Organizing the past 51of Rome and the religious wars heralded another fundamen-
tal shift in the bases of society and culture.
The architectural histories of this period by Charles Bur-
roughs, Manfredo Tafuri and Deborah Howard all engage
the problem of architecture’s subjection to extra-artistic
forces, but they do so within the traditions of cultural history,
treating the Renaissance as a cohesive historical epoch con-
taining the full range of its expressions.^25 This division of
architectural history according to major historical events and
the various degrees of historical cohesion they allow histori-
ans to address is a legacy of the cultural histories of Michelet
and Burckhardt. It accepts that architecture is a manifesta-
tion of culture, and therefore a form of historical evidence
- traces of historical forces that are evidenced, too, by a range
of cultural and social phenomena.
The bifurcation of historiographical positions during the
1950s and 1960s on the meaning of mannerism in sixteenth-
century Italian art and architecture highlights a key difference
between internal and external criteria for the cohesion of
historical periods.^26 Mannerism is itself a contentious term.
Among those historians for whom it had some valency,
however, some understood mannerism as an artistic, linguis-
tic deformation within the classical tradition, while others
positioned it as an expression of the uncertainties of the age,
of the loss of surety and the universal values of the Roman
church. One historiographical value (invention) is architec-
tural and artistic; another (anxiety) is cultural, societal and
religious. Particularly in more recent decades, architectural
historians have shifted from the treatment of ‘internal’ histo-
riographical categories of past epochs: the Roman Empire,
the middle ages, the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation,
the modern world since the Industrial Revolution. The archi-
tectural history of politico-cultural periods, indicated in such
epithets as Weimar Germany, New Deal America, Fascist
Italy, Colonial Brazil, Soviet Russia, post-war Japan and so
forth, take architecture as a trace of events and agendas that
are not its own, but which nevertheless implicate its historical
development.
The division of history by style and period is not, there-
fore, a monolithic approach, even if it has enjoyed a sustained
role in organizing the history of architecture. Style and period