Professor of History of Art
Eugenia Chase Guild Chair in the Humanities
Department of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

“On maniera, Moral Choice and Truth”

Style, or what in the Renaissance could be called maniera, is at once the defining element in the visual arts, depending as it does on the choices artists make; yet it has its dangers, when style becomes mere repetition. These problems are considered in the writings of the critic and artist Giorgio Vasari and in the work of various earlier and later artists, from Cimabue and Giotto to Constable and Jackson Pollock.