The Idea of Mannerism in Architecture: Rise and Decline of a Historiographic Category

Abstract

The concept of Mannerism in architecture had great critical fortune between the 30s and the 60s in the 20th century, with the progressive achievement of this historiographic category in the field of arts and culture. Regarding architecture, the term Mannerism received different definitions, periodisations and evaluations, up until the sudden and silent decline of the interest it had sparked.
This paper briefly reconstructs these events through the analysis of different critical approaches and positions with particular regard to the contributions of three great scholars who share the fact of having used the category of Mannerism to analyze architecture and then of having moved away from it in their more recent studies: Ernst Gombrich, Manfredo Tafuri, and Arnaldo Bruschi.
The history of the concept of Mannerism is put in relationship to contemporary historical research on architecture, by revealing that the use of this category allowed the renovation of traditional historiographical points of view and drew attention to previously neglected subjects. In conclusion, the later rejecting of Mannerism as an interpretative tool of architectural phenomena is attributed to the development of research itself, which had highlighted the complexity of XVth and XVIth century architecture, and to methodological improvements regarding not only the Renaissance but the whole field of architectural history as well.