R. A. Scotti (6 page)

Over the centuries, the encrustations of history had grown around the original church like barnacles on the rock of Peter. The old church had been looted, embellished, desecrated, and ornamented with mosaics, frescoes, statues, precious gems, gold, and silver. Chapels and memorials had been tacked on haphazardly. Constantine's basilica came to symbolize the resilience and continuity of the Church.

One hundred eighty-four popes had been consecrated in the first St. Peter's, and dozens of martyrs and saints were buried within its walls. The history of the faith could be read in its timbers, in its aisles and altars, and its proposed destruction caused a furor. Christians were outraged. The scholar-monk Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam condemned the new Basilica as a sacrilege and a grandiose waste of money. The new Julius, with pretensions to be the Christian Caesar, was displacing layers of history, disturbing the bones of pagan Romans and Christian martyrs and despoiling a hallowed shrine to satisfy his own megalomania.

To the della Rovere pope, the idea of replacing Constantine's church was unthinkable, dangerous—and irresistible. Michelangelo's tomb would glorify the man. A new Basilica, more splendid than any imperial construction, would glorify God and confer honor and renown on its architects for all time.

Although there is no way to know absolutely who had the idea to build a new Basilica, or what passed among the pope and his architects, Vasari suggests that once the idea was aired and Bramante saw “the powers and desires of the Pope rise to the level of his own,” he began to work on “an endless number of designs.”

Over the objections of cardinals, kings, and true believers, Julius forged ahead. In the newness of his papacy and in his supreme arrogance, less than two years after virtually buying the throne of Peter, he decreed that the original basilica, built by the emperor Constantine over the tomb of the apostle, would be razed and a new, more magnificent and monumental church constructed on the site.

P
ope Julius II's eagerness to build was so great, Vasari writes, that he “would have liked to see the edifice sprung up from the ground, without needing to be built.” Rejecting the Nicholas-Rossellino plan as clunky and old-fashioned, he called for new designs. Two architects
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were in contention. The first was Giuliano da Sangallo, who assumed that the commission would be his.

No name is found in the account books of the building of St. Peter's with more frequency than Sangallo. It is not a true surname but the name of a district of Florence, which was home to Giuliano and Antonio di Francesco Giamberti. The brothers “from Sangallo” were Tuscan guild artisans (members of l'Arte dei Legnaiuoli, the guild of sculptors, architects, bricklayers, masons, and carpenters). Because artists traveled from job to job, they were frequently identified by their home area—Leonardo da Vinci or Giuliano da Sangallo. The Sangallo brothers began as cabinetmakers and carvers, working in both wood and stone, and, like most Renaissance artists, they mastered many crafts.

Giuliano had probably worked on St. Peter's for Rossellino, because he is first noted in the Vatican records between 1467 and 1472 as a wood-carver. His name does not appear again for some thirty years. Returning to Florence, he became architect to Lorenzo de' Medici and gained a reputation for building military fortifications.

After Lorenzo's death in 1492, Sangallo became personal architect to Julius and a close friend, even going into exile with him. The years spent scheming a comeback in France had been long and frustrating, but now his patron was primate of the Church and first prince of Europe. It was a time of jubilance and creative expectations. The new pope was known to be a generous and discriminating patron, and every day more artists, musicians, and scholars came to Rome, hoping to work for him.

Art was an integral part of the political game. From triumphal arches incised with an emperor's heroics to Renaissance frescoes, art was a measure of refinement and wealth, a conspicuous display of position and power, and a means of conveying a message. Today, we have the media blitz, a barrage of television, print, advertising, and the Internet. Renaissance popes and cardinals had sculpture, frescoes, churches, and palaces. Since the vast majority of ordinary Christians were illiterate, art was the only mass medium, and pontiffs and princes lavished money on it. The popes who built St. Peter's were the Morgans and Rockefellers of their day, and many artists became wealthy working for them.

