The Domes of Rome 3

Perugino, Christ Giving the Keys of Heaven to St. Peter, a fresco in the Sistine Chapel

You can see The Domes of Rome 1 here.

You can see The Domes of Rome 2 here.

At the end of the 15th century, Rome was a wilderness of ruins.  The city long ago contracted to less than a quarter of its original size.  The remains of the ancient city of more than a million people formed a tangled maze of broken masonry and stone covered in wild vegetation.  Crime and banditry thrived in the ruins and farmers herded cattle and sheep where senators once walked.  Rome was a poor city despite its sanctity and the presence of the Pope.  Most of the enormous ancient churches that generations of pilgrims traveled far and at great risk to see were crumbling and badly in need of repair.  The south wall of St. Peter's faced imminent collapse.  Last minute buttressing and temporary repairs prevented the worst from happening but didn't solve the problem.  

The great city states of northern Italy, especially newly rich Florence, over-awed the crumbling splendors of a mostly ruined and uninhabited city with their new and magnificent cathedrals and palazzi publici.  Those cities all boasted links to ancient Rome.  The revival of Classical culture in the Renaissance gradually inspired the ambition to rebuild Rome as a world capital once again, but this time of an empire of souls in the Church.  That ambition would expand as a succession of popes, artists, and architects engaged in two century long effort to build Rome anew.

In that ambitious rebuilding of Rome, the dome returned to the city that made such structures great and inspiring.  The city of Florence topped their cathedral with a dome that surpassed in height and width the ancient Roman Pantheon.  By the end of the 15th century, there was a determination to return such ambitious construction to the very city that inspired all of it.

Toward the end of the 15th century, Italian architects from Alberti to Leonardo da Vinci dreamed of domed centralized churches, taking their inspiration from the writings of Vitruvius whose books on architecture are the only writings of their kind to survive from Antiquity.  Because of this association with Vitruvius, historians for a long time associated this shared vision of the church as a centralized domed building occupying the center of a broad open plaza as a kind of pagan revival.  As Peter Murray points out in his book on Italian Renaissance architecture, this notion is mistaken.  Most Roman temples were four square buildings occupying one end of a columned forum.  There were some round temples, usually built for goddesses, especially Vesta.  There are ancient Christian precedents for round churches, such Santo Stefano and especially Santa Costanza in Rome.  Both of those buildings were martyria, built not for congregational worship, but for rituals of circumambulation around the tombs of martyr saints or other holy places. 

These architectural visions of domed churches in central plazas for a long time appeared only in paintings such as the famous examples by Perugino and Raphael above.  At the beginning of the 16th century, the architect Bramante finally built one, though small in size, in Rome.  Bramante arrived in Rome from Milan in 1499, part of the exodus from Milan following the fall of its ruler Lodovico Sforza to the invading French.  In 1502, he completed the Tempietto in a cloister of San Pietro in Montorio in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome on a site revered by some as the site of St. Peter's crucifixion (the current consensus places the location of that event on the spina of the Circus of Nero on the south side of St, Peter's Basilica).  This beautiful small building announced the advent of High Renaissance architecture and created a lasting influence on later generations of architects down to the present day.

The Tempietto was the gift of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to the monks of San Pietro in Montorio and to Rome.

The Tempietto in San Pietro in Montorio in Rome.

The architects of the Renaissance were indeed out to revive Classical culture and Classical art and design, but not necessarily to imitate it literally.   They wanted to adapt it to the purposes of a new religion and a new era.  Brunelleschi revived classical forms and proportions, adapting them to medieval design and construction methods.  Alberti advocated a closer study of design and proportion emphasizing the monumental scale and volumetric aspect of ancient Roman architecture.  Bramante in the Tempietto looking at the ruins of Roman monuments through through eyes instructed by Brunelleschi and Alberti revived that central idea in Classical design of completion.  The building is whole and complete in the same way that our bodies are whole and complete.  Nothing more may be added without distorting the design, and nothing large or small may be removed without mutilating it.  Like us, it is whole and complete with all of its parts relating to each other in function and proportion resolving all into something as splendid and healthy as an athlete's body.

Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli, 1st century BCE, possibly a temple to Vesta.

Bramante modeled the Tempietto after Roman round temples such as the Temple of the Sybil in nearby Tivoli.  Like those temples, it is a masonry cylinder surrounded by a circular peristyle.

