Maniera
Maniera; drawing by David Levine

I

On the first page of Painting in Italy 1500-1600, Sidney J. Freedberg describes the first decades of that century as “the most extraordinary intersection of genius art history has ever known.” This evaluation, indeed, goes back to the sixteenth century and remained essentially unchallenged until the nineteenth, and it was so profound a conviction that the “classical” style of these decades, originated by Leonardo and culminating in Raphael, became the measure of all art.

Things have changed. Not only is Raphael no longer the standard of artistic value, but it is not even fashionable now to dislike him. The rehabilitation of the postclassical “Mannerist” art, the style of the succeeding generation of Pontormo, has been one of the most fertile and dynamic events in art history four centuries later. Today the authority of Raphael has been destroyed and we may admire him again without embarrassment.

To give an account of sixteenth-century Italian painting is a formidable task. There are few painters of any consequence who have not been the subject of at least one study since 1945, and faced with this mass of information the art historian risks compiling a bare list of artists, works, and dates. Further, the main artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, are of such towering importance that it is difficult to keep things in proportion. Finally, the historical problems are among the most debated and most difficult to resolve.

Sidney Freedberg was the most obvious choice for this volume of the Pelican History of Art. His principal work, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence—1500-1520, was a searching study and a major achievement. The exceptional visual sensibility and intellectual power at work in this vast study of style made him the leading authority in the field, in spite of the tortuous and demanding prose he invented to convey the complex process of seeing art (prose rumored to have been described by Freedberg himself as “late Henry James retranslated from the German”).

In the new Pelican volume, Freedberg conveys a remarkable amount of information including very rich bibliographical references (up to 1968), but the information is unobtrusive because it is subservient to a powerfully controlled scheme. Freedberg very seldom describes explicitly the methods he uses; they are like an elaborate intellectual scaffolding removed after a construction is finished.1

The first quarter of the book concerns the creation and development of the classical style of painting in central Italy (Rome and Florence) and in Venice. To Freedberg it is a style largely invented by Leonardo and formulated for the first time in his unfinished Adoration of the Magi of 1481 (Florence, Uffizi). The Last Supper (1495-98, Milan), simpler but more grandiose, can serve as a mature example of classicism. The disciples, while painted with extreme vividness, are also idealized heroic figures. With all their individuality, they each typify different ways of behaving at the dramatic moment when Christ has pronounced the terrible words: “One of you shall betray me.” The apostles are not lined up along the table as they had usually been in previous representations of the Last Supper but are arranged into four closely knit groups of three figures with an energetic movement that converges and resolves itself in the central figure of Christ. This formal arrangement is inseparable from the psychological interplay between the characters, and we also sense an organic relation between the figures and the space they inhabit.

The dominant quality of this kind of painting for Freedberg is that it has “a sense of living harmony,” a complete integration of all aspects of art: subject matter, psychological treatment, and formal organization. Freedberg’s characterization of Leonardo’s aim, “to effect a genuine reconciliation between the values of material and spiritual experience,” may be applied to High Renaissance classicism in general.

Although for a long time Leonardo painted in isolation, from about 1500 until 1520 the possibilities of the classical style were investigated thoroughly by a number of other artists (Michelangelo, Raphael, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, etc.) in Florence and Rome, especially in the vast decorative projects of the Vatican under Julius II and Leo X, and above all in Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and in Raphael’s Stanze and tapestry cartoons (now in London). In Venice an independent classicism displaying a greater concern with nature, atmosphere, and light was created by Giorgione. While the Venetian classical style was brought to maturity by Titian, who relied more on color to organize his painting than on line, as in Florence, the aims of Venetian classicism, for Freedberg, still are similar to those in central Italy: to achieve harmony among all the elements in the painting.

Freedberg sees the development of the classical style as a progressive increase of the “tension” among these elements—in particular between the rich and exact description of reality, on the one hand, and its transmutation into an idealized vision on the other. He describes Raphael’s Transfiguration (1517-1520) as showing the extreme limit of these tensions, revealing a breach or fault in the classical synthesis. The death of Raphael in 1520, a year which also saw the deaths of his two patrons, Pope Leo X and the banker Agostino Chigi, marks, in Freedberg’s view, the end of the High Renaissance in central Italy.