Renaissance artists used medals like business cards, with their portrait on one side and a favorite work on the other. A coin of Giuliano da Sangallo shows the artist in profile, his head wrapped in a turban, a flowing beard reaching to his chest. Prominent cheekbones jut like stony outcrops, and nostrils flare. His expression suggests an impatient stallion of a man, proud and assured. Sangallo fully expected to be named
magister operae
—master of all Vatican works. He had coffered the ceiling of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, using the first gold from the New World, and built the della Rovere palace. More significantly, he was thoroughly trained in Roman architecture and had employed imperial forms in a number of his best buildings. Although Sangallo was a gifted architect, his design fell short of the pope's expectations. The reason may be discerned from the judgment of Vasari: Sangallo represented the Tuscan style “better than any other architect and applied Doric order more correctly than Vitruvius.”

Julius wanted much more. The Cinquecento must have seemed like a miraculous time. The world was embarking on the Age of Discovery. Unimagined lands were being mapped, conquered, and claimed, and oceans of gold and silver would soon wash across the seas from the Americas.

Julius wanted his own miracle in stone—a Basilica that would “embody the greatness of the present and the future,” that would dwarf the epic constructions of the Caesars and proclaim the power and the glory of Christ and his Church. For this—the enterprise of the century—he turned to his new architect, Donato Bramante, an amiable, middle-aged man of no soaring accomplishments. Bramante's only notable building in Rome was the Tempietto, the “little temple” still under construction on the Gianicolo in the shadow of San Pietro di Montorio. It was a flawless miniature—nothing as perfect had been built in Rome since the Temple of Venus—and it had captivated Julius.

The art world of 1505 was a whorl of internecine rivalries, and within those fiercely competitive circles, the pope's choice was stunning. Bramante was an outsider, not part of any clique. He had come from the court of Urbino, by way of Milan, where he had been a friend and collaborator of another notable outsider, the unpredictable Leonardo da Vinci.
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The selection of Bramante put Sangallo, Michelangelo, and the other Florentine artists on guard. The sides were drawn before the first stone of the Basilica had been laid.

Julius had a keen understanding of the artistic psyche. Although history portrays him as a ferocious character, the man who built a palace to shelter a broken torso of Apollo and ordered all the church bells of Rome to ring when the Laocoön was unearthed could not have been soulless. He tried to let Sangallo down kindly, but after so many faithful years, the rejection carried the sting of betrayal. Sangallo had been so confident of the appointment that he had made plans to move his family to Rome, and he felt “put to shame” by the pope.

Sangallo returned to Florence an angry and bitter man, and Bramante began to build a new Rome.

 

Though often overlooked today, Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio, known as Bramante, was the fourth giant of the High Renaissance—together with his nemesis Michelangelo, his protégé Raphael, and his friend Leonardo. Bramante was a maverick. No artistic ties bound him to a particular school. He was not a Lombard, or a Tuscan like Sangallo.

In the self-portrait we have of Bramante, a fleshy lower lip juts from a shrewd, lined face. Small alert eyes appear ever vigilant. He was bald and ugly, a jovial, earthy man, a teacher, a mentor, an artful power player—and something of a surprise. How did he come so late in life and so unexpectedly to design St. Peter's and claim the title preeminent architect of the High Renaissance?

Although his early life is sketchy, there are a few clues. First, Bramante had the good fortune to be born in the duchy of Urbino, an enclave of Renaissance culture. Born to a farming family in 1444, two years before the death of Brunelleschi, he was named Donato—“the little gift.” After seven daughters, the arrival of a son who could work on the farm seemed like a gift from God. To the dismay of his family, Bramante showed no interest in farming. Instead, he trained as a painter in the palace of Urbino's ruler, Duke Federigo di Montefeltro.

An amateur architect and a man of exquisite refinement, Duke Federigo embodied humanism at its purest. When asked what was required to rule a kingdom, he answered, “
Essere umano
”—“To be human.” It was said that “no one of his age, high or low, knew architecture so well.” Among the painters in his court in Urbino were Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, and Giovanni Santi, who was more blessed as a father than an artist. His young son's name was Raphael.

