Uncle John's Band: Renaissance Aftermaths & Refocusing the Arts of the West

Back to the arts of the West with the implications of the Renaissance. For the immediate style known as Mannerism and the longer-term inversion of art in modernity.

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above.

Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularly and it will be up there.

Pontormo, The Deposition from the Cross, 1525-1528, oil on panel, Santa Felicità, Florence

Note - This post features a fair amount of artistic nudity. It doesn't wallow in it, but it is necessary to make some points & trace the history. Just a heads up for readers who find such things offensive.

Time to restore a little focus to the Arts of the West posts because we’ve lost the thread a little. Always a risk with the Band’s large topics, but most of those will have a built-in end point. Our other themes at the moment are Christopher Langan’s CTMU and the House of Lies. Of the two, the CTMU is more of a closed subject because the House of Lies describes the whole inverted socio-cultural cesspool that is the modern beast system. But they both have natural places to wrap up – even the House of Lies has a finite amount of structure to cover before it turns into disconnected reflections.

The arts of the West is different. The scope of the material is almost endless. Centuries of creations spanning numerous national schools and stylistic conventions and running through mainstreams and backwaters alike. Than there are all the influences from outside the main Western streams. There’s no way to try and cover all of that, even in a huge series of blog posts. Simple ‘introduction to art” textbooks are massive tomes. And they just cover the high points.

These are two pages from the contents of a 643 page book called A History of Western Art. It follows the standard timeline and only hits the standard highlights and it still a huge textbook-format tome. We see no point in trying to replicate something like this. The amount of prep time we would need is enough to rule it out.

So the point can’t be to “cover the arts of the West”. Not that we set out to, but recent posts have fallen into something closer to a historical summary. It's not hard to see why. Art develops into an endless network of tangents that are fascinating. And it was easy to get sucked into the monster creators of the Renaissance. They represent limits and limitations of the human creative spirit. But in the aftermath, the fragmentation intensifies. Traditions proliferate. And we need to stay on track.

The point of the Arts of the West posts was to figure out how the preeminent mechanism for realizing truth and beauty in every subsection of Western culture became a spray of humiliating garbage.

Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019 Art Basel Miami Beach

It's a banana duct taped to a wall. For 6 figures with the "certificate of authenticity".

Money laundering always springs to mind. But the spasms of a dying culture is also sufficient explanation. Both can apply at the same time.

It also became obvious that developments in art reflect - and comment on - developments in the culture that created it. The superhuman beauty of a Michelangelo or Raphael reflects the optimistic Renaissance dream of human spiritual perfectability. Just as lack-witted degenerates of the financialized beast economy spraying debt-backed fiat currency at a piece of fruit is an apt metaphor for our House of Lies era. The degeneration of art is not beat-for-beat isomorphic with the degeneration of culture, but they do correlate. And the arts of the West posts open unique windows into the creation of now-colapsing beast system that replaced the West.

All this means our best way to deal with art in the fragmenting post-Renaissance West is not to try and cover it all. Target the milestones on the road to postmodernism in art and culture instead. We can stick to the official timeline too, because we're dealing with "art" as it was officially defined. The official timeline is the timeline of officially defined art. In fact, art needed to be cut off from other forms of cultural production to be centralized and inverted in modernity. Into Art!

Just keep in mind that we aren't saying the official narrative has any actual merit. Not after the modernist inversion, anyhow.

Clyde Aspevig, Absoroka Beartooth Wilderness, 21st century, private

We can find works of beauty throughout the history of the West. After the modern inversion even. Some very traditional.

Rod Penner, Farmers Co-op Gin Anson, TX, 2012, acrylic on canvas

Others stylistically original.

The acrylic colors really add to the uncanny realism. Almost familiarity. There's a form of truth here.

But appealing paintings like these don't say much about the inverted Art! that infests the museums, books, and other organs of official culture. That's what we need to look at.

A word on definitions.

The Band uses the formula of Logos + Techne to define art. We often shorten it to L+T.

The idea is that art is a culturally-specific material manifestation of some aspect of truth. Beauty enters the picture through its relation to the True. We don't want to make every post about the ontological hierarchy, but absolute abstract reality-aligned virtues like the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are where the utter transcendence of God becomes logically comprehensible to Fallen limited human minds.

L+T works well enough theoretically as a guideline to what art ought to be. But here’s the problem. Only the techne part – the physical work – is material. This is the same representation issue that we’ve brought up a number of times as semiotic filtering. The obvious but often ignored fact that any idea or expression is only expressible or communicable via representations of it. Other than just showing someone something without comment. Any words, symbols, pictures, etc. are themselves "things" that are not the same thing as what they are intended to represent.

This is the difference between logos in human action and in external reality. We can choose to eschew logos in words and actions. We can live on false terms, at least for a while. We can lie.

Natural phenomena lack the the ability to prevaricate. Water always flows downhill and the dawn is predictable to the second. Deceit - like wanton cruelty - seems to be a result of Fallen human consciousness.

The same applies to our representations. For example, imagine the advertising world if words and images had to correspond as closely as possible to the thing being represented...

Semiotics are just signs and sign systems that mean whatever we use them to express. They can declare anything, true or false. It’s why perceptual stability - the consistent appearance of the external world - blows out the basic postmodern premise that reality is a discursive construct. Discursive constructs can say whatever we want them to. Falling off a balcony, on the other hand, has a given outcome, regardless of what we say. The ability of representation to lie is why we need moral reasoning to weigh assertions on their merits and sniff out deceptions.

And it’s also why art could be warped into its inverse.

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [four panel], 1951, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings were a series of groups of plain white canvases from 1951. The groups are distinguished by how many panels they have. "Composer" John Cage said they're "made up of “hypersensitive screens” which react to environmental changes in the room so as to “lead to the possibility of pure experience."

They're white canvases.

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [three panel], 1951, oil on canvas, SFMOMA

Click the link for a long essay on this one. It's a good look at how Art! spins narrative around nonsense. The questions to ask are how unhealthy must a culture be for this to happen? There's plenty of specific blame to go around, but it's the overall socio-cultural prognosis that is so damning.

If we think of the artwork as a representational object, commitment to logos is only as truthful as those making it. We can say the logos has to be present to truly be a work of art, but there is nothing preventing someone from presenting anything and calling it art if they want to. They may be lying, but if the idiot masses nod along with them, it is – as far as “society” is concerned – art.

A few steps are needed to create a situation where inverted Art! takes the place traditionally occupied by art. Some of these have already been identified in the historic posts up to this point on the late Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Note - the Arts of the West posts have their own sub-category at the top.