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Why did the classical synthesis break down? Freedberg mostly considers matters of style in answering this question. But we may interpret the almost complete extinction of classicism as a failure of the confidence in the unity between physical and spiritual reality that was at the heart of the humanistic culture of the first quarter of the century, a unity that expressed itself in the arts principally in the construction of three-dimensional space habitable by convincing although idealized figures. It was not only the body and the soul that seemed in harmony, but also religion and spirituality; even paganism and Christianity were felt to be reconcilablé.

After Raphael’s death, however, there arose a crisis which manifested itself first of all in the destruction of three-dimensional space, especially in Florentine painting—or in a straining of its possibilities and its verisimilitude that amounted to its destruction. In Pontormo’s or Rosso’s paintings of the early 1520s the figures are thrust against the surface of the picture. In the Sala di Costantino, mostly the work of Giulio Romano after the death of Raphael, the illusionist scheme of the decoration (with simulated statues and tapestries, etc.) is so complicated, and the receding perspective so abrupt, that we can see the surface as a pattern of rhythmic accents.

In Freedberg’s view this emphasis on the decoration of the surface of paintings was a crucial departure. By calling attention to the artifice of representation it prepared the way for the High Maniera of Vasari, Salviati, and Bronzino. And as Freedberg shows, the High Maniera, the utterly sophisticated art of central Italy in the middle of the century, a much more coherent style than earlier Mannerism, quickly conquered the whole of Italy. Only Venice, because of Titian’s immense authority, resisted it for a time, but eventually, with Tintoretto, it too surrendered to the Mannerist style.

By 1570, Freedberg concludes, the maniera of central Italy lost its vitality, at times taking the form of “Counter-maniera” (a new term coined by Freedberg), which replaced complexity and aestheticism with simplicity and piety in response to the Counter-Reformation. But the Counter-maniera, of which the Zuccharo brothers are the chief exponents, shares the artificiality of the maniera and is not to be confused with anti-Mannerist art or the Anti-maniera we see in Pulzone, for example (although the distinction is, indeed, not always easy to make). From this Anti-maniera, of course, came the true reform of Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio, with whom a new and transformed classicism was reborn.

Freedberg is careful to take account of variations in different regions, and his general scheme is an effective one to present the unprecedented production of sixteenth-century painting in a comprehensible order. Its main weakness is that it has no place for one of the greatest artists of the time, Correggio, who is classified by Freedberg as “proto-Baroque”—another way of saying that he does not really fit into the scheme. Even though Freedberg insists that Correggio could never be mistaken for a Baroque painter, he discusses him from a seventeenth-century point of view, as the Baroque artists would later see him, rather than within the context of the sixteenth century.

In fairness to Freedberg, it must be pointed out that this has become a traditional view of Correggio, because modern historians of Renaissance painting have not yet found a way to place him. Before the twentieth century he was simply considered one of the great canonic painters; but our view of the classical Renaissance has (with evident benefits) become more narrow and more sophisticated. I believe it would be preferable, however, to present Correggio’s work as an extension of classicism, as Freedberg has done for the late, so-called “impressionist” Titian.

II

What distinguishes twentieth-century views of sixteenth-century, painting, including Freedberg’s, is the important place given to Mannerism, even if what we understand by this name is controversial. Previously, from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, the Renaissance was conceived as a movement that reached its climax with the great classical generation of Raphael and Michelangelo (the High Renaissance) and then rapidly declined. “Mannerist” was a term used since the seventeenth century to condemn this late phase—a condemnation that as time passed was applied to more and more of the art of the sixteenth century. For the pre-Raphaelites and their spokesman Ruskin, even the later works of Raphael became decadent.

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Alois Riegl, a great Viennese art historian of the late nineteenth century, made possible a new understanding of the late Renaissance and, in fact, of all forms of art precisely by denying the validity of the term “decadence.” For him the art of any period or people should not be evaluated according to a fixed standard; instead, changes in style should be understood as revealing, within a general scheme of history, a change in the mental climate of the society that produced the art under discussion.2

