Donato di Pascuccio di Antonio, known as Bramante , occupies in the history of sixteenth century architecture the school-founder position that Brunelleschi and Alberti had had in that of the fifteenth century. He was formed in Urbino's environment, learning from Piero della Francesca's painting and from Luciano Laurana's architecture the preference for the airy structures that project themselves freely into space. It's probable that, before moving to Milan, he worked in Marche, in Emilia, in Padova and in Mantova, where the acquaintance with the S. Andrea by Leon Battista Alberti confirmed him in his love for a spatial vision of architecture. The first work assuredly made by him, however, was as a painter; in 1477, in Bergamo, he painted on the façade of palazzo dei Priori a series of filosofi (philosophers) , now in Brera's picture-gallery but reduced to few fragments; the substantial loss of this work only makes us appreciate all the more the rests of a latter cycle of frescoes, once in casa Panigarola in Milano, and now in Brera, depicting, as well, philosophers and men-at-arms, that clearly demonstrate just how much Bramante conceived architecture and painting as being called to a common decorative function. The only pictorial work on canvas that could be attributed to Bramante on good grounds, is the Cristo alla colonna (Brera), however by some ascribed to Bramantino; this work, while confirming how much Bramante owed to Piero della Francesca of his taste for geometrical austerity and to Melozzo da Forlì of his sense of volume, it's rightly considered as one of the masterpieces of the sixteenth century painting on grounds of the vastness of the spatial and plastic sense. But Bramante 's main activity unfolded in Milan (1479) in the court of Ludovico il Moro; in this period Bramante designs a Prospettiva fantastica (1481), engraved by B. Prevedari; presides to the reconstruction of the church of S. Satiro (around 1480-1486); collaborates to the works of Pavia's dome, of the cloister of S. Ambrogio's parsonage and of Vigevano's ducal castle; he builds the apsidal tribune of S. Maria delle Grazie; and raises Abbiategrasso's dome façade. It has already been said how crucial it was for Bramante the suggestion of Alberti's solemn forms, specially in S. Andrea in Mantova; and indeed the maestro, in S. Satiro's inside, preoccupied himself only to achieve a result of balanced spatial ampleness, adopting a three nave scheme with a transept and a semi-sphere shaped cupola and lengthening the apparent dimensions of the church by means of the scenographic apsidal decoration that gives the illusion of a deep choir that is actually inexistent, behind the altar. In the ancient sacristy, now used as a Baptistery, the architect took from the Lombard Romanic the octagonal plant and the superimposed rhythm of the lower arcades and of the overhanging women's gallery, but he only made use of these traditional schemes to affirm the principle of an architecture based on a intercourse of volumes. More reminiscences of the Po's Romanic are noticeable in the grandiose apsidal complex of S. Maria delle Grazie, characterized by the grafting of three semi-cylindrical bodies on a mighty cubic volume that functions as the base of the lantern, with which the luminous semi-spherical cupola concludes, on the inside, in its ample but perfect measure, the purely spatial values of the three-fold choir; the terracotta decorations that cover the walls both on the apse's outer side and on the church's inside appear quite frail in comparison with the monumentality of the architectonic complex. In 1499 the fall of Ludovico il Moro induced Bramante to leave Milan and head for Rome, where he will demonstrate the full measure of his architect's genius drawing stimulation from the direct contact with the classical Roman architecture to deepen his conception of balanced and monumental volumes inserted in space with geometrical rigour. In Rome the maestro built S. Maria della Pace's cloister (1500 – 1504), the small temple in S. Pietro in Montorio (1502), the only part to be accomplished of a more vast project, S. Maria del Popolo's apse, and maybe collaborated to the works in Palazzo della Cancelleria and the annex in S. Lorenzo in Damaso. His activity was multiform during the papacy of Giulio II, culminating with the works of the new factory of St. Peter and with the Vatican Palace, that remained interrupted because of the pope's death (1513) suddenly came when the works for the basilica had reached the completion of the apse and the placement of the cupola, while in the Palaces the construction of the two large courtyards of Belvedere e di S. Damaso had been commenced. If in S. Maria della Pace's cloister typically Lombard elements come to life however interpreted with a new spatial articulation of measured clarity, in the small and solemn temple of S. Pietro in Montorio the adoption of classical elements, such as the Doric columns and the architrave with metope and triglyphs, inserts itself into a rigorous unitary setting that harmoniously concludes the entire building, from the circular three terrace plinth to the semi-spherical crowning of the cupola. Equally centred, but greatly solemner due to the much larger ampleness of the dimensions, should have been St. Peter's basilica according to Bramante 's project; the maestro had in fact imagined a central plant building with numerous apses, with a high cupola sustained by a tambour and flanked by four towers; its main characteristic should have been the space's rigidly proportionate subdivision, its dominant theme would have been the light diffused in the inside's vast ambience from the cupola's high-standing placement. As it's of common knowledge, Bramante 's project was never enacted, since in the course of the works that lasted over 120 years (from April 18 1506, when Bramante commenced the construction, to 18 November 1626, when Urbano VIII consecrated the new temple), the Latin cross plant was finally preferred; of the monumentality of Bramante 's conception we can only have a faint idea through the drawings of Sangallo and Serlio and through the church of the Consolazione in Todi that, albeit in minor scale, keeps to the scheme Bramante conceived for St. Peter. The influence exercised by Bramante on architecture and art in his time was profound; not only the art of Sansovino, Sanmicheli, and Palladio, outside of Rome, and of Baldassare Peruzzi and Sangallo, in Rome, is linked to him; themes that will then be reprised by Michelangelo are clearly perceivable not only in the animated monumentality of the courtyard of Belvedere; in the Scuola di Atene , the fresco by Raffaello that glorifies the power of human knowledge, the utmost world's philosophers are depicted against the backdrop of a monumental architectonical structure, clearly deriving from Bramante : in that image Raffaello symbolized forevermore the universal meaning of the art of his great fellow townsman.