RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. l&O-C. 1606

seems to me no expression of struggle anywhere, though there is
conscious discordance all the way through. This austere animosity
against the happy and harmonious we have seen already, although
hidden under a polished formalism, in Giulio Romano. What
Michelangelo's Laurenziana reveals is indeed Mannerism in its most
sublime architectural form and not Baroque—a world of frustration
much more tragic than the Baroque world of struggles between
mind and matter. In Michelangelo's architecture every force seems
paralysed. The load does not weigh, the support does not carry,
natural reactions play no part—a highly artificial system upheld by
the severest discipline.1

In its spatial treatment the Laurenziana is just as novel and
characteristic. Michelangelo has exchanged the balanced proportions
of Renaissance rooms for an anteroom as tall and narrow as the
shaft of a pit, and a library proper, reached by a staircase, as long and
narrow as a corridor. They both force us, even against our wills, to
follow their pull, upward first and then forward. This tendency to
enforce movement through space within rigid boundaries is the
chief spatial quality of Mannerism. It is well enough known in
painting, for instance in Correggio's late Madonnas, or Tintoretto's
Last Suppers with the figure of Christ at the far, far end. The most
moving of all examples is Tintoretto's painting of the Finding of the
Body of St. Mark (Brera, Milan, c. 1565). Nowhere else is Mannerist
space so irresistible. In architecture this magic suction effect is intro-
duced into Giulio Romano's extremely severe Cathedral at Mantua
with its double aisles, the inner one with tunnel-vaults, the outer one
and the nave flat. The uninterrupted rhythm of its monotonous
columns is as irresistible as that of an Early Christian basilica. In
secular architecture its most familiar and easily accessible example is
no doubt Vasari's Uffizi Palace in Florence (pi. LX). It was begun in
1560 to house Grand Ducal offices. It consists of two tall wings along
a long narrow courtyard. The formal elements are familiar to us: lack
of a clear gradation of stories, uniformity coupled with heretical detail,
long, elegant and fragile brackets below double pilasters which are no
pilasters at all, and so on. What must be emphasised is the finishing

1 But to Jacob Burckhardt, die Swiss historian of the ipth century and the dis-
coverer of the Renaissance in the sense in which we understand the style to-day,
the anteroom of the Laurenziana is but "an incomprehensible joke of the great
master" (Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, yth edition, 1924, p. 208; written in
1867).

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