The Friday Afternoon Challenge for your beautiful minds: The Art of the Altarpiece! Part I.

[CTyankee]

113. Another thing about those "floating bodies"...

the Mannerists ditched single point perspective, a major rediscovery of the vanishing point by the Renaissance humanists and artists. All of the "balance and harmony" of the Renaissance ideal was thrown out. The human body was distorted (my major problem with El Greco, a notable Mannerist if there ever was one). Mary McCarthy talks about the Mannerist use of "candy box colors" in her book "The Stones of Florence" (now sadly out of print) as another manifestation of Mannerism, which you can readily see in Pontormo's palette. But the Baroque, pioneered by Caravaggio, came galloping in soon after and another glorious era of art began...