Antonio Pisano (Pisanello), Madonna with Child or Madonna of the Quail, 1420. Tempera on wood. Verona, Museo di Castelvecchio

Side note – the cultural inversion of the West unfolded over a long period of time. Things accelerated with the Enlightenment, but the roots run much deeper. The emergence of alien aristocracies separated from the people they rule over was well established by the end of the Middle Ages. Ditto the intrusion of secular and sacred authorities into each other’s spheres.

Art becomes a vehicle for an international aristocratic culture – the International Gothic. It’s beautiful, but a change from the more organic past.

A couple of things.

The Band defines the West as standing on three pillars – Christianity, the Greco-Roman intellectual tradition, and organic national European cultures. But this is also an ideal. And a countervailing subversive force has been present from the beginning. From Eden, really, but we’re sticking to the West. Call it Empire – not original, but accurate enough.

In Western terms, this is embodied by the image and memory of the Roman imperium. A political superstructure that subordinates nations to centralized control. And ideally dissolution. After the Western Roman Empire fell, medieval rejuvenation came from the Frankish empires – the Merovingian and especially Carolingian dynasties. Charlemagne constructed an imperial European culture out of the legacy of Rome – directly and through its offshoots. So not Roman revival, but a new image of empire that explicitly references the classical prototype. The Carolingian Empire didn’t make it out of the 9th century, but the dream of centralized control lives on. It’s one of the roots of globalism today.

The other thing is that cultural inversion is gradual – especially when the cultures were forged in the reality-facing demands of warfare and collapse and steered by a Christian ethos. There were individual horrors and tyrants of course, but the substructure was historically consistent in official culture.

Just as entropy takes social and moral forms, momentum does as well. The West had an implicit morality based on its formation that maintained standards even as things started to slip. The idea that good art was appealing to look at – even when the “truth” it was promoting was being undermined – continued through the 19th century at least.

John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, oil on canvas, Manchester Art Gallery

It goes beyond the appeal of the forms and setting. There's the implicit understanding that classical myth is part of the mental world of a reasonably educated Westerner. The slippage comes from the deliberate eroticism, though it's countered by the unreal air.

It’s why we have to go back to the distant past to pick up the threads at their inception.

The next development after the aristocratic International Gothic is the idea of “art” as having its own distinct identity. Something set apart from other pictures and representations. Defining something needs… definitions, and there is power in being the one to set them. In the case of art, the people determining what this distinct cultural area is.

This is where the representation-reality flip really comes in.

Auguste Vinchon, Louis-Philippe and the Royal Family, visiting the Galeries Historiques in the Musee de Versailles, 1848, oil on canvas, private collection

Think of the term “art” as referring to an area of human visual expression connected to the highest levels of skill and most important values. It represents what a culture sees as its greatest intangibles – aesthetically and ideologically.

Of course, as a human activity, someone has to do it and others have to support them. You need artists and clients or customer. And the more value a culture puts on art, the more it is likely to cultivate skilled makers and their supporters.

Henri Adrien Tanoux, The Next Commission, 1898, oil on canvas, private collection

Ideally this develops organically. If not through some kind of cultural osmosis, at least through the alchemy of artistic creativity and reward.

Artists come up with ways to express values or create beauty and are rewarded accordingly. Of course, this is based on the premise that the artists contribute value to the culture they belong to. Either the elite client class or as a whole.

A portrait should resemble or flatter the subject. Aggrandizement of a leader needs to be grand. A tribute to the divine needs to be worthy. A moral standard should exemplify the morals and appeal to the audience. A beautiful diversion needs to be beautiful. And so on.

Not every culture defined a subset of representations that they designated as “art” and the ones that did are all slightly different in concept. In the West it developed gradually and organically out of post-classical culture adapted to Christianized Germanic and Celtic society north of the Alps. And to whatever coalesced in medieval Italy to the south. With bits of other external influences salted in here and there. Art – as opposed to representation – wasn’t labeled as such until into the Renaissance, although there is clearly a hierarchy of prestige and quality.

The glorious windows and skillful vaulting in the early 13th century north transept of Chartres cathedral doesn't just happen without the capacity to identify and enlist the top artists and designers.

Just like Giotto doesn't emerge as a highly sought after painter of frescos and panels if he wasn't considered better than his peers.

Giotto, Arena Chapel frescos with the Last Judgment, around 1305, Padua

In a general way, that’s where the Arts of the West come from – refined techne with cultural currency so the finest practitioners attract the highest bidders for their services. The best masons and glazers work on the most prestigious cathedral projects and the best manuscript painters on elite codices. This seems obvious, but it's who's choosing that's important. The elite aristocratic client class appears to have selected the elite artists.

Jean Bondol, Jean de Vaudetar presents his gift of a book to Charles V of France from the Bible historiale of Jean de Vaudetar, 1371-2, The Hague, Museum of the Book Ms 10 B23 F2r

The appearance of court artists like Bondol in the Middle Ages shows the connection between aristocratic clients and top creators. This relation goes back at least to the Carolingian era, when Charlemagne set up imperial workshops and scriptoria to promote refined culture.

A court artist was an employee of the court - given housing and salary for consistent availability. Like being on retainer but with exclusivity. This meant permission was needed to take other jobs. But the prestige and security outweighed some constraints.

The big change that comes in the Renaissance is the emergence of the critic-theorist. The "expert" who purports to define art based on their take on contemporary values. The old philosophical bait and switch, where a mouthpiece pretends some sort of contingencies are eternal for personal gain. The first ones like the famous Alberti and Vasari were responding to legitimate new ideas being created around them. Click for a post on the former's 15th-century Florentine Renaissance context and the latter's 16th-century High Renaissance.

But it's the pattern that matters. The premise that art is defined by [writing a text] changes the old client-artist relation. And this opens the way to a new "modern" concept of art. The change looks like this -

The critic-theorist observes what artists were doing and distills it into abstract formulas

becomes

The critic-theorist sets down rules that determine what the art must be before it is made

The rules are not something general, like “beautiful”, “truthful” but specifics – like type of subjects, how they should look, what templates to use – with an entire vocabulary of binding terms.

Bronzino, The Adoration of the Brazen Serpent, 1540-1545, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

The mannerist art that appears in the aftermath of the High Renaissance is a conscious exercise in applying and exaggerating critical ideas. Raphael's grace and Michelangelo's complex bodies - exaggerated. But the realism, clarity, and harmony are gone.

There's something proto-modern about the self-conscious artiness of Mannerism. Even the idea of the canon of accepted masters to develop new works from. Renaissance art used ancient culture in a similar way, but that's different from defining a recent and recursive artistic tradition. This doesn't happen without critic-theorists setting up the values, naming the names, and defining the terms.

