B R A M A N T E ,Donato d'Agnolo (1444-1514) . One of Italy's major architects; perfected the creation of Renaissance space begun by Brunelleschi and Alberti; fathered the Grand Manner of High Renaissance architecture. Born of a farming family in Fermignano near Urbino, a center of humanism and the arts under its Montefeltro rulers, he is believed to have received his artistic education at that court, working at first as a painter. The influence of Alberti, Piero della Francesca, and, later, of Mantegna is discernible in his few surviving paintings. Little is known about his youth. In Milan, he rebuilt the Basilica S. Maria presso S. Satiro, whose original structure dated back before 900, creating an interior testifying to his flair for rhythm and proportion. His chief Milan accomplishment is the eastern section of the Dominican Church of S. Maria delle Grazie, which he built for Ludovico Sforza ("il Moro"--the Moor), duke of Milan. The domed crossing and deep apse are among the noblest Renaissance creations in all Italy. Circles or discs, Bramante's trademark, are the chief decoration. At the ducal court, Bramante met Leonardo da Vinci, whose Last Supper fresco is in the refectory next to the church. Both artists left Milan after the Moor's fall, in 1499. Bramante heeded for Rome, where, living on his savings, he spent his time examining and measuring antique buildings, including those of Hadrian's Villa outside Rome. Presumably, it was his passion for antiquity that brought him into contact wtih the rich and influential cardinal Oliviero Carafa (or Caraffa ) , a cultured Neapolitan, uncle of the future Pope Paul IV, who sponsored his first Roman work, the Cloister of S. Maria della Pace. Carafa looked after the interests of royal Spain in Rome and probably obtained for him the commission from Spain's "Catholic kings," Ferdinand and Isabel, for the decoration of the courtyard of S. Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum Hill. His circular Tempietto ("little temple"), standing in the center of the court, remains one of the truest expressions of the spirit of the Renaissance. Consisting of a domed, cylindrical body ringed by sixteen slender Tuscan columns, it is at once a monument to the Apostle Peter-who, according to a local legend, was crucified here-and a pagan temple, inspired by round structures of antiquity, such as the Temple of the Vestal Virgins in the Forum. Its purpose is to please. A circular portico Bramante had planned as a frame for it was never built. Bramante was, by now, the leading architect in Rome, called in on almost every major building project. The (long-since vanished) house he built, either for himself or for Raphael, his fellow Urbinate, friend, protégé, and, perhaps, distant kinsman, was widely imitated in Rome. When Giuliano della Rovere was elected pope in 1503, taking the name Julius II, he made Bramante his architect, charging him with the transformation of papal Rome into the caput mundi ("summit of the world") it had been under the Caesars. Rising to the challenge, Bramante, then aged sixty, began by welding the disconnected, far-flung structures of the Vatican into a single urban unit. By way of two parallel galleries linking the Belvedere Villa high on Vatican Hill with the cluster of papal palaces on lower ground, he devised a 1000-foot-long, 300-foot-wide enclosure, containing all the buildings as well as an enormous oblong courtyard ending in an open-air theater. Though his ingenious design was modified after his death (the courtyard is now subdivided by two crossarms), the complex, with its endless corridors, is basically his creation. Pope Julius next entrusted hiin with his most cherished enterprise, the rearing of a new St. Peter's to replace the decaying basilica built by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Neither Bramante nor the impatient Julius were to live to see the task completed. Bramante produced the first of many projects for what was to be Christendom's premier church, symbolic of the pontiffs' majesty: a "Greek cross" structure of colossal size, formed by four equally long arms with four terminal apses, crowned by a central dome. Its walls and vaults were to be made of brick-faced concrete (a compound of cement and rubble), a virtually lost technique that had enabled Roman engineers to "shape" such tough, resilient structures as the Pantheon and the Imperial baths. In demolishing the old basilica, Bramante proceeded, with typical Renaissance nonchalance, without regard for its rich tombs and monuments, ac- quiring the nickname Ruinante. At one point, he proposed to move the presumed tomb of St. Peter! Before he died, he had built the four mammoth piers that were to carry the central cupola and joined them with strong vaults. It was to take another one hundred years or so to finish the basilica, during which Raphael, Peruzzi, Michelangelo, and others succeeded him, each following his own design, thereby contributing to the architectural hodgepodge St. Peter's is today. Bramante was a man of cheerful disposition. He wrote fair poetry and liked to improvise--like Leonardo--on the lyre. His reported mischief-making for Michelangelo notwithstanding, he was on friendly terms with leading humanists and artists of his time. His influence on his successors, painters as well as architects, is fundamental. The architect Sebastiano Serlio (1475-c. 1554) called him "the inventor and the light of good, true architecture."