R. A. Scotti

by Basilica: The Splendor;the Scandal: Building St. Peter's

  Bramante’s second inspiration is an architectural wonder. The Pantheon is a large circular edifice, built as a pagan temple to the multiple gods of Rome and some time later rededicated to the Blessed Virgin. Each element of it astounds: the brilliant lighting achieved by a single eye in the sky—a 27-foot-wide oculus in the center of the dome; the solid walls 15 feet thick bearing the weight of the dome; and the massive dome itself. A marvel of construction and engineering, it is a 143-foot hemisphere, equal in diameter and height, constructed of cement faced with brick.

  The parts of a dome.

  Monumentality was a distinctly Roman conceit, and Bramante embraced it. His Basilica covered 28,700 square yards—a third again (11,350 square yards) as large as St. Peter’s is today. Like the Pantheon’s dome, his was as smooth and shallow as a porcelain saucer. Yet there were radical differences. Ancient temple domes sprang directly from the circular outer wall.

  Bramante’s cupola rested on a drum—a ring of uniform columns, each one 60 feet in circumference—and was held aloft by four massive piers. Arched by coffered barrel vaults, it towered 300 feet in the air. Its width was almost twice that of the nave and its diameter of 142 feet was equal to the Pantheon’s and just shy of the Duomo’s in Florence. Like the dome of the Pantheon, it was planned as a single shell constructed of cemented masonry. Bramante carried through the same 1:2:4 ratio in the proportion of the crossing arches to the dome. Their height was twice their span, and the total height of the dome was four times the arch span. For the exterior, he imagined a crescendo of smaller domes of increasing size over the apses and corner chapels culminating in the immense central dome.

  By the norms of Renaissance architecture, Bramante’s Basilica was revolutionary. In its titanic scale, in its use of space as an architectural force, and in its shape (the divine circle inscribed within a square), Bramante abandoned the serenity that was Greece for the drama that was Rome. The new St. Peter’s has been called the boldest experiment in religious architecture ever conceived. Nothing comparable had been attempted since the days of imperial Rome when Constantine raised the first basilica.

  The Roman architects were extraordinary engineers. But somewhere on the long, rutted road from antiquity to the Renaissance, the techniques they devised to erect massive arches and vault vast spaces were forgotten. Even the material that made their feats of engineering possible was lost. To build his church, Bramante had to rediscover their methods.

  Building on such a scale and with techniques not attempted for more than a millennium made much of the construction trial and error.

  Bramante coaxed the secrets of the ancient architects from the ruined city and welded Roman forms to Renaissance principles. The papal goldsmith and memoirist Benvenuto Cellini described his skill: “Bramante began the great church of St. Peter entirely in the beautiful manner of the ancients. He had the power to do so because he was an artist, and because he was able to see and to understand the beautiful buildings of antiquity that still remain to us, though they are in ruins.”

  Centuries of architectural history and tradition came together in Bramante’s plan—the arch, vault, and dome introduced by the elusive Etruscans; the harmonious proportion and unity of the Athenians; and the Romans’ remarkable use of brick and concrete, which formed the structural basis for the domes, piers, and arches of their massive constructions.

  Concrete is one of those dull, unsung inventions that make extraordinary achievements possible. When the architects of the Caesars had the inspired notion to mix sand and volcanic gravel, they came up with a substance that was handy, plastic, and extremely durable. If they used bricks and poured concrete, they didn’t need beams. They could support massive weights on piers alone and vault vast spaces, creating buildings on a heroic scale with immense open floors and soaring ceilings.

  By the second century, Romans were building both infrastructures and architectural marvels with concrete masonry. They could produce it cheaply and easily by combining pozzuolana, a volcanic gravel, with lime, broken stones, bricks, and tufa, a porous deposit found in streams and riverbeds. The ingredients were mixed with a small amount of water and beaten vigorously. The small proportion of water allowed the cement to set quickly, and a thorough beating ensured a durable substance.

  Roman concrete not only built the Pantheon, the baths, the aqueducts, and other engineering works, remnants of which still mark the landscape of Europe, it also paved all the roads that led to Rome.