This theory, with its elements of Hegelian idealism, provided a basis for rehabilitating Mannerism, but it would have remained ineffectual had it not coincided with a change in taste and sensibility that had powerful social, ethical, and spiritual echoes. In some aspects of sixteenth-century art that had previously been considered as aberrant, art historians—most prominently Walter Friedlaender and Max Dvorak—discovered features that were parallel to the avant-garde art of their own time. El Greco, whom Dvorak saw as the paragon of Mannerism, was hailed in 1912 on the first pages of Der Blaue Reiter, the expressionist manifesto edited by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Hugo von Tschudi, the museum director who daringly presented eight works of El Greco in an exhibition at the Munich Alte Pinakotek in 1911, was one of the principal supporters of the modern movement. Franz Marc wrote that “Cézanne and El Greco are related spirits,” and they both “stand in the closest connection with the flowering of our new ideas of art.” The new evaluation of Mannerism was part of the contemporary interest in all unclassical forms, from African art to the paintings of the Douanier Rousseau.

Historians no longer saw in the paintings of Pontormo, Rosso, Parmigianino, and El Greco the disintegration of Renaissance art but an independent style for which they kept, unfortunately perhaps, the very term, Mannerism, by which it had been condemned—precisely because its condemnation made it attractive. Max Dvorak saw in Mannerism the artistic expression of a spiritual trend. Walter Friedlaender, who restricted himself to the post-Raphaelesque years in central Italy, more guardedly defined Mannerism by its formal aspects—its distortion of anatomy, its emphasis of two-dimensional patterns, etc.—before attempting any interpretation. But for both, Mannerism constituted a successful challenge to the humanistic art of the High Renaissance.

This reassessment of the postclassical art of the sixteenth century quickly gained momentum. Under the influence of Surrealism, interest in Mannerism spread from its expression of spiritual values to the irrational itself. The Surrealist hunt for extravagant and bizarre themes as well as forms restored admiration to works produced during the sixteenth century throughout Europe. Mannerism threatened to proliferate indefinitely.

After World War II, in an attempt to reintroduce some order into our historical view of the late Renaissance, a new generation of scholars concentrated on the art between 1540-1560, the painting of Bronzino, Salviati, Vasari, and their followers. They no longer considered their work a watered-down version of Mannerism, as had Friedlaender, and they gave it semi-independent status under the name of maniera. The courtly art of the maniera, painted for a cultivated aristocratic elite, was in many ways antithetical to the powerfully expressive works of Pontormo and Rosso admired by the critics of 1920. If the center of gravity of Mannerism had now to be shifted from 1525 to the maniera of 1550, the whole notion had to be reconsidered.

The most thorough revision of the concept of Mannerism appears in John Shearman’s short book on the subject. Written in a spirit of pugnacious empiricism shared by many English scholars, it is almost a manifesto against much of the modern history of art I have been describing. Shearman’s ambition is to go back to the sources in order to reconstruct the past in the most accurate possible way. He wants to find in the sixteenth century itself not only the material of art history but the principles for interpreting that history.

The mid-sixteenth century was a period that was exceptionally articulate about its own critical and historical thinking; Vasari was its principal spokesman. In his and in other texts one can find a theory of art that crystallizes around the term maniera, which roughly means “style.” Vasari placed great emphasis on sophistication, elegance, grace, virtuosity. He and other writers worked out not simply an aesthetic theory, a definition of the beautiful, but a form of aestheticism, i.e., they placed aesthetic values above all others, or rather made them independent of other considerations. Historically, Vasari and his companions claimed to be the direct and complete heirs of the High Renaissance, and saw an unbroken continuity between the art of the first decades of the century and their own works. Their bella maniera was for them simply the quintessence of the art of the previous generations.

Shearman, however, assumes for the sixteenth century something that would be untenable for any period: that the contemporary theory gives a completely adequate and satisfying account of practice. He takes as an axiom that “every Mannerist work must exemplify the quality maniera,” or, in other words, represent the aestheticism I have mentioned. It must also exclude any qualities that are antithetical, like violent or intense expressiveness, powerful energy, or any kind of harshness. So Mannerism for Shearman includes a wide range of works by artists from Pierino del Vaga to Wtewael, covering most of the century, but excludes the early Pontormo and Rosso for their violence, Tintoretto as too energetic, and El Greco as suspiciously intense.

Shearman has done more valuable research on cinquecento painting than anyone else since World War II, but he has no coherent view of the sixteenth century. It is hard to imagine how the nonclassical works of art that he excludes from Mannerism would fit, except as oddities. But what concerns us here is not so much this difficulty as how little his Mannerism has to do with the style isolated and cherished by the historians contemporary with the expressionist movement of our century. If we accept Shearman’s view, then the violent and subversive expressions of Mannerism seem left out of history and consequently diminished in importance.

