Mannerism is as much a term as it is a trend. The word derives from the Italian maniera (style) and traditionally refers to the hyper-sophisticated, courtly art of central Italy dating from about 1520–80. It is an age typified by Pontormo, Bronzino, Parmigianino, and many others, whose works brim with an absolute brand of stylishness distilled from Renaissance art. The same can be said of many artists working today, who also rely on cultural derivatives to convey their meaning. History repeats itself, and, interestingly enough, not only with the same motivation but also with some of the same vocabulary.

“We are mostly Mannerists now,” Peter Schjeldahl observed in his New Yorker review of “The Drawings of Bronzino” at The Metropolitan Museum (February 1, 2010). Schjeldahl argues that artists of today bear the burden of modernism just as Bronzino’s contemporaries “toiled in the twilight of the Renaissance” and “squirmed under the crushing criteria that had been established by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian.” While Schjeldahl acknowledges this pejorative history of Mannerism, he also perpetuates the myth of a society overwhelmed by the achievements of the recent past, an opinion which was created centuries after the fact. Giorgio Vasari, the most celebrated art chronicler of the Mannerist period and a maniera artist himself, considered the art of his day not only equal but superior to all that had preceded it. Schjeldahl also wedges Michelangelo into the High Renaissance, forgetting that the artist’s late career is widely accepted as seminally Mannerist,