  To rediscover the brick-and-cement building skills of the emperors, Bramante studied the antiquities and consulted the Vitruvian text that Alberti had tried to interpret for Renaissance builders. As Alberti noted, Vitruvius was the only architectural writer to survive “that great shipwreck of antiquity,” and he was such a poor stylist “that the Latins thought he wrote Greek and the Greeks believed he spoke Latin.” From Vitruvius, Alberti drew attention to the giant pilasters, the colossal orders, and the massive barrel vaults that were essential elements in imperial architecture. Bramante would make them essential elements in the new Basilica, combining them in ways the Romans had never attempted.

  In essence, barrel vaults are tunnels formed by a series of abutting arches. Because rigid concrete vaults exert no lateral thrust, the Romans could span expanses of vast height and width, creating a monumental architecture. For the concrete vaults in his new Basilica, Bramante had to train artisans in the “new” masonry and establish an on-site operation at St. Peter’s to form, shape, and cut the bricks.

  Writing some twenty years after Bramante’s death, Serlio called him “a man of such gifts in architecture that, with the aid and authority given to him by the Pope, one may say that he revived true architecture, which had been buried from the ancients down to that time.”

  The St. Peter’s (drawn in gray) is shown in relation to Constantine’s basilica (broken black line) and the imperial Circus of Caligula and Nero (solid black line). The small square to the left of the words “Caligula and Nero” indicates the original location of the obelisk.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  VAULTING AMBITION

  If Julius had chosen a more circumspect personality to be his architect, he might have had second thoughts about replacing Constantine’s church, but the two men shared an exuberance, a rashness, and a rush to glory. Julius and Bramante were the same age, and they were conspiring in the most glorious escapade of the century.

  In late fall of 1505, Bramante went to work, Vasari says, “with various extraordinary methods of his own and with his fantastic ideas.” He started excavating the foundation for the northwest pier, known today as St. Veronica’s. It was the first of the four massive piers that would support the Basilica dome. Digging started behind the old church, just west of the abandoned tribune of Rossellino and Nicholas.

  In place of the planes and boxes that characterize Renaissance buildings, Bramante was constructing an architecture of cylinders and hemispheres. His interest was in the space itself, not the walls that enclosed it. The dynamic central space he devised gives the illusion of a centrifugal force pushing an ever-expanding space out into the arms of the church and beyond. In his architecture, solid geometry replaces plane geometry. Space and volume seem to come to life, becoming active dimensions on a scale so awesome that they suggest an omnipotent agent.

  Even a perfect miniature like the Tempietto cannot compete with a flawed but colossal construction. Heroic size is itself a claim to divinity, the ultimate chest-pounding. Modest men don’t attempt the Colosseum or the Basilica of St. Peter, and if Bramante’s Basilica had been built, it would have been the marvel of the High Renaissance. No wonder Michelangelo’s tomb seemed diminished by comparison.

  Returning to Rome after eight months in the quarries of Carrara, the sculptor found a noisy, boisterous construction yard in St. Peter’s Square. Oxen dragged broken arches and columns from the Palatine to recycle in the new church. Although much of the interior would be sheathed in the marble of the classical city, travertine was b
ecoming the building stone of papal Rome.

  So much of the honey-toned limestone was needed for its churches, fountains, and palaces that the Holy See leased an entire quarry in nearby Tivoli. Transporting the stone the twenty-mile distance to the work yard was a logistical enterprise, requiring a complete transportation system. Landing docks and convoys moved the stone by barge from Tivoli down the narrow Anio tributary that flows into the Tiber. Then mule trains and oxcarts carried the stone overland from the river to the Vatican.

  Michelangelo was excited by the pope’s new plans and proud to be the cause of the hectic, busy scene. “Venner ad esser a cagione di me,” he boasted—“It is happening on account of me.” The new St. Peter’s would be a magnificent home for his extravagant tomb, and he added happily to the chaos, dumping his own marble boulders in the piazza. The first load was probably “34 carrate, including two pieces that are 15 carrate.” Michelangelo had signed a contract on November 12 to have the stone sent to Rome. With one carrata equaling about 1,875 pounds, 34 carrate was more than 30 tons.