 

Santa Constanza, Rome, 4th century.

Bramante also found inspiration in early Christian martyrium churches, especially Santa Costanza in Rome, built for the rite of circumambulation with the addition of clerestory windows to a second story above the columned ambulatories.

Bramante combined and beautifully harmonized these two influences in his design, a first story surrounded by a circular peristyle, and a second story recalling the second story clerestory of an ancient martyrium church.

Even in the details, Bramante takes ancient Classical precedents and adapts them to the needs of the Christian religion.

The entablature of the Temple of Vespasian in Rome with carved reliefs of sacrificial implements.  Completed in 87 CE.

The entablature of the peristyle of the Tempietto showing implements of the Christian Mass, inspired by the frieze on Vespasian's temple among other sources.

The Tempietto today is not quite what Bramante intended.  The dome was modified in the 18th century.  The drawing above from Bramante's workshop shows us the more hemispherical dome he intended and actually built.

This print from Serlio's Architecture shows something else Bramante intended but was never built.  The Tempietto sits a little awkwardly in a narrow cloister yard.  Bramante wanted to put the Tempietto in the center of a spacious circular and columned courtyard.  Our experience of it would have been so different had that courtyard been built.

Some pictures of the very small interior of the Tempietto.

The Tempietto was the first domed structure built in Rome since the completion of Santa Costanza about a thousand years earlier.  Its appearance announces the beginning of the long project to rebuild Rome as a world capital once again.

The Chigi Chapel

Another important domed building in Rome adjoins the Augustinian monastery church of Santa Maria del Popolo right next to the Porta del Popolo facing the Piazza del Popolo, for many centuries the main entrance to the city for religious pilgrims traveling south down the Via Flaminia.  One such pilgrim was the young Martin Luther in 1510, then a young Augustinian monk who stayed as a guest in the monastery still attached to Santa Maria del Popolo.

In 1507, Pope Julius II granted Agostino Chigi, the chief banker and financier of the Vatican Curia, rights to build a burial chapel for himself and his family attached to Santa Maria del Popolo.  The Chigis were a very wealthy and powerful banking family from Siena in Tuscany.  In about 1512, Agostino Chigi hired the artist Raphael to design and build this chapel.  Construction began on it in 1520 shortly before Raphael's death the same year.  Construction continued in fits and starts under many subsequent artists until it was finally finished in 1670 under the direction of the great Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini.

The exterior of the dome of the chapel from the north side of the church across the Aurelian Wall.

The entrance to the chapel from the interior of the church.

The sumptuous interior of the chapel with paintings by Sebastiano del Piombo over the altar and on the walls and vaults by Francesco Salviati.  The sculptures in the niches are Jonah by Lorenzetto who was Raphael's reliable in house sculptor, and Habakuk and the Angel by Bernini from about a century later.  
The pyramidal tomb monuments to Agostino and Sigismondo Chigi were designed by Raphael and completed with modifications by Bernini.

The pyramidal tomb monument to Agostino Chigi designed by Raphael with modifications by Bernini.  Pyramidal tomb monuments were unusual, but not unheard of in Roman churches.  It is likely modeled on the ancient Pyramid of Cestius near the Porta San Sebastiano in Rome.

Bernini's superbly dramatic sculpture of Habakuk and the Angel completed in 1661.

The sculpture is one of a pair by Bernini based on a relatively obscure story in the Book of Daniel where the Prophet Habakuk made lunch for reapers in a field in Judea.  An angel appears to him and orders him to take that lunch to the Prophet Daniel locked up in the lions' den in Babylon.  When Habakuk protests that he's never seen Babylon, the angel picks him up by the hair and carries him to Babylon and sets him before the starving Daniel in the lions' den with a fresh lunch.  The angel then returns Habakuk to where he came from.

Bernini's sculpture of Daniel waiting in the Lions' Den.

The dome mosaics are based on designs by Raphael and executed by Luigi di Pace in 1516.  They show the Seven Planets under the divine influence of God the Father who appears in the oculus at the top of the dome.

Agostino Chigi took a keen interest in astrology.  One of the painted ceilings in the pleasure palace he built for himself across the Tiber from Rome (now known as the Farnesina) may show his star chart as interpreted by the Sienese artist Baldassare Peruzzi.  The mosaic cycle in the dome reflects those astrological interests and beliefs.  

The oculus mosaic of God the Father.

