But if the basilican form was hallowed by tradition and recommended by its suitability to the Latin rite, it did not sit well with humanists whose taste was governed by more abstract considerations. Alberti expressed his bias in favor of the centralized plan, particularly when it came to sacred architecture which, in order to “encourage piety” must first “delight the mind.” Like all good humanists, Alberti believed that such delight was provoked when the mind encountered forms that obeyed the laws of pure reason, which, expressed in architectural form, would replicate the most perfect forms found in nature. “It is obvious from all that is fashioned, produced or created under her influence, that Nature delights primarily in the circle,” Alberti insisted. “Need I mention the earth, the stars, the animals, their nests, and so on, all of which she has made circular? We notice that Nature also delights in the hexagon. For bees, hornets, and insects of every kind have learned to build the cells of their hives entirely out of hexagons.”
Bramante’s Plan for St. Peter’s, c. 1503.
For Alberti—following a tradition that dates back to Plato himself—God expressed Himself in the world in terms of pure geometry. “For without order,” Alberti says in On the Art of Building, “there can be nothing commodious, graceful, or noble.” The planets, for instance, which belonged to the higher celestial realm, must travel in perfect circles—a prejudice that caused endless headaches for astronomers who had to devise elaborate mathematical schemes to bring observation into conformity with theory. Symmetry was an attribute of the divine, the sign that Mind underlay the apparent chaos of the universe. And just as early-twentieth-century architects were convinced that rational planning—usually taking the form of large housing projects laid out in simple grids—was the solution to urban ills, Renaissance artists believed in the healing power of mathematical forms. A famous fresco in Urbino (home to not only Bramante but also Perugino and Raphael) captures the Renaissance ideal of a city whose ordered geometry was both an expression of pure reason and an antidote to the haphazard layouts that turned most medieval cities into warrens of dark, unsanitary alleyways.
Vitruvius gave this faith in symmetry anthropocentric slant:
The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect. . . . Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members, as in the case of those of a well shaped man. . . . And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found in it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square. . . . Therefore, since nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, it appears that the ancients had good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the different members must be in exactly symmetrical relations to the whole general scheme. Hence, while transmitting to us the proper arrangements for buildings of all kinds, they were particularly careful to do so in the case of temples of the gods, buildings in which merits and faults usually last forever.
Leonardo created the most famous visual representation of this idea in his Vitruvian Man, showing how a well-proportioned (male) body could be inscribed within a circle and a square, these geometric forms being the most perfect since they exhibit the greatest degree of symmetry. Though Leonardo never actually built anything himself, he sketched out many designs for churches in his notebooks. Perhaps because these were works on paper and did not have to accommodate actual worshipers, each is based on the circle, the square, or one of the regular polygons; pure geometry was privileged over practicality.
Despite its uncanny resemblance to Leonardo’s drawings, Bramante ’s design for the most important building in Christendom was not simply borrowed from the great man’s sketchbook. The idea that a centralized plan based on the circle, the square, or the hexagon was an emblem of God’s plan for the world was ubiquitous in the Renaissance. One can see similar domed structures in paintings like Perugino’s Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter in the Sistine Chapel and in the Marriage of the Virgin by his pupil Raphael. The School of Athens is the culmination of this ideal. In Raphael’s grand conception, the greatest thinkers in history probe the deepest questions beneath a spacious dome that echoes Bramante ’s church rising a few blocks to the south.
• • •
The design Bramante submitted and Julius accepted was for a massive, centrally planned structure based on a Greek cross with four equal arms surmounted by an immense, hemispherical dome, all inscribed within the symmetrical form of the cube. His goal, according to Paride de Grassis, was to “raise the dome of the Pantheon on the Basilica of Maxentius.” The fact that such a design would eliminate the axial focus crucial for the celebration of the Latin Mass was less important than the symbolic unity of a design that would stress God’s perfection by replicating it in marble and mortar. It is impossible to determine Bramante ’s precise design from the surviving drawings. Perhaps the most faithful rendering of Bramante ’s conception comes from a commemorative medal struck at the time that shows the massive domed structure flanked by towers, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the famous Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
Driven by Julius’s impatience, Bramante worked rapidly, raising the four massive central piers that would support the dome before his death in 1514. By that time, Julius was also dead, his place at the head of the Church taken by the profligate Leo X. Despite Julius’s penchant for waging war, he—with the assistance of his banker, Agostino Chigi—had kept a tight rein on finances. In February 1507, Julius appealed to the crowned heads of Europe to help defray the costs: “The New Basilica, which is to take the place of one teeming with venerable memories, will embody the future greatness of the present and the future. In proportions and splendor we believe it will surpass all other Churches of the Universe.” But the great lords of Europe were apparently less enthralled with the project than he was, and soon the resourceful Chigi was forced to come up with more creative expedients.
