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'Art', declared Vasari in Lives of the Artists, has been reborn and reached perfection in our time'. Indeed the roster of great names in painting of the Cinquecento, which only begins with those of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, appears to justify this grand claim. Professor Freedberg here discusses the individual painters and analyses the hallmarks of their work. He traces the classical style of the High Renaissance, the Mannerism that succeeded it, and the events, in North Italy especially, that resist stylistic categories. He has given order to this diversity, but at the same time has preserved the intense individuality of the works of art.

This book is an account of painting in Italy during the period of the High and the Late Renaissance, the period which included the most remarkable concentration of accomplishments in the artistic history of Italy. No other time and place can offer a roster like the Cinquecento: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, and Correggio are the exalted luminaries in the constellation, and around them there is company of the magnitude of Sarto, Rosso, Pontormo, Bronzino, Parmigianino, Lotto, Tintoretto, and Veronese, to mention only some. The diversity of achievement of the painters is as remarkable as its quality; probably no earlier period offers so complex a picture of self-conscious differences of artistic style, in which an ethical attitude is often a major factor within an aesthetic one. The author delineates the painters' individualities and characterizes their important works. At the same time, however, he relates these individual events to categories and patterns that appear to a more general view of Cinquecento art. In ten carefully interwoven chapters he discusses the history of the classical style of the High Renaissance in the earlier decades of the century, the rise, spread, and eventual adulteration of the Mannerist style, and the events, in Venice and North Italy especially, that resist generalization and help make up the whole rich historical texture that is called the Late Renaissance. -- Inside jacket flap.