Mannerism/Maniera/Modernity: Historicizing Fifty Years of Scholarship Renaissance Society of America (Chicago, March 30-April 1, 2017) Chair: Tiffany Lynn Hunt, Temple University Organizer: Heather Graham, California State University Long Beach The 50th anniversary of the publication of John Shearman’s Mannerism offers an occasion to reflect upon the current state of the study of Italian Renaissance art and especially of the art of the sixteenth century. Shearman’s book was both the culmination of earlier work on Mannerism and a turning point: it sought to break abruptly with the romantic, psychologizing approaches of Frederick Hartt and Eugenio Battisti, and the way that it objectified the issue of style even distinguished it from the work of formalists such as Sydney Freedberg. At the moment of its publication, it was regarded as an outstanding example of art-history-as-cultural-history, and it helped prepare the way for the enthusiastic reception of the work of Michael Baxandall a few years later. Since its publication, some recent scholars see the “stylish style” as anticipating the “autonomy” of art in a fully modern sense, while others interpret it in relation to the “crisis” of the image associated primarily with the Reformation. Using Shearman’s text as a particular episteme of the 1960s, this session will examine how Shearman’s Mannerism holds up under the pressure of these developments with the goal of signaling new directions of future research into the topic. What topics were overlooked that could yield significant contributions? Which elements of the book retain their validity and authority? Which require revision or elaboration? Which, if any, have become irretrievably obsolete?