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architects, culminating in the great Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), who completed the work and then went on to lay out the piazza in front of the church, with its flanking colonnades, finished in 1667. Thus this great church took more than two centuries to be built, and was the work of more than a dozen architects under thirty-two popes, some of whom interfered directly and imposed their own ideas or vetoes, and it spanned the mid-fifteenth-century Renaissance, the High Renaissance and the Baroque. (I am ignoring the sacristy and the clocks, the work of Rococo times.) This wonderful building, closely examined, bears all the marks of its long evolution and manifold progenitors. Yet, as with its dome, because we are used to it, it looks right, as though the endless squabbles, changes of plan and demolitions had never been. It illustrates the problem of writing architectural history, and indeed of being an architect, who can never be in quite the same control of his work as a painter or sculptor is. So, who built St. Peter’s? The answer is that God and time built St. Peter’s, but insofar as any one man did it, it was Bramante.

Michelangelo’s proposed façade for St. Peter’s, which embroiders on rather than reflects the interior it conceals, and is wider too, breaks all the rules of architecture as laid down by Vitruvius, Alberti or anyone else. And the reason for this is that Michelangelo did not enter the art or trade as a novice, eager to learn, but as a world-famous sculptor, more anxious to teach. His grandiose sculptural schemes required appropriate architectural settings. The settings required appropriate churches, or other buildings, to house them. The search for appropriateness, therefore, produced a natural progression from sculpting to architecture. The first work for which he was responsible was the great pontifical fortress of Sant’-Angelo in Rome (1515–16). It is punctuated with sculptural devices, as though the itch to carve was still stronger than the need to tell workmen what to do. Leo, a Medici, also wanted Michelangelo to complete the family church of San Lorenzo in Florence with a marble sculptured façade, and drawings and a wooden model for this project survive. But there were disagreements and quarrels over the cost of the proposal and nothing came of it.

Michelangelo did, however, carry out two works for another Medici pope, Clement VII, at San Lorenzo—a sacristy and a library. Both are based on ideas he plucked from antiquity, both ignore Vitruvian and any other rules, and both exhibit the fertility of his imagination. He made up his architectural vernacular as he went along, improvising and inventing, so that nothing he did is like anything done before by others, or even by himself. His contemporaries and successors found this disconcerting, and Vasari criticized him as a rule breaker. The sacristy is really a tomb-depository for Medici grandees, which suited Michelangelo, a tomb-designer-turned-architect, and his details are extraordinarily inventive. But they overwhelm the whole, which lacks unity. It should be regarded as a preparation for the Laurentian Library and its vestibule, which came later (1524, completed 1562). For this library, and its staggering stair approach, Michelangelo turned architecture outside in; that is, he used the structural features one finds on the outside of a building as decorative features for the interior. Windows, whether oblong or square, become blind recesses or tabernacles; entrances become doors or mere punctuations in blank walls; pillars or pilasters, instead of supporting the roof, frame the nonwindows; while the ceiling reflects the decorative non-functionalism of the walls rather than suggests how it hangs there or what architectural machinery it conceals. There are all kinds of ingenious inventions that catch and delight the eye, and the style of everything is consciously classical, or rather classicism as reinvented by Michelangelo. Yet one cannot help feeling that he was unconsciously following the same exuberant route as the late-Gothic stonemason-architects,