About
An astonishing act of visual deception, this church is small on the outside and big on the inside.
Many famous architects and painters were involved in making the wonders of renaissance Italy, though it took a special kind of expertise to assemble a large church on a small site. Donato Bramante was precisely the man for this task. In 1472, Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza from Milan engaged him to construct a new church for his city. His desires were immense but the spot he had at hand was restricted by a nearby street. This meant that the area behind the altar, where the choir usually stood, had to be cut back, making the church unpleasantly short. Nevertheless, Bramante used his imagination and concocted an ingenious plot. He utilized an optical illusion to create his masterpiece.
