In the coffered ceilings of the main hall appear animals, flowers, trees, cornucopias, and other symbols characteristic of Manierism. This artistic movement, situated between the Renaissance and the Baroque, arose in Italy and spread through Europe and the Americas in the late 16th and early 17th cc.

Manierist painters, influenced by Michelangelo, sought expressiveness and delighted in the unusual and artificial. They depicted mythological figures, symbolic animals, exotic plants, monstrous beings, and hybrid forms. In the Casa del Fundador, the style appears in tempera paintings on plaster, some based on printed illustrations then circulating in the Hispanic world. These paintings date to the period of Doña Menda de Figueroa’s second marriage to Don Juan Núñez de la Cerda. Hidden by a 19th-c. ceiling, they were uncovered and restored between 1964 and 1969.