Donato Bramante was an Italian architect, who introduced the Early Renaissance style to Milan and the High Renaissance

High Renaissance

The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...

 style to Rome, where his most famous design was St. Peter's Basilica

St. Peter's Basilica

The Papal Basilica of Saint Peter , officially known in Italian as ' and commonly known as Saint Peter's Basilica, is a Late Renaissance church located within the Vatican City. Saint Peter's Basilica has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world...

.
Bramante was born in Monte Asdrualdo (now Fermignano

Fermignano

Fermignano is a comune in the Province of Pesaro e Urbino in the Italian region Marche, located about 70 km west of Ancona and about 35 km southwest of Pesaro.Renaissance architect Donato Bramante was born here.-History:...

), under name Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio, near Urbino

Urbino

Urbino is a walled city in the Marche region of Italy, south-west of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site notable for a remarkable historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino from 1444 to 1482...

: here, in 1467 Luciano Laurana

Luciano Laurana

Luciano Laurana was a Croatian or Italian architect and engineer from the historic Vrana settlement near the town of Zadar in Dalmatia, Croatia. After education by his father Martin in Vrana settlement, he worked mostly in Italy during the late 15th century...

 was adding to the Palazzo Ducale

Palazzo Ducale, Urbino

The Ducal Palace is a Renaissance building in the Italian city of Urbino in the Marche. One of the most important monuments in Italy, it is listed as UNESCO World Heritage Site.-History:...

 an arcaded courtyard and other features that seemed to have the true ring of a reborn antiquity to Federico da Montefeltro

Federico da Montefeltro

Federico da Montefeltro, also known as Federico III da Montefeltro , was one of the most successful condottieri of the Italian Renaissance, and lord of Urbino from 1444 until his death...

's ducal palace.

Bramante's architecture has eclipsed his painting skills: he knew the painters Melozzo da Forlì

Melozzo da Forlì

Melozzo da Forlì was an Italian Renaissance painter and architect. His fresco paintings are notable for the use of foreshortening. He was the most important member of the Forlì painting school.- Biography :...

 and Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its...

 well, who were interested in the rules of perspective

Perspective (graphical)

Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...

 and illusionistic features in Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality...

's painting.