R. A. Scotti
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If the details were variable, the essence was fixed. Earlier artists had imagined an impressive avenue leading to the new Basilica.* Bernini created an embrace. His solution was an ellipse, reaching out from the sides of the Basilica and designed “to receive maternally with open arms the Catholics and confirm them in their belief, to reunite heretics to the Church, and to illuminate the infidels to the true faith.” His plan called for three colonnades—one on either side of the Basilica that we see today, and a third smaller one, parallel to the façade, that was never built.
Like the atrium of Constantine’s basilica, the colonnades would form a paradisus—a kind of open-air entryway where pilgrims prepared themselves spiritually to enter the sanctuary. Just as the Baldacchino creates the interior setting for the altar and dome, the colonnades create the external setting for the Basilica. “The piazza and the gradual slope upward to the mighty Temple,” George Eliot wrote, “gave me always the sense of having entered some millennial Jerusalem where all small or shabby things were unknown.”
Bernini enclosed a space the size of the Colosseum with an ellipse formed by symmetrical, covered colonnades. The piazza is 1,115 feet long, the distance of three average city blocks. Like the imperial amphitheater, it is an open oval that can contain huge crowds. In each colonnade, four rows of Doric columns create three passageways. The central passage is 61 feet, wide enough for two carriages or cars to pass, and inscribed with a verse from Isaiah: “A tabernacle from the heat, and a security and cover from the whirlwind and from the rain.” On top of the colonnades, Bernini placed giant statues of popes and saints, twice as large as life, creating what he called “a cloud of witnesses.”
Because the obelisk is misaligned by 2 degrees from the Basilica nave, Bernini didn’t use it as the locus of the ellipse. Each colonnade has its own center, so that the rows of columns seem to shift and change, appearing as one or many as you approach the Basilica.* To correct the proportions of the façade, he kept the colonnades only sixty-four feet high, lending the illusion of greater height and lesser width to Maderno’s creation. Bernini described the relation of the colonnades to the Basilica as similar to the relation of the arms to the head.
The labor involved in building the colonnades was intensive. Simply excavating the site was a massive undertaking, displacing tons of earth, which then had to be removed from the site to make way for the quarried stone as it arrived from Tivoli. Construction required much of the engineering and sculptural talent in Rome. To handle the logistics of raising 284 columns and 88 pillars, each one 52 feet tall, Bernini created a veritable assembly-line force, with one group of artisans assigned to bases, another to shafts, another to capitals. Both to minimize transportation costs and to keep the work site uncluttered, he also employed teams of stonecutters in the quarries to hew the columns from the blocks of travertine. The roughed-out columns were then transported to a work area in the Vatican known as San Maria, where they were raised by winches. Teams of sculptors worked on them, then the finished columns were lowered onto rolling flatbeds, dragged to the piazza, and lifted into position. By the end of September 1658, the first twenty-four columns were in place.
A similarly work-intensive process was employed for the “cloud of witnesses” atop the porticoes. There are 140 twelve-foot statues.* Creating each one took about two months, required many hands, and involved five basic steps: building a full-size wooden model, chiseling a rough likeness in stone, hoisting the unfinished statue onto the portico for precise positioning, taking it down again to be finished, then raising and mounting it.
While Alexander was preoccupied with the Basilica projects, France threatened to invade the Papal States. The pope’s most potent offensive weapon was his architect. For years the egocentric French king Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had been hounding the pope to share the divine talent of Bernini. A letter from Colbert tactfully pleads for “a few hours of those you employ with such glory in the beautification of the first city of the world.” Alexander had resisted the Sun King’s imputations, but with the French spurred and booted, he capitulated. The pope agreed to loan his architect to the French for three months.
On April 29, 1665, Bernini reluctantly relinquished what he termed “the two most important works in the world.” Leaving his brother Luigi and Carlo Fontana to continue the Cathedra and the colonnades, Bernini embarked for Paris to build the Louvre. Accompanying him were three servants, the head of his household, and his three favorite assistants: his second son, Paolo, the sculptor Giulio Catari, and the architect Mattia de Rossi, who had been eighteen when he began apprenticing in Bernini’s workshop.
Although King Louis assured the pope that “upon entering my kingdom, Cavaliere Bernini should begin to receive proofs of the consideration I have for his merit in the manner in which he will be treated,” the visit was a disaster from the first day. Bernini was in bed taking a siesta when Colbert arrived to greet him, and relations deteriorated from there. The Italian was contemptuous of the petit bourgeois mentality of the Frenchman and dismissed his practical questions about time and cost as fit for a quartermaster, not for the world’s premier artist. “Do not speak to me of anything small,” he warned Colbert. Instead of building the Louvre, Bernini returned to Rome and the Basilica of St. Peter.
When Alexander VII died on May 22, 1667, ten years almost to the day after accepting Bernini’s design, the two long colonnade arms were nearing completion. Bernini never began the third colonnade, and it would take another century before the last figure in his “cloud of witnesses” was sculpted and mounted.
