DELLA PORTA, GIACOMO. - Born probably in Lombardy around 1540 and died in Rome in 1604. After a youthful period of activity in Genoa, where the church of the Santissima Annunziata is attributed to him, he was active throughout in Rome from 1573, when he succeeded Vignola in the construction of the Gesù, modifying its design and making it the prototype of Counter-Reformation architecture. He replicated the same model on a smaller scale at S. Maria dei Monti (1584), while he departed from it in other works: the facade of S. Luigi dei Francesi (before 1583), S. Paolo alle Tre Fontane (1590), and the interior of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where the arrangement of Sangallo is taken up again, abandoning Michelangelo's design.
He also succeeded Vignola as architect of the Vatican fabric, in which, by contrast, he did not depart from Michelangelo's conception: under Gregory XIII he erected the chapel named after that Pontiff; and he continued the works under Sixtus V with Domenico Fontana at his side, with whom he turned the dome, altering only slightly the master's design. Confirmed in his post by Clement VIII, he executed for the Pope the Clementine Chapel, symmetrical to the Gregorian, and the new confessio, likewise called Clementine.
He also had a part in the construction of S. Atanasio dei Greci and probably also of the Santissima Trinità dei Monti and of S. Maria in Vallicella, and he rebuilt the transept of S. Giovanni in Laterano. Among the civil buildings erected by him, those for the Aldobrandini stand out: the palace in Piazza Colonna (later Chigi) and the villa at Frascati, both left unfinished at his death. The type of the sixteenth-century fountain in Rome is also owed to him, realized for the first time in the Piazza del Pantheon (1575).
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Mario Zocca