The Brooklyn Rail

History repeats itself; so does our reaction to it. The overwhelming presence of crisis today, from self-righteous wars to the rise of alt-right politics, throws us back into the turmoil of the early twentieth century, which fueled the pioneering view of Mannerism as an art proper to a troubled world. The timely publication of this book in 2023 is unsurprising—it emerged alongside the relevant and mature regeneration of a discourse on Mannerism, the “Architecture of Crisis.” It would be a mistake, however, to regard this book as the work of a historian attempting a better definition of architectural Mannerism. It is rather a work of theory that draws cues from well-rehearsed scholarship and articulates a latent continuity between cinquecento architecture and that of today. Although this is a trope that we have seen in Colin Rowe’s “Mannerism and Modern Architecture” (1950) and Irina Davidovici’s “Abstraction and Artifice” (2004), it does not undermine its achievement in breathing new life into contemporary European architectural discourse and production.

The book is structured in two parts, following the logic of González de Canales’s argument: if architectural Mannerism means an architecture of crisis, one should be able to discern its manifestation today where relentless instability is the norm. The first chapter provides an admirably comprehensive survey of the historiography of Mannerism, covering almost all major historians from the last century who have tried their hand at giving form and content to Mannerism. From Max Dvořák’s pioneering view on Mannerist art as symptomatic of a spiritual crisis (1920) to Arnold Hauser’s parallelisms between the sixteenth century cultural crises (1965), one expectedly reads of the exaggerated notion of crisis in the definition of Mannerism. And its associated formal ambiguity, as articulated most eloquently by Colin Rowe and Robert Venturi, is argued in the second chapter to have permeated the work of the neo-Mannerists: Lütjens Padmanabhan, 6a architects, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, architecten de Vylder Vinck Taillieu, TEd’A, and MAIO. This raises a question: are the ambiguous plans, the debilitating wall treatments, and the odd columns mere expressions of an external crisis, ergo Mannerist?

What is perplexing about the narrative is the way González de Canales shifts between two attitudes towards crisis, essentially two incompatible definitions of Mannerism, as if they were the same. Here, most of the favoured voices (Dvořák, Walter Friedländer, Nikolaus Pevsner, Anthony Blunt, Rowe, Hauser) are disposed to a view that Mannerist art and architecture reflect a spiritual malaise caused by the catastrophic societal conditions of cinquecento Italy. In his The Architecture of Mannerism (1946) Nikolaus Pevsner famously subordinates the formal ambiguity and oddity of the likes of Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and Baldassare Peruzzi to the devastating impact of the Reformation and the Sack of Rome. His judgement that “Mannerism has no faith in mankind and no faith in matter” surely resonated with its audience in a war-torn Europe at the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this early twentieth century interpretation, laden with Hegelian determinism and interwar-postwar sentiment, was criticised and effectively foreclosed by Ernst H. Gombrich and John Shearman at and after the 1961 New York Congress. Despite the regrettable brevity given to this watershed moment in the book, González de Canales’s arbitrary reliance on this dated view seems to belie his other theoretical source: Manfredo Tafuri.

One sees in Tafuri’s work on this subject the second attitude towards crisis, which I believe is the real conviction of this book: one that pertains to an awareness of crisis rather than an unconscious reflection of it. For Tafuri, the emergence of Mannerist architecture in the sixteenth century is characterised by a desire to perpetuate the quattrocento classical project of Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, whose authority was gradually threatened and put in tension by the demands of reality. Reality, I say, because crisis simply constitutes another aspect of the reality in which the architect must work alongside “mundane realities as construction, pre-existences, or program,” and other political, cultural, and economic circumstances. Mannerism thus refers to a work procedure (to invoke the likeminded Hessel Miedema) in which the architect, who is deferential to—yet critical of—the disciplinary tradition, subjectively negotiates between internal theoretical concerns and an array of external conditions. Or it is a “radical acceptance of existing reality” that González de Canales sees in Álvaro Siza and Venturi (one is also reminded of Hermann Czech), which no doubt conveys the same sense of procedural complexity that Rudolf Wittkower uncovers in his reconstruction of the history of Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana (1934). This Mannerist ability to handle contingencies is what González de Canales sees as relevant to the relentlessly unstable present.

Following this logic, is Mannerism at all a formal concern? The formal ambiguity that Venturi so venerates in Complexity and Contradiction (1966) surely tells us what a Mannerist form could potentially be, but to qualify a work as Mannerist requires an inquiry into the architect’s intention. Conversely, a mere reference to a Venturian form or a Mannerist form does not qualify a work as Mannerist, a mistake González de Canales at times commits in his discussion of contemporary European practices. For these architects, the 2008 financial crisis has defined a clear economic reality in which the grandiose ambitions of the early 2000s are deemed unfeasible. As González de Canales rightly points out, these architects have been bounded by usually private commissions that have budgetary and resource constraints, complex site conditions, and involved clients. Conceptually, they have returned to the past and fundamentals of our discipline to understand where the architecture is in, say, a small rear extension project, where a Mannerist can act upon. They appear to move dialectically, first deducing certain architectural traditions (domestic plan, or tectonic members), later negotiating them with the existing reality, and finally arriving at the Mannerist synthesis. It is their varying emphasis on certain traditions which differentiates each Mannerist architect from the next. In each of them we see a total possibility of architecture. One might protest, but all this is to make architecture palpable again.