tell you, I don’t think you’d have a clue what is going on here. It’s actually the ascension of the virgin, and even in this closeup, where is she? She’s just lost in this kind of crazy, angelic football crowd. In fact, she’s, on this excerpt, she’s on the left hand side towards the bottom, in amongst all these figures. And the other thing is the eroticism, sensuality. 'Cause you know, angels are not supposed to have a sex. They’re meant to be transgender to use a modern anachronistic term. They’re not meant to be male or female. But here, we can’t, it’s in our face. We are looking, if you go, I advise you, if you go to Parma, you want to take pair of opera glasses or binoculars so you could look up into this dome. And you look through the binoculars, and you find yourself staring straight up angels’ anuses. And there is no doubt what sex they are. Here we are. And legs, these tangles of legs. This was something that was actually quite criticised. Somebody at the time said it looked like a mass of frog’s legs. And it always makes me think of the Pugin, the English architect, who was actually a Catholic, and he went to Rome, and he went into the Church of Il Gesu, by Baciccia, which is late 17th century, but very influenced by this.

And he said, “I went into the church for a quiet prayer, and I knelt down, and I looked up, hoping to find divine inspiration. And what did I see? Legs.” So now we move on to another artist who was actually born in Parma, and very influenced initially by Correggio. And this is Parmigianino, he’s born in 1503, also very short-lived, died at the age of 37, same age as Mozart, Gershwin, Bizet. 37 is, I think, a dodgy age for a lot of artists of genius. You can see that from this, this is a self-portrait in a convex mirror, he was 21 years old when he painted this. And you can see that he’s picked up that sort of wonderful milky sfumato from Correggio. And this was a painting that he made, really, to demonstrate his skill. He arrived in Rome in 1524, and brought this with him and showed it around. And everybody was amazed by it. It is amazing. And as I said, that is a high priority of artists of the Mannerist period. And he, when we get to Parmigianino, yeah, he’s pretty Mannerist. He’s right at the core of the movement. This is a painting of “The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine.” And again, you can still see, I think, in this softness, the slightly milky quality, the influence of Correggio, but this is, it’s more stylized, the elongated necks, and figures, and the complexity of the composition is more Mannerist.

Now, he was in Rome ‘til 1527. And he was there when Rome was hit by an absolutely catastrophic event that sent shock waves around the Western world and had enormous cultural implications, and that was the 1527 sack of Rome. Ever since the Duke of Milan, Sforza duke, had unwisely invited in French army to defeat his enemies. At the end of the 1490s, Italy had been a war zone between the French and the Hapsburgs. The Hapsburgs had enormous numbers. Of course it was a multinational empire, had much of central Europe, Germany, Spain, the Americas. So they had a multinational army, which was actually consisted mostly of Germans, many of them not Catholic actually, they were actually Protestant. And so this was the army of the emperor Charles V, he was of course a Catholic. He was Holy Roman Emperor. But he failed to pay the troops, and they rioted, and mutinied, and went crazy. And they sacked Rome in the most horrific way, rape, pillage, massacre, burning, looting, the whole bit. It was a tremendous shock.

I mean, the population of Rome in 1527 was reduced from 50,000 to 10,000 people. People were murdered in great numbers or they fled. And as I said, Parmigianino was working. It was this painting on the right hand side, which is a virgin and child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome. It’s an enormous picture. It’s also in the National Gallery in London. I think it must be, by a long way, the tallest picture. The whole format, very elongated, and the very elongated baby for Jesus and the virgin herself. And it’s a pretty awesome picture. Vasari tells a story that Parmigianino was totally absorbed in it, and he was really concentrating on his work. And these German ruffians, rioting ruffians, burst into his studio, bent on murder and looting and so on, and that they just were stopped in their tracks by the rather awesome, rather disturbing power of this picture. Here’s a detail of Saint John the Baptist. I was asked with, in connection with Leonardo, what is this about, this gesture pointing upwards? Well, it’s pointing to mystery, to heaven. So Parmigianino flees from Rome in 1527 and actually goes back to Parma and he spends the rest of his life in Parma. He was a strange and eccentric character who was doubling in alchemy. And he was also experimenting with highly original ways of making prints. I mean, at this point, there’s only engraving and wood blocks, wood engraving. He tries to introduce colour and an element of tone into his prints with all sorts of experimental methods.

