Rome

their plans. It is no surprise that one of the architect’s nicknames was “Bramante Ruinante,” Bramante the Wrecker. This was used a lot as he prepared to undertake the biggest project of his life, perhaps the biggest project of any architect’s life (unless you count later mile-high skyscrapers in Arab sheikhdoms or mega-airports in China): the design and building of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Both the pope and the architect believed, with good reason, that the old building, erected in the fourth century by Constantine, would no longer do. In the reign of Nicholas V (1447–55), a survey had shown its walls were tottering out of plumb, and there was a real danger that an earthquake tremor (to which Rome, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was more prone than it is today) would bring the whole thousand-year-old fabric down. Both men were conscious of their own mortality, and in fact would die within a year of each other, Julius in 1513 and Bramante in 1514. If history were to remember them as the authors of this colossal enterprise, they would have to hurry. Moreover, they needed to move the project as far along as possible, so that the next architect and the next pope would be stuck with their conception, unable to make radical changes.

Unfortunately, since Bramante did not run an architectural office in the modern sense, there are practically no written or drafted records of how ideas might have passed to and fro between him and Julius, and the only firsthand record of Bramante’s intentions is a drawing known as the “parchment plan,” now in the Uffizi. It shows a central dome and two domed chapels, forming a Greek cross, though of course with no indications of size. But there were strong motives for making the basilica enormous, and one can imagine Julius and his architect discussing how, now that Constantinople had fallen (in 1453) to the Turkish infidel and Hagia Sophia had become a mosque, the largest dome should be the center of Christendom. The questions raised by the demolition of a building as venerated as old Saint Peter’s would be silenced by the phrase inscribed on a medal depicting its intended elevation: TEMPLI PETRI INSTAURACIO. Instaurare meant “to restore,” “to make new”; the pope and the architect could say that they were only “restoring” the ancient fabric, though of course they were replacing it altogether.

Bramante’s inspiration for the new church was essentially Roman, not Florentine. That is to say, it was modeled on the gigantic bath complexes of ancient Rome and, like them, made of concrete and brick, with various facings of marble and limestone. As built, the basilica is 218.7 meters long, its main nave being 26 meters wide and 46 high from floor to roof. The transept is 154.8 meters long. The whole fabric contains 46 altars. It covers an area of 5.7 acres. None of these raw figures gives more than a faint impression of the vastness of a building that can, if the congregation is packed in, hold up to 60,000 people (though not comfortably). For comparison, the Duomo in Milan can hold about 37,000. Saint Peter’s dome is the tallest in the world—448 feet from the floor to the top of the external cross on the lantern. In diameter, it is fractionally smaller than the ancient dome of the Pantheon and Brunelleschi’s “modern” dome of Florence Cathedral. The tradition that it is built on top of the actual site of Saint Peter’s tomb is only that—a tradition, for which there is no compelling historical or archaeological evidence.

Not the least impressive aspect of the cupola was its lighting, splendid and theatrical. Today it is done with electric floods and spots, but from the Seicento to the end of the nineteenth century it was achieved (on special occasions, such as the festa of Saint Peter) with a superabundance of several thousand lamps, lanterns, and torches, all of which, on the orders of a theatrical maestro, would be lit simultaneously. Everyone who saw this, before the age of electricity, was astounded by its grandeur. Goethe, who witnessed it, recorded, “If one reflects that, in that moment, the great edifice serves only as the frame of a fantastic orgy of light, one can well understand that nothing else like it can be found in the world.” Rome’s vernacular poet Giuseppe Belli echoed this astonishment in a sonnet he wrote in 1834:

Chi ppopolo po’ esse, e cchi sovrano,

Che cciabbi a ccasa sua ’na cuppoletta

Com’ er nostro San Pietr’ in Vaticano?

In qual antra scitta, in qual antro stato,

C’e st’illuminazzione bbenedetta

Che tt’intontissce e tte fa pperde er fiato?

“What people, and what sovereign,/Have in their home a little dome/Like that of our St. Peter in the Vatican?/In what other city, in what other country,/Is there this blessed light/That stuns you and takes your breath away?”

The design of the basilica was heavy with liturgical symbolism. Thus (to take only one instance) the early drawings for the church specify twelve doors, alluding to the twelve tribes of Israel and to the twelve apostles. The most essential thing about it, from both Bramante’s and Julius’ viewpoint, was that it should be based on “perfect” geometrical forms, the square (symbolizing, among other things, earth) and the circle (the heavens), one inscribed within the other. It was not built that way, but in another building by Bramante—not in Rome—one can get some idea, on a smaller scale, of the general effect. This is the far smaller pilgrimage Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, built on a hillside below the town of Todi, in Umbria. Its dome rises from a drum which in turn rises from a square block, from which grow four polygonal apses, each roofed with a half-dome. There is no town around it; it simply emerges from the earth, flooded with light inside. No mosaics, no statuary, no gilt, no marble: only strong, ideal geometrical form. To have such an interior to oneself, in the light of a spring morning, is to grasp a fleeting sense of what Dante meant—“luce intellettual, piena d’amore”: “the light of the mind, suffused with love.”

The construction of Saint Peter’s took 120 years and lasted for the lifetime of twenty popes. When Bramante died in 1514, he was replaced by Giuliano da Sangallo, Fra Giocondo, and Raphael. Sangallo and Fra Giocondo both died the next year, which left Raphael as the master architect until he, too, died, in 1520.

Antonio da Sangallo now took over the revision of the design, and stayed with it until his own death in 1546, by which time Michelangelo—old, reluctant, and increasingly infirm—was handed the enormous task. By then Sangallo had built the crossing piers that would support the dome, and vaulted some of the arms of its immense Greek cross.

But the dome itself did not exist yet.

Michelangelo’s first step was to cancel Sangallo’s plans altogether and tear down whatever structures by Sangallo he did not like.

He wanted to revert to a Bramantean purity, and in a famous letter he sent to the Fabbrica, or Office of Works, of Saint Peter’s, he wrote, “Any who have deviated from Bramante’s arrangement, as Sangallo did, have deviated from the truth.”

Sangallo had cut off all the light from Bramante’s plan, or so Michelangelo thought, creating dark corners where nuns could be molested and false coiners could do their nefarious work. In the evenings, when the basilica had to be locked up, it would take twenty-five men to clear out anyone hiding inside. And so, “Winning [the commission for Saint Peter’s] would be the greatest loss to me, and if you can get the pope to understand this you will give me pleasure, because I don’t feel well.” It was no use. Having no choice, Michelangelo accepted, full of misgivings, in 1547. He sent off to Florence for clay and wooden models of its Duomo. These became the first inspiration for the