Flanders-born sculptor Giambologna in 1564 follows his first important work, the Fountain of Neptune, with an elegant Mercury (of which he will actually do four versions), a gravity-defying cast bronze that conveys the impression of swift, graceful motion and weightlessness.

Poised on one foot, supported by a zephyr, the god raises one arm to point heavenwards, in a gesture borrowed from the repertory of classical rhetoric that is characteristic of Giambologna's maniera.

Florentine sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino completes a bronze relief of a relic for the altar of San Marco sometime before 1565.

Daniele da Volterra had been commissioned by Paul III to complete the decoration of the Sala Regia.

On the death of the pope in 1549, he lost his position as superintendent and the pension to which it entitled him.

He has since devoted himself chiefly to sculpture.

After Michelangelo dies in Rome on February 18, 1564, a few weeks shy of his eighty-ninth birthday, Pius commissions the artist’s good friend and former student to cover up Michelangelo’s nude figures in the Sistine Chapel, which is how Volterra earns the nickname Il Braghettone—"the breeches maker."

Volterra’s fine draftsmanship of the nude reflects his study of the late works of Michelangelo, of whom Volterra creates a bronze portrait bust (later famous).

Venetian painter Tintoretto, aided by numerous assistants and pupils, among them his sons Domenico and Marco and his daughter Marietta, had begun an extensive cycles of paintings for the Scuola of the Confraternity of San Rocco in 1560.

He resumes work at the scuola in 1565, painting the magnificent Crucifixion, for which he is paid a sum of two hundred and fifty ducats.

Frans Floris applies his characteristic Romanist Mannerist style to a Last Judgment in 1565.

The boldness and force of the Flemish painter's works reflect the monumental style of their Italian models.

Their technical execution reveals a rapid hand, bright coloring, and a mastery of anatomy not always evident in Netherlandish art of the time.

Floris owes much of his repute to the cleverness with which his works are transferred to copper by Jerome Cock, Cornelis Cort, and Theodor Galle.

Pieter Breugel the Elder executes several paintings in 1565, including The Months, a cycle of probably 6 paintings of the months or seasons, of which five remain:

* The Hunters in the Snow (Dec.-Jan.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

* The Gloomy Day (Feb.-Ma.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

* The Hay Harvest (June–July), 1565, Lobkowicz Palace at the Prague Castle Complex, Czech Republic

* The Harvesters (Aug.-Sept.), 1565, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

* The Return of the Herd (Oct.-Nov.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Breugel’s winter landscapes of 1565 (e.g., Hunters in the Snow, are taken as corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during the Little Ice Age.

Hunters in the Snow displays the influence of his Alpine crossings on his artistic imagination, placing tall mountains in his panoramic background while depicting a typical Netherlandish setting and subject in the center and foreground.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, court painter to Maximilian II, executes a portrait in 1566 of a jurist, thought to be Geneva’s late theocrat Jean Calvin, in the grotesque style for which he has become famous: portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books.

Influential Italian Mannerist painter Taddeo Zuccaro (Zuccari) dies on September 2, 1566, a day after his thirty-seventh birthday.

Among his most notable works are the frescoes, painted mostly in the past six years, in the Cappella Frangipane, San Marcello al Corso, Rome, which display Taddeo’s Mannerist assimilation of Raphael’s Vatican Stanze frescoes as well as his interest in the work of Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo.

Taddeo also completed a Michelangelesque altarpiece for the same Frangipane Chapel, The Conversion of Saint Paul.

His well-known historical painting, Francis I of France receiving Emperor Charles V, hangs in the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, where Taddeo has worked for the past seven years.

Taddeo is buried in the Pantheon, close to Raphael.

His younger brother Federico continues to help develop the Mannerist style in central Italy.

In 1566, also, the National Academy of Saint Cecilia for music is founded in Rome.

Breugel paints a Massacre of the Innocents around 1566-67, setting the New Testament episode in contemporary village setting in winter.

Vasari paints a self-portrait at fifty-six in 1567.

The Peasant Wedding, a 1567 or 1568 painting by Brueghel the Elder, is one of his many depicting peasant life.

It is currently housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

The bride is under the canopy, and the groom is uncertain, but may be the man in black, to the left of the largest figure, leaning back, with a mug in hand.

Two pipers play the pijpzak (a type of two-droned Flemish bagpipe), and an unbreeched boy in the foreground licks a plate.

The feast is in a barn; two ears of corn with a rake reminding us of the work that harvesting involves, and the hard lot peasants have.

The plates are carried on a door off its hinges.

The main food is bread, porridge and soup.

Luis de Morales, a Spanish Mannerist painter who may have studied with the Flemish painter Hernando Sturmio in Badajoz, has worked in Badajoz from 1546, leaving on occasional commissions but making his home there all his life.

Summoned by King Philip II of Spain to help in the decoration of El Escorial, he had painted a Christ Carrying the Cross that did not please the king and had been removed to the Church of San Jerónimo, Madrid.

Influenced, especially in his early work, by Raphael Sanzio and the Lombard school of Leonardo, he is called by his contemporaries "The Divine Morales", because of his skill and the shocking realism of his paintings, and because of the spirituality transmitted by all his work.

His emotional religious paintings greatly appeal to the Spanish populace.

Morales always works on panels, often depicting such subjects as Ecce Homo, Pietá, and The Virgin and Child.

Perhaps the best known of these panels are twenty on the life of Christ, painted for the Church of Arroyo del Puerco from 1563 to 1568.

All of his paintings are marked by their Leonardesque composition, detailed execution, and anguished asceticism.