WHAT IS HIGH RENAISSANCE

The 'birth' of new interest in Classical Greco-Latin world, that artistic revolution of
the Early Renaissance matured to what is now known as the High Renaissance.
There has never been growth as lovely as that of painting in Florence and Rome, of
the end of 15th and early 16th centuries. High Renaissance in Italy is the climax of
Renaissance art, from 1500-1525. It is also considered as a sort of natural evolution
of Italian Humanism (Umanesimo.
It has been characterized by explosion of creative genius. Painting especially
reached its peak of technical competence, rich artistic imagination and heroic
composition. The main characteristics of High Renaissance painting are harmony
and balance in construction.
Italian High Renaissance artists achieved ideal of harmony and balance comparable
with the works of ancient Greece or Rome. Renaissance Classicism was a form of art
that removed the extraneous detail and showed the world as it was. Forms, colors
and proportions, light and shade effects, spatial harmony, composition, perspective,
anatomy - all are handled with total control and a level of accomplishment for which
there are no real precedents.
We find it in the works of the greatest artists ever known: the mighty Florentines,
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; the Umbrian, Raffaello Sanzio; along with the
great Venetian masters Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

HIGH RENAISSANCE ARTISTS

Giovanni Bellini (1430 - 1516)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
Michelangelo (1475 - 1564)
Raphael (1483 - 1520)
Tintoretto (1518 - 1594)
Titian (1477 - 1576)
Paolo Veronese (1528 - 1588)

WHAT IS MANNERISM
Mannerism is the usual English term for an approach to all the arts, particularly
painting but not exclusive to it, a reaction to the High Renaissance, emerging after
the Sack of Rome in 1527 shook Renaissance confidence, humanism and rationality
to their foundations, and even Religion had split apart.
Like "modernism", the term is one of the few style designations whose label was
self-applied; it comes from the Italian maniera, or "style," in the sense of an artist's
characteristic "touch" or recognizable "manner."
Mannerism was initially a contentious stylistic label among art historians when it
resurfaced before World War I, first used by German art historians like Heinrich W?
lfflin to categorize the seemingly uncategorizable art of the Italian 16th century, the
style that introduced the Renaissance to France in the Fontainebleau schools and to
Antwerp in quite another "manner", styles that were neither Renaissance nor
Baroque. Mannerism is not easily pigeonholed; it scarcely affected the popular arts,
and no definitions survived much examination, in the views of English art historians,
partly perhaps because they already had sufficient local categories: "Elizabethan
drama," "Jacobean architecture and furniture."
The framing of the engraved frontispiece to Mannerist artist Giorgio Vasari's Lives of
the Artists would be called "Jacobean" in an English-speaking context. In it,
Michelangelo's Medici tombs inspire the anti-architectural "architectural" features at
the top, the papery pierced frame, the satyr nudes at the base. In the vignette of
Florence at the base, papery or vellum-like material is cut and stretched and scolled
into a cartouche (cartoccia). The design is self-conscious, overcharged with rich,
artificially "natural" detail in physically improbable juxtapositions of jarring scale
changes, overwhelming as a mere frame: Mannerist.

Vasari's own opinions about the "art" of creating art come through in his
praise of fellow artists in the great book that lay behind this frontispiece: he
believed that excellence in painting demanded refinement, richness of invention
(invenzione), expressed through virtuoso technique (maniera), and wit and study
that appeared in the finished work, all criteria that emphasized the artist's intellect
and the patron's sensibility. The artist was now no longer just a craftsman member
of a local Gild of St Luke. Now he took his place at court with scholars, poets, and
humanists, in a climate that fostered an appreciation for elegance and complexity.

The coat-of-arms of Vasari's Medici patrons appear at the top of his portrait, quite as
if they were the artist's own.
Mannerism is usually set in opposition to High Renaissance conventions. It was not
that artists despaired of achieving the immediacy and balance of Raphael; it was
that such balance was no longer relevant or appropriate. Mannerism developed
among the pupils of two masters of the integrated classical moment, with Raphael's
assistant Giulio Romano and among the students of Andrea del Sarto, whose studio
produced the quintessentially Mannerist painters Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino,
and with whom Vasari apprenticed.
After the realistic depiction of the human form and the mastery of perspective
achieved in high Renaissance Classicism, some artists started to deliberately distort
proportions in disjointed, irrational space for emotional and artistic effect. There are
aspects of Mannerism in El Greco (illustration, left). In spite of the uniquely
individual quality that sets him apart from simple style designations, you can detect
Mannerism in El Greco's jarring "acid" color sense, his figures' elongated and
tortured anatomy, the irrational perspective and light of his breathless and crowded
composition, and obscure and troubling iconography.
In Italy mannerist centers were Rome, Florence and Mantua. Venetian painting, in its
separate "school" pursued a separate course, epitomized in the long career of
Titian.
MANNERISM ARTISTS
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 - 1593)
Correggio (1494 - 1534)
El Greco (1541 - 1614)