Donato Bramante, Tempietto, c. 1502, San Pietro in Montorio, Rome
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:11] We’re high up on a hill overlooking Rome, one of the seven hills of Rome, the Janiculan Hill, in small courtyard, looking at Bramante’s small but important building, the Tempietto.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:18] This is one of the treasures of Rome, and it’s actually one of my favorite buildings in the entire world. It’s tiny, in fact, I’m not even sure I feel comfortable calling it a building. It’s a marker.
Dr. Harris: [0:27] The Tempietto marks the site of the crucifixion of Saint Peter.
Dr. Zucker: [0:31] Or what Bramante and the Church thought was the site of the crucifixion of Saint Peter.
Dr. Harris: [0:35] Right, and in fact, if you go inside, there’s a hole that marks the spot in the ground where the cross was placed. Saint Peter was crucified upside down.
[0:44] By marking the site, by making such a beautiful structure here, the Church is, in a way, saying that office of the papacy goes back to Saint Peter, the very first pope, who got that job from Christ himself.
Dr. Zucker: [0:56] It’s interesting that it’s Bramante who’s designing this space, because Bramante will also be one of the principal architects responsible for the other major site in Rome that is associated with Saint Peter, the Basilica of San Pietro in the Vatican, the site where Peter was buried, and so both of these become markers, but this is a tiny little structure where, of course, Saint Peter’s is enormous.
Dr. Harris: [1:21] This looks back to a kind of early Christian building called the martyria, or a marker of a site associated with a early Christian martyr.
Dr. Zucker: [1:30] Those were round buildings, and it’s interesting that Bramante is borrowing both from that early Christian tradition, but also borrowing directly from antiquity. In fact, in Rome itself, if you go to the Forum, you can see a small round temple to Vesta, which is not so dissimilar from this. In fact, it’s surrounded by columns.
Dr. Harris: [1:48] That’s right. Both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans employed this circular plan, and so Bramante is very consciously going back to the ancient Roman writer Vitruvius, who wrote a great treatise on architecture and on correct proportions in architecture, which Bramante is really following here in the Tempietto.
Dr. Zucker: [2:12] Bramante really is in love with the ideal geometries of antiquity, especially of ancient Greece. This building is a radial building, it’s a round structure. It’s very much unlike the traditional cruciform church, which is based on the ancient basilica.
[2:22] It’s interesting because Bramante also used a kind of ideal geometry in the other building we were talking about, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, which was originally a perfect cross.
Dr. Harris: [2:32] Right, it was a Greek cross, employing the circle and the square. This interest in pure geometric forms is something that we really see in the High Renaissance.
Dr. Zucker: [2:42] Let’s talk about that relationship between ideal ancient geometry and the divine. I think that was really important at this moment that we call the High Renaissance.
[2:52] If you draw a circle, no matter how good an artist you are, it’s always going to have some imperfections. But looking at that circle, we can be prompted to imagine something where there’s no deviation, where there’s no imperfection.
[3:08] Geometry was thought by the ancient Greeks — and, again, in the Renaissance — to be a vehicle by which we could imagine the perfection of heaven.
Dr. Harris: [3:16] And so Bramante, like many other artists of the High Renaissance, is interested in this pure circular plan.
[3:25] And here, of course, the focus of this circle is that important site of the crucifixion of Saint Peter. As we look up at this building, we have the steps from the stylobate that lead us up toward the circular colonnade, the cylinder or the drum, and then the dome on top.
[3:41] So we have this focus on a center, and that would have been even more true if Bramante had designed the courtyard as he wanted to, with a colonnade around it.
Dr. Zucker: [3:46] One can imagine the amplification if this was surrounded by yet another colonnade with a series of radial niches. There would have been a conversation between the space around the building and the central structure itself that I think would have been unprecedented.
[4:01] All of those elements that you mentioned — the stylobate, the steps, the colonnade, and, of course, the dome — are all elements that come from antiquity. And the artist was careful to get these things right.
[4:15] If you look at the columns themselves, this is a Doric order. But it’s not the Doric that we see from ancient Greece, not what we would see on the Parthenon. This is a Roman variant instead. It’s called the Tuscan order.
[4:30] We can see columns like this embedded in the side of the first level of the Colosseum, where, unlike the Greek Doric order, these columns are not fluted. They have even more of a sense of mass and solidity.
Dr. Harris: [0:00] And true to the Doric order, we see triglyphs and metopes in the frieze just above the columns. Bramante’s really capturing an authentic Doric order here.
Dr. Zucker: [4:51] Although he does sometimes allow for some variation. For instance, the Greeks and the Romans would not have, inside their colonnade, put pilasters that pair with the columns. These were maximizing the radial quality by aligning the true columns with the columns.
Dr. Harris: [5:11] There’s a real rhythm that Bramante is creating here. What makes this so High Renaissance to me is its grandeur. Even though it’s so small, there’s a real sense of monumentality.
[5:24] In a way, this is the architectural equivalent of Michelangelo’s figures in the Sistine Chapel. A real sense of the heroic, looking back to classical antiquity, and celebrating a kind of humanism.
Dr. Zucker: [5:32] There is a kind of self-assurance in the High Renaissance, this idea that man can produce exemplars on Earth of the perfection of the heavenly. And even though this is such a small building, I think its monumentality comes from its great ambition.
[0:00] [music]
