The Mannerist Earthquake

being another stop on a journey to Venice

We were warned about Mantua. Professor D., ever the optimist, gleefully insisted we would probably catch some unspecified and medieval pestilence from the lakes that surround this chill ducal town. The sky was pale and flat, hovering with strange unbalance over the thick dark greenery that ringed the grounds of the Palazzo del Té, a palace whose name—derived either from words for tea or, more extraordinary, hovel—seems as flippant and incomprehensible as its architecture.

In the history books, it’s listed as Mannerist in style, a term which creates about as many problems as it puts to rest. Tuscan mannerism had hovered on the edge of our brief pass through Cortona, grinning at us through grotesque masks and winking at us from the curving, broken pediments of the cattedrale’s altarpieces. But it had refused to show itself. Even when one faces it head on, as at the Porta Pia in Rome, it defies definition.

It’s an ephemeral movement, and its members seem to vary from textbook to textbook; Giulio Romano, Parmigianino, sometimes even Michelangelo. It had no Quattro Libri, no sacred text, no canonical structure. Even the definitions are vague and unsatisfying. Vasari, in his gossipy, inaccurate but nonetheless classic Lives of the Artists described it as maniera, a sort of selective and eclectic borrowing of the best, not touching on its mesmerizing fascination with the bizarre, which in turn obsesses the historians of today to the exclusion of the search for perfection, and the search for smiles.

Mannerism is meant to make us smile.

At least the Palazzo del Té does, this magnificent frescoed hovel. Built by Giulio Romano, it was a pleasure pavilion for the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua, long since extinct. The Gonzagas are largely forgotten today, remembered uncharacteristically for producing a Jesuit saint and more typically for the mythical duke of Rigoletto. However, the palace is too witty and sophisticated for the debauched singer of La donna è mobile. Professor D. described it as being something more akin to improvisational jazz.

At first glance, it seems conventional enough, a hollow-square villa with an expansive cortile and airy loggia overlooking fishponds and a vast scenographic Doric hemicycle. But as you look closer, as you explore, eccentricities rise to the surface of the dark waters of the garden pools and you see the strange orange-scaled fish that slither in the depths, and you laugh in wonder.

Around the cortile, the architectural elements seem to come alive and play, loosed from their stony moorings. The cornice is fractured: triglyphs slip from their sockets as if shaken by an earthquake. Meanwhile, the arches seem heavier than necessary, bolstered against the shock with redundant keystones and astructural pediments. It’s a joke, an inside joke between Giulio and his Duke, because only the Duke in the warmth of his palazzo knows what tremor has symbolically convulsed the rock-solid bulk of his cortile.

The frescoed apartments are the key to this mannerist earthquake, and one room in particular. We moved towards it, passing beneath stormy painted night skies and cherubs perched atop moonlit clouds. And then, the Room of the Giants.

The whole room is frescoed, ceiling flowing into walls in a tumble of billowing purple and white smoke as the grotesque, pink-muscled Titans are cast down from Mount Olympus by the blazing jagged thunderbolt of Jupiter. His eagle stands enthroned above beneath a billowing rainbow-hued canopy. There are grimaces and frowns as they tumble stonily into the netherworld, one forlorn Titan even seeming to raise his hands in a despairing attitude of prayer towards the very deities he had sought to uproot. Stones tumble in great zig-zags, fragments of entablature suspended in mid-air. Vasari with gleeful ghoulishness notes Giulio’s fresco is the height in realism, as when the fireplace is lit it seems as if Hell itself is opening to swallow up the rebellious giants.

Giuliano is breaking the rules to be clever, but also to tell a story.

Sometimes mannerist license seems purposeless, even immoral. At least Giuliano Romano’s house in Mantua has reasons for cleverness with its off-center door and protean pediment-turned-belt course as a tour-de-force of his artistic prowess. But the old palace that houses the local branch of the ministry of Justice on the edge of the old city is decorated with hideous grotesque caryatids, the plague buboes of one gigantic old crone decorously hidden by the autumn-leafed trees lining the boulevard.

In Mantua, we leave behind the mannerist fantasies of its outskirts and cluster beneath the great Germanic baroque dome of Sant’ Andrea, marking the vast octagonal bronze-crowned vault that houses the two cruets of the blood of Christ. St. Longinus brought them here two millennia ago, one of the three sets given to him, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea for safekeeping amid the turmoil of the early persecutions.

The church’s façade and nave was designed by Alberti as the model of Renaissance decorum and restraint from mystical proportions that even are commemorated in the inscription over the door, unus ex septum, one from seven. It seems, however, curiously flat, its pilasters barely more than frames fitted to the archetypal triumphal-arch façade. Within is darkness and solemnity, a far cry from the sturm und drang of Giulio’s capolavoro in the palazzo.

The mannerists were marvels, but can wit alone sustain the lifeblood of architecture?

It doesn’t, because it doesn’t have to. Mannerism was not a movement, but a personal choice, a private style. There are many rooms in the mansion of classicism, and despite the stringent dogma of Le Duc or Ledoux, one of those rooms is full of comedians like Giuliano. Because precisely he knows when not to be funny. The palace is comprehensible precisely because he doesn’t break the rules every time, because his columns are columns and his windows are windows. He challenges us, but still gives us, as in a dream, a familiar face or place to hang onto, giving familiar charm to old details.

And he also knows that pleasure palaces should be funny and churches shouldn’t. One of his last works is tempered with that wise sobriety, testifying to the wealth and variety of maniere that the treasure-house of tradition stores. It is serene and simple, colonnaded aisles leading up to a solemn sanctuary, perhaps even more sober than Alberti’s grand church a few piazzas away. It is the work of an architect at peace with himself, a man smiling in the serenity of half-remembered jokes of youth and knowing, in the end, that he crafted his wit with a clean conscience.