Question: What was the High Renaissance viewed as?
About the article "High Renaissance", section "Painting".

Candidate passages:
The study of the history of art is a relatively recent phenomenon; prior to the Renaissance, the modern concept of "art" did not exist.
Over time, art historians have changed their views about what art is worthy of scrutiny.
For example, during the early Victorian era, the 15th-century Italian artists were considered inferior to those of 16th-century High Renaissance.
Such a notion was challenged by the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
There has since been a trend, dominant in art history of the 21st century, to treat all cultures and periods neutrally.
Thus, Australian Aboriginal art would not be deemed better or worse than Renaissance art—it is just different.
Art historical analysis has also evolved into studying the social and political use of art, rather than focusing solely on the aesthetic appreciation of its craftsmanship (beauty).
What may once have been viewed simply as a masterpiece is now understood as an economic, social, philosophical, and cultural manifestation of the artist's world-view, philosophy, intentions and background. 
The High Renaissance was traditionally viewed as a great explosion of creative genius, following a model of art history first proposed by the Florentine Giorgio Vasari.
Even relatively minor painters of the period, such as Fra Bartolomeo and Mariotto Albertinelli, produced works that are still lauded for the harmony of their design and their technique.
The elongated proportions and exaggerated poses in the late works of Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto and Correggio prefigure so-called Mannerism, as the style of the later Renaissance is referred to in art history.
The serene mood and luminous colours of paintings by Giorgione and early Titian exemplify High Renaissance style as practiced in Venice.
Other recognizable pieces of this period include Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" and Raphael's "The School of Athens".
Raphael's fresco, set beneath an arch, is a virtuoso work of perspective, composition and "disegno".
Scholar F. O. Matthiessen originated the phrase "American Renaissance" in his 1941 book "American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman".
Although Mathiessen limited his definition to the period between 1850 and 1855, the term has since expanded to a broader range of time.
In "The American Renaissance Reconsidered", for example, Eric Sundquist expands the years covered by the American Renaissance to "the 1830s through the Civil War."
The notion of an American Renaissance has been criticized for overemphasizing a small number of white male writers and artifacts of high culture.
William E. Cain noted the "extreme white male formation" of Mathiessen's list of authors and stated that by "devoting hundreds of pages of analysis and celebration to five white male authors, Mathiessen unwittingly prefigured in his book what later readers would dispute and labor to correct."
The demographic exclusivity of the American Renaissance began eroding toward the end of the twentieth century.
Emily Dickinson, who began her poetry in the late 1850s, made her way into the canon.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (1852) rose to prominence in the late 1970s.
African American literature gained increasing recognition.
The American Renaissance continues as a central term in American studies.
The American Renaissance was for long considered synonymous with American Romanticism and was closely associated with Transcendentalism.
Often considered a movement centered in New England, the American Renaissance was inspired in part by a new focus on humanism as a way to move from Calvinism.
The thematic center of the American Renaissance was what Matthiessen called the "devotion" of all five of his writers to "the possibilities of democracy."
He presented the American Renaissance texts as "literature for our democracy” and challenged the nation to repossess them. 
Andrea di Cristoforo Bregno (1418–1506) was an Italian sculptor and architect of the Early Renaissance who worked in Rome from the 1460s and died just as the High Renaissance was getting under way. 
The Renaissance was a European cultural movement spanning the 14th to the 17th century.
It began as the:  Italian Renaissance Renaissance may also refer to: