(1444–1514), whose most important and innovative work was done toward the end of his life. He came from Urbino, which was part of the Papal States, and his achievement reflects the way in which in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the architectural center of Italy was shifting from Florence to Rome. As soon as he could read and write he was put to painting and perspective, and may have been taught by Mantegna. He was close to the high-powered artistic court of the great Federigo da Montefeltro, where Alberti was a visitor, and he witnessed the construction of the duke’s tremendous palace by Luciano Laurana, where Piero della Francesca was also at work. He came to architecture via a fascination with perspective drawings, one of which survives as an engraving. By the time he started work designing buildings, first for the Sforza dukes of Milan, and elsewhere in Lombardy, he was already developing a taste for the monumentally gigantic, which was quite new, and was closer to the hugeness of ancient Rome than the elegant creations of the Florentines, with their stress on slender columns and graceful arches. Bramante’s first important work, the miracle church of Santa Maria Presso Santo Satiro, Milan, though small in itself, has a novel grandeur based on massive piers and pilasters. In 1492, he did a new east end or tribune for the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, a monumental concoction of apsidal recesses based on huge square piers, which carries his ideas of an awe-inspiring structure enclosing vast spaces much further. He got additional practice in the monumental by helping in the rebuilding of Pavia Cathedral, which was recast as a Greek cross forming the center of a vast octagon—obviously Bramante’s idea, though others were involved. The Duke of Milan also gave Bramante the opportunity to design a stunning courtyard, with ingenious use of a variety of Roman-style columns and pilasters, for the Abbey of Sant’Ambrogio, and, perhaps more important, the layout of a new square in the nearby town of Vigevano. This involved the demolition of an old quarter and its replacement by a vast open Renaissance space as a setting for the cathedral—a critical step forward in a process that was soon to cover the capitals of Europe with monumental squares and oblongs.
By this point in his career it was evident that Bramante’s work was dominated not so much by the erection of buildings in itself as the function they served—enclosing huge areas of internal space in a way that staggered the beholder. By a fortunate coincidence, the collapse of Sforza rule in Milan in 1499 drove Bramante to Rome, where there were better opportunities for him to express his grandiose ideas, first under the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, then under the great Julius II (pope 1503–13). Julius was obsessed by power, which he expressed both in building up the Papal States as a major force, militarily and financially, and in reviving the glories of Rome, as an imperial city, by an enormous program of building. Even before Julius received the tiara, Bramante made his mark by creating impressive courtyards and palaces, and by producing carefully measured studies of major buildings from antiquity, not only in Rome but at Tivoli, Caserta and Naples. The fruits of his efforts to understand and express the antique were seen in what is now called the Tempietto di Sant’Andrea, the one building of the entire Renaissance that comes close to perfection. This is a circular stone chapel, with columns and dome, covering the exact spot where, it was thought, St. Peter was martyred in Rome. It is a combination of features based upon a number of Roman prototype temples. It follows strictly the Vitruvian rules of proportion, the measurements of the elevations and units being multiples of the diameter of the columns, which is the modal norm. It uses the Doric order and is the first Renaissance building to be decorated with metopes and triglyphs in a regular Doric frieze. But it is at the same time an entirely original building, for the outer columns are echoed by the