All art historians who are interested in questions of "styles" or "schools" agree in identifying a High Renaissance school of Italian
painting. There is, however, a disagreement, which has seemed nonterminating, regarding Mannerism: Is it another distinct school or
is it merely a late development of the Renaissance school? We believe that this disagreement can be terminated by distinguishing questions of
fact about paintings from questions about the definitions of schools. To this end we have had two representative subsets of paintings--one
earlier, one later--rated on four of the dimensions of implicit presuppositions that we have introduced in other Working Papers. When
the paintings are scaled in this way a very distinct profile emerges for the earlier, or Renaissance, paintings. In contrast, the later, or
Mannerist, paintings are so heterogeneous that we conclude that they are best described as deviations from the Renaissance profile, rather
than a separate school. These results are not unimportant--at least for art historians. But they are more important methodologically
inasmuch as the procedures applied here can be used in classifying and distinguishing from one another all kind of cultural products
