Mauro Codussi

Codussi brought the Renaissance to Venice. Born around 1440 near Bergamo, on the mainland rather than in the lagoon, he arrived in a city still building Gothic and introduced the round arch, the classical order and the dome to it.

His first Venetian work, San Michele in Isola, is usually counted as the city's first Renaissance building: a white Istrian stone front with a semicircular crowning gable, put up on the cemetery island where the effect could be read across open water. He repeated and refined the curved gable elsewhere, and it became a Venetian signature long after him.

He was equally at ease with secular work. Palazzo Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal set classical columns and paired round-arched windows into the traditional Venetian palace front, producing a façade that is symmetrical and ordered without losing the glassiness the city had always built. He also gave the Piazza its clock tower, the Torre dell'Orologio, and worked on the staircases of the Venetian scuole, where he favoured a straight monumental flight over the cramped spiral then usual.

He died in 1504. His buildings are the hinge between Gothic Venice and the classical city Sansovino and Palladio would later work in.