Rosso Fiorentino, The Dead Christ with Angels, c. 1524-7, oil on panel, 133.4 x 104.1 cm (52-1/2 x 41 inches) (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] Where do you go after the perfection of the High Renaissance?
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:08] Exactly. If you’re an artist in the 1520s, looking back at, for example, Michelangelo’s “David” or Raphael’s frescoes in the Papal Palace, how could art be more perfect than it had been made by Michelangelo and Raphael and Leonardo?
Dr. Zucker: [0:23] The style that develops in the courts of Rome immediately after the High Renaissance, a period that we call Mannerism, is defying in fact the strictures of that perfection and is looking towards a kind of virtuosity that has to do with distortion and a remaking of form.
Dr. Harris: [0:38] Mannerism is borrowing from the High Renaissance, but as you said, it’s changing it and distorting it.
Dr. Zucker: [0:46] We can see that in one of the great treasures of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a painting by Rosso Fiorentino.
Dr. Harris: [0:52] This painting shows the dead Christ with angels. Normally, we would see much more of an emphasis on Christ’s suffering and on the angels mourning the dead body of Christ. It’s not unusual in Mannerist paintings for us to have elements that are hard to figure out, where the iconography has been changed.
[1:11] He’s really minimized the usual clues we have about Christ’s suffering. We can’t easily see the wounds in Christ’s hands or feet. Even the wound in his side that Christ received while he was on the cross seems devoid of blood.
[1:24] All that is unusual. Normally, an artist would present us with those attributes and really have us meditate on Christ’s physical suffering. We’re not given those clues here.
Dr. Zucker: [1:36] Even the angels don’t seem to be mourning, as they might be in more traditional paintings. You can see Rosso playing fast and loose in a number of different ways in this painting.
[1:45] Not only do you have Christ, this very large figure, in fact almost too large for the size of this canvas, surrounded by the four angels that seem almost too close, but you have this very indeterminate space pushed very close to the foreground, and you have distortions in the relation of the scale of the bodies.
[2:04] Look at the size and the mass and weight of this dead Christ in relationship to those angels in the background.
Dr. Harris: [2:11] Christ seems way too large, almost like he’s going to break out of the space that he’s in. It’s been suggested that there’s not so much emphasis on Christ’s suffering here because there’s more of an interest in the idea of Christ’s resurrection. Perhaps that idea of him breaking the bounds or the confines of this canvas suggests that idea.
Dr. Zucker: [2:34] Well, certainly the two torches held by the angels are a traditional symbol of the Resurrection, so that absolutely works. Christ is so interesting here because there’s a real sensuality to that body. It’s a beautiful body. It’s got this elegant curvature to it, and yet it’s also dead and kind of yellow.
Dr. Harris: [2:52] It’s not unusual for Mannerist artists to make art, to make paintings, based on other paintings. We definitely see that here in the way that Rosso recalls Michelangelo’s figures on the Sistine ceiling.
[3:06] Look at his right thigh. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s impossibly long. The way that it connects to his hip doesn’t seem anatomically plausible, and the length to the knee doesn’t seem anatomically plausible.
Dr. Zucker: [3:19] Even the other thigh is too large for the torso.
Dr. Harris: [3:23] We have a really hard time figuring out how those feet would carry the weight of this body — in fact, how he’s being supported at all.
Dr. Zucker: [3:31] So those distortions that you’re talking about, we see in so much Mannerist work. You might think of Parmigianino’s “The Madonna of the Long Neck” for example.
[3:39] But it’s not that this is a mistake. It’s that Mannerist artists like Rosso were restructuring the body in order to express not only their virtuosity, but in a sense, to be able to manipulate form as if it was a plastic medium.
Dr. Harris: [3:52] And perhaps to heighten the spirituality of the moment, maybe by exaggerating the body or by elongating it or twisting it; there’s a sense of transcending the earthly and the physical.
Dr. Zucker: [4:05] Stylistically, we can certainly say that Mannerist artists transcended the strictures, the perfection of the High Renaissance.
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