  “So great was the quantity of marble that spread out on the square, it aroused wonder among all and joy in the Pope, and Julius showered such boundless favors on Michelangelo that after he started work, many and many a time the pope went right to his house in order to find him, discussing with him the tomb and other matters just as if they were brothers.”

  Michelangelo’s studio was located behind the church of Santa Caterina della Cavellerotte,* close by the elevated stone passageway leading to Castel Sant’Angelo. The passetto was the popes’ escape route in times of turmoil, and Julius ordered a bridge slung from it so that he could visit Michelangelo’s atelier at any time.

  In the first months of 1506, the pope visited often. Michelangelo didn’t like to be interrupted when he was working, and even more, he didn’t like someone looking over his shoulder. Julius barged in anyway at unexpected hours, unannounced and uninvited. Then in early spring, he promoted Bramante to magister operae, and soon after, his visits to Michelangelo stopped.

  Michelangelo didn’t complain. He worked without interruption through the forty days of Lent, too engrossed in sculpting the tomb to be anything but relieved that the pope wasn’t banging down his door. Work in the construction yard quickened. At daybreak on domenica in albis,** the first Sunday after Easter, the pope was planning to lay the foundation stone of the new St. Peter’s.

  In the beginning of April, Michelangelo received the bill of lading for an additional shipment of marble, probably another 56 tons, that had arrived at Ripa, a port on the Tiber. Just before leaving Carrara, on December 10, he had signed a second contract for “the extraction of the last 60 carrate, comprising four large stones—two of eight carrate and two of five carrate—with the remainder each weighing two carrate or less.”

  When he brought the bill to the papal palace for payment, he was told that the pope was too busy to see him—be patient, and try again tomorrow. He returned to the Vatican the next day, and the next. Each time, he was turned away, the bill unpaid, the door barred. Michelangelo did not doubt that the pope was occupied with the liturgies of Holy Week, and he paid the freight charges of 150 to 200 ducats himself. “I found myself very frustrated by lack of money,” he wrote later. But more than Holy Week had intervened.

  Michelangelo’s grandiose sculpture had impelled Julius to replace Constantine’s church. Now, building the new St. Peter’s was consuming his attention.

  On Saturday morning, April 17, a bishop from Lucca, who happened to be going into the palace, saw Michelangelo denied entry. “Don’t you know who this is?” he said to the man.

  “Forgive me, sir,” the sentry replied, “but I have been ordered to do this.”

  Michelangelo was stunned. “No curtain had ever been drawn nor door bolted” against him before. “You tell the Pope,” he shouted at the sentry, “that from now on if he wants me, he can seek me elsewhere.”

  Michelangelo suspected that Bramante was behind his banishment, and he scribbled an angry note to Julius: “This morning I was turned out of the palace by your orders; therefore, I give you notice that from now on, if you want me, you will have to look for me elsewhere than in Rome.” In spite of his renown, he was still a naïf, and this was his first taste of treachery. With the lessons of Holy Week fresh in his mind, he saw it not as one artist outmaneuvering another but as a dark plot by the architect and a personal betrayal by the pope.

  By superior skill, duplicity, or an amalgam of the two, Bramante had displaced Sangallo. Now he had sidelined Michelangelo. The Basilica had eclipsed the tomb. Julius was pouring all his enthusiasm and funds into Bramante’s masterwork. There was nothing left for Michelangelo’s.

  In pique and paranoia, believing that Bramante had “deprived him of the pope’s favor” and “the glory and honor he deserved,” Michelangelo fled from Rome under cover of night, just hours before Julius would lay the first stone of the new Basilica.

  The Renaissance art world was intimate, intensely suspicious, and covetous. To survive and thrive required craft as well as creative talent. Bramante possessed both. Free of provincial allegiances, open to new ideas, he reinvented himself in Rome. He was at the right place at the right time, and he was canny and congenial enough to exploit his good fortune. With the young sculptor back home in Florence, sulky and sore, the over-the-hill upstart installed himself in the Vatican.