Simplify the change -

We observe what you like

becomes

We dictate what you like

Consider how often that's played out...

Now we have that classic reality-representation inversion set up only applied to art as a whole. The concept of "art" formed as a way of classifying and defining organic cultural production. It is a socio-cultural representation of socio-cultural values and preferences. But it inverts the priority order when it goes from describing cultural production to pre-determining what it should be. The old bottom-up inverted into the top-down. Arbitrary theoretical parameters that become the ends in themselves or art, with socio-cultural values and expectations intended to follow the dicta.

And universal rules can separate art from the organic cultures where it is produced. The top-down values of Mannerism carry an Italian theoretical idea of art into Northern Europe. Compare this painting to the "Northern Renaissance" art from the last few posts.

Abraham Bloemaert, Apollo and Diana Punishing Niobe by Killing her Children, 1591, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Denmark

Complicated nude bodies exaggerating High Renaissance types, odd, disharmonious proportions and lighting. There's no connection to local culture or tradition - even the subject is a psychotic mash-up of sexualized violence from classical antiquity. The skill is obviously there. The art theory that first emerged in the Renaissance assumed artistic quality was based on mastery of techne. But there's nothing implicit in the top-down system of critical determination that compels it to be...

Journalist Andrew Breitbart famously observed that culture is downstream from politics. Recent history has complicated this by making it obvious "the people" choose neither the politicians nor the policies that rule them. It is true that the advanced House of Lies that we live in doesn't get this far without a de-moralized secularist culture that lacks any capacity for coherent moral judgment. The refusal to recognize the reality of evil has left modern society defenseless against the satanic beast system to a historically unprecedented degree. But "culture" isn't organic any more either. It's centralized and projected top-down by inverted narrative engineers [click for a post]. And this starts with defining the arts as distinct things under centralized critical-theoretical control. The change looks like this...

Remember, it's a gradual process. First the presumption of the fake centralized system in lieu of - but not in opposition to the values of - organic cultural expression. Once that's set up, it can be guided wherever those who call the shots want it to go. That is, whoever has the money. Art is elite activity. Who are the elites, and who do they empower to make the decisions?

Jean Garnier, Louis XIV, the protector of Arts and Sciences. Allegory of 1672, 1670-1672, oil on canvas, Palace of Versailles

Louis XIV was the first to try and centralize art and culture under critical-theoretical bodies that he controlled. The French Academy was a model for later royal academies. But his concept of art involved things like beauty and skill.

1994 Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of the Rockefeller collection and one of the pearls shown therein.

When the funding elites are beast system-founding plutocrats, beauty and skill are in short supply. David was former Chairman of the Board of Trustees and grandson of one of the museum's founders. According to the MOMA's own history site, "in the late 1920s, three progressive and influential patrons of the arts, Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, perceived a need to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums".

The elite shape politics long-term by shaping culture with critical-theoretical ideology. Whether or not this conforms to L+T becomes personal choice and "art" becomes what their ideology desires.

It's in the aftermath of the Renaissance where the divide between the new theoretical concept of art and more traditional understanding really comes into view. Because it overlaps with major socio-cultural changes - splitting Christendom in the Reformation and the not-unrelated rise of the state as power center. "Art" as developing thing in itself takes place as the demand for directed polemical elite rhetoric is intensifying. First the Church sets new patterns and expectations. Then these get adapted and coopted by the secular elites of the "Age of Absolutism". And ultimately, art becomes official ideology separated from logos. A discrete thing with arbitrary boundaries for new elites to jack and turn against the old order.

Joseph Werner, Allegory of Louis XIV as Apollo on the Chariot of the Sun, 1664, Versailles

Louis XIV is instrumental in secular monarchy replacing the Church as the central focus in art. This painting uses ancient symbolism like a Renaissance humanist work with the emotion and supernaturalism of the Catholic Baroque. But all to aggrandize a king that didn't live up to classical ideals or reflect the will of God. Religious emotionalism was a form of rhetoric that tried to simulate the glory and majesty of the divine. That is, real metaphysical status. This is using similar methods but for a subject whose metaphysical claims are false. Hollow, bombastic rhetoric that pretends the flawed beneficiary of a political system is something more.

Louis isn't divine. And fake statements to the contrary just cut art off from logos and turn it into political propaganda. To be reviled and inverted when the narrative engineers change.

The the thing about the Ontological Hierarchy is that it's connected. Hierarchies always are. The Logos connects truth as expressed on different levels of reality to the absolute Truth that is by definition the nature of ultimate reality. The nature of God as we can conceptualize it. Making the Logos at the highest level synonymous with the divine will in Creation - Jesus as the Word as described by John. But the Ontological Hierarchy only observes divine, abstract, and material working together in harmony. It doesn't govern what we do in the moment. Remember, humans can choose to lie and fallen perception can deceive. At least in the short term.

This makes art is structurally similar to morality. Both are attempts to apply absolute standards - the True - to subjective material experience.

Here's the full Ontological Hierarchy graphic. Each level of reality has an epistemological mode that it is known by in green and a complementary deontological nature in purple. Ultimate reality provides Truth, Beauty, and especially Goodness as foundational standards as we can conceive them. Material reality confronts us with changing and often complex circumstances. Moral reasoning lets us apply the one to the other. It's a bridge between subjectivity and God. Art - as L+T - is a similar type of bridge in visual representation. Like a moral code, art can take different superficial forms to adapt to different cultural contexts. But the foundation in truth is objective and consistent.

Now consider what happens when that objective foundation that the subjective form has to express is cut off. All that's left is the subjective. And moral entropy ensures that that inevitably becomes whatever serves the interests of who's pulling the strings.

Art doesn't have to be overtly religious in subject matter. But it does have to convey truth through techne on some level. And the beauty of the Ontological Hierarchy is that it makes it apparent at a glance that any form of objective truth is an extension of God's will in Creation. That is, the same subject that defines legitimate religion, whether the artwork is explicitly religious or not. Truth is true at any level because it all stems from the ultimate foundation in Logos.

But as we noted, the nature of Fallen man is that we can choose against Logos, in a way that a falling rock cannot. The need for moral reasoning to live in Truth indicates that the alternative is possible. The long-term consequences may be unavoidable, but it is possible for a while. Just look at the House of Lies that modern culture has become. In the same way, pictures can be made that don't express logos with techne. As past posts have shown, they can be skillful and alluring. But cut off from the objective source, the standards die. Because the very ideas of goodness, beauty, and truth are extensions of higher ontology. Of Being. Of God. Extending down into Creation.