It is to be expected that Shearman would disapprove of militant historians like Dvorak who believed history had a direction and who revalued the despised fragments of the past that were sympathetic to their own view of the present. However, the rehabilitation of the maniera that Shearman and others have undertaken is equally militant, and it is also a definite step forward in the history of taste. It has brought to light many works that were disregarded and revealed qualities in them we had missed. Their high artificiality may now appear to us as deliberate and positive. We appreciate better the porcelain-like finish of Bronzino’s religious paintings with their underlying eroticism, or the ornamental elaboration of Salviati. And even Vasari occasionally triumphs by his extravagant and witty overstatements (as in the Sala dei Cento Ciorni, Cancelleria, Rome).

But to celebrate art that is entirely subservient to an established social rule—the art of courts at its most characteristic—is symptomatic of a conservative cast of mind, and curiously links the aestheticism of the maniera to comparable tendencies in the art of today and its criticism.

III

Freedberg’s own view of Mannerism in the Pelican book is complex and original. He agrees, as we have seen, with Friedlaender and those who followed him that there was a profound break between the classical and Mannerist generations. Nevertheless he believes that the High Renaissance had a decisive and pervading influence throughout the entire century; and he has at the same time profited from the recent celebration of the High Maniera.

Freedberg in fact has worked out an idiosyncratic way of characterizing painting which is as interesting as his conclusions about the sixteenth century. In his view, the course of art is determined by a few men who distinguish themselves by “invention,” which is for him an absolute value equivalent to what is usually called genius. Invention, however, always seems to be based on previous works and manifests itself as a way of dealing with specifically artistic problems, not of course in verbal theories, but in art itself. Hence, as I have already mentioned, Freedberg argues that Mannerism emerged from the inner tensions within classicism, and that it was from the achievement of Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo that Pontormo evolved a new style. As for the minor masters, those painters who do not “invent,” they appear in Freedberg’s work as feeble buffoons, aping an art that remains alien to them. They bring comic relief to a book otherwise on a consistently elevated tone; at the same time, they fulfill the survey function expected of the Pelican History of Art.

If the classical style is the privileged invention of a few great artists, the relation between individual artists and the style of a period must be reconsidered. Since Wölfflin, many critics have thought that the style of a period is like an artistic language used by artists, much as writers use the language of their time. For Freedberg, an artist works within a style (or “idiom,” as he often calls it), and yet paradoxically art is precisely the creation, transformation, and elaboration of style.3 Once a style of painting is adopted and used by artists, it becomes weakened and adulterated. Hence “invention” is the power to create style, a power that always distinguishes great or high art, a notion to which Freedberg is clearly attached.

What Freedberg mainly does in the Pelican History is to characterize and compare the different sixteenth-century styles. As he writes in his preface, “The most pressing business of the art historian is to deal with that which is essential and peculiar to art: its visual matter as it becomes, both in its own right and as an instrument, an agency of meaning” (emphasis added).

This statement is more outspoken than explicit. But clearly it must be understood as part of a distinct tradition of art criticism: the quest for the quality or qualities which set art apart from all other activities. Of course, the heroic days of searching for “that which is essential to art” are gone, the days when Roger Fry could deliver a lecture on a Crucifixion without ever mentioning Christ except as the “central mass of color.” Yet Freedberg does concentrate on purely visual matters such as color and line and on what might be called their abstract meaning in paintings.4 He is notorious for his lack of concern with iconography—with the interpretation of subject matter in the light of textual evidence and symbolism that such art historians as Warburg and Panofsky have practiced so brilliantly. But Freedberg is also very sensitive to certain aspects of representation, not only to spatial effects but to what he calls the “human content” of pictures, the figures as we see them before we apply iconographic knowledge to them.

One of my students recently described a Raphael Madonna as a “mother and her child.” “The circles around the heads,” she added, are “probably symbolic.” Her attitude is not dissimilar to Freedberg’s. To put it simply, what she was ignorant of, he has chosen largely to ignore. Both separate the human content of art from the religious.

