Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [42]
With Julius II on the papal throne, Bramante was soon able to realize his soaring ambitions in earnest. He began work on the prodigious extension of the Vatican Palace known as the Cortile del Belvedere. This has grand terraces and breathtaking internal and external vistas, some of them designed to delight the ambitious eye of the pope as he peered at them from his bedroom window as soon as he woke in the morning. Part of the complex incorporates an ingenious and grand spiral staircase or ramp, which takes the visitor from top to bottom of the building, through its various floors. Near the base, the columns are Tuscan; then they become Doric and, in ascending order, Ionic and Composite, and these gradations are repeated in the various floors of the palace. Thus Bramante had hit on a new way of emphasizing the variety of the decorative forms of antiquity by allowing each to dominate a particular floor. He used the same device in the façade he designed for the superb Palazzo Caprini (1510), where the ground or street floor is heavily rusticated in massive stone blocks, with curved archway windows, as though for a fortress, and the piano nobile above it is held up with slender Doric twin columns framing elegant palatial windows. This delightful trick of having two building designs in one, another instance of grandeur and profusion achieved by modest means, was later imitated in thousands of formal buildings all over Italy and Europe—indeed, it became one of the most common architectural clichés of all time. It was a sign of the times, and of the increased fame, prominence and wealth of individual artists in the Italy of the High Renaissance, that this wonderful creation was bought by Raphael in 1517 as his town house.
Bramante worked on many churches in Rome, notably Santa Maria del Populo, and elsewhere in the neighborhood, like the church of Santi Celso e Giuliano, but his principal efforts were concentrated on Julius II’s plans for a new St. Peter’s. His ideas and Bramante’s coincided: that it was time to wipe the slate clean and replace the old basilica, which both thought barbarous, with one embodying the principles of the new antique-based architecture; that this project should be completed on the largest possible scale, to show that the new Rome now arising was superior to its imperial, pagan past; and that the building should exhibit the space enclosure now made possible by engineering experience, and that it be most calculated to impress vast congregations during the pontifical services. For inspiration, Bramante looked to what had been the largest roofed buildings in ancient Rome, the enormous public baths, especially those of Caracalla, whose piers and circular openings supported roofs enclosing spaces that even Renaissance man found unimaginable.
Actually, the ambitious Bramante had no need of inspiration from antiquity, since most of his ideas for the new St. Peter’s had already been adumbrated by his work in Lombardy, notably in Santa Maria delle Grazie and Pavia Cathedral. The chief difference was the increased size. Size may not be the most important element in architecture as a rule, but it is in buildings aiming to awe. Many people worked numerous modifications to his original plan. But it was he who gave the church its salient element, both inside and out—sheer size. Whether seen from ten miles away, in the Rome skyline, or glimpsed from across the city or nearer to from the space between the enclosing arms of its vast colonnade, or goggled at from within, St. Peter’s is the crowned monarch of ecclesiastical architecture. There is nothing else like it anywhere, and scale is the key to its uniqueness.
Having said this, however, it must be admitted