  As chief architect of all Vatican projects, Bramante became, ipso facto, the preeminent architect of the High Renaissance. His strengths were his enthusiasm, his curious, open mind, and a willingness, even eagerness, to experiment. In the beginning, he may have felt unsure. He was the newcomer, and beneath the bravura, the quick, often cutting, wit, and the sudden enthusiasms, he was always on his own, always unsatisfied and second-guessing himself. But as Vasari suggests, when Bramante saw a chance to upstage the Florentine artists, he “threw everything into confusion to persuade the pope to accept his proposal for a total rebuilding of the church.” He won over Julius and consolidated his new position by controlling operations, dispensing assignments, and dividing the opposition. Undercutting the papal favorites Sangallo and Michelangelo, he formed his own circle of loyal artists.

  Although Leonardo is the most celebrated Renaissance man, he wasn’t the only one. St. Peter’s was designed in an age when architects were more than engineers. They were artists, which explains why their works are so enduring, and to be an artist often meant being a painter, sculptor, poet, set designer, stonecutter, actor, musician, administrator, and bill collector.

  Today, when specialization has been cut so fine, the notion that someone might have so many talents may seem, at the least, an exaggeration. But what sounds incredible now was the norm in the Cinquecento. Most Renaissance artists were polymaths. Bramante, Raphael, and Baldassare Peruzzi were painters. Filippo Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Gianlorenzo Bernini were sculptors.

  Renaissance artists were traveling salesmen, brushes and chisels for hire, traveling from city-state to city-state, competing for commissions. No longer bound to a specific guild as they had been in the Middle Ages, artists became independent contractors. Packing their pigments and saddling their horses, they shuttled from prince to prelate. Painting on canvas was just coming into vogue. (Michelangelo dismissed it as a pastime for dilettantes.) Since most paintings were murals of one kind or another, artists had to go wherever the work was, moving from town to town, from Florence to Pescara, Perugia to Milan, Urbino to Rome, and beyond.

  The best were sought after and liberally paid. Their reputation was spread by envoys, ambassadors, and warring princes who came to Italy for conquest and found culture and the new art.

  Among the seasoned artists who came from the north to work in the Vatican were Pietro Perugino and Bernardino “Pinturicchio” di Betto from Perugia and Luca Signorelli from Cortona. As long as Bramante was the unchallenged numero uno, he was magnanimous. He was genial and generous to his circle of artists, supporting them, n
ot only for their talents, which were considerable, but also as a counterforce to the Florentines.

  Bramante was equally generous and wily with the young artists whom he hired to work on the Basilica. He advanced the Sienese architect Baldassare Peruzzi, at least in part because he was the protégé of Julius’s favorite banker, Agostino Chigi, and he employed at least three of Giuliano da Sangallo’s nephews, possibly as a wedge to further divide the Florentine clique. Although his motives were not always pure, Bramante was such a fine teacher that his pupils became the leading architects of the next generation.

  While Bramante consolidated his position, Michelangelo sulked in Florence, protected by the Signoria and comforted by his aggrieved friend Sangallo.

  Michelangelo believed that he had escaped from the imputations of an incorrigible patron, from the press of his own reputation, and from the architect-assassin scheming against him. Even as an old man, he never forgave or forgot. Some forty years later, he was still blaming Bramante to justify his flight from Rome: “If I fly into a passion, it is sometimes necessary, as you know, when defending yourself against evil people.”

  Julius bombarded the Signoria with missives, demanding the return of the sculptor “by force or favor.” But urged on by Sangallo, Michelangelo rejected every overture, even the gentler ones.

  Although the pope enticed Sangallo back to Rome in May, the two Florentines continued to seethe and commiserate in an exchange of letters. While Sangallo certainly fed his friend’s fears, Michelangelo was not without guile. Knowing that Sangallo would show the letter to Julius, he wrote to Sangallo in Rome: