Mannerism, Spirituality, and Cognition: The Art of Enargeia

A study of the conceptual vocabulary found in sixteenth-century treatises on art from Giorgio Vasari to Federico Zuccaro, this book analyzes how language and spirituality complement the visual styles of Mannerism. By reading the way in which writers for example, Lomazzo, Armenini, and Leoni describe artistic styles as they discuss the relationship between art and spirituality, the author establishes a religious base for the language of art in sixteenth-century Europe, and identifies a spiritual mission in which artists and theorists participated. The book focuses on Italian and Spanish art from Pontormo to Jusepe Ribera, and includes consideration of French Mannerism, through to Jacques Bellange. While focused principally on style and language, this study also addresses the impact that visual images have on the spectator as artists experimented with the adjustment of space, proportions and forms to create images that aroused the emotions of the viewer. These cognitive shifts, linked to the visual reception of the created forms, affected the religious expression and experience of the spectator in a way that Lynette Bosch argues to have been deliberate on the part of artists working within the historical period of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and its debates about images. Mannerism, Spirituality and Cognition employs a new approach to the art of sixteenth-century Europe, while incorporating rhetoric and theory to enable a reinterpretation of the origin of Mannerism as understood by sixteenth-century writers about art.