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

buildings on a heroic scale with immense open floors and soaring ceilings.
    By the second century, Romans were building both infrastructures and architectural marvels with concrete masonry. They could produce it cheaply and easily by combining pozzuolana, a volcanic gravel, with lime, broken stones, bricks, and tufa, a porous deposit found in streams and riverbeds. The ingredients were mixed with a small amount of water and beaten vigorously. The small proportion of water allowed the cement to set quickly, and a thorough beating ensured a durable substance.
    Roman concrete not only built the Pantheon, the baths, the aqueducts, and other engineering works, remnants of which still mark the landscape of Europe, it also paved all the roads that led to Rome.
    To rediscover the brick-and-cement building skills of the emperors, Bramante studied the antiquities and consulted the Vitruvian text that Alberti had tried to interpret for Renaissance builders. As Alberti noted, Vitruvius was the only architectural writer to survive “that great shipwreck of antiquity,” and he was such a poor stylist “that the Latins thought he wrote Greek and the Greeks believed he spoke Latin.” From Vitruvius, Alberti drew attention to the giant pilasters, the colossal orders, and the massive barrel vaults that were essential elements in imperial architecture. Bramante would make them essential elements in the new Basilica, combining them in ways the Romans had never attempted.
    In essence, barrel vaults are tunnels formed by a series of abutting arches. Because rigid concrete vaults exert no lateral thrust, the Romans could span expanses of vast height and width, creating a monumental architecture. For the concrete vaults in his new Basilica, Bramante had to train artisans in the “new” masonry and establish an on-site operation at St. Peter’s to form, shape, and cut the bricks.
    Writing some twenty years after Bramante’s death, Serlio called him “a man of such gifts in architecture that, with the aid and authority given to him by the Pope, one may say that he revived true architecture, which had been buried from the ancients down to that time.”

    The St. Peter’s (drawn in gray) is shown in relation to Constantine’s basilica (broken black line) and the imperial Circus of Caligula and Nero (solid black line). The small square to the left of the words “Caligula and Nero” indicates the original location of the obelisk.

CHAPTER SEVEN
VAULTING AMBITION
    I f Julius had chosen a more circumspect personality to be his architect, he might have had second thoughts about replacing Constantine’s church, but the two men shared an exuberance, a rashness, and a rush to glory. Julius and Bramante were the same age, and they were conspiring in the most glorious escapade of the century.
    In late fall of 1505, Bramante went to work, Vasari says, “with various extraordinary methods of his own and with his fantastic ideas.” He started excavating the foundation for the northwest pier, known today as St. Veronica’s. It was the first of the four massive piers that would support the Basilica dome. Digging started behind the old church, just west of the abandoned tribune of Rossellino and Nicholas.
    In place of the planes and boxes that characterize Renaissance buildings, Bramante was constructing an architecture of cylinders and hemispheres. His interest was in the space itself, not the walls that enclosed it. The dynamic central space he devised gives the illusion of a centrifugal force pushing an ever-expanding space out into the arms of the church and beyond. In his architecture, solid geometry replaces plane geometry. Space and volume seem to come to life, becoming active dimensions on a scale so awesome that they suggest an omnipotent agent.
    Even a perfect miniature like the Tempietto cannot compete with a flawed but colossal construction. Heroic size is itself a claim to divinity, the