time was because the uncertainties of the situation in Italy. The failure of ambitions to integrate city states into large unity did not lead to thedevelopment of bourgeois republics. It opened the way for common bankers to take overthe control of the cities and the patronage of art.According to the tasteful explanations of the Patonic Academy in Florence, Mannerist paintings should reflect the ideals of the artists, they should be intellectualmirror images of the arts rather than servile imitations of nature. This standard wasembraced by the first generation of Mannerists in Florence and Northern Italy. Itordained artistic method in Rome, Venice and Fontainbleu, and even more so in theNorthern centers of art. It was due to this propose that the figures seem to lose contactwith nature and mans actual environment, and to take their place in the painting as iffloating in some kind of unreal medium, inclined beside one another, but joined by anemotional or intellectual bond. El Grecos sleeping apostles are creatures of loneliness,discovered in the shell of their dreams. There are several reasons for the relatively swiftspreading of Mannerist style throughout cultivated Europe, and for its similarity, despitegeographical distances and economic differences. Both the uniqueness of its style and itsspreading were partly due to the peculiar popularity of the techniques of reproductionthen available. Literary sources refer the prevalent diffusion of engravings of the work ofItalian masters.Through the proficient genius of El Greco, who took a acute interest in theintellectual currents of his time the style spread as far as distant Spain. At the same timethat Spanish and French invaders were in control of Italy, France, Spain, England and theGerman city states were fighting their own long-enduring wastes.The characteristics of Mannerism first made their appearance in the full during theperiod of the classical Renaissance. It began to sp...