The scheme he invented to raise the necessary funds involved an offer to remit the sins of the faithful in return for a cash contribution, transactions known as indulgences. Even the worldly Julius apparently had some qualms about resorting to such a blatantly corrupt practice. He turned to it only on a small scale at the end of his life. Leo had no such scruples. Under his reign, the sale of indulgences reached massive proportions, particularly in Germany, where Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg struck a deal in which he and the papacy shared in the profits from the wholesale trafficking in human souls. It was this practice to which Martin Luther vehemently objected. His disgust would expand into a wholesale denunciation of the Church and ignite the Protestant Reformation.
The liber mandatorum, an account of the annual costs associated with the building of St. Peter’s, reveals that while on average Julius spent about 16,500 ducats a year on the building, in 1514, the first full year of his reign, Leo spent 60,000. Among the various criticisms leveled by Luther at the papacy and nailed to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, many dealt implicitly or explicitly with the unholy bargain the pope had struck to build his church. “Christians should be taught that, if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence-preachers, he would rather the church of St. Peter were reduced to ashes rather than be built with the skin, flesh, and bones of the sheep,” reads the fiftieth proposition; while the eighty-second reads, “Meanwhile [the pope] redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build St. Peter’s church, a very minor purpose.”
Far from being the crowning glory of Julius’s reign, the vast construction project he initiated was quickly becoming a symbol of corruption. Not only was it responsible for driving huge numbers from the faith, but without Julius’s steady management, i
t threatened to bankrupt the Church. “Everything is for sale,” complained one critic, “temples, priests, altars . . . prayers to heaven, and God.” Upon Leo’s sudden death in 1521, one anonymous wit concluded that the notoriously gluttonous pope had “eaten up three Pontificates: the treasury of Julius II, the revenues of his own Pontificate, and those of his successor.”
Reacting to the excesses of Leo’s reign, the cardinals elected the Dutchman Adriaan Florensz as Hadrian VI, but during his brief time in office the Roman populace found his austerity far harder to bear than his predecessor’s profligacy, which at least provided jobs and entertainment to the citizens. Hadrian’s successor, Clement VII, hoping to carry his cousin Leo’s work forward (but in a more responsible manner), established in December of 1523 a board known as the Fabbrica di San Pietro to manage the finances and oversee the construction of the project.I But like most of the things Clement put his hand to, a sound idea was undermined by poor execution. Work that had largely stalled for decades came to a complete halt with the disastrous sack of 1527. Even after the imperial troops departed, the pope seemed distracted by events in his native Florence, first with the rebellion and afterward with the various building projects at San Lorenzo.
Not all the blame for these lost decades can be laid at the feet of the popes who, after all, had more to worry about than attending to the building of a single church, no matter how symbolically important. Bramante ’s death in 1514 deprived the project of its presiding genius, and the appointment of his protégé Raphael as his successor, while greatly enriching the painter, did little to move the project forward. “What task can be nobler than the construction of St. Peter’s?” Raphael asked his uncle Simone Ciarla. “This is certainly the first church in the world, and the greatest building that man has ever yet seen; the cost will amount to a million in gold. The Pope has ordered a payment of 60,000 ducats for the works. He thinks of nothing else. . . .”
Like his mentor, Raphael was not averse to doing well by doing good, making such profitable use of Leo’s generosity that he was able to build himself a lavish palace in a fashionable neighborhood. “[H]e lived,” noted Vasari, “not like a painter, but like a prince.” After his own untimely death in 1520, Raphael was succeeded as chief architect by his assistant Baldassare Peruzzi, followed shortly by another of Bramante ’s protégés, Antonio da Sangallo, the nephew of Michelangelo’s old friend Giuliano. But it was not until after the accession of Paul III in 1534 that the neglected project received a fresh impetus, as the pope tried to project confidence following the devastating sack and in the face of the assault on his legitimacy by the Protestant north. By that time, the great piers and central vaults raised by Bramante were overgrown with weeds, a fitting symbol of warped priorities and wasted opportunities.
A renewed push was encouraged not only by ideological imperatives but by the fact that papal finances had been put on a sound footing as gold and silver from the Spanish empire in the New World made up for revenue lost in the breakaway territories of northern Europe. While Michelangelo shut himself away in the Sistine Chapel grappling with the mysteries of the Final Days, Sangallo began tinkering with Bramante ’s original design, building a scale model in wood so elaborate that it took seven years to complete at the exorbitant cost of 4,000 ducats.
Even before Sangallo took the reins, the original centralized plan had been modified by Peruzzi and Raphael to accommodate the liturgical requirements of the Latin Mass. Sangallo’s revision retained the piers and vaulting raised by Bramante, but encrusting his design in so many columns, towers, and secondary domes that the monumental elegance of the original design was swallowed up in a wedding cake profusion of decorative elements. Inside, the cavernous spaces conjured by Bramante were subjected to the same kind of elaboration, with multiple ambulatories separated from the nave by colonnades. All in all, Sangallo’s conception was more massive and less impressive than Bramante ’s original.
