Girolamo Rainaldi

Girolamo Rainaldi (1570 – 15 July 1655) was an Italian architect who worked mainly in a conservative Mannerist style, often with collaborating architects. He was a successful competitor of Bernini. His son, Carlo Rainaldi, became an even more notable, more fully Baroque architect.

The son of a painter from Norcia, Rainaldi was born in Rome.

He trained with the architect-engineer Domenico Fontana and collaborated as a junior partner with Giacomo Della Porta, whom he succeeded as the papacy's chief architect, under the patronage of Pope Sixtus V. He became the chief Papal architect of Rome in 1602, and thus was constantly at work on lesser projects such as altars and church furnishings, and with on-going projects of other designers, especially at St Peter's and in completing Michelangelo's project at the Campidoglio with the Palazzo Nuovo discreetly designed to mirror Michelangelo's masterful Palazzo dei Conservatori.

Rainaldi's most influential single design was the façade of the Chiesa di Gesù e Maria; the project began in 1642, and was not completed before Rainaldi's death. In his official capacity Rainaldi also designed the palazzo to house the Jesuits in the Piazza del Gesù, a Mannerist façade without a trace of Baroque in its details. As the favored architect of Cardinal Pamphili, he temporarily eclipsed Bernini when this cardinal became Pope as Innocent X in 1644. The elder Rainaldi's important projects in Rome the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona (c. 1645 – 1650), where he designed the ground plan of Sant'Agnese and laid its foundations beginning in 1652, but was replaced the following year by Francesco Borromini, who erected quite a different façade on Rainaldi's foundations; after Rainaldi's death his son Carlo was called in to replace Borromini.

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