Francesco Melzi, after a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Leda and the Swan, between 1508 to 1515, Uffizi, Florence

It can already be seen in the reintroduction of ancient pagan culture in the Renaissance. This copy of a lost Leonardo depicts one of the "loves of the gods" - stories from Ovid and other sources with very different moral tones from Christianity.

In this one, Zeus-Jupiter takes the form of a swan to have sex and father children with Leda. So an excuse for voyeristic nudity with overtones of bestiality with no real purpose other than lasciviousness. But because it's "ancient", it's acceptable as "art". The point is what happens when fake standards are added to or replace the actual deontology of the Ontological Hierarchy. It moves art away from expressing logos - other than the truth of that sexual deviance is depressingly popular with a lot of people - because people find it erotic.

Andrea del Brescianino, Leda and the Swan, 1520s, oil on panel, private collection

Leonardo and his circle were not alone.

Copy after a lost painting by Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan, 1535-60, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

Michelangelo's lost version was the most overtly coital. Consider how this becomes an acceptable subject for establishment artists. The techne is still there, but art as a humanistic discipline becomes untethered from Logos.

Without acceptance of objective truth that Logos carries with it, art suffers the same fate as modern "morality". It's not that it's impossible to produce good art. It's that there is no external reason to do so. As long as the gatekeepers have standards, the art will too. But we live in a Fallen world in a society that has slowly morphed into a comprehensive House of Lies. Where active and passive evil collaborate to undo expressions of Logos in Creation. Actively oppose the good and true that artistic beauty is built on.

Note how auto-idolators and satan-huffers always blather about "not needing God to be good", etc. Note also how "good" is never satisfactorily defined. "Do no harm" is a nice sentiment, but a bedrock principle can't be defined as a negation of an undefined identity. It just kicks the need for a definition to "harm". And that presumes a person of good will - already an assumption - can ascertain what will be harmful. And to whom. The other popular canard is some sort of common weal - like in utilitarianism or the Kantian categorical imperative. Whatever is most beneficial or societally terminal if extrapolated to everyone. Tautologically defining the good as [that what does the most good]. That is, more forecasting with undefined outcomes or vague projection. And no check on the slippery slopes of moral entropy.

Conversely...

Objective morality applies objective principles that are unchanging and external to human whim and circumstance.

We know the alternative. It's pure vanity. The satanic inversion of pretending contingent desires determine the preexisting nature of reality.

And it's why the same cycle of errors keeps perpetuating. The Fallen nature of man insures immoral and auto-idolatrous drives and the sophistic faux-moralizing to "justify" them. Objective morality tries to conform to “the nature of” God - the ultimate ontological foundations of all that is - in terms we can access. This is what makes Logos essential as the thread that links the levels of reality together.

Logos as the Band perceives it expresses what is true on whatever level of reality we're considering. It's why it - and we - start with ultimate reality as the objective ontological foundation Creation as we can perceive it. Biblical morality is then simply a textual expression of the nature of ultimate reality in terms that we can grasp and process. We can personify this ultimate reality as "God's Will", but it exceeds what we can personalize. It is the foundational and teleological orientation of all we can know. The Logos that "originates" as divine hypostasis at the ultimate reality level can be apprehended by human minds logically as truth, natural order, real beauty, and, of course, good. Applying this in our Fallen material existence is a bit more complicated because we live in an entropic state where lies are possible. Hence moral choice.

Take this gibberish.

Empathy is simply the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It is literally irrelevant to truth or falsehood. There is no mechanism to distinguish between conflicting feelings. Other than whatever the empath prefers. Which, when we think about it, is being your own moral arbiter. Relativism. Or, do what thou wilt.

We were mistaken. It's not gibberish. It's satanic.

Giving someone a hand when they've slipped on a hike is fine. Protecting your culture and community from invasion and dispossession requires a more substantial metric. The more you think about it the more ridiculous this is. But then again, the House of Lies is built by the evil for the stupid.

Morality is based in truth across the levels of reality. We judge actions by the fruits - the material outcomes - not how the doer felt. Fairness and consistency require applications of logic, not how the thinker felt. And standards of right or wrong are expressions of the fundamental nature of ultimate reality - the ontological foundation of all that follows. Not how someone felt. And the thing that ties ultimate reality, logic, and material fact together is logos. Or Logos.

Rejecting Logos is rejecting Truth no matter how much we bleat about downstream scientific fact and objectivity. It's still possible to speak factual truths, but there's no foundation to fix the moral value of them. And no reason to prioritize them over lies that make us feel better or advance out interests.

Note how prophets of "secular" morality invariably describe cultural Christianity - only without the unwanted requirements. And then pretend that this is a "natural" orientation for people. It isn't. It's the vanity of pretending a feeble skinsuit facsimile can strip objective reality of it's essence and still somehow have ontological weight. But without external Truth to anchor individual choice, there's nothing to compel taming desire. And without the fixed standard, moral entropy takes over and things decline. Gradually then quickly.

Art is the same way.

Take the nude as one example of the parallel between this morality aside and art. Nudes as a subject took off in the Renaissance as a way to use myth as a fig leaf for erotica. This was only possible because humanism had introduced an alien pagan ethos as a morally acceptable perspective. To be clear, we aren't addressing whether the beauty of the human form should be depicted. We're looking at how abandoning logos in art by introducing new "secular" moralities eventually inverts the whole system.

We defined art as Logos plus techne - the logos being the abstract part and the techne being the material execution. But Logos is the chain of truth that also defines coherent morality. And that means objective value judgments. There's always going to be a subjective component to personal preference, but the objective anchor is what's needed for consistency over time. The only way to resist moral entropy and degeneration in a Fallen world. Techne is skilled making, but "skill" is a judged standard. Without the abstract Logos component, there is no intrinsic value in artistic skill. They have no more purchase than canons of Logos-less beauty. This becomes a problem when Logos-less shells take over the centralized theoretical activity that art becomes.

It's easier to show than tell.

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, around 1485, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Botticelli's famous Venus came out of the aristocratic Florentine humanist environment. The subject is classical and the post comes from Roman sculpture. The overt display of nudity replaces Logos-based beauty with visual allure [click for a post].

Titian, Venus Of Urbino, 1538, Uffizi Gallery

It's the aristocratic culture of Renaissance Venice - with their sensuous oil painting and rich powerful families - where the "mythological" nude moves into erotica.

Alessandro Allori, Venus and Cupid, around 1570, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

By the end of the 16th century, erotic Venuses are all over Italy. Allori is a Florentine Mannerist and his stylized painting lacks narrative coherence or connection between figures and setting. It's pure sexualized display of a woman who fits the beauty canons of the time.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Birth of Venus, around 1753-1755, Musée Grobet-Labadié

This carries through centuries of academic art. Here's Venus and company as an eroticized display of the Rococo canon of female allure.

