​CINQUE CENTO (Italian for five hundred; short for 1500), in architecture, the style which became prevalent in Italy in the century following 1500, now usually called “16th-century work.” It was the result of the revival of classic architecture known as Renaissance, but the change had commenced already a century earlier, in the works of Ghiberti and Donatello in sculpture, and of Brunelleschi and Alberti in architecture.