GRGR(30): You will want cause and effect.

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy
--- David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Back to Mannerism, the Post-Renaissance predecessor to PoMo. 
> Michaelangelo 
> was a leading genius in this go-beyond-the-rules school.  Jokes (for 
> knowledgable insiders only) abounded.  Later schools, Baroque &
> Rococco 
> relied on illusion/fantasy for their new worlds.  Mannerism was more 
> subversive, sly.  Things looked "correct" on the surface, but the
> joke's on 
> you!  

I don't buy the idea that Michelangelo was perceived by his
contemporaries as *joking*, and I'm sure he was in deadly earnest
himself.  He served Popes and Cardinals, as well as humanist merchant
princes, and powerfully celebrated "the establishment" of his day. 
Doubtless he infuriated more conservative architects with his lapses
from "correct taste", much as Hawksmoor and Gibb infuriated Lord
Burlington and Colin Campbell in England.  Think of poor Antonio Da
Sangallo the Younger: Michelangelo comes along and just *tears down*
much of both of Da Sangallo's juiciest Roman commissions - the Farnese
Palace and St. Peters - and completely reworks them.  I may boast that
I've visited most of his surviving work, and see his innovations as
"expressive distortions" which cannot be justly characterized as
bizarre.  I would submit the apses of St. Peters in evidence.

(How do you guys put these nifty little blue web links in your posts? 
I'd love to be able to just give you all a button to push so you can
see what I mean.)

Giulio Romano on the other hand wasn't above deploying a whoopi-cushion
now and again, but by then he was working for the Gonzagas in Mantua --
what else was there to do in that cow-town on a Saturday night? (That's
a joke, no offense, all you Gonzagas and Mantuans out there...)

Mark

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