Tarentino and Mannerism

I've described Quentin Tarantino as a Mannerist and I'd like to explain myself.

Here's my proposal: if I define a Mannerist as an artist who creates from his knowledge of art, not nature (or real life), then the label fits Tarantino, with his famous knowledge of not-famous movies, from his years working at a video rental shop.

Here's the history: the original Mannerists worked in Italy from about 1520 - 1580. Michelangelo, a High Renaissance painter, didn't die until 1564. So if you were a young painter and this great artist was still working, what did you do? You copied. And that's how people learned to paint in those days: they moved away from painting from real life, and began to practice, practice, practice, by copying all the great Renaissance art around them. And this was not a bad thing. Many great painters came out of this tradition: Parmagianino, Pontormo, and Bronzino in Italy. And El Greco ("The Greek") working mostly in Spain. Sculptors and architects did the same thing.

Just so this does not sound like a minor chapter in art history, let me digress and describe something that happened at the same time: the Italians called it "Desegno" (which translates as "drawing", but which really refers to the intellectual component of art, the part that is the ideas, and the rest is just "coloring") The Italians realised that artists could design all the new things of the world and make it beautiful. And what was new? Books, not just Bibles, but books for everybody. And in those books were words made up of letters and those letters could be designed, and what did you get: Typefaces. And a great age in typeface design began. And so today we use Bodoni, and, you guessed it, Giambattista Bodoni was an Italian artist who came out of this tradition.

So Quentin is not a Rossellini, who lives through the German occupation of Italy, then makes a movie about it ("Open City"). He's a guy who watches "The Great Escape" and "The Guns of Navarone" and "The Dirty Dozen" and then he makes "Incorrigible Basterds" using all he's learned. And that's not bad at all, but it's what makes him an American Mannerist.