Bernini enveloped the Basilica of St. Peter in mystique. The experience begins at the river crossing. Bernini’s angels on the bridge at Castel Sant’Angelo lead the way across the Tiber to the Vatican. Through the spray from his fountain, iridescent in the sunlight, the Basilica comes into view. To the right is the Scala Regia, his majestic stairway to the Vatican palace, a statue of Constantine at his moment of conversion poised on the landing. To the left, no trace remains of Bernini’s ill-conceived and long-forgotten campanile.
Within the embrace of his colonnades, you cross the piazza, mount the steps, and encounter the Basilica—the immense, glittering, breathtaking culmination of two centuries of art and architecture. As you enter the nave, directly ahead, his Baldacchino draws the eye to center stage, framing the moment and the eternal mystery of an incarnate God. From so much disparity, the grand illusionist conjured unity. It was Bernini’s supreme achievement.
EPILOGUE
If not the greatest story ever told,* the creation of the Basilica of St. Peter is its epilogue. The narrative is written in the stones of the Basilica and in the landmarks of the city. Bramante’s piers set heroic dimensions, but they are the outline, not the essence.
Call it the power of an idea or divine inspiration. From what could have been a Tower of Babel, the artists, popes, and knaves who built St. Peter’s incised a symbol of the transcendent Christ against the landscape of a city that embodied paganism. As the Basilica rose stone upon stone, the city of Rome grew with it. From the dust of empire and the neglect of the Middle Ages, it became what Byron called “the city of the soul.”
Few buildings have less of Alberti’s concinnitas than the Basilica of St. Peter. Through the years, architects and pontiffs followed one another in rapid and sometimes wanton succession. At times, the construction site seemed more like the set of a French farce, doors opening and closing and characters crisscrossing the stage in dizzying numbers, than the site of the architectural endeavor of the epoch. There were numerous builders, many contradictory plans, and disharmonious junctures. Yet entering St. Peter’s, the visitor experiences unity as solid as dogma. There is no suggestion that the Basilica was a work in progress for more than two centuries. From a confusion of sacred and secular, from a clash of genius and a stew of ironies, an extraordinary feat of architecture and engineering emerged.
Time and again, construction collided with history and st
alled. Emperors and kings, alliances and battles, heads that rolled actually and figuratively, egos that chafed, recede before the immutable presence of the Basilica. In its ability to inspire awe—to make the heart stop and the soul soar—art triumphs over politics.
The sacrifice was huge. The Renaissance popes hocked the family jewels in the name of art, begged, borrowed, and splintered the Christian Church to build the Basilica. The details changed, but the ideal remained constant—to construct a metaphor in stone for the leap of faith that is at the heart of the gospel of Christ.
Although the fact that it took so long was a matter of money and politics more than a lack of vision, the delays seem serendipitous. The perfectly proportioned Renaissance architecture, each part in exact geometric ratio to the other and to the whole, seems too tidy for such a sprawling, messy, overreaching institution as the Church of Rome. The Baroque is its truer reflection.
When it was finally completed, the Basilica was truly catholic, incorporating in one supreme construction the conviction of numerous popes and the genius of many architects—the power of Bramante, the grace of Raphael, the clarity of Michelangelo, and the theater of Bernini. In its imposing size and majesty, the brilliance of the Renaissance and the drama of the Baroque converge. Two million tons of stone transformed into spirit create what Rome’s preeminent historian, Edward Gibbon, called “the most glorious structure that ever has been applied to the use of religion.”
San Pietro in Vaticano lifted Rome from the rubble of its lost grandeur and made it the Eternal City. Gothic cathedrals reach up to heaven. St. Peter’s—muscular, sublime, irrevocable—brings heaven to earth.
APPENDIX ONE
THE POPES FROM NICHOLAS V TO ALEXANDER VII
APPENDIX TWO
STATISTICS
St. Peter’s covers a total area of 227,070 square feet, more than five acres. The floor area is 3.7 acres.
The façade is 375 feet wide by 167 feet high.
The interior of the Basilica is 451 feet wide by 613 feet long—almost one eighth of a mile.
The columns and pilasters are more than 90 feet high.
The circumference of the central piers is 240 feet.
The nave and transept are 151.5 feet high.
The nave is 613 feet long by 84 feet wide.
The length of the transept is 451 feet.
The height of the dome, from the pavement to the tip of the cross, is 452 feet.
The diameter of the dome is 137.7 feet. (The dome of the Pantheon exceeds it by 4.9 feet, but St. Peter’s dome is three times higher.)
The drum is 630 feet in circumference and 65.6 feet high, or 240 feet from the ground.
The lantern is 63 feet high.
The ball and cross are 8 and 16 feet high, respectively.
The Baldacchino is about 100 feet high.
St. Peter’s Square is 1,115 feet long by 650 feet wide.
Each arm of the colonnade is 306 feet long and 64 feet high.
The colonnades have 284 columns, 88 pilasters, and 140 statues.
The obelisk is 83.6 feet (with base and cross, 132 feet) high and weighs 320 tons.
NOTES
These bold-faced phrases are not necessarily self-contained. In most cases they highlight an area of thought suggested or supported by the cited sources.
