THE USE OF COLOR BY PAINTERS IN ROME FROM 1524 TO 152

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that color theory and practice evolved in a way similar to changing concepts of form and style. It is the suggestion of this dissertation that a review of the use of color by artists during the early years of the cinquecento yields results integral to the full assessment of the evolution from Renaissance to Mannerist art. The six major artists who were in Rome from 1524 to 1527: Sebastiano del Piombo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino, Perino del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio and Baldassare Peruzzi, shared their understanding of the theory and use of color and as a result came away from that city with a common body of knowledge. The six artists were familiar with three different types of coloring: hue-based, tonal, and chiaroscuro; and with the artists whose paintings best exemplified each one: respectively, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. Once these three methods of giving forms relief were articulated, it followed that, by the use of a certain kind of coloring, a painter illustrated aesthetic aims such as licenzia, facilita, unione, or contrapposto. Thus, an artist quoted types of coloring in a manner similar to the learned rephrasing of figural motifs which is part of what characterized early Mannerism.;This study has been organized around a core of six chapters, each surveying the use of color by one of the six artists in Rome from 1524 to 1527 during the course of his entire career. The first chapter is an introduction to the three types of coloring through a description of the use of color by its chief exemplar: hue-based, Michelangelo; tonal, Raphael; and chiaroscuro, Leonardo. The final chapter traces the delineation of these three methods in the roughly contemporary art theory, summarizes the innovations in the use of color which came about in Rome from 1524 to 1527, and explains how early Mannerist painters exploited these means to illustrate their aesthetic goals.