Donato Bramante - Urbino and Milan

High Renaissance architect, born near Urbino, WC Italy. He started as a painter, and worked in Milan (1477–99), where he executed his first building projects, such as Sta Maria delle Grazie. He was employed in Rome from 1499 by Popes Alexander VI and Julius II. He designed the new Basilica of St Peter's (begun in 1506), as well as the Belvedere courtyard, the Tempietto di Sta Pietro in Montorio (1502), the Palazzo dei Tribunale (1508), and the Palazzo Caprini (1514).

Donato Bramante (1444 - March 11, 1514) was an 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.

Urbino and Milan

Bramante was born in Monte Adrualdo, near Urbino: here, in the 1460s, Luciano Laurana was adding to the Palazzo Ducale an arcaded courtyard and other features that seemed to have the true ring of a reborn antiquity to Federico da Montefeltro's ducal palace.

Bramante's architecture has eclipsed his painting skills: he knew the painters Melozzo da Forlì and Piero della Francesca well, who were interested in the rules of perspective and illusionistic features in Mantegna's painting. Around 1474, Bramante moved to Milan, a city with a deep Gothic architectural tradition, and built several churches in the new Antique style. As with Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, Renaissance architecture was born in 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 some other smaller constructions in Pavia and Legnano However, in 1499, with his Sforza patron driven from Milan by an invading French army, Bramante made his way to Rome, where he was already known to the powerful Cardinal Riario. 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, possibly later) of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum. Within a year of its completion, in November 1503, Julius engaged Bramante for the construction of the grandest European architectural commission of the 16th century, the complete rebuilding of St Peter's Basilica. Bramante's vision for St Peter's, 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 equal transepts, each one capped with a smaller 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.)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Donato Bramante

Occupied with St Peter's, Bramante had little time for other commissions. Bramante is also famous for his revolutionary design for the Palazzo Caprini in Rome.