Word: mannerists
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Particularly challenging is Othello, perhaps Shakspere's finest play and certainly his greatest Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). For all its length, Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials; yet Welles has come up with a film exactly 90 minutes long. Obviously this required extensive cutting of the original; and Welles fully realized the impossibility of trying simply to photograph a stage production of the play. The result is not Shakspere's Othello, but Welles' adaptation and interpretation of the Othello tale using Shakspere...
Some of the great poetry is gone, and the monumental construction is gone. But the marvelous Baroque drive and momentum of the inner line is still there. Welles has applied to it the kind of Mannerist treatment that has always come most naturally to him, introducing as he does such elements as the disproportionate, the unbalanced, the oblique, and the devious...
...labeled the Mannerist-style painting of Gabrielle d'Estrées [Oct. 3] "Lady After Her Bath." Surely a more appropriate title would have been: "I dreamed I was in a jewelry store without my Maidenform...
Even royal mistresses, such as Henri IV's Gabrielle d'Estrees (see color page), posed to show their full, solid voluptuousness revealed under the thinnest of gossamer veils. To hold a king's roving eye, Painter François Bunel the Younger needed all his Mannerist tricks: he shifted the focus endlessly within the frame, from head and face to breasts to Gabrielle's arched, elegant hand holding a ring, then to maidservant, and finally to Gabrielle's mirrored profile, which disobeys all known laws of reflection...
...other Mannerist extreme stood El Greco, who in his Toledo paintings finally dissolved the too, too solid flesh from his saints, painted them with bodies soaring upward, elongated and weightless, with fingers no more than mere ribbons of flesh. When El Greco died in 1614, the Age of Mannerism was already drawing to a close. But before El Greco died, he had validated the Mannerists' extreme contention, that the laws of perspective and proportion must give way before man's inner vision, which not so much mocks nature as triumphs over...