Italian mannerism, David Lynch, and Lars von Trier

A model of style

Because I plan to do occasional posts on literature, painting, cinema and music, I thought it would be useful to sketch out my “model” of how to think about trends in the arts.  In this post, I’ll use 16^th century Italian mannerist painting as a lens through which to examine recent trends in cinema, as well as the distinction between artistic talent and artistic greatness.  In particular, I’ll argue that a high level of artistic talent is actually very widespread, but artistic greatness is rare because it requires a very specific and uncommon mix of talent and opportunity.

[Reading the comments, it’s clear than a number of readers have better taste than I do. This makes me a bit reluctant to pontificate on the arts. But some readers seem to like the posts, and perhaps this will spur some interesting discussion in the comment section.]

I’ve heard people suggest that it was a sort of miracle that there were so many artistic geniuses in Italy right around 1500. Well, economists are the sort of people who tell little children that Santa doesn’t exist, and I’m here to tell you that there was no miraculous clustering of talent in Italy. The world is full of geniuses.

But there was a flowering of artistic greatness, and we need to understand why.

Between 1500 and 1550, great paintings were produced by people like Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Bellini, Giorgioni, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bottecelli and del Sarto, among others. All of these Italian masters lived in a country of about 10 million people, the population of Ohio. Who are Ohio’s top ten painters?

But it’s even more miraculous, far more:

1. Many Italian children died before age 5.

2. The vast majority of Italians that lived to adulthood were poor peasants or workers, with no access to education or artistic supplies.

3. The first 5 on the list came from a small area near Venice, and the second 5 were mostly from around Florence. That’s not even close to a cross section of the Italian public.

I suspect that the number of Italians in the early 1500s that possessed the sort of talent demonstrated by those on the list is far greater than 10. Those who get the chance to “shine” are just the tip of the iceberg. We could do the same sort of analysis for composers in German speaking areas around 1700-1825, which would include a phenomenal number of the all time greats. All in an area with roughly 30 million people, the population of Texas. Our planet has 8.2 billion people. So for those of us who do not believe in miracles, what’s going on here?

You probably think I’m one of those tech guys that denigrates art and insists that AI can do just as well. Nope, just the opposite. Those tech guys don’t understand the nature of great art. Italy really did produce a lot of great art. Eighteenth century Germany/Austria really did produce a lot of great music. But why?

The key is to understand the difference between artistic talent, which is not uncommon, and artistic greatness, which requires talent and a very special set of circumstances. One way of understanding this distinction is to examine the transition from the High Renaissance to the Mannerist period.

Readers are probably familiar with the most famous Renaissance paintings, such as Leonardo’s Last Supper, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Raphael’s School of Athens. These grand achievements represent a sort of culmination of centuries of artistic progress. But for artists just coming along, it wasn’t clear where to go next. Here’s Wikipedia:

By the end of the High Renaissance, young artists experienced a crisis: It seemed that everything that could be achieved was already achieved. No more difficulties, technical or otherwise, remained to be solved. The detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, physiognomy and how humans register emotion in expression and gesture, the innovative use of the human form in figurative composition, and the use of the subtle gradation of tone, all had reached near perfection. The young artists needed to find a new goal, and they sought new approaches. At this point Mannerism started to emerge. . . .

The word "Mannerism" derives from the Italian maniera, meaning "style" or "manner".

The tech bros might think we simply need to program machines to keep doing more great paintings like those of Leonardo or Michelangelo. Just as you’ll hear traditionalists say, “Don’t do rap or indy rock, write more Beethoven-like symphonies.” Alas, it doesn’t work that way.

Wikipedia’s essay on mannerism explains the basic problem:

Giorgio Vasari noted that Michelangelo stated once: "Those who are followers can never pass by whom they follow.”

Never might be too strong, but “almost never” is certainly accurate. Almost invariably, great art occurs when people develop new styles. The public may not understand that fact, but the artists themselves most certainly do. Harold Bloom called this the anxiety of influence.

Mannerism is based on the Italian term maniera, which means style. That’s right, the mannerist style is the style style. (Sort of like ATM machines.) We will look at two paintings by Italian mannerists that should have made my top ten list, but were inexplicably left off. First, Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck (Uffizi, 1540):

I won’t try to explain this painting, as three years ago the New York Times had a wonderful essay discussing it in detail, far more effectively than I could. Please read it. But the TLDR is that things that may look a bit strange or “off”, do not reflect artistic incompetence. Parmigianino is intentionally moving away from the more realistic style of the High Renaissance, in order to produce a certain effect.

[BTW, for an older fan of the visual arts like me, the NYT’s graphics seem almost miraculous. I feel lucky to have lived long enough to read this sort of article.]

Now let’s look at Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (1545, London.)

We have clearly moved a long way from the grand, dignified symmetry of the High Renaissance, and have ended up in a very strange place. For some reason, this reminds me a bit of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. The idea of corruption and rot beneath a surface of glossy beauty. And both of these paintings have a dreamlike quality, which is perhaps the most notable characteristic of Lynch’s films.

Artists never wish to repeat themselves; they are always looking for a new style. Many of the greats (Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, etc.) shifted to a much less realistic style as they aged, as the sought new approaches that were more expressive. Even Michelangelo became a mannerist in his old age.

If I’m right, then there's nothing mysterious about the apparent clustering of artistic genius. Geniuses are always around us, but they only show up when events create an opportunity to express something new. These opportunities are often created by a mix of internal developments within an art form (say perspective in painting) and new technologies (say oil paint.)

