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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Renaissance and Baroque, two terms unknown in the ages they describe, are now an integral part of the general public's cultural vocabulary. The first encompasses European civilization from the mid-fifteenth century to around 1550, and the second refers to developments in the seventeenth century, with the intervening fifty years forming a period of transition termed Mannerism. Beginning with the appearance of Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunst geschichtliche Grundbegriffe in 1915, these two great epochs of intellectual development have been described quite successfully by juxtaposing the one with the other. Wölfffin, for example, saw five great categories of discrimination between the two, namely Linear and Painterly, Plane and Recession, Closed and Open Form (Tectonic and A-tectonic Form), Multiplicity and Unity (Multiple Unity and Unified Unity), and Clearness and Unclearness (Absolute and Relative Clearness). More recently, Wylie Sypher in Four Stages of Renaissance Style has extended the list with the polar characteristics of Cyclic-Broken (Cyclothym-Schizothym), Exact-Abstract (Representational-Nonrepresentational), Visual-Haptic, Nearseeing-Farseeing, Dark-Light, Horizontal/Vertical-Oblique/Spiraling, and Points/Lines-Planes/Volumes.
1 Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger, Dover Publications, 1950.
2 Garden City: Doubleday, 1955.
3 New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
4 The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson, Library of Liberal Arts, 1960, p. 49.
5 Nicholas Copernicus, "Dedication of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," in Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books, New York, Collier, 1938, p. 55.
6 Cited in A Documentary History of Art, ed. Elizabeth G. Holt, Garden City, Doubleday, 1957, I, 230.
7 The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, New York, Vantage, n.d., p. 182.
8 From Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, New York, Free Press, 1955, Chapter 3.
9 See Dudley Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974, pp. 36-43.
10 Technology, Science and Culture, London, Heinemann, 1972, p. 14.
11 Quoted by John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1926, pp. 241-42.
