Taken more than a mile away
on the Ponte
Sant'Angelo, this photograph illustrates how
Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's dominates the Borgo
and the right bank of the Tiber. Begun in 1546 as
Michelangelo took over as capomaestro of St. Peter's,
only the drum of the dome was finished by the master's
death in 1564. It capped nearly a century of
re-construction and renovation of Constantine's original
basilica, built over the tomb of St. Peter in 312 AD.
Construction continued on through the beginning of the
17th century when, in 1612, Carlo Maderno was
commissioned to extend the nave of the church and create
a monumental facade. Though neither a cathedral, nor the
mother church of the Catholic faith (see St. Giovanni
in Laterano), St. Peter's is perhaps the most
imposing church of Christendom.(Bramante, Michelangelo & Maderno)
As the basilica was
originally constructed by Constantine to mark the spot of
St. Peter's entombment, the architects of the Renaissance
conceived of centralized plans to focus attention,
architecturally, upon the sacred spot. The only remnants
of Bramante's plan (pictured top right), conceived in
1507 for Julius II, are the four crossing piers which
were retained in Michelangelo's design (pictured left) of
1546 and beyond.
Here the piers become more plastic and
sculptural, yet the overall Greek-cross design is
retained. One can see in Michelangelo's plan his
intention of creating a temple like mausoleum, complete
with a tetrastyle/ cum decastyle colonnaded entry raised
on a podium, albeit unconventional, like a good Roman
temple.
In 1605 with the papacy of Paul V
Borghese, and the post-tridentine mood abound in Rome, we
see a switch back to a more conservative Latin cross plan
evidenced by Carlo Maderno's (pictured bottom right)
addition of three bays to Michelangelo's nave.
Atop
Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's, one gains an
incredible panoramic view of Rome, dominated by Bernini's
Piazza St. Pietro in the foreground. Commissioned under
the pontificate of Alexander VII Chigi in 1655, the
piazza was designed as a monumental square in front of
the recently completed basilica. Bernini had several
topographical obstacles to overcome in the development of
a design for the piazza. He had to at once give Maderno's
overpowering facade greater breadth while hiding the
irregularly placed buildings of the Vatican palace, as
well as harmoniously incorporating the extant obelisk
re-erected in front of the basilica in 1586.
Bernini's
solution was to design a piazza in the form of an
ellipse, bordered by a quadruple colonnade forming a
portico wide enough to let carriages pass. The foci of
the ellipse are indicated by marble disks embedded within
the pavement of the piazza, from which the columns of the
portico align in such a way as to give the illusion that
only a single colonnade exits rather than the actual
four. In the distance once can see the Castel
Sant'Angelo, linked to the Vatican by way of
the passeto, a secret elevated causeway that afforded
besieged pope's safe passage to the fortress.