ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how Mannerism’s and maniera’s many origins and meanings were developed prior to maniera’s emergence in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, where he extolled maniera’s bellezza and maniera’s grazia, as forming part of God’s gifts to humanity, so that art could bring Nature to life as part of God’s plan for humanity’s salvation. Any consideration of maniera and spirituality should begin, in 1941, with Marco Treves’s study of maniera’s linguistic history, which stands as the benchmark linguistic analysis of the meaning of maniera. As the seventeenth century unfolded, maniera was excoriated by a new generation of critics, who attacked it on a variety of fronts. Spirituality returned to maniera, in 1914 and in 1928, with Walter Friedlaender’s essays, ‘Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting’ and ‘The Anticlassical Style.’ Guided by Alois Riegl’s theories about the development of intellectual history, Friedlaender established, in these essays, the foundation for modern, scholarly study of maniera and Mannerism.
