ABSTRACT
Renaissance architects of the fifteenth and six-teenth centuries endeavored to create new rational, mathematically describable forms based on what they understood of the Classical architecture of ancient Rome. They even invented a term to describe their decisive break with the Gothic past, saying their work marked a renaissance, or rebirth. Some of the architects of the seventeenth century, however, who continued to develop this Classical architecture, especially in Italy, made of it something quite different from what had been imagined by Alberti and Brunelleschi. They coined no special term except their word for “modern” to contrast their work with that of the fifteenth century. The nearest equivalent is the term maniera, used by Vasari in the 1550s to describe affectation and deliberate stylization. This is the origin of the modern term Mannerism.1 In continuing to seek new forms, in exercising their newly won artistic prerogative to invent, these seventeenth-century architects created an architecture that became what Renaissance architecture was not-complex, multilayered, molded, and plastically or sculpturally shaped.