And he dies, as I said, at the age of 37, in 1540. When anybody died young in the Renaissance, everybody assumed that there was some kind of skullduggery, poison thing involved, and the rumour was that he’d actually poisoned himself through his experiments with alchemy. Now, another key figure of Mannerism is Pontormo. Jacopo Pontormo, his dates are 1494 to 1457. So he’s much more long lived. And this is probably his most remarkable painting, which is a deposition. Remember yesterday we saw a deposition painted by Raphael, and as I said, deposition, it is that taking of Christ down from the cross, carrying his body. So you have a lot of opportunity for drama and movement. But with the, and you certainly get that with the Raphael, but this one is really a tricky one from, I mean, try and work out, I mean, try and actually reconstruct this. This is so obviously absolutely impossible. Where are these people standing? What are they standing on? It is extremely complex and spatially extremely ambiguous. And you’ve got these quite amazing kind of Day-Glo, shocking colours, shocking pinks, shocking blues, really completely unnatural. And another work by Pontormo in a similar style, this is the visitation of the Virgin to her cousin Elizabeth when they’re both pregnant. The virgin is pregnant with Jesus, and Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist.

Here you’ve got, again, they seem to be, it’s like a ballet, isn’t it? These pictures are very choreographed. This this one too, of course, very, very balletic. Pontorma is the most wonderful draughtsman. This is a self-portrait, a bold thing to do, this very striking form, shortening of the arm pointing towards you. His drawings are, he’s really the tops, I think, with drawing. I mean, if I had the chance of, well, probably Leonardo would be the top for me for drawing, but I think I would put Pontormo next, actually. It’s a very personal, very subjective thing, but they’re really extraordinary, his drawings, sometimes very free, very expressive. You can see the one on the right hand side has been squared up for enlargement and transfer to a fresco. And how about this? I mean, it’s wild, isn’t it? This could be a 20th century drawing. It’s so free and expressive. It’s almost an Expressionist drawing. This is the most famous masterpiece of a Florentine artist, called Rosso Fiorentino, Rosso is red, and apparently he had red hair, so that was his nickname. So he was the redhead from Florence. And this was, again, it’s a deposition, Christ being taken down from the cross.

And this shows the Mannerist style, really, at its most extreme, its most agitated, its most bizarre, its most neurotic. And this was commissioned, it’s a big work, it was commissioned for the cathedral in Volterra. And there’s details from it. This is a minor artist who I really love. He’s called Dominico Beccafumi. I think you have to say he spent most of his life in Sienna, by which by this time, course it had been a major centre in the Middle Ages, but by the 16th century it’s a backwater. So you could dismiss him as provincial. He’s not really a mainstream artist. But he’s got this extraordinary almost hallucinogenic colours and a wonderful sort of soft, misty effects. This is also Beccafumi. This is the “Saint Catherine Receiving the Stigmata,” various saints, like Saint Francis, obsessed so much. I mean, this is such a strange thing, I know, to non-Christians, this absolute fixation on the bleeding wounds of Christ, obsessing, obsessing about them. Something, of course, Saint Ignatius Loyola, these spiritual exercises, you sit in the dark room, and you obsess about the ghastly wounds of Jesus. And if you do it long enough, you’ll, don’t try it, please, but you’ll, theoretically, you’ll get stigmata, you’ll get wounds in your hands and your feet. But look at this, isn’t this beautiful? A wonderful, misty, poetic landscape background. Now I’m going to look at portraiture. This is a great period for portraiture. And the court portraitist in Florence to the Medici was Bronzino.

And apart from the allegory that I started with, I suppose that’s what he’s most famous for. So portraitists, from the 15th century 'til now, I think, can be divided between the portraitists who tell the truth and those who want to flatter, those who idealise and those who give you every wrinkle. Well, you won’t find any wrinkles in Bronzino. He’s of the extreme end of the flatterers. This is Eleanora of Toledo, who is the Duchess of Tuscany, with her son. And these are smoothly, immaculately painted. And of course part of the fascination and the beauty of them is his marvellous, marvellous rendition of these very, very elaborate court costumes of the Renaissance painting period and the wonderful dukes. This is a Medici princess, this is Bia de Medici. Good, high quality reproduction, again, this sort of porcelain smoothness, immaculate smoothness of the skin, which, of course, you might really get with a child. And this wonderful rendering of the pearls, and the chain, and the lace, all precisely, immaculately depicted. He paint, this could, some people think this might be a self-portrait. I don’t what the evidence for that is. And again, it’s so idealised and he doesn’t really, usually self-portraits, 'cause the artists are looking at themselves in the mirror, you have a very strong sense of engagement with the viewer, which I don’t with this. But it’s a very, there’s a whole series of portraits of very elegant, beautiful young men by Bronzino.

