• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2887 0

that the architectural history of the new St. Peter’s is extremely complicated. A truly great church appears to have a vigorous life of its own, and at times the architects successively connected with it seem little more than flies buzzing round the site. Work on the proposed site for the new church had actually begun as far back as 1452, under Bernardo Rossellino, and the foundations then laid had a permanent effect on the structures later placed upon them, like a palimpsest emerging through the writing that covers it. There were various stops and starts before Bramante took over. His first plan on paper (1506), a beautiful affair in orange wash and brown ink, actually survives. It envisaged a centralized, square church, with four subsidiary domes as well as the main one. One of his assistants, Giuliano da Sangallo, criticized this concept, and Bramante scrapped it for a more longitudinal shape. When Julius II died, there were further changes under the new pope, Leo X, a Medici with ideas of his own. The central piers, though reduced in size, had been completed when Bramante himself died in 1514. Sangallo and his other assistant, Fra Giocondo, then took over, but the pope put the young Raphael of Urbino (1483–1520) in overall charge. Raphael abandoned some of Bramante’s ideas, but in other ways he reverted to his original plan, adding bits of his own. But he too died in 1520, together with his amendments, which were either never built or demolished. Sangallo produced an alternative, which survives as a wooden model. But the sack of Rome, and subsequent lack of cash, prevented much from being done. Sangallo in turn died in 1546, whereupon the aging Michelangelo (he was seventy) was told to take over. He produced yet another plan, which involved clearing out the completed Raphael-Sangallo portions more or less entirely and again reverting to Bramante. So much of the present interior is essentially Michelangelo’s work, but following Bramante’s idea.

Michelangelo was obsessed by the dome, and produced a number of designs leaning heavily on Brunelleschi’s Florentine dome. What he eventually produced is much more complicated and monumental, with strongly articulated curved buttresses descending into twin columns outside the drum. He actually built the drum, but when he died in 1564, no work had been done on the dome. By now the pope was Pius IV, who told the two new architects, Pirro Ligorio and Giacomo da Vignola, to carry out Michelangelo’s plans without argument. Pirro ignored this injunction, started his own work on the attic inside the dome and was sacked. Vignola reintroduced the idea of subsidiary domes, which Bramante had abandoned more than sixty years before, and his successor, Giacomo della Porta, actually built two flanking domes, as we see them today. He demolished what was left of Bramante’s choir, vaulted Michelangelo’s dome, but increased the rake, and this meant that the outer shell is much steeper than Michelangelo’s broad shape, as well as nearly thirty feet higher. The dome was complete by 1593, but della Porta had to employ an engineer, Domenico Fontana, to work out the stresses, something none of his predecessors would have done, and evidence of the increasing specialization of the building industry, now operating with colossal masses. However, in architecture what matters is what is actually put up, and remains put up. Della Porta’s dome is markedly different in silhouette from Michelangelo’s, but it was built, and after a few years began to look not only right but inevitable. So his is the great dome shape that was imitated throughout Rome and eventually all over Europe. Thus della Porta, though not a great architect, certainly became an influential one.

There remained the façade, which had also been designed by Michelangelo, on a scale and width that even Bramante might have thought a touch too grandiose. It was more like an emperor’s palace than the front of a church, with its giant pilasters and pillars and endless bays. The spirit of this design was eventually carried out by a succession of five