Raphael's splendid drawing for God the Father, probably based on a model drawn from life in red chalk.

The mosaic of the planet Mars with a guiding angel in he dome.

Raphael's magnificent drawing for Mars and his Guiding Angel, probably drawn from life from two models.

The pietra dura skeleton designed by Bernini in the floor of the chapel directly under God the Father in the Dome.  The inscription  in Latin says "Through Death to Heaven."  The skeleton holds the the stemma, the coat of arms, of the Chigi family.

Sant' Eligio degli Orefici

Raphael designed and built this church about the same time he was painting the great frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura and is a sharp contrast to the later sumptuous Chigi Chapel.

Like the Chigi Chapel, this too was mostly left to others to build and complete such as Baldassare Peruzzi who probably designed the dome.  The early 17th century facade was built by Flaminio Ponzio.

 

The splendid but very spare interior is mostly Raphael's own design and contrasts sharply with the elaborate splendor of the Chigi Chapel, even though the plans and sizes of the two domed chapels are very similar.

The church was built for the goldsmith's guild in Rome, St. Eligius of the Goldsmiths.

San Giovanni dei Fiorentini

As the name says, this church was built for the Florentine congregation in Rome.  The present church was designed and built by Giacomo della Porta based on an earlier design by Jacopo Sansovino with some later modifications by Alessandro Galilei, a descendent of the great scientist Galileo.

Pope Leo X, a Florentine and a Medici (Giovanni de Medici) ordered the church built to replace an older church dedicated to Saint Pantaleon.  

The facade by Alessandro Galilei completed in 1734.

Interior of the church

The dome built by Carlo Maderno, a circular interior with an octagonal exterior recalling the great octagonal dome of Florence Cathedral.

In 1559, Duke Cosimo I de Medici commissioned Michelangelo to submit a design before construction began in earnest upon the church.  

Michelangelo experimented with several centralized designs for a great domed church in a series of magnificent architectural drawings.

An engraving of a wooden model for Michelangelo's final design for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini.  It was not used.  The congregation continued with the original design by Sansovino.

St. Peter's

I've discussed the redesign and rebuilding of St. Peter's before on this blog at length here and here.

The greatest dome in Rome, and among the greatest in history, curiously does not quite dominate the city in the way we would anticipate.  It stands off to the side of the city at a distance.  If we stand on a hilltop just about anywhere in Rome, we can see it on the horizon looking like a distant mountain, more like Mt. Fuji on a clear day from Tokyo instead of dominating the whole city like the US Capitol dome over the center of Washington DC.

The Vatican hill was always just outside ancient Rome on the west side across the Tiber.  Until the mid 20th century, the territory on the other side of the Vatican was open countryside to the sea coast.

Adding to the unusual aspect of St. Peter's in relation to its city is the fact that it is not built on a hill top, but into a hillside, for centuries a continuing challenge for construction inspiring much structural innovation.

The dome of St. Peter's crowns the largest single building construction project in Rome's long history.  Construction on everything we see now took around a century and a half to complete.  St. Peter's remains the largest church ever built, even in our age of prodigious construction enabled by new and newer technologies.  Its dome is still the tallest in the world, at 447 feet (136 meters).  All the other great domes of the world would fit comfortably within its vast interior like nested Russian dolls with room to spare.

Rising over the historically most important Christian altar in the Western world, the great dome designed by Michelangelo rests on a crossing designed and built by Bramante and contains within its form the entire history of the Western Church to the 16th century.  The dome is an architectural form identified with ancient pre-Christian Rome.  It recalls the round paintings on the ceilings of cubicula in the catacombs of the third century.   The dome calls to mind the round martyrium churches built over the tombs of martyr saints after Christianity was legalized by the Emperor Constantine.  The huge dome rests on four great arches, a creation of the Byzantine Empire and Eastern Christianity.  The emphatic ribbed verticality of the dome inside and out reminds us of Gothic art with its great cathedrals. 

So much meaning and association concentrated into a clear concentrated form on a great scale that only someone with the intellectual strength and confidence of Michelangelo could bring off.  

The lantern of St. Peter's crowded with tourists.

A pope's eye view of the Baldachino over the altar of St. Peter's and the dome beyond.

Etienne Duperac's engravings of Michelangelo's proposed designs for St. Peter's.

A photo of St. Peter's from the west taken in the 1890s, a view now obscured by a lot of early 20th century construction after the Vatican became an independent state within Italy.  As we can see, until recently the countryside came right into what are now the Vatican gardens.  

