Donato Bramante
Bramante came from Milan to Rome around 1500 and designed the Tempietto and the first plan for the new St Peter’s: a Greek cross beneath a gigantic dome. The plan was altered many times, but the idea lived on in Michelangelo’s dome.
Donato Bramante was born in 1444 near Urbino in central Italy. He probably trained as a painter, and the Duchy of Urbino, with Federico da Montefeltro’s palace, was one of the foremost centres of art, mathematics and perspective of the age, where he may have come into contact with Piero della Francesca. In the late 1470s he came to Milan, where he worked as a painter and architect under Ludovico Sforza for some twenty years and got to know Leonardo da Vinci. There he designed, among other things, Santa Maria presso San Satiro, where he used illusionistic perspective to paint a choir that is in reality only about a metre deep.
When the French took Milan in 1499, Bramante moved to Rome, where he studied the ancient ruins and developed a new, monumental style. The Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio, probably begun around 1502, is a small circular temple with Doric columns and a dome, built on the spot where, according to tradition, the apostle Peter was crucified. It became the model building of the High Renaissance. Pope Julius II put him in charge of the great building projects in the Vatican: the Belvedere Courtyard and the new St Peter’s, whose foundation stone was laid in 1506. His plan was a Greek cross with an enormous dome inspired by the Pantheon, surrounded by smaller domes and towers in a symmetrical whole.
Bramante died in 1514, when only the four huge piers at the crossing of St Peter’s had been raised. His successors Raphael, Antonio da Sangallo and Michelangelo changed the plan many times, but the piers and the idea of the great central dome remained. The Tempietto was copied and reinterpreted for centuries, in domes such as St Paul’s in London and the Panthéon in Paris. Bramante gave the Renaissance its Roman, monumental scale and became a model for how the grandeur of antiquity could be revived in new buildings. His buildings were obligatory objects of study for the Swedish architects who travelled to Rome, from Tessin the Younger in the 1670s to the Academy’s scholarship holders in the 19th century.