To Transform the Body
"Hektor held out his arms to his baby, who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse’s bosom screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father, terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair, nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet" - Homer, The Illiad
Developments in sixteenth century ceremonial and tournament armor saw the exploration of bodily boundaries through transformation into the grotesque. The Mannerist art style developed out of the highly mathematical, geometric, and perfectionistic art styles of the High Renaissance of the late fifteenth century which aimed to represent the body and the world around it as realistically as possible. This new era of art referred to as the Mannerist period of the early sixteenth century arose coinciding with the period of societal unrest caused by the Christian Reformation, plague, and the sack of Rome by German and Spanish soldiers in 1527. Mannerist art was characterized by its visual bizarreness in comparison to the art which preceded it, often featuring acrid colors, distorted physical proportions, illogical occupations of space, and the ornamentation of the non-human grotesque in frescoes.
One famous example of this shift from High Renaissance art to Mannerist art is in that of Parmigianino's Madonna and Child with Angels (Madonna with the long neck). When visually compared to earlier artistic representations of the High Renaissance such as Raphael's The Madonna of the Meadow it becomes easy to see the differences in these two representations of the same religious figures. Raphael’s The Madonna of the Meadow succeeds in representing the accurate bodily proportions of its characters and features a naturalistic background, all painted in lifelike colors. In comparison, Parmigianino's depiction of the Virgin and Child features several oddities in the representations of their bodies, as the Virgin’s lower half seems to swell to a larger size compared to her upper half while the Christ Child’s abnormally large adolescent body is draped over his mother’s legs. As well, the background of Parmigianino's piece is abstract with disorganized characters and architecture.
Although the Mannerist period and its art continues to be debated in its inception and manifestations, it is not implausible to presume this playing with form and incorporation of the inhuman which characterized Mannerist art bled into the world of armor, constructing the grotesque armor which utilized this cultural shift towards bodily distortion to explore the benefits of deformation. Grotesque armor was highly zoomorphic, shaping the male body into hybrid creatures composed of horns, beaks, feathers, wings, and scales, adorned them with imaginary and monstrous creatures, and highly exaggerated the human form. This etched design for a rapier hilt and scabbard chape of a sword displays several characteristics of Mannerist art as the human figures which make up the hilt are strangely and illogically twisted and interact abnormally with each other's bodies. Mythological creatures such as half-human, half-animal beings and goblins also decorate the pieces.
Thought by scholars to have been made with largely humorous intentions, this donning of the non-human and the magical stands in stark contrast to the transformation of body seen in armor all 'antica, departing from the preceding symbolism of the physical body entirely. Instead, grotesque armor subverted ideas of the ideal form enforced in armor all 'antica and explored the vast possibilities of drastic prosthetic enhancements. It is this feature which makes this grotesque armor distinctly Mannerist in style. The art of the Mannerist period consciously dismisses the many expectations of perfection in form and proportion which became commonplace in the art of the High Renaissance.
A similar comparison to that between the two Madonna and Child pieces can also be made between these two helmets, one from the High Renaissance and the other from the Mannerist period. The High Renaissance close helmet is engraved with ornate floral motif etchings, it is self-contained, streamlined, and, as is common in High Renaissance art, the decoration functions to add to the central feature of the overall beauty of the piece. It is visually communicated that the purpose of this close helmet and its decorations is to attract the awe-struck eyes of its audience, highlighting the power of the body wearing it. The Mannerist helmet, in comparison, extends into the world of the absurd both literally and metaphorically as the features of the chicken fashioned into this visor extend physically outside the physical space taken up by its wearer. This intentional subversion of the former values of armor allowed Mannerist art to create an entirely new physical form.
Like Postmodernist art, Mannerist art hinges on this consciousness of artistic subversion from both the creator and viewer, crafting a shared visual conversation of a facilitated and received departure from the expected. Grotesque armor embodies this shared experience of self-conscious subversion, it speaks directly to the centuries of preceding European armor culture which formed the articulated, masculinized, assuredly male bodies of the Renaissance by instead creating something strange, nonhuman, and visually genderless. As described by Carolyn Springer,
all armor inherently illustrates the “evolutionary desire to exceed the limits of the species."
Grotesque armor exists decidedly within this desire, departing entirely from the limits of the human body. Instead, this armor adopts the apotropaic nature of the monstrous, paralleling insects such as butterflies and moths which use ocelli to repel and fascinate predators. This armor works similarly to reconstruct the human form to intimidate, disguise, fascinate, and mock while also physically protecting the body.