For example, when Freedberg writes of Pontormo’s Deposition (Florence, Sta Felicita), he is not concerned with the religious subject, although the two angel-like figures who carry the dead Christ are such an odd feature in this painting that one may well wonder whether its subject is indeed a deposition. But he is preoccupied by the emotions in the picture:

The character of his [Pontormo’s] emotion, too, acquires new clarity…. There is no search, as in the Certosa, for disjunctive eccentricities of expression, nor are emotions pointedly assertive, as they were there. In the Deposition, there is a tight emotional consistency, which the actors differentiate within its unitary texture as if according to the precepts of the classical style. The power of feeling that was in the Certosa Passion is heightened by this concentration, and the sympathy elicited is more complete, because it is without distraction.

This discussion is carried on entirely in psychological terms which are applied mainly to the artist himself (“the character of his emotion”). Yet the emotions, since they are expressed by the figures, evidently have something to do with the subject of the picture, what Freedberg calls (when speaking of another Deposition) “the human and religious meaning that the theme traditionally bears.”

Naturally this emotional content largely depends on physical appearance and gestures, but it is also intimately related to the more purely formal aspects of painting. About Rosso’s Madonna and Saints, 1518 (Uffizi), Freedberg writes:

The color—assertive and now wilfully dissonant—consumes and replaces effects of plastic form. It finds a singular quality of beauty, poignant and bizarre, that partly redeems and partly reinforces that state of mind the actors illustrate.

The word “poignant,” often used by Freedberg, is ascribed here to the effect of color, and he uses it to link the formal characteristics of the painting, its abstract meaning, with its human subject.

But one wishes Freedberg were more explicit about how this human content is conveyed to the spectator. As it is, the reader feels at the mercy of personal impressions and of suggestive rather than descriptive prose, in spite of Freedberg’s eloquence and his use of a consistent terminology, which gives his work an appearance of rigor. This is unfortunate in view of the importance of psychological interpretation in his work. Clearly for him the iconographic meaning of a painting, something we perceive only after we take in the purely visual relations, is inferior in importance to the human content, which seems primary, and of direct importance to style.

IV

This comes out clearly in Freedberg’s treatment of the maniera, where he brilliantly analyzes the techniques used by the mid-sixteenth-century artists. He shows how the maniera painter stresses the physical presence of his work, for instance by a high finish or by creating contradictions in the fictional space of the painting that call attention to the painted surface. He points out how the artist “quotes” motifs from previous works of art in a way that cuts off the quotation from its original setting without making it part of a new one. The result is an emphasis, in maniera pictures, on the artifice of art and a break between the meaning or impact of the work and its subject matter. Thus Bronzino’s Pietà (Besançcon), a masterpiece of the maniera style, appears, to our eyes at least, as anything but dramatic or “poignant”: a cold but intense beauty overpowers every other consideration.5 For the maniera artist the only secure reality that seems to remain is art itself, and aesthetic force becomes his almost exclusive motive and pre-occupation.

Even the human content, the “psychic energy” of the figures, to which Freedberg is so attentive, he finds sacrificed in maniera painting. He strongly implies that, gifted as some of the maniera artists, such as Salviati, may be, they remain inferior to their predecessors because of the limits of the maniera style itself.

Although no aspect of art seems foreign to Freedberg, his effort to isolate what is particular to art restricts his attention roughly to two kinds of meaning: 1) the abstract meaning, which he discusses by describing the devices at work (for example, clarity of line, harmony or violence of color); 2) the “human content,” which we have found to be psychological. Both convey what is usually called the expressive meaning, the immediate sensuous and emotional effect of the formal organization, or of the figures, without the help of more or less conventional symbolic languages.

To restrict oneself to the expressive aspects of art, however, can be dangerous. It leads Freedberg to exaggerate the independence of aesthetic considerations, as we can see by considering one example, his treatment of the first-generation Mannerist Parmigianino.

He does not, of course, interpret Parmigianino in the light of the later maniera aesthetic, and he grants to the Vision of Saint Jerome (London, National Gallery) “a high spirituality in its very aestheticism.” But for him this still is a “private substitute” for devotion in a work that has “no overt religiosity.” Similarly, in writing about the famous Madonna of the Long Neck, he still seems to believe, as he did in his early monograph on the artist (1955), that the subject of the painting is a mere pretext for aesthetic experiment.