How about this wonderful hand, again, sort of anticipating Ingres in the 19th century, it’s almost kind of boneless of a hand. And two more of these very beautiful young men, aristocratic young men, and there is a, quite a strong homoerotic element, I would say, in his portraits. And Benvenuto Cellini, who I’m going to finish with, was very bitchy about Bronzino’s homosexuality. Here is a detail of this painting. This young man is called, I’ve got his name here somewhere. Yes, this is Ugolino Martelli. And this is a painting that’s in the National Gallery in Berlin. Now we move back to Parmigianino, fantastic portraits, oh my god. Actually, I would, of course it’s all very arbitrary, giving people marks out of 10. But Parmigianino is the one for me, for portraiture. And I think this is really fantastic picture of a prince called Galeazzo Sanvitale, that’s painted in 1424. So he’s also very wonderful at rendering details of costume, and jewels, and so on, but not quite as glossily smooth. It’s more painterly than Bronzino. And lots of slightly sinister portraits of men. These are both Parmigianino portraits of men, unknown sitters, but extraordinary, vivid, rather dark, disturbing images. And this young priest, mournful, rather beautiful, handsome, mournful, young priest, this is Parmigianino. And how about her?

She’s really adorable. This painting is traditionally known as “The Turkish Slave.” I don’t know if there’s any definite evidence that it does represent a Turkish slave. This is another painting, incidentally, this is Parmigianino, and it’s in the National Gallery in Parma. So it’s another painting you can see in Parma. And she’s really giving us a delightful, flirtatious, come-hither, naughty look. Look at those eyes. I said that the sack of Rome was this incredible cultural shock, and it caused a dispersal of these artists who created the Mannerist style. They all flee from Rome and they go to other parts of Italy, and they go to other European countries. And Rosso Fiorentino, who I showed you his deposition, he’s hired by Francis I of France, along with another artist called Primaticcio. And they, Francis I is making his great palace at Fontainebleau outside of Paris, wonderful place. I mean, I so much prefer it. This is again, a very personal judgement , but I mean, Fontainebleau, for me, is sheer magic. I find it so much more beautiful, so much more interesting than Versailles. And this is the Grand Gallery in Fontainebleau that was decorated, created by Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio. And out of this, there’s the so-called Ecole de Fontainebleau, and there’s a French late-Renaissance Mannerist style. And one of the most interesting figures is the sculptor Jean Goujon.

And his most famous work is the Fontaine des Innocents, which is just near, well it’s just near my favourite restaurant in Paris. And it’s just near the Pompidou Centre. What you see here on the left hand side is that it’s all actually a modern reproduction, the sculptures made by Jean Goujon for this monument and the originals are now in the Louvre. And these river goddesses, or sources of rivers, on the right hand side, very Mannerist with the elongated bodies, these disco-dancing, balletic poses, twisted, figura serpentina. Here, these are actually, this photograph, these photographs are taken from plaster casts that were made in the 19th century when the sculptures were still in situ, and these are actually in the V&A in London. They’re probably, they show the sculptures in a better state of preservation than they are today, the originals in the Louvre. And I’m going to finish just with a mention really of one of the most fascinating characters of the period, which is Benvenuto Cellini. He was the greatest goldsmith of the Renaissance. Of course, one of the problems with the work of goldsmiths is it tends to get melted down for various reasons. It gets looted, it gets melted down in wars, and so on. So we don’t have a lot of work by Benvenuto Cellini.

But he’s famous, really, for just three things: this sculpture of Perseus, which is in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, the gold salt cellar that he made for Francis I that I’ll show you in a minute, and for his autobiography. In fact, it was only published a long time later, in the 19th century, in the Romantic period, when you can see the, he was a rebel, outrageous, a very dubious character. But the autobiography, I recommend it to you, another great holiday read. And it’s a wonderful source. It really brings the life of the Renaissance, well, it brings it all to, very vividly before your eyes. And I said he was up to all sorts of no good. At one point he was accused of forgery and was thrown into the Castel Sant'Angelo. And he’s one of the very few, Castel Sant'Angelo, one of the most, it’s like Alcatraz, it was impossible to escape from it, but he did. And there’s a wonderful, exciting account of his escape from Castel Sant'Angelo in his autobiography.

There’s also a very, this sculpture, enormous bronze sculpture, was a tremendous technical feat. And there is a long, detailed description in the autobiography of how he did it. Of course, right up to the last minute, they weren’t quite sure whether it was going to work or not. And the other very, very famous work, of course, that he made was this golden salt cellar that he made for Francis I of France, which is now one of the great treasures of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the detail from it, in Vienna.

And so I’m going to stop here and see what we have in the way of questions.

Q&A and Comments:

This Maxine Sack saying, “There’s remains of a mini grotto in Skipton Castle, dating from the 17th century, made of shells and coral and stone, featuring figures representing air, sea, sun, earth.”

