Cinquecento is the Italian word for five hundred, used to describe the latest period of the Italian Renaissance, in the sixteenth century.

If Florence was the most important city of the Quattrocento, during the 16th century the artistic capital moved to Rome, mostly because of the presence of the Pope, the great protector of the arts. During this period the art was obliged to adequate to a more classical style, given it was designated to decorate religious buildings. In the second part of the 16^th century, the art evoluted towards what was to become the Baroque Period.

This art period, also known as the High Renaissance, represents the culmination of the goals of the earlier periods, such as the manipulation of light and darkness, such as the tone contrast, such as the development of sfumato and chiaroscuro. It was during the Cinquecento that it was attained the accurate representation of figures in space, rendered with credible motion and in an appropriately decorous style.

In this time period the most important painters were also Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo Buonarroti, whose techniques suffered the evolution of the epochs. Also Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) has great importance in this art period.

The Cinquencento painting evolved into Mannerism (c. 1520-80), especially in Florence. Mannerist artists consciously rebelled against the principles of High Renaissance, and started representing elongated figures in illogical spaces. Contemporaries criticized this period as seeming artificial, but the modern scholarship has recognized the capacity of Mannerist art to convey strong (often religious) emotion where the High Renaissance failed to do so. Some of the main artists of this period are Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino and Giulio Romano.