Bernardo Antonio Vittone

However, when the royal House of Savoy resumed its patronage of architecture in the early 1740s, they appointed Benedetto Innocente Alfieri as their architect, not Vittone.

The exterior has a tiered dome, but the hexagonal interior has geometric elaborations with alternating convex and concave chapels that recall the architecture of Juvarra and Borromini.

In the dome, the elaborately decorated ribs, reminiscent of Guarini's work, intersect to form a complex design illuminated by natural light playfully concealed by hidden windows.

Both were dominated by traditional Renaissance musical theory of proportion, which is perhaps rather surprising given that Vittone had edited Guarini's treatise and absorbed the lessons on projective geometry so well in his own architectural designs.

He pointed out that Vittone attempted to mathematically prove the correct classic proportions of buildings, and that he used the recent discoveries of light by Newton to address questions of architecture, and he ends with a dedication to God and the Virgin Mary.

He describes Vittone as: an architect of rare ability, full of original ideas and of a creative capacity equalled only by few of the masters...What little we know of him suggests that his was an obsessed genius.