The Masters of Mannerism [antikvár]

T he theory that every period of style carries in itself the heritage of the old and the seed of the new applies to Mannerism most of all, where art is concerned. It was in the full maturity ofthe Renaissance, in the 15 20's, after Raphael's death, that the first signs of Mannerism appeared. Its ascendancy endured for about eighty years, but as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century representatives of the style could still be found scattered through the Low Countries, among the humanists and wealthy citizens of the greater and les ser towns of Germany, in the princely courts, and among the artists attached to the court of Emperor Rudolph II in Vienna and Prague. The more important masters of Mannerism expressed the new ideas, tendencies and philosophical currents ílooding the Italy of the Cinquecento, taking the culminating achievements of the High Renaissance as a starting point, and making use of them in the form and content of their own works. The apparently rounded and undisturbed harmony of Renaissance life was based on the structure of secular and religious society in the Middle Ages. The contact with classical culture and its later developments, the humanist approach to the world and the balance and sense of proportion which regulated cultural life, gave harmony and a certain buoyancy to every manifestation of Renaissance art. As early as the fifteenth century, however, percipient observers examining the course of events were able to note indications of the restlessness below the surface occasionally erupting in the fields of economy, politics, philosophy and even art. With the passing of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the disintegration of the old order reached out to wider areas, and evidence of it was more obviously apparent. The scientific discoveries which disrupted the old hierarchy of Church and secular society, the successive campaigns which ravaged Italian territories, the struggle of conflicting philosophical currents at home and the philosophy of the Reformation spreading in the North, led to a crisis in artistic expression. The foundation of equilibrium and security, believed so im mutable, began to give way, and the doubt and unrest found a response in the creative attitudes of thinkers and artists in the first place, and later of writers and poets, actively responding to the new intellectual currents. The geometrically triangular composition of Raphael's bright Madonnas,