Donato Bramante

Donato Bramante trained in Urbino, a small court that under the duke Federico da Montefeltro had become one of the most sophisticated humanist centers in Italy, and he is thought to have worked alongside the painter Piero della Francesca there. What he took from that environment was an obsession with illusionistic space, the kind of trompe-l'œil perspective he had seen in the Paduan painter Andrea Mantegna's frescoes, and he spent his early career applying it to architecture rather than just to painted walls.

By 1476 he was court architect to Ludovico Sforza, the duke of Milan, and his choir for the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro is a shallow niche painted and carved to look like a full apse, a trick of perspective solving a real problem of cramped urban space.

When Milan fell to the French in 1499 Bramante moved to Rome, where Pope Julius II made him his chief planner for rebuilding the city, including the Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio and, from 1506, the new St. Peter's Basilica itself. Bramante's design was a centralized Greek-cross plan; he died in 1514 before it was built, and the commission passed through Raphael and later Michelangelo, who kept Bramante's central dome idea but extended the nave, permanently altering the shape he had planned.