Description

Donato Bramante reached Rome at about fifty with no great building behind him, and in fifteen years invented the language of modern classical architecture. Marcel Reymond follows that transformation: the Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio, tiny and perfect; the Belvedere court at the Vatican; and finally the Greek-cross plan for St Peter’s that Michelangelo would later defend as untouchable. Reymond, a historian of Florentine art, writes as a man who knows building sites as well as drawings: he shows what Bramante took from antiquity, what he made of it, and how his pupils carried it across the peninsula. One of the books that fixed the French reading of the Italian Renaissance.