About as close as this show comes to salacious is the peculiarly placid portrait of "Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter" (gelatin silver, 1979), all leathered up and draped with chains but posed like Mom and Dad in the living room—as if Mapplethorpe had drawn inspiration not from ancient sculptors but from Olan Mills. The only other image some might find mildly objectionable is not Mapplethorpe's, but a print by pioneering surrealist photographer Man Ray, who drew an upside-down cross around a pale image of the similar but more sinuous lines traced by the buttocks. Like the absent mannerist prints, however, this 1933 photograph, titled "Monument à D.A.F. de Sade," appears in a reproduction.
The idea of the show's curators, Germano Celant, senior curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim in New York, and Arkady Ippolitov, curator of Italian prints at the Hermitage, was to draw parallels between Mapplethorpe's elegant, ripped torsos and the meticulously rendered, torqued musculature of the mannerist approach. The Renaissance revived classical antiquity as the grounding of European culture, along with the idea that the human mind and body were fit subjects for art. The mannerists displaced Renaissance poise and balance with more turbulent and tortured views of the body—taking the earlier assertion a step further. Mapplethorpe, too, looked to antiquity, even photographing classically derived sculptures. A possibly 19th-century bust of Mercury from his collection is shown, along with his "portrait" of it, "Ermes" (gelatin silver, 1988). "Ken Moody" (platinum print, 1983) presents the model from the rear, with his arms lifted and outstretched so that they seem to be missing, as if he had been recovered from the ruins of a temple.
Projecting black panels with reproductions cannot, of course, replace the etchings and engravings. It is worth keeping in mind, though, that the missing prints were reproductions for their day, a way for the middle class to own famous paintings and scenes from classical mythology. It might have been apt, for instance, to pair Mapplethorpe's "Alan Lynes" (gelatin silver, 1979), showing a man with spiky braids lifting a leg while waving a rope, with Cornelisz van Haarlem's painting "Apollo in the Clouds," which depicts the sun god looking and leaping upward. The original exhibition offered instead Jacob Matham's engraving of the painting, and this one steps back another remove.
In any event, Mapplethorpe's and Matham's poses are similar but not the same. Mapplethorpe, as far as anyone knows, was not drawing upon mannerist sources. Lost here is a comparison of two types of prints 400 years apart, and the resonant cultural implications of making classically oriented images in those two times. And you can't help thinking Hendrick Goltzius' engravings of Cornelisz van Haarlem's "The Four Disgracers" would have been a splendid counterpoint to Mapplethorpe's four "Thomas" prints (gelatin silver, 1987), whose subject deploys limbs like spokes inside a circular cavity.
Still, a Mapplethorpe show with study aids is a fine experience, and certainly preferable to a dark gallery. Even with the reproductions, you can see that for the mannerist artists, the body animated the joys and agonies of human experience. With or without them, it's clear that Mapplethorpe's project was both more sensual and clinical. These are utterly lovely photographs, most of them, but the man who declared photography "the perfect way to make a sculpture" made people into sculptures rather than making sculptures of people. Heads are cropped, faces mostly expressionless. Bodybuilder "Lisa Lyon" (gelatin silver, 1982) steps forward forcefully, arms lifted, fists clenched, but her head is swathed in a fabric drape. Nothing of the humanist ideal, evident even in the intense mannerist way, transfers to Mapplethorpe's compositions—except maybe an equally fierce aestheticism, asserting the body's apotheosis as art.