ABSTRACT
As if that wasn’t enough to take on in his seventy-first year, he was also appointed in that same year to be the architect for St. Peter’s Basilica. The structure had been under construction for almost forty years, and a series of architects had made little progress. As he was completing the frescos, he redesigned the plans for the basilica, building on what had been done before but designing changes to make the existing structure both stronger and more beautiful. He worked on the basilica until his death in 1564; it was completed many years later, largely to his specifications. It is one of the two largest churches in the world, and generally agreed to be the most well-known work of Renaissance architecture.
