Donato Bramante

Donato Bramante (1444 - March 11, 1514), Italian architect, who introduced the Early Renaissance style to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his most famous design was St. Peter's Basilica.

Bramante was born in a very small place near Urbino, where in the 1460s Francesco Laurana was adding to Federico da Montefeltro's ducal palace an arcaded courtyard and other features that seemed to have the true ring of a reborn Antiquity.

Bramante's architecture has eclipsed his painting skills: he studied under the Early Renaissance masters Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, who was interested as a painter in the rules of perspective. Illusionistic features in Bramante's early solid constructions recall this training as a painter. About 1474 Bramante moved to Milan, a city with a deep Gothic architecture tradition, and built several churches in the new Antique taste. The Duke, Ludovico Sforza, made him virtually his court architect, beginning in 1476, in commissions that culminated with rebuilding the choir of the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro (1482-1486). Space was limited, and Bramante made a theatrical apse in bas-relief, combining the painterly the arts of perspective with Roman details. There is an octagonal sacristy, surmounted by a dome. As at Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel Renaissance architecture was born at Florence, so at Bramante's Santa Maria presso San Satiro the Renaissance arrived in Lombardy.

In Milan Bramante also built Santa Maria delle Grazie (1492-99); other early works include the cloisters of Sant'Ambrogio, Milan (1497-1498), and the Palazzo Caprini (1501-1502) and some other smaller constructions in Pavia and Legnano, but in 1499, with his Sforza patron driven from Milan by an invading army of the French, Bramante made his way to Rome, where he was already known to the powerful Cardinal Riario.

In Rome he was soon recognized by Cardinal Della Rovere, soon to become Pope Julius II.

Tempietto, San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, 1502: the High Renaissance began here...

... but many more designers saw the Tempietto in Andrea Palladio's Quattro Libri (woodcut, 1570) than found the discreetly-sited original

For Julius, almost as if it were a trial piece on approval, Bramante designed one of the most harmonious buildings of the Renaissance: the Tempietto (1502, illustrated, right) of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum. The church was commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and marks the spot in Rome where, according to tradition, Saint Peter was crucified. With all the transformations of Renaissance and Baroque Rome that were to follow, it is hard to sense now what an apparition this building was in 1502. It is almost a piece of sculpture, for it has little architectonic use, like a banquet table centerpiece made large. Despite its small scale the construction has all the grandeur and rigorous conformity of a Classical building. Perfectly proportioned, it is surrounded by slender Tuscan columns and surmounted by a dome. Bramante planned to set it in within a colonnaded courtyard to complete the scenery, but larger plans were afoot. Within a year of its completion, in November 1503, Julius engaged Bramante on the construction of the grandest architectural commission of the European 16th century, the complete re-building of St Peter's Basilica. The cornerstone of the first of the great piers of the crossing was laid with ceremony on April 18, 1506. Many drawings by Bramante survive, and many more by assistants, which shows the extent of the team that had been assembled. Bramante's vision for it, a centralized Greek cross plan that symbolized sublime perfection for him and his generation (compare Santa Maria della Consolazione, Todi influenced by Bramante's work) was fundamentally altered by the extension of the nave after his death in 1514. Bramante's plan envisaged four great chapels filling the corner spaces between the transepts, each one capped with a dome surrounding the great dome over the crossing. So Bramante's original plan was very much more Romano-Byzantine in its forms than the basilica that was actually built. (See St Peter's Basilica for further details.)

With St Peter's occupying him, Bramante had little time for other commissions. One of his earliest works in Rome, before the Basilica's construction got under way, are the cloisters (1504) of Santa Maria della Pace near Piazza Navona. The handsome proportions give an air of great simplicity. The columns on the ground floor are complemented by those on the first floor, which alternate with smaller columns placed centrally over the lower arches.