What Sangallo lacked in artistic vision he made up for in technical skill. Unlike most sixteenth-century architects who began as painters and draughtsmen, Sangallo had absorbed the practical aspects of the profession as an apprentice in Bramante ’s bustling firm. He had also learned the fine art of skimming from the top to pad his own accounts, this despite the fact that he had won the job in large part by promising to reverse the corruption that was already rife within the system. “Acting more out of pity and respect for God and St. Peter and respect and the desire to be useful to Your Holiness, than to myself,” he told Leo, “this is to inform you how the money being spent with little respect for or use to God and Your Holiness is like throwing money away. . . .”
Under Sangallo’s leadership, however, the project became even more bloated. Friends and relatives dominated the Fabbrica and grew wealthy subcontracting for the labor and materials. While the physical structure grew only slowly, the number of those profiting from the greatest works project in Europe grew exponentially, so that by 1546, the year of the architect’s death, la setta sangallesca (the Sangallo faction) was an entrenched constituency in the papal bureaucracy.
But at least the building had begun to move forward after decades of neglect. A new sense of purpose was injected into the project by a pope determined to leave his mark on the city he had grown up in, and work crews once again swarmed the area behind the half-dismantled old basilica.
II. FOR THE PROFIT OF MY SOUL
With the death of the sixty-two-year-old Sangallo—the sixth architect to head up the project since Bramante ’s death if one includes cameo appearances by Giuliano da Sangallo and Fra Giovanni Giocondo—it was clear to Pope Paul III that there was only one man with the stature to carry this crucial work forward. No patron since Lorenzo de ’ Medici had maintained such a sympathetic and productive relationship with the temperamental Florentine; the current pope not only admired Michelangelo’s work but knew how to get the most out of him. He had defied the critics of his Last Judgment, proclaiming it a work of artistic genius and unimpeachable orthodoxy, and had demonstrated his confidence by assigning the artist to paint the walls of his private chapel.
When approached by Paul to carry on the work at St. Peter’s, Michelangelo, as was his habit, played hard to get. It was not his art, he told him, and besides he was too old and tired to take on such a massive undertaking. Worst of all, la setta sangallesca had its tentacles in every aspect of the operation and would resent an outsider coming in and telling them how to run things. Michelangelo was never a team player, particularly when he could not select the team himself.
In the years that followed, Michelangelo made sure everyone knew that he had taken up the burden with the greatest reluctance. “Messer Giorgio my friend,” he wrote Vasari in 1557, “I call God as my witness that it was against my will and only through the great pressure exerted by Pope Pagolo that I was put in charge of rebuilding St. Peter’s ten years ago. . . .” But as always, it’s best to be skeptical whenever Michelangelo tries to play the martyr. To hear him tell it, he hardly ever lobbied for a commission but had to be dragged kicking and screaming, relenting in the end out of a sense of obligation.
In this case his reluctance was understandable. He was already over seventy and had been in poor health for a long time. Decades of hard work and an indifference to both hygiene and bodily comfort had taken their toll. In addition to persistent problems urinating, twice in recent years he had come down with a life-threatening fever. Both times he appeared to be so close to death that his friend Luigi del Riccio had him carried to his own house, where Michelangelo could be attended daily by del Riccio’s personal physician. But though Michelangelo was no longer vigorous, he still burned with ambition. Operaius (builder) for St. Peter’s was the most prestigious and high-profile position to which an artist could aspire, and shepherding the immense building project to a successful conclusion would be the crowning achievement of a glorious career. Not only would it satisfy his hunger for worldly fame, but it would serve as a fitting tribute to his
God. As he approached the end of his long life, this second consideration loomed ever larger in his mind.
Michelangelo’s protest that architecture was not his art, like the similar statements he made about painting, was disingenuous. He was already an experienced builder, having designed a façade for San Lorenzo in Florence, as well as the Medici tombs. While in Rome, he continued to supervise from afar the ongoing work on the Laurentian Library, the most daring of his architectural designs to date. Here, his expressive, idiosyncratic reconfiguring of classical Vitruvian forms was on full display. The famous entrance hall in particular captures his taste for visual puns that (were it not for his lugubrious personality) might even be called playful. Columns, instead of projecting in front of walls, sit behind them in recessed panels, while the wall itself protrudes, in effect serving as the visual support relinquished by the pillars.
Strangest of all are the stairs that flow from the reading room to the vestibule below in rolling cascades. Given the novelty of the design, it’s unfortunate that Michelangelo was not on site to supervise the work. He explained his ideas to Vasari, who was overseeing the project in Florence, though his description is more poetic than precise. “I recall a certain staircase, as it were in a dream,” he told him, providing a rough accompanying sketch, “but I do not think it is exactly what I thought of then, because it is a clumsy affair, as I recall it. . . . I’m writing nonsense, but I know very well that you and Messer Bartolomeo will make something of it.”
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