Santa Maria del Popolo
The architect or architects of this innovative project remain unknown due to a lack of contemporary sources. Giorgio Vasari in his "Lives" attributed all the important papal projects in Rome during Sixtus IV to a Florentine, Baccio Pontelli including the basilica and monastery of Santa Maria del Popolo. Modern researchers deemed this claim highly dubious and proposed other names among them Andrea Bregno, a Lombard sculptor and architect whose workshop certainly received important commissions in the basilica. The fundamental differences between the façade and the interior suggest that maybe more than one architect was working on the building.
Montemirabile Chapel (Santa Maria del Popolo)
The funeral monument of Cardinal Antoniotto Pallavicini on the left wall was made by the Bregno workshop. It was originally set up in the apse of the Old St. Peter's Basilica but a Dutch traveller, Aernout van Buchel glimpsed it in 1587 among various other discarded tombs and sculptures in the nave due to the ongoing demolition of the ancient church. According to the inscription on the sarcophagus "always having death in mind, Antoniotto Cardinal of S. Prassede, erected [this tomb] for himself while still alive, in the year 1501". The monument was restored and transferred to the choir of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo by his great-nephews in 1596 to which date the longer inscription on the base belongs. At the same time the Pallavicini family erected another tomb in the right aisle for a long deceased member of their house, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pallavicino. The tomb of Antoniotto has been moved into the baptistery at an unknown date (but later than 1629) after temporary stay in the Chigi Chapel nearby.