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.
Italian Baroque
In 1605, at the very beginning of his pontificate, Pope Paul V commissioned Carlo Maderno to redesign St. Peter's Basilica. It was at the age of 72, in 1546, when Michelangelo first took hold of the unfinished rebuilding project started by Bramante. When Michelangelo died, the construction of the, then, Greek-cross section surrounding the Papal altar and the tomb of Peter had been completed only as far as the top of the drum. The dome then became completed, with some modifications, by Giacomo della Porta in 1590. It was the continuous debates over the religious and aesthetic benefits of keeping the Greek-cross plan or enhancing the space by extending it into Latin-cross plan that led Paul V to boldly commission for Maderno's services. Maderno's initial projects, including the long nave addition, which created a new Latin-Cross solution upon the ground plan, the façade and the portico, became an instantly recognizable image of Rome and the heart and spirit of Catholic Christianity.