'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 employs a new approach to the art of sixteenth-century Europe by incorporating rhetoric and theory to enable a reinterpretation of elements of Mannerism as being grounded in sixteenth-century spirituality. Lynette M. F. Bosch examines the conceptual vocabulary found in sixteenth-century treatises on art from Giorgio Vasari to Federico Zuccari, which analyses how language and spirituality complement the visual styles of Mannerism. By exploring the way in which writers from Leone Ebreo to Gabriele Paleotti describe the interaction between art and spirituality, Bosch establishes a religious base for the language of art in sixteenth-century Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, religious studies, and religious history.