John Shearman Famous Quotes & Sayings
4 John Shearman Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
Changing prejudice often inverts the value of words while preserving most of their sense; virtues are turned into vices, artistic qualities become defects.
When a Mannerist artist breaks rules he does so on the basis of knowledge and not of ignorance. A considerable amount of North European architecture of the sixteenth century must be excluded for these reasons.
If we say that a person has style we may wish to imply that he is unnatural, affected, self-conscious or ostentatious. In the sixteenth century 'maniera' was generally a desirable attribute of a work of art, but this positive aspect was accompanied by the realization of the negative one that correspond to what we now call, derogatively, stylization.
The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course.