When these opportunities show up, it can be like the Oklahoma land rush. Geniuses pop out of the woodwork to quickly exploit the low hanging fruit, the most promising opportunities offered by the new style. Before long, the low hanging fruit are all taken and the next generation of artists moves on, looking for the next style.

I have always found it interesting that mannerism is Italian for “style”. There is a sense in which this is the first real style. Yes, Renaissance painters also had their styles. (Bottecelli’s paintings are immediately recognizable.) But they were all trending toward a realistic approach that culminated in the masterpieces of the High Renaissance. Mannerism feels like the first self-conscious style—intentionally moving away from realism. Style for its own sake. Mannerism isn’t just a style, it is style.

Part 2: Mannerism in film

So what is the High Renaissance of film? By the 1950s, technology had progressed to the point where it was possible to make grand statements such as the classics of David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago) and John Ford (The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Some might point to earlier classics like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and Gone With the Wind.

Whether or not you like these classics, I don’t think anyone would regard them as particularly weird. In contrast, the films of many of our most talented contemporary directors tend to be a bit odd, in a self-conscious way. Not just the directors in the title of this post, but also Tarantino, Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, and many others. They don’t wish to make traditional “great films”, as after The Godfather was released in 1972, not much more could be said in a classic format.

Lynch and von Trier are the two that most remind me of the Italian mannerists. Both are underrated because they do a lot of things that are kind of weird, scenes that make people uncomfortable. They push the expressive possibilities of film to the extreme. (There was a time when Kubrick was underrated for similar reasons, but with time his critics have mostly caught up to him.)

In 1990, David Lynch helped to produce two seasons of an odd TV series—Twin Peaks. In 2017, it returned for a third season, even weirder than before. It’s a mix of drama and black comedy, a “dramady”. Lynch directed a few of the episodes in the first two seasons, and all of them in the return. Twin Peaks is my all time favorite TV series, but it’s hard to say which part is best. The first series had a better story, but the return has the advantage of Lynch’s direction. When I watch current TV series like Fargo, I see Twin Peaks influence all over the place.

In 1994, Lars von Trier directed a Danish TV series entitled The Kingdom, citing Twin Peaks as an inspiration. It is an even blacker comedy than Twin Peaks. And like Twin Peaks, von Trier brought it back in 2022 with a new set of episodes. I just rewatched The Kingdom, including the new season. Unfortunately, it falls well below Twin Peaks, except perhaps toward the end of season one, when the manic intensity of the black comedy is almost sublime. Once again, proving Michelangelo’s maxim about followers.

How good is Twin Peaks? One Youtube rating of Lynch’s best work had two TV episodes of Twin Peaks in the top five Lynch films. Those were episode 1 of the 1990 series and episode 8 of the 2017 series. That’s high praise, as Mulholland Drive is often rated the second best film of the 21st century. (There’s a separate Twin Peaks film, which is also excellent.)

Luis Buñuel once described the medium of film as follows:

In the hands of a free spirit, the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. It is the best instrument through which to express the world of dreams, of emotions, of instinct. The mechanism that produces cinematic images is, among all forms of human expression, that which most closely resembles the mechanism of the human mind in the way it works, or better yet, that which best imitates the workings of the mind during sleep. A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream…The cinema seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which reach so deeply into poetry, yet it is almost never used toward that end.

This almost perfectly describes what David Lynch and Lars von Trier do in their films. They developed odd styles because they wanted better ways to express their ideas.

Because the world is full of geniuses, the possibilities of any new art form, or even a new technology within an art form, will be quickly exhausted. That’s why there are far more people with great artistic talent than there are people with great artistic achievement. It‘s harder to create an entirely new style than to work within an existing style.

To use an analogy from tech, there might be a guy living a few miles from you who is just as talented as Thomas Edison, but he’ll never invent the light bulb, movie projector or record player, because Edison already invented them. Then someone develops semiconductors and that opens up many new possibilities for invention. Rinse and repeat.

During the second half of the 20th century, film was a far more creative medium than painting, but only because it was much newer. I believe the vast majority of the greatest films ever made were directed during the middle decades of the 20th century (say 1920-80). But I also believe that the most talented directors of all time are at work today.

To use an example from pop music, the Beatles are a greater band than Radiohead, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are more talented. It’s almost impossible to compare talent levels across long time periods, as the later artists are engaged in an entirely different enterprise from the earlier ones. Apples and oranges. I suspect that people have trouble grasping that distinction, the idea that both of the following may be true:

A. Beethoven composed the greatest symphonies ever written

B. There are dozens of composers alive today that are more talented than Beethoven

You see the same confusion in the world of sports. Wilt averaged 50 points a game for an entire season, something inconceivable in the modern NBA. As a result, lists of the greatest athletes are sort of meaningless. They don’t know whether to make the list in terms of the most talented, or the greatest achievements, and end up with a compromise that satisfies no one.

[There’s a sense in which Wilt is the greatest basketball player of all time, but not the most talented, whereas Shohei Ohtani is perhaps the most talented baseball player ever, but not the greatest.]

If we go back to the Italian mannerists, it seems possible to me that Parmigianino and Bronzino were just as talented as some of the much more famous Florentine artists that came a few years earlier, but they were nowhere near as great in terms of actual achievements. They were too late.

If you are a talented young economist, please don’t set out to become a Keynesian, monetarist, Austrian or Marxist. That’s the path to mediocrity. Take the best from several different sources, and forge your own style of economics.

PS. It’s OK to set out to become a market monetarist, as we don’t have anyone like Keynes, Friedman, Hayek or Marx. You’d have a real shot at becoming the leader of this little school of thought. :)