Théodore Chassériau, Venus Anadyomene or Venus of the Sea, 1838, Louvre Museum

This carries to the end of the academic era in the 19th century. The Venus Anadyomene type is the marine Venus - Venus posed on the sea shore. Note how Chassériau anticipates erotic photography by posing the fighre in a way that makes little narrative sense but displays her form in the most alluring way.

We could continue, but the point isn't to show Venus paintings. It's to show the consistent, high-level techne even as the moral aspect of Logos is jettisoned. All these paintings are done with a very high level of skill.

The Venuses span centuries with consistent application of techne to alluring eroticized forms. There is an element of truth - the truth of human appeal there - and there is traditional beauty in form and color. But there's no higher Logos. No higher Truth. The beauty is connected to carnal allure. Click for a post that deals with beauty and allure. And this is possible because there is no adherence to objective higher standards to check it. L+T becomes a vehicle for titillation. That is [not-Logos]. And if there is no requirement to ground art in Logos, there's nothing to stop it from sliding into moral entropy. There's just momentum and cultural preference.

And if there's no requirement for Logos, why do we have to adhere to techne?

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Manet's painting is one of the most important pieces in the modern Art! beast narrative. Because it strips veneers - there's no pretense that the prostitute is "Venus" and the idealized beauty is gone. It's flat and ugly compared to the above.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Woman with Seashell, 1885, private collection

The late 19th-century transition to modernism is a weird time. The old standards were replaced and inverted by Impressionism and post-Impressionism respectively. But idealized academic realism carried on until the end of the century.

Bouguereau was the last great master of the academic tradition and his traditional techne is incredible. His figure is a stunning example of eroticized female allure by the beauty standards of his time. But note the absence of the old mythological fig leaf cover. It's not a Venus Anadyomene despite being by the sea. It's a last gasp of Logos-less techne for it's own sake.

What Bouguereau shows is how circumstantial and contingent material preference is. It can pretend to be an expression of Logos so long as people accept it as such. But once opinions change, the old standards are hung out to dry. The lack of objective foundation becomes painfully obvious. There never was any Logos in the pedestalizing of antiquity that gave the Venus its fake credibility. Just naked pretty girls to excite rich clients. And knocking antiquity off the pedestal made it painfully obvious.

But defenestrating antiquity was only part of the transition to modernity. The dyscivic part was the attack on beauty that became the rejection of meaningful representation at all. The rejection of Logos crossing a rejection of techne. Because the Logos-less took over and inverted art.

Paul Cézanne, Women Bathing, 1900, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Modernist theorists have spilled endless ink fluffing the importance of Cezanne. Art as color patches, with representation blurred and flattened and allure replaced with misshapen ugliness. Without Logos there's only the gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers were satanic culture destroyers.

Pablo Piccaso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art

One of the most important paintings of all time according to the beast narrative. The final replacement of the Renaissance illusion of space with flat fragmented forms and non-western masks. And of course they're supposed to be prostitutes.

Once Art! was coopted, the inversion followed really quickly. And it couldn't happen without the centralizing and critical dominance that started in the Renaissance.

So that's the same pattern in morality and art. And they stem from the same core problem. It's easy to see when we put some of our commonly-used graphics together. Consider...

The Ontological Hierarchy graphic with the relevant deontology is very familiar to readers. We're focusing on the deontological part in purple on the right.

Ultimate reality anchors the objective foundations we've been writing on. Material reality - the Fallen, entropic human world we live in - presents us with situations requiring moral judgments. Judgments guided by those objective foundations. Proper moral reasoning is the application of the foundational principles to the situations. It's an abstract process that could have just been called "morality". The abstract application of ultimate principles to material circumstance.

Now take art. The Logos component refers to truth, and the True that anchors morality in the Ontological Hierarchy derives from ultimate reality. From God. The techne is skilled material craft. Art is Logos-guided material action, or the application of foundational principles to material circumstance. It's how "art" is distinguished from "other manmade stuff".

The abstract application of ultimate principles to material circumstance. Sound familiar?

Put them together and the abstract adaptation of ultimate principle and material circumstance is structurally similar. Same Logos-anchor coming down from God applied to the contingent circumstances in the same material world to create analogous abstract hybrids. It looks like this...

Pay attention to the central level. The deontology side is is "Moral Reasoning". There's no overt mention of reasoning on the art side so the graphic comparison makes the implicit explicit. Identifying art is an act of reason - the logical application of Logos to technical skill.

The problem in both cases is that the “logos” component can be replaced with lies without obviously changing the outcome. Not definitionally - the definition of art as L+T is wiped out - but in practice. We just looked at the decline of the Venuses into modern hideousness, but erotic allure over beauty is just one example.

The bigger pattern is replacing ontologically consistent truth tied together by Logos with the inverted materialist lies of post-Enlightenment "secularism".

This is a really important observation. Art can be "truthful" by commenting on material reality in an accurate way. Some insight into the natural world or the human condition. But in the secular flatland that is the modern House of Lies, material reality is all that is acknowledged.

The Flatland graphic captures the difference between the ontological fullness of the pillars of the West and the ontological constipation of post-Enlightenment secular materialism. Click for the post this came from.

One of the big things in the development of modern Art! is the idea that art reflects the "modern condition". Because the higher realities than the material that anchor truth are not permitted. And the modern version of material is satanic beast system inversion. So the modern Artistic! reflection of the modern human condition may be an accurate representation of that beast system inversion. But it's not connected to the True through Logos.

This gets back to the deontology-art parallel and the similarity between moral reasoning and defining art. Representing fake beast ideology may be true in a correct sense but it severs the tie to truth. For example, using Dante's Inferno as an opportunity to dwell on suffering and madness. Carpeaux is ahead of the game here, but not hard to see a forerunner to the "existential" bleakness of the next century.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino and His Sons, 1865–67, marble, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

According to the website, "this intensely Romantic work is derived from canto XXXIII of Dante's Inferno, which describes how the Pisan traitor Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, his sons, and his grandsons were imprisoned in 1288 and died of starvation". The techne is excellent, but the ugly madness and potential cannibalism apply it to the inverse of Logos, the good, the beautiful, or the true.

Don't ask whether it's skillful. It is. Consider why someone would find this a desirable use of techne...

Different views better show Carpeaux' crazy technical skill and the suffering and starvation...

Or the creeping madness that may or may not foreshadow cannibalism...

This is a technical display of sculptural talent, but what is the truth? That humans are fallen and cruel? That cruelty can induce madness? Who wants to look at this? Is it a good use of cultural resources? Justification for the skill required to make it?