I show this photo because this is a view of Michelangelo's best and most ambitious work on the exterior of the church that is no longer possible.  Vatican administration buildings from the 1930s now block most of this view.  The general public, tourists and all, are not admitted to see this view except for bits and pieces of it from windows and  balconies in the Vatican Museums.

Also, we can see much more clearly in this photo than we can now how St. Peter's is built into a lower slope of the Vatican hill.

The Domes of Rome 2

The first post in this series can be found here.

It's remarkable to realize that the domed church came late to Rome.  The city famous for St. Peter's and it's many domed churches did not see any domed construction after the 5th century until the 16th century.  All the major developments in domed church architecture took place in the Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire, or as we know it, the Byzantine Empire, and didn't find their way to the city of Rome until Bramante built the Tempietto.   While major inventions such as the dome resting on four arches and the dome clerestory took place in the Christian East, the city of Rome planted the seeds of those ideas in some of its earliest surviving Christian structures and churches.

We get a small preview of things to come when Christianity was still an illegal spiritual movement widely loathed and feared in the Roman Empire, in the ancient Christian catacombs.  While Rome in various periods of persecution destroyed churches and burned Christian books, it spared Christian burial places.  Roman superstitions about the dead preserved Christian cemeteries.  The first identifiably Christian art appears in the 3rd century when large numbers of educated and well to do Romans begin converting to the new religion during the Third Century Crisis.  They brought their pre-Christian culture of imagery and reverence for the dead into the new faith.  They also brought the Roman institution of the family tomb into the underground Christian cemeteries that once honeycombed the bedrock outside the city walls, the catacombs.  We see in these photos a cubiculum, a family tomb chamber in the Catacombs of Priscilla north of the Vatican in Rome.  All the burials in this room belonged to a single family.  

The Room of the Veiled Lady in the Catacomb of Priscilla.

The Veiled Lady, perhaps a personification of prayer.  She wears something that looks to me like a tallit.

She raises her hands in what was once the universal gesture of prayer throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Today that gesture survives in Islam and in the gesture of priests saying the Eucharistic Prayer in Western liturgy.

The Good Shepherd in the ceiling of the Room of the Veiled Lady in the Catacomb of Priscilla.  The passage in the Gospel of St. John where Jesus declares himself to be the Good Shepherd of the Sheep almost certainly inspired this image.  It is likely a repurposed borrowing from Classical art of Apollo or Mercury as guardian of flocks.

A family cubiculum in the Catacomb of St. Marcellinus and St. Peter.  After of the Great Fire of 64, Christianity became illegal throughout the Empire on the decree of the Emperor Nero who blamed Christians for the catastrophe.  Nero declared that the fire was punishment from the gods for tolerating the presence of impious and seditious Jewish heretics.  For the first two centuries of its existence, there was no identifiably Christian art.  The first generations of Christians were largely from marginal classes; slaves, freedmen, the poor, and women.  The Jewish prohibitions on imagery still had force for these first adherents of a religion that came out of Judaism.  Among these congregations of poor and marginalized people there were no funds for making art.  Christianity in its beginnings was an apocalyptic religion that proclaimed the imminent end of the world.  The earliest generations of Christians expected to see the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ in their lifetimes.  What was the point of making durable works of art in a doomed world?

The earliest identifiably Christian art appears in the city of Rome in the third century when large numbers of educated and affluent Romans began converting to the new religion in the course of the Third Century Crisis.  Theirs was a culture of the image where ideas and concepts were visualized in stories and personifications.  They naturally and inevitably brought that culture into Christianity.

The Roman Empire during its periodic persecutions of the religion destroyed early church buildings and early Christian books.  But, Roman superstitions about the dead protected Christian cemeteries.  The earliest surviving Christian art comes from underground cemeteries outside the city walls of ancient Rome called catacombs.

The ceiling of the cubiculum in the Catacombs of St. Marcellinus and St. Peter.  

We hardly recognize this ceiling painting as Christian at all.  None of the familiar symbols and images of Christianity appear anywhere, no crosses, no images of Christ, no Virgin Mary, no saints.  At first glance, this ceiling painting does not look much different from any other tomb imagery of the period.
In the center medallion we see The Good Shepherd, but this would not automatically identify this as a Christian burial.  He could be Apollo Protector of Flocks, or Mercury another Protector of Flocks and a Bearer of Souls to the underworld.  The story told in four panels between praying figures is the story of Jonah.  In the undamaged panels we see Jonah thrown overboard and swallowed by the whale.  The whale spits up Jonah on the beach before Nineveh, and finally there is Jonah resting under the gourd vine.