But if Parmigianino had been as indifferent to subject matter as Freedberg appears to be, it is unlikely that he would have produced this unprecedented version of the subject. The Virgin, tall and aristocratic, with an acute and sinuous grace, holds the child asleep on her lap with his arm hanging down in the traditional position of the dead Christ of a Pietà. In the foreground a great angel, surrounded by youthful figures, holds out a polished urn that should reflect the body of Christ. Vasari, who described the painting with care, emphasized that the urn instead reflected a cross. No such cross is visible today, and Freedberg believed that Vasari must have been mistaken. However, an early copy of the painting as well as an eighteenth-century engraving plainly show the cross, and it is now established that a complex and overtly mystical subject figures in the Madonna del collo lungo.6

Does the remarkable anatomical distortion that gives the picture its name have an iconographic justification (as Freedberg once suggested only to reject it immediately)7 or is it simply an experiment in grace, pure maniera, as he would have it? I do not suggest simply that Parmigianino lengthened the Virgin’s neck for symbolic reasons. In fact, a study of the preparatory drawings8 assures us that the composition as we know it was not the visual translation of an iconographic scheme provided in advance either by the artist or his patron. It evolved while Parmigianino worked. He moved gradually away from a straightforward symmetrical composition and a conventional treatment of the Madonna to the elaborate conceit and precarious equilibrium of the painting.

We can see from the unfinished background that Parmigianino’s formal and thematic investigations both continued for as long as he worked on this painting. He seems to have hesitated between his original plan for a colonnade in a rapidly receding perspective, and the single white column we now see—“the Column of the New Law” that is one of the most familiar Renaissance symbols for the Virgin. And this visual metaphor linking the Virgin’s neck to the column in the background corresponds by a remarkable symmetry to the one that links the urn to the body of Christ.

Freedberg was right to suppose that the length of the neck was primarily determined by considerations of style. But only when Parmigianino isolated and emphasized the column did the long neck become fully significant in the painting. The metaphorical relation of the neck to the column is an essential part of the visual poetry of the work. Moreover, the interplay between symbolism and visual form brings out the expressive content always latent in the style itself. The deformation of nature, the anatomical distortions in this painting reflect not only an aesthetic pursuit but also a contempt for material contingency. The extreme grace, even the nascent eroticism express a mystical urge.

V

There is no serious reason to believe that the handling of the themes in painting is any less essential or peculiar to art than the handling of paint, or that they are in the end separable activities. Freedberg’s isolation of the aspects of art which he considers specifically visual is really a fiction, a convenient instrument of analysis. Its drawbacks are evident and there is much to be gained by considering iconography as only one aspect of form in a general rhetoric of art.9 Still, the fiction Freedberg constructs is a useful one. By making a strong distinction between meaning and subject matter it does away with the insidious illusion, fostered by too many art historians, that iconography can deliver to us the meaning of a work of art.

Moreover the point of view from which Freedberg sees sixteenth-century painting finds a strong justification in the period itself. The idea of style as the vital force of an artistic language, central to Freedberg’s work, itself goes back to the Renaissance. Thanks to that idea, ways were found for art to pose its own problems without cutting itself off from other kinds of experience. For example, the rapid development of Raphael’s style and the unity of style in each of his large projects—the Vatican rooms he decorated and his series of tapestry cartoons—show how preoccupied he was with stylistic questions. Yet in these works we find no loss of human understanding or of Raphael’s extreme sensitivity to the religious, social, and political functions of art.

Conditions were not always so favorable in the sixteenth century as they were for Raphael. The efforts of the maniera artists to keep art in seclusion, largely separate from spiritual and social concerns, were pathological, clearly related to the precarious social and economic position of artists after the breakdown of the guild system which had previously protected them. The profusion of treatises on art that appears during the maniera years is a symptom of the artists’ concern with their uncertain status.

Nevertheless, these texts articulated ideas which were to remain useful and alive in one form or another long after the maniera was discarded. The notion of style in these works, their conception of a system of independent artistic values, has remained essential to the Western tradition of artistic thought. What Freedberg has done is to elaborate this heritage into a sophisticated modern criticism. By adhering to a conception of art linked to the Renaissance by a living tradition, he has been able to make the art of the sixteenth century immediately understandable to us without losing a sense of its distance from us in history.

This Issue

August 31, 1972