CHAPTER ONE: THE FIRST STONE, APRIL 1506
3 a lavender cloak: Vasari, Giorgio, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Everyman Library, 1927).
7 Named for the vati: Hersey, George, High Renaissance Art in St. Peter’s and the Vatican (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).
CHAPTER TWO: THE FIRST ST. PETER’S
13 Romans blamed him: Hibbert, Christopher, Rome: The Biography of a City (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985).
18 Monte Caprino: Ibid.
18 extorting what they could and decapitating whom they dared: Ibid.
CHAPTER THREE: IL TERRIBILIS
23 He enters history in a fresco by Melozzo da Forlì: Klaszko, Julian, Rome and the Renaissance: The Pontificate of Julius II (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903).
CHAPTER FIVE: A SURPRISE WINNER
41 The brothers “from Sangallo”: Heydenreich, Ludwig H., and Lotz, Wolfgang, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1600, trans. Mary Hottinger (New York: Penguin Books, 1974).
43 Bramante was an outsider: Bruschi, Arnaldo, Bramante (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).
45 earning five ducats a month: Ibid.
46 his drawings of centrally planned churches: Heydenreich and Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1600.
CHAPTER SEVEN: VAULTING AMBITION
57 Space and volume: Ackerman, James S., The Architecture of Michelangelo (London: Zwemmer, 1961 [Pelican, 1971]).
59 in albis: Zander, Pietro, Creating St. Peter’s: Architectural Treasures of the Vatican (New Haven, Conn: Knights of Columbus Museum in Association with the Fabbrica di San Pietro, 2004).
62 artists became independent contractors: Barzun, Jacques, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
CHAPTER EIGHT: ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
70 As many as fifty banking houses had offices in Rome: Gilbert, Felix, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
CHAPTER NINE: A CHRISTIAN IMPERIUM
77 the Menicantonio Sketchbook: Millon, Henry A., and Lampugnani, Vittorio M., eds., The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo (New York: Rizzoli, 1994).
80 a laborer worked for 15 to 20 ducats a year: Partridge, Loren W., The Renaissance in Rome, 1400–1600 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996). Rowland, Ingrid Drake, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
84 Rome replaced Florence: Cook, Olive, The Wonders of Italy (Viking Press, New York, 1965).
CHAPTER TEN: A VIPER’S NEST
97 Bramante reciting Dante to him like an actor on a stage: Bruschi, Bramante.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FIRST MEDICI PRINCE
116 Florentines flocked south: Hibbert, Rome.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A ROMAN CANDLE
135 architectural renderings: Heydenreich and Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1600.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE REVENGE OF THE SANGALLOS
138 Antonio built the centering: Heydenreich and Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1600.
139 more than one thousand of his drawings: Ibid.
141 Twenty thousand men: Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SALVATION FOR SALE
145 only confession and contrition: New Catholic Encyclopedia, (Washington, D.C.: Thomson/Gale Group, 2003) in association with the Catholic University of America.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: SWEET REVENGE
152 one press in 1465: Burke, Peter, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in
Italy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999).
152 the power of the printing press: Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: A BRIEF MOMENT OF TRUTH
155 “How many of the clergy”: Burke, The Italian Renaissance.
156 “agony of Catholicism”: Laffont, Robert, ed., A History of Rome and the Romans: From Romulus to John XXIII (Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1962).
CHAPTER NINETEEN: MEDICI REDUX
160 Charles V ruled an empire: Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence.
162 German and Austrian troops marched south: Hibbert, Rome; Cook, The Wonders of Italy; Laffont, A History of Rome and the Romans; Stinger, Charles L., The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
CHAPTER TWENTY: A VIOLENT AWAKENING
173 Familiar habits were forbidden: Partridge, The Renaissance in Rome.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: JULIUS’S FOLLY
187 money to finance it: Heydenreich and Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1600.
CHAPTER TW
ENTY-TWO: MOTU PROPRIO
193 the Fabbrica assumed that construction would continue: Heydenreich and Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1600.
200 Michelangelo’s method of building: Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: A NEW CENTURY
229 the Fabbrica now established offices in many cities: The Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro dell’Urbe in Malta, http://melitalhistorica.250free.com.
229 Known as the Sampietrini: Zander, Creating St. Peter’s.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: THE ROMANCE OF THE BAROQUE
245 The young Bernini remained thoughtful: Bernini, Domenico Vita del cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino (Roma: A spese di R. Bernabò, 1713).
246 An English diarist, visiting Rome in 1664: Hibbert, Rome.
247 cinematic special effects: Cook, The Wonders of Italy.
249 He began with a small wax model: Borsi, Franco, Bernini Architetto (New York: Rizzoli, 1984).
250 one tenth of the Church’s annual income: Vicchi, Roberta, The Major Basilicas of Rome (Florence: Scala, 1999).
CHAPTER THIRTY: FULL CIRCLE
265 The experience begins at the river crossing: Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation: A Personal View (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ackerman, James S. The Architecture of Michelangelo. London: Zwemmer, 1961 (Pelican, 1971).
Alberti, Leon Battista. De re aedificatoria, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.