It's possible that the artists employed in painting these tombs may not have been Christians themselves.  They were maybe second or third string house painters hired for a another tomb job for another mystery religion.  They borrowed heavily from what they already knew, the stories from Classical mythology.  Jonah under the gourd vine looks like Bacchus under a grape vine arbor.

Early Christian architecture -- at least what survives -- does not appear until after the Emperor Constantine ended Christian persecution with the Edict of Milan in 313 and afterwords gave the religion state patronage (though Christianity would not become the state religion of the Roman Empire until the Edict of Thessalonica under Emperor Theodosius in 380).
Most of the early churches built by Constantine and his successors were adaptations of the Roman basilica, originally secular government buildings with a long center hall lit by clerestory windows and flanked by columned aisles.  Much less common were round churches built for the ritual of circumambulation, walking around a holy site, usually a saint's tomb, always keeping it to your right.  In ancient times all religious people in the Mediterranean world practiced circumambulation.  Today it mostly survives in Islam.  Early Christians circumambulated, and round churches were built for that ritual.

A round church built for circumambulation would seem to be a natural for a domed ceiling.  Not necessarily.

The Church of Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome originally built for circumambulation around the tomb of St. Stephen the First Martyr whose remains were brought to Rome from Jerusalem in the 5th century.

The church has a wide circular aisle for crowds of people circling the tomb of St. Stephen.  Originally this wide single aisle was two aisles divided by columns recycled from earlier temples.

Over the center altar, there is not and never was a dome, only a ceiling held up by an arch on a pair of ancient columns.

The circular aisle or ambulatory of Santo Stefano.

The circular church of Santa Costanza in Rome is the only church that survives intact from Constantine's reign.  The Emperor built immense churches in Rome, St. Peter's and the Lateran Church, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.  Hardly a scrap of those original churches survive.  St. Peter's and the Lateran Church were completely rebuilt and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was destroyed and rebuilt many times over.

The Church of Santa Costanza was originally attached to the larger church of Santa Agnese that is now ruined.  This was the only domed church in Early Christian Rome.

The very beautiful interior of Santa Costanza, built as a burial place for the Emperor's sainted daughter in a great porphyry sarcophagus that now stands in the Vatican Museums.  There is a copy in the church.  

The Sarcophagus of St. Constantia or Costanza in the Vatican Museums.

The ruins of the Church of Sant' Agnese next to the Church of Santa Costanza.

A single ambulatory with doubled columns supporting masonry arches circles the center rotunda of the church.  The columns are all spolia, columns taken from earlier temple and reused in the church. They appear to come from many different temples.  Columns and their capitals don't always fit together and impost blocks assist a few columns that are slightly too short.

On the vaulted ceiling of the ambulatory is the one and only mosaic to survive from the time of the Emperor Constantine, among the very earliest of Christian mosaics.

At first glance, these mosaics don't look particularly Christian.  They are part of the syncretic Christianity of the Emperor Constantine that would make later theologians very uncomfortable.  Constantine attributed his victory over his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge to Christ the Christian god.   He built votive monuments in thanksgiving to that god as would any of his predecessors on the imperial throne.

I find these ancient Roman floor mosaics now moved to the ceiling to be very beautiful.  The Roman household imagery of birds, flowers, fruit, and still life items take on a new religious dimension.

More of these very Roman domestic ceiling mosaics given a whole new dimension of meaning by their presence in a church.

The original dome mosaics, perhaps from the 5th century, do not survive except in a 16th century drawing by Francisco Hollanda.  The decayed 16th century fresco on the domed ceiling may be an imaginary reconstruction of that original mosaic cycle.

The Church of Santa Costanza may well be the last dome built in ancient Rome.  The city that pioneered domed architecture would not see another dome built within its walls until the 16th century.

In the meantime, ambitious and inventive domed architecture moved far to the east in the Byzantine Empire and later in Islam.

The domes of the Church of Hagia Sophia in what is now Istanbul from the 6th century.

The north dome chamber of the Masjid i Jami in Isfahan, Iran, 11th century.