Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was a Florentine sculptor, painter and architect. He began designing buildings in his forties for the Medici family at the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. In 1546, at 71, he became chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and held the post until his death.

At San Lorenzo he designed the New Sacristy (1520s-1530s), a tomb chapel for members of the Medici family, and the Laurentian Library, begun in 1524. The library's tall vestibule has paired columns set back into recesses in the walls and a stair that divides into three flights as it descends. The reading room opened in 1571, and the vestibule was finished only in 1904.

On Rome's Capitoline Hill, from 1536, he redesigned the Piazza del Campidoglio as a trapezoid with an oval pavement around the ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius. The palace facades around it have giant pilasters, flat columns that rise through two stories. At St. Peter's he returned to Bramante's central plan and designed the dome, which Giacomo della Porta completed in 1590. He also designed the top floor of Palazzo Farnese, the Porta Pia city gate, and the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, built inside the vaulted hall of the ancient Baths of Diocletian.