Architectural Forms in the Mannerist Period

During the Mannerist period, architects experimented with using architectural forms to emphasize solid and spatial relationships. The Renaissance ideal of harmony, gave way to freer and more imaginative rhythms.

During the High Renaissance, architectural concepts derived from classical ancient times were developed, and used with bigger surety. The most representative architect is Bramante (1444–1514), who expanded the applicability of classical architecture to contemporary buildings in a style that was to control Italian architecture in the sixteenth century. During the Mannerist period, however, architects experimented with using architectural forms to stress on solid and spatial relationships.

Specifically, in Mannerist architecture, the Renaissance ideal of harmony, gave way to freer and more imaginative rhythms. The best known architect associated with the Mannerist style was Michelangelo (1475–1564), who is credited with inventing the giant order, a large pilaster that stretches from the base, to the top of a façade. He used this in his design for the Campidoglio in Rome. Stylistically, Mannerist architecture was marked by generally diverging tendencies from Renaissance and Medieval styles that eventually led to the Baroque style, in which the same architectural vocabulary was used for very different rhetoric.

Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536) was an architect working in Rome, whose work bridges the High Renaissance and Mannerism. His Villa Farnesina of 1509, is a very regular monumental cube of two equal stories, with the bays articulated by orders of pilasters. Peruzzi’s most famous work is the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne in Rome. The strange features of this building are that its façade curves gently around a curving stre...

... middle of paper ...

...y used to describe the art in Italy which directly succeeded that of the Renaissance and preceded the Baroque. Its first widespread use, in the 17th century, was pejorative, implying an over-elaborate distortion, an imbalance, and a neurosis first discerned in the later work of Michelangelo and in the followers of Raphael.

References:

• Histories of the immediate present: inventing architectural modernism

• The late renaissance and mannerism

• The high renaissance and mannerism: Italy, the north an spain 1500-1600

• The politics of the piazza: the history and meaning of the Italian square

• http://www.jstore.org/Michelangelo-on-architecture.html?searched=mannerism201545336

• http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/mannerism-in-italy-and-spain.html?searched=mannerism+architecture&highlight=ajaxSearch_highlight+ajaxSearch_highlight1+ajaxSearch_highlight2