ngel who is painted in pearly greys. Behind the angel, on the left arespinning clouds. Preceding from an outline of an imaginary town, on the right, aresoldiers carrying flags. The inconceivable impression of the picture is due to the contrastof not only passionate and cerebral but in terms of colour- between the two planes andtheir figural content as well. This painting is the last date of the El Greco pictures in Budapest and is from thelast period of the artists life. The Biblical occurrence illustrated is standardized on twolevels, one above the other. The group of the three sleeping apostles fill the lower plane. We find comparable groups of apostles in pictures by Giovanni Bellini. El Greco returnsto Quattrocento etiquette, especially in the manner in which the sleeping gray-hairedapostle bends his arm around his head. Of the abundant versions of this painting in the artists own hand there is a smallercopy in the Museum at Lille, and other variants are to be found in the Episcopal palace inthe Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. The variant most similarly related to thepainting in Budapest is the larger-scale version in the Church of Santa Maria at Andujarwhich displays other works of mannerist art.The mannerist style thrived at the same time as High Renaissance and Baroque art. Mannerism, like many other names attached to so many other periods of art, was a nameconceived in disdain and impudence. Maniera, meaning maner, was correlated with theartist who worked in the manner of someone else. Like an imitator who adapted andsometimes perfected the forms of another. However, there are characteristics of theMannerist style which disconnected it from the period of the High Renaissance as well asthe distinguishing it from the emerging Baroque. A number of crucial artist ofMannerism have displayed meaningful works. Only in the last ninety years hasMannerism come to be respected as an independent style in the history of art...
