On Will’s transitional nature.
Earlier, I already mentioned that after long reflection, the artistic language of Hannibal increasingly reminds me of mannerism in many of its elements: the distortion of forms, the departure from the familiar, and the dominance of aesthetic structure over moral content.
Let us return to my idea that Will is a transitional figure—from the Early Renaissance to the Late Renaissance.
🧡 The characteristic features of the Early Renaissance lie in artists’ and sculptors’ engagement with the ideas of humanism. Anthropocentrism (a philosophical worldview according to which the human being is the center of the universe) becomes especially prominent. The Quattrocento is marked by a gradual elevation of human status: the human approaches God not as an equal, but as His highest and most perfect creation. The significance of the human individual becomes one of the key values of artistic thought during this period. In painting, this manifests in a growing interest in portraiture and landscape, as well as in bodily and emotional authenticity.
Looking at the first season and Will as he appears there, we can observe a similar emphasis on the human being. Roughly speaking, the value of the human here is not for art itself, but for Will personally. His anthropocentrism is directed toward the value of human lives. Portrait-like shots that closely frame Will’s face, the heightened attention to the surrounding landscape, and the stag as a mythological image all point to the presence of the Early Renaissance around Will—even in how he is positioned within the frame.
🧡 Turning to the High Renaissance and to Will’s image in the second season, it is important to note that his development gradually leads him toward a state characteristic of the High Renaissance: a condition of apparent wholeness and inner balance. Will becomes less compassionate and less reactive, as he begins to perceive himself as the center of events, as a figure capable of influencing their course rather than merely being a “victim.” Yet even in this state, his wholeness remains unstable. Will only approaches the true harmony associated with the High Renaissance, but remains suspended in an intermediate condition. His intellect and sensitivity—which, within humanist logic, should have led him to clarity and balance after realizing everything that has happened—instead become a personal source of inner tension and fracture, now on an ontological level.
🧡 In the third season, Will definitively shifts into the zone of the Late Renaissance (mannerism). If earlier he balanced between humanist attention to the individual and the pursuit of Renaissance wholeness, now this wholeness reaches a point of tension and instability. Mannerist logic first and foremost abandons the classical equilibrium characteristic of the High Renaissance and acquires a growing disjunction between form and inner content.
Visually, Will’s image still preserves anthropocentrism (he remains the compositional core of the frame, and his attention is still focused on people), yet space no longer supports him. The proportions of the world appear disrupted, pauses become more prolonged, and the narrative grows increasingly anxious. In art-historical terms, the Late Renaissance is the moment when the presence of ideals no longer functions. Will in the third season exists precisely within this mode: Renaissance in visual logic, yet deprived of faith in its stability. His image becomes saturated with a contradiction between preserved form and inner disintegration, bringing him closer to the aesthetics of mannerism.
Thus, Will in the third season becomes a figure of the Late Renaissance, in whom the humanist ideal of the individual does not disappear but loses its salvational function. He no longer affirms harmony, but instead records its impossibility, preparing the final transition to the mannerist artistic language that is fully realized in the series through the figure of Hannibal.