Or once the tie to Logos is replaced with ugliness and torment, what is the point of treating refined techne as a value?

A similar thing happens when beauty or sublimity are replaced with allure.

Guillaume Seignac, The Wave, before 1924, oil on canvas, private collection

A last puff of French academism. A good technical painter reduced to awkward softcore. The figure might fit classical canons of beauty, but it's pure voyeurism and sexual immorality. If the only goal is arousal, might as well switch to photography and film. Which is what happened.

There's nothing there beyond the surface. And because the inverted flatland of modernity won't even acknowledge that there could be anything there, there is no pathway out within official channels. Demented abstractions or "realisms" that are limited to the techno-materialism of the burgeoning House of Lies...

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York

This American painter isn't without skill either. And the painting does capture modern things. Perhaps readers can find the Logos.

Alfred Stieglitz, From My Window at the Shelton, West, 1931, photograph, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Because if geometric patterns in modern blight is the goal of "art", photography does this better too.

So art can be replaced with promotion of falsehood and inversion because Logos can be replaced with lies without immediate collapse. And this points to a bigger problem. Being able to lie is a major difference between human and external realities. It's endemic to the systems of representation that we use to communicate and understand... everything.

It’s the translation process in representation that makes lies possible. Our art, pictures, speech, etc. are representations of something else that they aren’t. Whether a sight, thought, desire, etc. The original subject of the representation is objectively real or true in its own terms. The sight is really seen, the thought actually thought, the desire actually felt, etc. But there is nothing forcing the way we represent it to conform truthfully to the subject. Or stopping us from claiming the false representation is true. And since Logos and Truth are ontologically connected, nothing stopping gatekeepers from claiming the "L" can be removed from L+T without changing the nature of art.

Of course it does. It has to. But if the liars are believed, people will act as if it doesn't. Until they're genuflecting at scribbles.

Like this ~~cry for help~~ call for submissions from something called the Bougie Art Gallery. From the link - "For this virtual art exhibition, we wanted to talk about the fine art itself. And what represents fine art more than abstract art? This style of art does not attempt to represent external reality but seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, forms, colours, and textures. It shows the fine art in its purest form".

So once “art” is defined on the basis of gatekeepers’ arbitrary criteria there is nothing to demand that it be rooted in truth. The gatekeepers may even think they’re drawing on inviolate objective a priori foundations. They may even be more convinving because they believe they are. But they create the centralized, credentialed structure that the entire inversive House of Lies is built on. And this starts with the formalization of "art" under arbitrary preferences masquerading as defining precepts in the Renaissance.

But it's not just the Renaissance. We're looking through art at culture-wide transformation in the West. The Renaissance may address art explicitly, but the Reformation is every bit as transformative. More profoundly so when we consider the subject. Taken together, we get the double whammy of establishing Humanism and fracturing Christendom. That is fluffing of human auto-idolatry while dealing the moral authority of the Church a grievous blow. Calling to mind an old moral entropy graphic we've used from time to time. Just think Logos for Truth. Same thing, just more obviously applicable to art.

Fragmenting Christendom removed the possibility of reforming religious institutions within a pan-national structure and replaced it with localized cultural politics. Now obviously the material form of religious observance always had cultural dimensions. Like art, religious observance is a representational form. It crystalizes something abstract in material reality. And the material form is only significant to the extent that it is consistent with the abstract that it represents.

But in the Reformation, the question “what kind of Christian” is politicized because it’s territorial. Informal local expression become formal ones and religion is subordinated to material-level culture.

Alfred Guillou, Arriving at the Pardon of Saint Anne de Fouesnant at Concarneau, 1887, oil on canvas, private collection

Religious observance can be thought of structurally like the L+T art graphic. Something Logos-based but immaterial given culturally determined material form. It's not the changing superficialities of material culture that determine metaphysical right and wrong but how closely those superficialities express God's Will.

The mortal operators of the Church may be corrupt or outright evil, in which case they need to be replaced. But putting Christianity under political control - as in "national churches" - is inversion.

Oversight of the Church will always be a potential problem because of the human tendency for corruption and the absolute nature of God. Accommodating the transcendent in the material is inherently imperfect. With the politicization of religion in the Reformation, this bug becomes the feature. And material circumstance comes to define the transcendent.

This old print does a decent job of depicting distinct national cultures belonging to and expressing variations on a common Christendom....

And this modification captures the fundamental structural inversion that defines the Christianity in material, human standards. Not expresses variations on a common faith but determines the faith itself.

Now picture this Reformation transformation in conjunction with rising auto-idolatry of the Renaissance and its humanism. Add the illegitimacy of alien aristocrats presiding over oxymoronic “nation-state” tyrannies. Material-level culture goes from organic emergent principle to top-down web of imposed lies floating on a sea of human vanity. And if religion is part of that web…

Since these posts are looking at the arts of the West, we'll stick to the socio-culture implications for art. We’ll also stick to the conventional narrative because rethinking the entire nature of art is beyond us. We can’t even list all the different traditions, sub-schools and byways of art, let alone trace their significance or changes. Endless branches that just get more numerous as we get closer to the present. Just remember that huge amounts of material are being left out.

Maxfield Parrish, At Close of Day, 1944, oil on board, private collection

This is ok because what we're tracing is the official narrative. People have continued to make works of Logos and beauty. Like this. The inversion of art into Art! took place in a defined "theoretical" space that became synonymous with art despite being the arbitrary creation of critics with no intrinsic link to logos.

It's also what the masses think of when they hear the word "art". So that's where our investigation goes.

Up to this point the Arts of the West posts have identified a dominant central Italian strain, because that’s where the theoretical basis originates. A separate Venetian strain that also becomes influential. And a “Northern” strain because there is an advanced techne culture there with different attitudes. It’s also where the Reformation first hits visually. And even there, we're bundling German and Netherlandish together.

So staying general, there are two big art developments to consider right after the Renaissance & Reformation. They kick off in Italy because that's where the theoretical concept of art first takes hold before spreading across the West. One is rooted in art culture, the other in religion and both are interrelated. Lets call them Mannerism and Counter-Reformation. The first comes sooner and refers to what looks like a change in artistic priorities. The second is a reaction to Reformation religiously and culturally and to Mannerism artistically. We'll finish this post with a look at Mannerism because it sucks and needs little attention. Art and Counter-Reformation will get it's own post.

Mannerism

This is a complicated term that refers to art in the aftermath of the High Renaissance. It is hard to pin down because it's made up of lots of different artists sort of doing their own thing. Here's an excerpt from an explanatory slide show from the National Gallery of Art that explains the term and why it's hard to sum up.

