ABSTRACT
During the early decades of the sixteenth century, particularly in the late 1520s, the 1530s and 1540s, in Italy both poets and artists started to experiment with radically new and audacious forms of expression, out of a combined desire to promote innovation and to gain personal success and admiration. These experiments are rooted in a background of growing competition between artists and poets, which in its turn was one of the results of what one might call the advent of the free market economy in the arts, that offered artists and poets many new opportunities to obtain commissions or to address different audiences. The most common strategy to gain maximum profit from these new opportunities was, as it is now, excellence, or simply the suggestion of it. The directions taken by this tendency to what one might call artistic or poetic self-promotion, were in great part determined by elements of contingency. Two such elements will be the subject of this essay: on the one hand, the inspiration that newly discovered elements of antique or ancient culture offered, and on the other hand, the ideological preoccupations that in these very years were offered to the dominant orthodox culture by the challenge of Protestantism.1
