Pictures from the Rylands Library
Styling It Out with Raphael and Raimondi

If, as W.S. Graham contends, words are ‘scored and impressed by the commotion of all of us’, it is hardly surprising that through time their meanings mutate. Nor is it remarkable that in a living language such changes signal the emergence of new ideas and thought within a wider cultural context. Shifts within the meaning of a word and its cognate forms can even, etymologically speaking, become cacophonous, and if these meanings are contradictory, transform into contranyms which carry their own antonyms. Such contrarian conflict within the body of a word perhaps captures the emergence of a novel concept or belief as it struggles to punch at its weight in the fight to make itself heard and find expression in active dialogue.


Take for example the transformation that took place in the development of the word ‘manner’. Polysemic and complex at any time in its long history, it originally derived from Anglo-Norman to denote modes of action and forms of behaviour. One of its meanings, promoted by the Renaissance artist-critic Giorgio Vasari, came to denote ‘the distinctive style characteristic of a particular artist’ (OED), deftly ‘formed in their own idiom’ (Claudia La Malfa). So in the late fifteenth century , a new concept of art emerged which claimed to recognise the ‘personal presence of the artist as the maker of a unique object created by an irreplaceable human being’ (Lisa Pon), and found utterance in the shifting senses of a word’s meaning. The true artist, it inferred, was no longer seen as ‘a mere craftsman but an individual who was the only source for… his or her creations’ (Pon). The work of art as a cerebral ‘relic of genius’ (Patricia Emison), remote from manual labour, is a theory still familiar with us today. Yet, the Latin prefix of the word ‘manner’, meaning by the hand, suggests otherwise and carries with it the idea that works of art continued to be forged by the skilled performance of an artist through the actual production of their handiwork as is evident in the picture shown here. Deemed to be ‘one of the most celebrated images of the sixteenth century’ (Arthur Hind), this engraving, known as ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, was designed by Raphael and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi. Due to the colossal stature enjoyed by Raphael within hierarchies of canonical art history, it was for many years assumed that the image we see here was a ‘simple unproblematic record of a lost work by Raphael’ (Wouk and Pon) – a mere copy in printed form. Scholars now believe that both draftsman and engraver worked together, on equal terms, to create a composition from Raphael’s drawings made ‘purely for the purposes of [Raimondi’s virtuoso] printing’ (Edward Wouk and Pon), which both artists then signed. By combining graphic and mechanical techniques, the manner (as a code of behaviour) of their collaboration could embody a collective notion of artistic style allowing them to create together ‘one of the most revered inventions of the Italian High Renaissance’ (Pon).

‘Massacre of the Innocents (with fir tree)’, designed by Raphael and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, c.1512–13.
Image provided by and © of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.