Classicism and Mannerism in the 16th Century
The 16th Century was one of the most eventful periods in the history of Italy. The European powers were clashing in the peninsula. One of the most traumatic events for humanists was the sacking of Rome by the Imperial lansquenets in 1527. However, whilst this episode and the deaths of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci marked the end of the first Italian Renaissance, an artistic diaspora facilitated the assimilation of Italian methods by painters at Fontainbleau, Prague and Haarlem. The publication of Vasari's Lives of the Artists enabled, for the first time, the development of one of the most fertile debates in artistic literature: the clash between the Florentine School's sense of line, as seen in C Gherardi's Visite de la Vierge à sainte Elisabeth (Visit of the Virgin to St Elisabeth), and the love of colour that developed in Venice and Parma.
The Mannerist painters imposed new, more elongated canons, a cold palette, and a refined and sometimes esoteric academic culture as seen, for example, in the marvellous Sainte Famille (Holy Family) by Zucchi. Michelangelo's monumental painted forms, which show the influence of the goldsmiths' work, contributed to the creation of a court art reserved for connoisseurs. Despite the anti-Mannerist reaction of Caravaggio and the Carracci from 1590, this style endured up until 1620 (Curradi).
| Renaissance and Mannerism |
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