It's a move towards more personal takes rather than adherence to a consensus ideal. The Renaissance emphasis on nature and classical models is replaced with self-conscious and individualized stylistics. The painting is Agnolo Bronzino's portrait of Eleonora di Toledo, from around 1560. She was duchess of Florence - married to a the Medici - where Bronzino was court painter.

More from the National Gallery, including the lack of scholars' consensus and the weird unsettling qualities that replaced the harmony of the High Renaissance ideal.

The Band thinks Mannerism is a reaction to the absolute mastery of the High Renaissance. This was the culmination of a long process of perfecting nature according to humanist interpretations of the classical ideal. Meaning art should be realistic but better. Idealized. The values are similar to those of Classical Greece – not surprising given the Renaissance interest in ancient Greco-Roman culture. Greek ideals were adapted by imperial Rome and from there passed into Renaissance thought through ancient writings about art and ancient sculptures.

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498-1499, marble, St. Peter's, Vatican City

Because of this transmission process, Renaissance art doesn’t look exactly like ancient art – especially the painting. But there are strong influences and the larger aims are the same. Real, but more perfect in a Neoplatonic way. There's also something of the Aristotelian fusion of form and matter - Renaissance humanism being a mash-up up of ancient ideas. Art pointing to something beyond the material in the terms of the material.

Here's a fun comparison. Lots of techne, but spot where the Logos disappears...

How about the beauty?

Anyhow, that's the High Renaissance ideal. Two main poles – realism and perfection. The logos in the L+T is both truth to nature and the truth to higher beauty. And that directs us to the Logos. To ultimate reality. And it's not just Michelangelo.

Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, 1512, oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Raphael parlayed his various influences into a vision of superhuman grace and beauty that shaped Western art until the rise of modernism.

It wasn't just the perfection of the human form, although that was a big part of it. Humanism did dominate the intellectual culture of the day and the main artists were plugged into that. It was an overall harmony of forms in space and subject matter. A pure artistic ideal that brought every aspect of the work into a vision of higher unity.

Here's Michelangelo again, representing the Creation of man as a moment of perfect harmony of ideal creation and divine Creator. How better to show man created in the image of the inimitable?

And Raphael again, doing his total harmony in a huge group of figures. The famous School of Athens represents the legacy of Greek philosophy where everything - including color tones - are perfectly ordered and calibrated. All while seeming fresh and natural.

But where does art go after that? Well, there's shifting away from balance and harmony to emphasize the artistic values that the theorists would prioritize. That's Mannerism. Exaggerating the fluid “grace” and anatomical complexity of the figures and groups. Creating disharmonies and incongruities. Intellectualized, eroticized, ambiguous, and/or confusing groups, figures, and settings. There’s no one style of Mannerism – it’s based in individual creativity within the new idea of “art”.

There does appear to be different phases or stylistic categories. The earlier springs up in Florence right after the peak of the High Renaissance and is full of weird incongruities, and distortions. We aren't sure what to make of it beyond that because there doesn't appear to be any sign at the time that this seemed off. But to our eyes it's totally different from something like The School of Athens. Pontormo is a perfect example of this. Note the outright bizarre setting, odd colors, disproportions, etc...

Jacopo Pontormo, Joseph with Jacob in Egypt, 1518, National Gallery

Everything about this painting from the vibrant colors to the lack of coherent space to the inexplicable structures is weird. Even the story is hard to follow. There is techne here, but the Logos is taking something of a back seat to Pontormo's own preferences. Check out some close-ups.

There is no way to reconcile the staircase, the landscape or the proportions of the figures. If the earlier Renaissance was defined by rationalizing space with perspective, this is the opposite. And what is going on in the background.

Or the aged Jacob on his deathbed in some sort of platform boudoir. To say nothing of the strange dancing cherub-statue on the column...

We could also point to Pontormo's contemporary Rosso Fiorentino - another well-known first gen Mannerist. His style is harsher and more aggressive, but the unrealistic and disturbing incongruities are cut from the same cloth. At the same time, the different way that they each do this shows why it's hard to sum up Mannerism as a movement.

Rosso Fiorentino, Deposition from the Cross, 1521, oil on wood, Pinacoteca Comunale, Volterra

Where to start. The wildly disproportionate cross that Jesus carried to Golgotha? The bizarre figures with distorted expressions - including the insect-like old man at the top? The metallic colors and sheet-metal like garments? The complete lack of any spiritual inspiration or sympathy for the us in the audience?

If we were going to try and sum up, we'd say the representation of the subject matter or any canon of beauty becomes less of a priority than the artist's personal style. It is deliberately "artistic" rather than primarily representational. This means putting the personal over logos. And that's modernism's music... See the connection?

The idea of artistic self-consciousness – theoretical awareness - is a big forerunner of modernism. Artists fixating on “artistic” issues over traditional representation is seen as anticipating that retarded concept of autonomy we've looked at in earlier posts. It even foreshadows the postmodern idea of art as representational, but of self-reflective discourse. Mannerist art isn’t like modern crap – it is still made for the monied elite for traditional reasons. But the shift from L+T in specifically Renaissance terms is obvious.

The second wave of Mannerism was a bit different.

Giorgio Vasari, Portrait of Alessandro de' Medici, 1534, oil on panel, The Uffizi, Florence

The Father of Art History, humanist, and painter was a Mannerist himself. Vasari's pioneering art theory emphasized exaggerated grace and intellectualized complexity based on copying and enhancing great works of the past. Ancient works, but also the masters of the High Renaissance.

The hothouse culture of the late Renaissance courts of Medici Florence and papal Rome were ground zero for this approach.

Second wave Mannerism is still full of incongruity and disjunction, but is much more referential. The influence of past art forms the basis for the imaginative flights. But here too the goal is self-conscious artistry and not coherent effective representation. It's an art that appeals to cultured collectors in the Italian courts but is much less effective - and even inappropriate for - traditional uses.

Take Bronzino, the Medici court painter who filled his paintings with complex figures based on Michelangelo and Raphael. Only exaggerated, unrealistically crowded, and given a china-like finish. This is curious enough in secular subjects, like this coldly erotic allegorical gift from Grand Duke Cosimo de' Medici for King Francis I of France.

Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (An Allegory of Venus and Cupid; A Triumph of Venus), around 1545, National Gallery, London

This symbolic puzzle deals with the terrible consequences of illicit lust. Venus and Cupid share an erotic incestuous embrace surrounded by symbolic figures. Time unveils Pleasure, Deceit, Oblivion, and others. The figures are skillfully painted in an exaggerated graceful Mannerist way. The crowding and complexity of are a polished aristocratic take on the Michelangelo's Last Judgment. Everything about it is pitch perfect for the art-loving sophisticates of the Medici court. And the French one.

