Giovanni Battista Prímoli

Trained as an architect in Milan and then admitted to the Society of Jesus, Giovanni Battista Prímoli reached Buenos Aires in 1717 and spent the remaining thirty years of his life building for the Jesuit province of Paraquaria. In Buenos Aires he finished the church of San Ignacio, begun by Johann Kraus, and worked on San Francisco, El Pilar, La Merced, San Pedro Telmo and the town cabildo; in Córdoba he raised the definitive fabric of the cathedral and worked on the Compañía de Jesús. He also designed the churches of the Guaraní mission towns of San Miguel, Concepción and Trinidad, and the layout of the Trinidad reduction as a whole. He died in 1747 at the Candelaria mission. His idiom is a plain, massive Italian Baroque cut in local sandstone by Guaraní masons.