The French word decadence comes from the Latin decadentia (fall). It is used to denote cultural decline, regression. Coined the term by Montesquieu in his study of the decline of the Roman Empire.
Cultural decadence is repeated in history with a certain periodicity: the decline of the Roman Empire in the 2nd-4th centuries AD, Mannerism of the 17th century, which ended the Renaissance, decadence at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, postmodernism at the end of the last century … Mannerism originated in Italy at the beginning of the 16th century as a crisis of the Renaissance humanistic worldview. In painting, this trend is characterized by the rejection of the classical style of the High Renaissance. The Mannerists believed that the basis of the artistic image was the "inner drawing" generated by the artist's imagination. The external expression of the "inner idea" was the elongated silhouettes, complicated compositional drawing, irrational colors. The Italians Pontormo, Rosso, Beccafumi can be considered the representatives of mannerism; the Spaniard El Greco; artists of the French school of Fontainebleau; court painters of Emperor Rudolf II. In literature, mannerism is characterized by the sophistication of the syllable and the pretentiousness of the style, the wide use of allegories, the opposition of the sublime and low sides of life. It is believed that the influence of Mannerism was experienced by Donne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne. In 1886, the French Symbolists began to publish their own magazine Decadence, after which poets and writers - adherents of the trends of Symbolism and aestheticism began to be called decadents. Decadents announced the rejection of civic and political themes in their work. The subject of art, in their opinion, could only be the inner world of the artist. In Russia, the Symbolists of the older generation considered themselves the last singers of high culture during its decline, called upon to preserve the aesthetic values of a dying civilization. In the early 90s of the last century, new Symbolists led by Vyacheslav Ivanov, as an alternative to decadence, put forward the idea of "theurgy" - a religious art aimed at transforming reality. O. Wilde, Baudelaire, Maeterlink, Nietzsche are considered the representatives of decadence. In Russia, the most famous decadent poets are F. Sollogub, Z. Gippius, early Bryusov, K. Balmont, Merezhkovsky.