Laurynas Gucevičius was born Laurynas Masiulis, son of a Lithuanian peasant, in a village near Kupiškis in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and took the surname of the godmother who paid for his schooling. He entered the Academy of Vilnius in 1773 and studied architecture under Marcin Knackfus; his patron, Bishop Ignacy Massalski, sent him first to Warsaw and then to Rome. He spent a year and a half in Paris in the orbit of Jacques-Germain Soufflot and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and came home carrying French Neoclassicism into a city still thick with Baroque. Everything he designed was built in the Grand Duchy: the Verkiai palace complex outside Vilnius, the recasting of Vilnius Cathedral as a colonnaded temple, and the Vilnius Town Hall. He saw neither of the last two finished — he died in 1798, aged forty-five.
