Figura Serpentinata is a style in painting and sculpture that is typical of Mannerism

Mannerism

Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...

. It is similar, but not identical, to contrapposto

Contrapposto

Contrapposto is an Italian term that means counterpose. It is used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs. This gives the figure a more dynamic, or alternatively relaxed...

, and features figures often in a spiral

Spiral

In mathematics, a spiral is a curve which emanates from a central point, getting progressively farther away as it revolves around the point.-Spiral or helix:...

 pose. Early examples can be seen in the work of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

, Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

 and Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...

.

Emil Maurer writes of the painter and theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600): "The recommended ideal form unites, after Lomazzo, three qualities: the pyramid, the "serpentinata" movement and a certain numerical proportion, all three united to form one whole. At the same time, precedence is given to the "moto", that is, to the meandering movement, which should make the pyramid, in exact proportion, into the geometrical form of a cone."

Bousquet holds that the "serpentinata" style arose as a result of the discovery of the Laocoön group

Laocoön and his Sons

The statue of Laocoön and His Sons , also called the Laocoön Group, is a monumental sculpture in marble now in the Vatican Museums, Rome. The statue is attributed by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus...

 in 1506, and its deep impact on all artists, but on Michelangelo in particular. John Shearman

John Shearman

John Kinder Gowran Shearman was an English art historian who also taught in America. He was a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, regarded by many as "the outstanding figure" of his generation in this area, who published several influential works, but whose expected major books on...

 also argues that it was invented by Michelangelo, citing the "Victors" that he produced for Pope Julius II

Pope Julius II

Pope Julius II , nicknamed "The Fearsome Pope" and "The Warrior Pope" , born Giuliano della Rovere, was Pope from 1503 to 1513...

's tomb. Maurer, on the other hand, can only detect this style rarely in Michelangelo's work and cites Beccafumi instead as its pioneer. Beccafumi's student Marco Pino

Marco Pino

Marco Pino or Marco da Siena was an Italian painter of the Renaissance and Mannerist period. Born and first trained in Siena, he later worked in Rome and in Naples, where he died. He was putatively a pupil of the painters Beccafumi and Daniele da Volterra. The biographer Filippo Baldinucci also...

 connected Beccafumi's style with those of Salviati

Salviati

Salviati may refer to:Families:* The Salviati, a 15th century Florentine-Roman banking family.** In Galileo's Dialogue, Salviati is the character who speaks for him...

, Parmigianino

Parmigianino

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola , also known as Francesco Mazzola or more commonly as Parmigianino or sometimes "Parmigiano", was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker active in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and his native city of Parma...

 and perhaps even Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...

, and his work as a whole is marked by "serpentinata" motifs. Paolo Pino

Paolo Pino

Paolo Pino was an Italian painter and art writer. He was born in Venice. A student of Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo, he wrote the "Dialogo di pittura" , which affirmed the supremacy of the Venetian School over the Florentine School and anticipated some aspects of the Mannerist style.-Works:* Dialogo...

 himself says in his "Dialogo della Pittura", that his figures' poses are many and varied, and that in all his works to find one single figure, that completely and utterly distorts, is ambivalent and difficult.

As Maurer writes, painters are freer than sculptors and less closely tied-down to nature. Thus they can play around with their figures, reshaping, overstretching, geometricising, dissolving, caricaturing, colouring, meandering, according to the painting's goal and intended effect. With the loosening of the norms of the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 and the development of the "Serpentita" style, that style's structures and rules began to be systematised. A style of form began by which figures showed physical power, passion, tension and semantic perfection. Movements were not without motivation, nor even simply done with a will, but with will shown in a pure form. Also their actions arose not out of power, but powerlessness.

The style exerted an influence even into the 1620s, with Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina

The Rape of Proserpina (Bernini)

The Rape of Proserpina is a large baroque marble sculptural group by Bernini executed between 1621 and 1622. Bernini was only 23 years old at its completion...

.