DONATO-LAZZARI, a celebrated architect, whose family was of Castel Durante, near Urbino, in the state of Urbino, where he is generally said to have been born, though others assert that he was a native of Monte Asdrualdo, a villa four miles from Urbino. Coluccio assigns 1450 as the year of his birth, but Vasari states it as 1444. Cardinal Oliviero Caraffa brought him to Rome, and introduced him to Alexander VI., for whom he designed and erected the Chancery, a somewhat heavy pile, yet grand from its spacious tiers of arched galleries around a court, sustained by granite columns. Julius II., with whom he became a favourite, first employed him to connect into one vast whole the Belvedere with the older portions of the pontifical palace, which he accomplished so as to produce an imposing mass out of very heterogeneous materials. When the imperious and impatient pontiff determined in 1513 to rebuild St Peter's, he employed Bramante on the design; and such was Bramante's zeal and industry, that not only was the design completed, but the architect had erected the four great piers and their connecting arches before his death, which took place in the following year. The designs of Bramante were lost sight of by those who succeeded him in this vast work; and notwithstanding the boldness of the majestic dome of Michael Angelo, many Italians have regretted that the designs of Bramante were departed from, more especially in the present bald and tasteless western facade, which has nothing but its magnitude to deserve commendation. One of Bramante's best designs now remaining is the fine oratory in the cloister of San Pietro Montorio, a little circular temple with a colonnade of great elegance on three circular gradini.

Bramante was not merely an architect and a painter, but also a poet, as appears from the volume of his works published at Milan in 1756. He was the uncle of Raphael, whom he instructed in architecture, and introduced to the notice of Julius II. The painter has gratefully commemorated his master by placing him in his School of Athens. Bramante died at Rome in 1514.