In the eternal dispute as to which of the fine arts ranks first, architecture is often considered the most important,
as the foundation of the other arts. Architecture does not assume such a high position in the stylistic picture of
Mannerism. Mannerist art is far too interested in ideas, far too unrestrained and focused on an artistically liberal
attitude in its inventions for that. The Mannerist artist was over-fond of giving his caprices full rein, instead of
giving serene balanced expression to the classical solidity and unequivocal harmony appropriate to architecture.
He sacrificed the objectivity current up to the Renaissance and preferred pursuing more subjective effects and
ingenious gambles. Even in his buildings he was often trying produce psychological effects on the spectator,
disregarding the basic rules of traditional architecture.

This is largely true even of the great founder and model of the Mannerist style, Michelangelo. However unusual,
powerful and brilliant his buildings are, yet we cannot from their very essence regard them as the creations of a
genuinely architectonic mind. Even as architect Michelangelo remains the born sculptor and faces the creation
of buildings with an unusually unrestrained, completely new and self-willed approach to the design. In this
connection it is significant that the architecture and the plastic decoration in the Medici Chapel at Florence seem
to fuse into an inseparable unity. They have the effect of a perfect whole, because for Michelangelo the individual
architectonic features -- pilasters, windows, frames, corbels -- are also three-dimensionally charged organisms,
stamped with personality.

It is particularly interesting to note the class of artists by whom Mannerist architecture was mainly produced.
The driving forces are not professional architects, but talents whose main interest often or in the first instance lay
in quite different fields. A great many of them were originally painters or sculptors. In other words they were
practising artists in fields which are more accessible to the fantasy and facility of creation than architecture can be,
owing to the unwieldiness of its materials. The most important painter-architects, among them Baldassare Peruzzi,
Giulio Romano, Francesco Primaticcio, Giorgio Vasari, Pellegrino Tibaldi and Pirro Ligorio, appear in Central
Italy, Michelangelo's immediate sphere of influence. Jacopo Barozzi, known as Vignola, began his career, which
led him to become both practising architect and architectural theoretician, as a designer of intarsios, on which
representations of buildings in perspective were a speciality at the time. Others too were not originally or exclu-
sively architects: Giulio Mazzoni was a painter and stucco worker, Bernardo Buontalenti painter and theatre
designer, Bartolommeo Ammanati a sculptor. In addition many of them had strong scientific interests, for example
Pirro Ligorio and Giovannantonio Dosio, who both made extensive antiquarian studies. Significantly enough,
those architects who were architects by profession kept apart from the Mannerist mentality and its disruptive effect
on architecture. Examples of such artists are Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Giacomo della Porta and Andrea
Palladio, of whom the two last named are to be counted among the most important architects of all time.

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