Donato d'Angelo Bramante Born in : Urbino, 1444 - Dead in : 1514 La "Haute Renaissance" Donato Bramante is 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. 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. Biography 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. 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. (cf : Wikipedia) Connections Studied under Andrea Mantegna et Piero della Francesca http://www.insecula.com/us/contact/A005925.html Bramante, Donato (1444-1514) Bramante, Donato (1444-1514), is one of the leading architect of the High Renaissance in Italy. He was often ranked with Michelangelo and Raphael as one of those who represented the full flowering of the Renaissance of Italy. Born in Monte Andruvaldo, near Urbino as Donato d'Angelo, Bramante was trained as a painter. His architectural career began in Milan, where he settled in 1482. In his design for the Church of Santa Maria presso Santo Satiro (1488), he used false perspective in the painted apse to create a feeling of depth- the first time this device had been used in architecture. Bramante left Milan in 1499 and settled in Rome, where, until the end of his life, he was employed almost exclusively by Pope Julius II. Here, under the influence of classical antiquity, his style became more monumental and less ornamented. His two greatest projects, which he did not complete, were his plans for the rebuilding of Saint Peter's Church and the Vatican Palace. Bramante stands with Michelangelo and Raphael among the artistic giants of this period in Italy. Successfully fusing the ideals of classical antiquity with those of Christian inspiration, his sculptural, expressive grandeur paved the way for the more elaborate baroque architecture of the next century. Bramante's main influence was perhaps in the classical ideas and the Renaissance principal of unity that he passed on to the many pupils he had taught in Rome. S Pietro in Montorio Tempietto Montorio, Rome 1502 Through this small and centrally planned church, Bramante expresses a sense of grandeur and elegant balance which moves the Renaissance into a new and high phase. The Tempietto is a martyrium. It stands gracefully and forcefully in the center of the cloister of S. Pietro in Montorio, supposedly on the spot where Saint Peter was crucified. Isolated on a high platform, it consists of a central cylinder crowned by a hemispherical dome. A revolving peristyle of Doric columns supports a frieze with alternating metopes and triglyphs. Bramante's model for the Tempietto, his first building in Rome, was probably the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/5220/renaiss/braman.html Tempietto de San Pietro, Montorio The Tempietto in the cloister of San Pietro in Montorio was built by Bramante after 1502, on the commission of the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The emphasis here is on the harmony of proportions, the simplicity of volumes (cylinder, hemisphere) and the sobriety of the Doric Order. The circular plan symbolizes divine perfection. Inspired by ancient temples, the Tempietto is both a homage to antiquity and a Christian memorial. The Tempietto is built over the spot where, according to legend, St. Peter was martyred. Bramante built the Tempietto small in size, hence the title and with classical allusion. The Tempietto is very symmetrical . The only aspect that it is not like ancient memorials is the fact that there is a drum between the main body of the building and the hemisphere of the dome. The little temple with its stylobate rests on three steps which link it to the plan of the courtyard. Sixteen Doric columns which form a luminous enclosure, support the beams above which rises the body of the temple; and the upward movement is stressed by the exterior ribs of the dome (a subdued echo of Brunelleschi). For Bramante, the planning of the Tempietto must have represented the union of illusionistic painting and architecture he had spent his career perfecting. The building, too small on the inside to accommodate a congregation (only 15 feet in diameter), was conceived as a 'picture' to be looked at from outside, a 'marker', a symbol of Saint Peter's martyrdom. http://web.uccs.edu/cstephen/tempietto.htm Renaissance architecture is the architecture of the period between the early 15th and early 17th centuries in different regions of Europe, in which there was a conscious revival and development of certain elements of Classical Greek and Roman thought and material culture. The Renaissance style places emphasis on symmetry, proportion, math and the regularity of parts as they are demonstrated in the architecture of Classical antiquity and in particular, the architecture of Ancient Rome, of which many examples remained. Orderly arrangements of columns, pilasters and lintels, as well as the use of semicircular arches, hemispherical domes, niches and aedicules replaced the more complex proportional systems and irregular profiles of medieval buildings. Developed first in Florence, with Filippo Brunelleschi as one of its innovators, the Renaissance style quickly spread to other Italian cities and then to France, Germany, England, Russia and elsewhere. [edit] Historiography The word "Renaissance" derived from the term "la rinascita" (meaning re-birth) which first appeared in Giorgio Vasari's Vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori Italiani (The Lives of the Artists, 1550–68). Although the term Renaissance was used first by the French historian Jules Michelet, it was given its more lasting definition from the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose book, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien 1860,[1] was influential in the development of the modern interpretation of the Italian Renaissance. The folio of measured drawings Édifices de Rome moderne; ou, Recueil des palais, maisons, églises, couvents et autres monuments (The Buildings of Modern Rome), first published in 1840 by Paul Letarouilly, also played an important part in the revival of interest in this period.[2] The Renaissance style was recognized by contemporaries in the term "all'antica", or "in the ancient manner" (of the Romans).