Bramante was equally fortunate to leave the serene duchy for the sinister court of Ludovico Sforza. The condottiere prince of Milan known as “il Moro”—“the Moor”—because of his dark complexion and brooding disposition, Ludovico also prized paintings and buildings, but for different reasons. To Duke Federigo they were objects of beauty. To il Moro, they were displays of power. If Urbino embodied the harmonious Renaissance, Milan was its evil twin. In the menacing atmosphere of il Moro's court, Bramante mastered the political arts.

He was earning five ducats a month as painter and architect in Milan, when a thirty-year-old artist arrived from the Republic of Florence, bringing with him a silver flute that he had fashioned in the shape of a horse's head. The newcomer's name was Leonardo da Vinci, and the horse was one of his many preoccupations. Leonardo's official title in the Sforza court was
ingeniarius ducalis
—“the duke's inventor.”

Since Bramante played the lyre and sang, the two young men may have accompanied each other. Both were illiterate, according to the humanist standards of the day—they didn't speak or read Latin, and neither attempted Greek. But they tried their hand at just about everything else. Bramante loved drama, and they designed stage sets together and sketched out various solutions to engineering questions.

During this period, probably in the late 1480s, il Moro was thinking of building a new palace. Instead of using his own artists-in-residence, he asked Lorenzo de' Medici to send an architect from Florence. Lorenzo dispatched Sangallo. Leonardo and Sangallo probably knew each other, but this was Bramante's first encounter with the architect against whom he would compete two decades later for the Basilica commission.

Sangallo had spent several years in Rome, and at the time he visited Milan, he knew the monuments of the emperors more thoroughly than any other artist. We can only guess how Bramante and Leonardo reacted to his arrival, or whether the three discussed the building methods of the Romans. We do know that il Moro “was filled with astonishment and marvel” when he saw Sangallo's model palace.

For close to twenty years Bramante and Leonardo worked together in Milan, exchanging ideas, experimenting, and studying the principles of the Roman architect Vitruvius. The only classical book on architecture that had survived the ages, the Vitruvian text had become the bible of Renaissance builders. Vitruvius saw architecture as analogous to the human body, “each limb belonging to the whole” and proportional to it. The image of a male figure, arms extended and legs akimbo within a circle, symbolized man as the ultimate measure. In his architectural drawings, Leonardo experimented with the concept. Although he never built anything himself, his drawings of centrally planned churches
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clearly influenced his friend's design for St. Peter's.

In 1499, Milan fell to the French, and Bramante moved to Rome, where he experienced an epiphany. Rome was a cemetery of history, and the ghosts of its imperial past were its ruins. Even in rubble, the architecture of the emperors was a revelation.

Bramante stopped working, lived as cheaply as he could on the money he had saved in Milan—which couldn't have been much given his five-ducat salary—and spent the next several years measuring the enormous edifices: the Pantheon with its simple geometry and massive saucer dome, the vast aisles of the Basilica of Maxentius, the immense vaults of the Baths of Caracalla.

His tools were the same ones the ancients had used: a level, compass, and straight edge, an astrolabe for determining slope, and a Jacob's rod for estimating depth and distance. To figure the height of an edifice, Bramante probably used a quadrant, a graduated arc of 90 degrees with an attached plumb line for fixing the vertical direction. Or he may have used a simple mirror. Laying a mirror on the ground so that the top of the building was reflected in its center and measuring the distance from the base of the building to the mirror, he could then calculate the height of the building.

Until he arrived in Rome, Bramante had never encountered volume, space, and mass on such a monumental scale. He studied the ruined antiquities closely both as works of art and as lessons in engineering. In Rome, Bramante encountered the heroic dimensions of the imperial city and the heroic dimensions of Julius II.

In October 1505, imagination, opportunity, and enterprise converged. Julius officially accepted Bramante's design for the new Basilica of St. Peter, saying that it showed “the finest judgment, the best intelligence, and the greatest invention.” The architect's ambition was as vaulting as his own. Bramante wanted to build a Basilica that would “surpass in beauty, invention, art, and design, as well as in grandeur, richness, and adornment, all the buildings that had been erected in that city.”