Jacopo Sansovino

Sansovino remade the centre of Venice. Born Jacopo Tatti in Florence in 1486, he took the name of his teacher, the sculptor Andrea Sansovino, and worked in Rome until the Sack of 1527 drove him north. Venice, needing an architect, appointed him proto — chief architect — to the Procurators of St Mark's, and he held the post for four decades.

The Piazzetta is his. The Biblioteca Marciana, facing the Doge's Palace across the open space, brought full Roman classicism to a city that had never had it, and Palladio called it the richest building since antiquity. Sansovino also built the Loggetta at the foot of the campanile and the Zecca, the mint, next to the library.

He remained a sculptor throughout, and it shows: his façades are unusually deep, with columns standing clear of the wall and heavy sculptural relief in the frieze, so they read as modelled objects rather than as decorated surfaces.

A vault of the library collapsed during construction in 1545 and he was briefly imprisoned for it. He rebuilt and continued, dying in Venice in 1570.