RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I^ZO-C. I6OO*
ledge and ever deeper appreciation of Antiquity, but artists of
weakened self-confidence, classicists where Bramante and Raphael
had been classics.
At this point a warning must be sounded against confusion
between the three terms classic, classical and classicist. The difference
between classic and classical has been pointed out on p. 26. If classic
is the term denoting that rare balance of conflicting forces which
marks the summit of any movement in art, and if classical is the term
for anything belonging to or derived from Antiquity, what then is
classicist ? A definition is far from easy. In our context it can be
arrived at only in a somewhat roundabout way.
Neither classic nor classicist are terms which signify historic styles
such as Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance. They coincide rather
with aesthetic attitudes. However, in so far as aesthetic attitudes as
a rule change with historic styles, the two sets of terms can often be
co-ordinated. In England the position until a relatively short time
ago was that the term Renaissance was used to cover die art from
the 15th right to the early ipth century. But there had been so many
fundamental changes of styles during these more than three hundred
years, that the term covering such a long period could not stand for
any distinct aesthetic characteristics. Thus, on the example of the
Continent, it was gradually divided up into Renaissance and Baroque,
the Baroque to cover the work of such artists as Bernini, Rembrandt,
Velasquez. However, since our knowledge of, and susceptibility to,
distinctions in aesthetic expression has grown considerably within
the last fifty years or so, it is becoming more and more patent that
Renaissance and Baroque do not really define the qualities of all art
of importance in the I5th, i6th and iyth centuries. The contrast
between Raphael and Bernini or Rembrandt is evident, but art of
the period between roughly 1520 or 1530 and 1600 or 1620 does not
fit into the categories of the Renaissance or the Baroque. So a new
name was introduced about twenty or twenty-five years ago:
Mannerism, a name which was not specially coined, but which in a
derogatory sense had already been used to characterise certain schools
of 16th-century painting. The name in its new sense is only now
becoming known in this country. It has much to recommend it. It
certainly helps to make one see the important differences between
art of the High Renaissance and art of the later i6th century.
If balance and harmony are the chief characteristics of the High
Renaissance, Mannerism is its very reverse; for it is an unbalanced,