Francis would have appreciated a top-level Mannerist allegory from the Florentine master. The French were the first foreign court to import Italian Renaissance art and ideas. This begins a long engagement where official French culture adapt Italian developments into their own vision. Until they come to take over dominance of the European world of art with the French Academy.

Benvenuto Cellini, Saltcellar of Francis I, 1540-44, gold, enamel and ebony, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Cellini was an Italian sculptor who spent some years in Paris working for Francis I. Paying handsomely to entice a first rate Mannerist like Cellini to come North brought Francis' court culture up to date.

This piece was actually a salt cellar for Francis' use - a masterpiece of aristocratic Italian Mannerist grace and humanist mythological symbolism. The figures are gods of earth and sea.

Eventually Mannerism will spread around the European courts and wealthy merchant classes. It went hand in hand with the spread of the Italian Renaissance concept of artists' status. "Art" as it's own thing defined by style over representation. By its self-aware artiness. With the myths and symbols of the Italian Renaissance.

Bartholomaeus Spranger, Glaucus and Scylla, 1580-82, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Mannerism has different phases in different places. Spranger is a Flemish version. The crowding isn't an issue here, but the exaggerated artiness of the figures undermines the emotional resonance of the story.

No matter where it turns up, self-conscious artistry, complexity, and disjointedness tend to be constant.

Joachim Wtewael, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, 1601, oil on copper, Mauritshuis, The Hague

Or a late Dutch version filled with exaggerated stylized nudes, mythological references, and cold eroticism.

Note the similarities between the different examples, despite the national differences. This is the result of a defining concept of art in theoretical terms outside of organic traditions or specific needs.

Disjointed, intellectualized, inaccessible, weirdly erotic, sometimes confusing - Mannerism was the first sign of art as an independent thing. But it wasn't as effective at the things art was traditionally expected to be able to do. It couldn't be - it was prioritizing style and artistry over representation and beauty. This was one thing with secular aristocratic art - myths, eroticism, and humanist symbols were Renaissance holdovers. But this was a different matter for church art.

Take this Madonna and Child painting by Parmigianino - a painter who exaggerated Raphael's grace into what looks to us like weird distortion. Mary is stretched out, while Jesus looks deformed if not dead.

Parmigianino, Madonna with the Long Neck, 1534–1540, oil on panel, Uffizi, Florence

Note the column supporting nothing and the tiny figure of the prophet who is way out of proportion with the rest of the scene. And the crowd of figures on the left don't fit either.

Then there's the the inappropriate eroticism of Mary's sheer wet t-shirt look.

Or consider this painting by Salviati, who was a big name on the Roman scene in the first half of the 1500s.

Francesco Salviati, The Assurance Of St. Thomas, 1547, oil on canvas, National Museum of the Prado, Madrid

The overt eroticism is is less extreme, but the stylization, aestheticism, and crowding distract from the direct emotional impact of the message. Being moved by Biblical miracle and admiring self-conscious artiness are at cross-purposes.

It's the two masters problem. What is the primary goal of the art work? Mannerist stylization is a projection relatively recently developed concept of "art" as a separate cultural thing. The critical and theoretical entity that will invert into Art! that we are tracing. This is different from maximizing the impact of beauty or other immediate emotional impacts to represent a message. That is, the purpose of the religious images that made up the vast majority of art before the modern world. Add that strange Mannerist eroticism and the impact is even further removed from a Christian ethos. Here's Bronzino again.

Bronzino, Descent of Christ Into Limbo, 1552, Santa Croce, Florence

The tangle of artful nudes in garish colors have an impact that is not significantly different from a mythological Mannerist painting. Because the goal is the same as his mythological paintings. Michelangelo's complicated figural variety, but with aristocratic polish based on exaggerated Raphael.

Which is totally different from a moving and inspiring image of Christian salvation.

Mannerism will hang around until the late 16th century. But it doesn't survive the conflict with the second of our big developments - Counter-Reformation. An old term that somewhat undersells what was really a pretty wide Catholic cultural reform that started in the mid-1500s and ran over a century. Reaction to the Reformation was only part of it, but we'll use the term because it's well-known. Just remember it's also limited.

We'll look at Catholic reform and development in the next Arts of the West post - for now it's enough to point out that this included concern over religious art. There were a few factors coming together here. The first being hostile Protestant attitudes towards the material culture of the medieval Church. Including a dimmer view - and even outright hostility - to the ubiquitous religious imagery.

Frans Hogenberg, The Calvinist Iconoclastic Riot of August 20, 1566, print, Hamburg, Kunsthalle

Some Protestant sects banned religious images altogether. Iconoclasm was an extreme example of this. There reasons were actually political as well as religious, but the result is the same. But even more moderate sects were more restrictive than the Catholics.

The Catholic response was to reaffirm the value and legitimacy of religious art, but there was another problem. Mannerism was not well-suited to the kind of clear and inspiring messaging that the Church wanted. Meaning that there was a stylistic component to the Counter-Reformation and art as well as a religious one. Not just affirming the use of religious images, but rethinking them as forms of effective representation.

There were aspects of late Mannerism that pointed in this direction. Especially in places outside the refined critical cultures of central Italy. Like Venice for example, where the Mannerist label doesn't fit so perfectly.

Tintoretto, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1556-1559, oil on canvas, Museo Soumaya, Mexico City

Renaissance Venice developed its own artistic culture based more on light and color instead of Florence's emphasis on linear design. Tintoretto gets lumped in with Mannerism for his strange perspectives, clashing colors, and stylized figures. But his light and color gives his art a kind of dramatic energy that is missing from the polished Bronzino. It's more moving in appropriate ways.

El Greco is another artist who fits this description.

El Greco, The Crucifixion, between 1597 and 1600, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado

El Greco is a unique artist with a range of background influences. He was Greek as his professional name suggests and originally trained as an icon painter. He then went to Venice where he learned their approach - note some similarities to Tintoretto - before moving to Spain where he spent most of his career. His art is Manneristic for it's contrasting colors, elongated figures, and lack of coherent space. But it also has a mystic intensity that lines up well with the intense Spanish religious culture of the time.

He was appreciated by early modern artists looking for inward expressiveness and alternatives to classical realism. But historically he fits in that late Renaissance / Counter-Reformation transition period. Just as a stylistic outlier.

The real revolution - or reformation - of religious art will start when this sort of drama and energy is joined with realistic appeal and clarity of forms. And when that happens, the arts of the West move into a new phase known as the Baroque. But that's for the next post.