Yes, as I said, they became very fashionable. They spread over Europe, and of course they continue into the 18th century.

Oh, 1627, yes. Well, cause England, as I said, was very, very behind. They were just beginning to catch up with Renaissance.

Q: Anne Seton said, “When you were you talking about Nero’s Domus Aurea, you showed a grotto with a variety of animals.” That was in Florence. Where is the week of debauchery, please?

A: I’m not quite sure what you are asking me there.

Giulio Romano is mentioned, yes, I find that very interesting,

Jane Green, saying this. But this convinces me that Shakespeare actually never went to Italy.

There is this big, we don’t know for sure, and some people said, 'Well, there’s so much about Italy.“ But you know, if he’d been to Italy, he would’ve known that Giulio Romano did not make polychrome funeral monuments as he’s described as doing in "The Winter’s Tale.” That’s my view, anyway. Van Gogh died at 37 year, dodgy age, I’m glad I’m well past it. I’m too old to die young.

Q: Just wondering if there were any Jewish paintings during the Renaissance period?

A: No, I mean there couldn’t be, could there, 'cause it was forbidden. There are no significant Jewish painters, really, 'til the, you’ve got to have assimilation before you can really get Jewish painters of any significance. So the first ones are not really of any real quality, and not 'til Max Liebermann, Pissaro, in the 19th century.

Development of colour, there’s some very good books about colour and pigments and so on. Could follow that up. Don’t, not sure, yeah, can’t. I’m not sure I understand that about pora obliora by Bram. No, I don’t get that.

Q: When was the term Mannerist first applied to this period?

A: That’s a complicated one to answer because Vasari talked about maniera, he didn’t talk about Mannerism, but he talked about maniera, meaning style or stylish painting. So I think that, in the art historical sense, Mannerism wasn’t really coined for this movement, if you think it’s a movement, until the early 20th century.

Clothing, jewellery, the whole picture looks like the picture of Donna Gracia that we saw last week. Well, same period, so that’s quite likely. Oh, you’re talking about Eleanora Toledo. Sorry, I have to, sorry, where that question was.

Q: Why is it called the Mannerist period?

A: Well, as I said, Vasari uses the term maniera. It’s a style which is very mannered. So I think, in a way, it’s quite a good name for the period and the style, which is very precious, very artificial.

The name of my favourite restaurant, which I think I, I’m sure I, I’ve given the list a few times. It’s called La Fresque, as in French for fresco. I’m really thrilled actually that tomorrow, I’m actually going to be meeting up with probably about a dozen listeners from lockdown who are coming to Paris. And actually, on our itinerary, my favourite restaurant is not included, but they might have an opportunity to sneak off and go there.

Thank you for your kind comments. Let me see. Berlioz characterised in wonder in his opera, of course he does, yes, Benvenuto Cellini terrific. You can see why Berlioz was attracted to him, because, as I said, Cellini is a kind, again, he’s outside his time. He’s a kind of proto-Romantic, with a capital R, real daredevil, rebellious character.

A useless bit of information, they treated syphilis with mercury, that’s true. Well there were all sorts of horrendous treatments of syphilis, I mean, it’s possible that Keats died of mercury poisoning. It’s often the treatment was worse than the actual illness. And as I know that Trudy has talked about Ehrlich and the magic bullet, who was, of course, a Jewish doctor and scientist who eventually found a cure for the syphilis in the early 20th century, to the outrage of the Catholic church.

Q: Did Artemisia paint after Mannerists?

A: Yes, she did, she belongs to the Baroque period. She’s in the early, first half of the 17th century.

No mention of El Greco. Yes, I did mention him at the beginning, perhaps you missed that. And I, of course, I’ve done a lecture on El Greco already, earlier this year on lockdown. He’s too big to be included in a general lecture. He needs his own lecture. He should be really seen in another context.

There appears to be a third body on the, that’s the Bronzino Allegory. I think the son is a contortionist. I think they’re all contortionists, and that’s typical of Mannerism.

Yes, so as I said, it’s going to be very exciting tomorrow. I’m really thrilled to do my first foreign trip. My favourite restaurants in Italy. Well, the only restaurants, I can’t really tell you now, but I know some wonderful restaurants in Parma, which is a place I go to regularly, and I know a few in Milan. I haven’t travelled that much in Italy, apart from Parma and Milan, the cities I go to regularly for opera tours. So that seems to be it for today. And I’m thrilled to tell you that my next lecture to you will be given from Paris. So I will be back with you in a week. Bye-bye.

• [Judy] Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, thank you everybody. Goodnight.