ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines how the fifteenth-century ars nova of Northern Renaissance art affected, influenced, and changed the inspiration for Italian, late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art. It explores the connections between sixteenth-century visual styles and the renewed spirituality of reform and change that followed the impact of the Reformation on European culture. The book traces the incorporation of enargeia into the theology of the Early Church. It considers the role of art in the process of salvation as developed in sixteenth-century treatises on art. The book discusses Mannerism’s historiography, with an emphasis on Mannerism and spirituality. It deals with the reaction against maniera found in seventeenth-century theorists, who saw maniera as being antithetical to the reformed Church, thereby considering it to be artistically the equivalent of vice.
