Read Online R. A. Scotti by Basilica: The Splendor, the Scandal: Building St. Peter's - Free Book Online

was more expensive and of a higher quality than the typical drawing paper from the same period. It was folded over several times, and each crease is worn thin and cracked. When opened the plan measures more than three feet by twenty inches and is drawn on a scale of 1:150. In spite of its large size, it is only one half of a blueprint known as the Parchment Plan. The missing half was presumably a mirror image.
    The study was drawn in brown ink, then traced over in watercolor. Though faded now, the wash is still a warm umber tone, a few shades softer than the roof tiles of Tuscany. On the back, scrawled in ink, is a note saying, “ di mano di Bramante, non ebbe effetto ,” in effect, a plan “by the hand of Bramante, never executed.”
    The Parchment Plan may be the very paper that Bramante presented to Pope Julius, and later showed to the workers when he was explaining his design for the new Basilica. Together with the commemorative medal coined for the foundation-stone ceremony, it gives the best visual clue to his original design. The one shows the interior, the other the exterior.
    For the first church of Christendom, Bramante imagined the dome of the Pantheon raised on the shoulders of the Basilica of Maxentius, the last and largest basilica built by the Roman emperors. On the commemorative medal, the Basilica appears as a vast horizontal structure, with a hemispherical dome rising above a colonnaded drum, a bell tower on each end and four secondary towers.
    Like the original St. Peter’s, Bramante’s design fused the Christian shrine to a martyr and saint with the pagan basilica. Placed directly over the apostle’s grave, the martyrium was the essence of the new St. Peter’s. It was also Bramante’s boldest concept and greatest challenge. Like the Tempietto, his St. Peter’s was a central plan—round because the circle, without beginning or end, is the perfect symbol of God, and domed. An immense basilica extended from the central shrine.
    Bramante’s design was both true to the Renaissance ideal and a radical departure from it. He composed an exercise in geometry, made up of perfectly proportioned parts within parts. It was a symmetrical Greek cross with four arms of equal length. The interior was a series of identical shapes in ever-diminishing size. Within each arm were smaller crosses, and within their arms still smaller crosses forming chapels, each exactly half the size of the next largest. The four corner chapels were as big as most conventional churches. By making them replicas on a 1:2:4 ratio, Bramante drew attention to the enormous central space.
    Although the Renaissance ideal was Greek in spirit, shape, and scale, Bramante’s Basilica was Roman. He was inspired by two of the monuments that he had studied so closely, yet he departed dramatically from imperial architecture. Ancient Roman basilicas were rectangular roofed constructions, Roman temples were domed. By uniting these two distinct imperial forms—the basilica and the temple—he imagined a new Christian Basilica.
    Bramante’s first inspiration, the Basilica of Maxentius, also known as the Temple of Peace, opens onto the Forum and was reputedly the last, the largest, and the most magnificent basilica built in Rome. It was begun by Maxentius in a.d. 308 and finished by his rival and challenger Constantine five years later, no mean feat considering its massive size—115 feet high by 262.4 feet long. Like the typical Roman basilica, it was a rectilinear construction, but it rose to a distinctive three-dormered roof. Two stories of tall arched windows filled the interior with light. Within the basilica, marble colonnades divided the vast space into a high wide nave flanked by narrower aisles. The nave ended in an apse, which Constantine filled with a heroic-size statue of himself.
    Bramante’s second inspiration is an architectural wonder. The Pantheon is a large circular edifice, built