The present palace has never been used as a papal residence; in the 18th century it was an orphan asylum, and is now a museum of classical sculpture and early Christian remains.
The Vatican palace originated in a residence built by Symmachus (498-514) adjoining the basilica of S. Peter. This was The Vatican. rebuilt by Innocent III. (c. 1200) and enlarged by Nicholas III. (1277-80). It did not, however, become the fixed residence of the popes till after the return from Avignon in 1377. In 1415 John XXIII. connected the Vatican and the castle of S. Angelo by a covered passage carried on arches. But little of the existing palace is older than the 15th century; Nicholas V. in 1447 began its reconstruction on a magnificent scale, and this was carried on by Sixtus IV. (Sistine chapel), Alexander VI. (Torre Borgia), Julius II. and Leo X. (Bramante's cortile and Raphael's Loggie and Stanze), and Paul III. (Sala Regia and' Cappella Paolina by Antonio da Sangallo). Sixtus V. and his successors built the lofty part of the palace on the east of Bramante's cortile. The Scala Regia was built by Bernini for Urban VIII. and Alexander VII., the Museo Pio-Clementino under Clement XIV. and Pius VI., the Braccio Nuovo under Pius VII., and lastly the grand stairs up to the cortile were added by Pius IX.[1]
The Quirinal palace, now occupied by the king of Italy, is devoid of architectural merit. It stands on the highest part of The Quirinal. the hill, near the site of the baths of Constantine. This palace was begun in 1574, under Gregory XIII., by Flaminio Ponzio, and was completed by Fontana and Maderna under subsequent popes.
The only important church in Rome which is wholly Gothic in style is S. Maria sopra Minerva, the chief church of the Dominican Ecclesiastical Gothic. order. This was not the work of a Roman architect, but was designed by two Dominican friars from Florence—Fra Ristori and Fra Sisto—about 1289, who were also the architects of their own church of S. Maria Novella. It much resembles the contemporary churches of the same order in Florence, having wide-spanned pointed arches on clustered piers and simple quadripartite vaulting. Its details resemble the early French in character.[2] It contains a large number of fine tombs; among them that of Durandus, bishop of Mende (the author of the celebrated Rationale divinorum officiorum), by Giovanni Cosma, c. 1300, and the tomb of Fra Angelico, the great Dominican painter, who died in Rome, 1455. The most elaborate specimen of ecclesiastical Gothic in Rome is that part of S. Maria in Ara Coeli which was rebuilt about 1300, probably by one of the Cosmati, namely, the south aisle and transept. During the 14th century (chiefly owing to the absence of the popes at Avignon) the arts were neglected at Rome, and a period of decadence set in. The sculptured effigy and reredos of Cardinal d'Alençon (d. 1405) in S. Maria in Trastevere, executed by a certain Paulus Romanus, is a fair example of the works produced during this period; the effigy is a very clumsy and feeble copy of the fine recumbent figures of the Cosmati.
Florentine Period, c. 1450-1550.
The long period of almost complete artistic inactivity in Rome was broken in the 15th century by the introduction of a number of foreign artists, chiefly Florentines, who during this and the succeeding century enriched Rome with an immense number of magnificent works of art. The dawn of this brilliant epoch may be said to have begun with the arrival of Fra Angelico (see Fiesole) in 1447, invited by Nicholas V. to paint the walls of his small private chapel in the Vatican dedicated to S. Lorenzo.
In the latter half of the 15th century a large number of sculptured tombs (as well as tabernacles, altar frontals, Florentine and Lombard sculptors. reredoses and the like) were made for Roman churches by sculptors from Tuscany and north Italy. The earliest of these tombs is that of Eugenius IV. (d. 1447) in S. Salvatore in Lauro, by Isaia da Pisa. It presents the typical form of a life-sized recumbent effigy resting on a richly ornamented sarcophagus over which is a canopy decorated with reliefs and statuettes. The type was brought to perfection by the Florentine Mino da Fiesole (see Mino di Giovanni), who worked in Rome under Pius II. and succeeding popes, being assisted in some cases by another artist of almost equal skill, Giovanni Dalmata. A Lombard sculptor, Andrea Bregno, came to Rome under Paul II. and worked there until the closing years of the century; his tomb is in S. Maria Sopra Minerva. The works of these artists and their followers are to be found in a great number of churches, notably S. Maria del Popolo.[3]
The architecture no less than the sculpture of the latter part of the 15th century was mainly the work of Florentines, especially of Baccio Pontelli, who is said by Vasari to have built S. Maria del Popolo, S. Agostino,[4] and S. Cosimato in Trastevere. He also was the architect of S. Pietro in Montorio, erected in 1500 for Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Other buildings were carried out by another Florentine, Giuliano da Majano. The Palazzo di Venezia, begun for Cardinal Barbo, afterwards Paul II., about 1455, a very massive and stately building of medieval character, was built by Giuliano da Sangallo and Francesco di Borgo San Sepolcro.
During the latter part of the 15th and the first few years of the succeeding century Rome was enriched with a number of buildings Bramante. by Bramante (q.v.), one of the greatest architects the world has ever seen. He combined the delicacy of detail and the graceful lightness of the Gothic style with the measured stateliness and rhythmical proportions of classic architecture. Though he invariably used the round arch and took his mouldings from antique sources, his beautiful cloisters and loggie are Gothic in their general conception. Moreover, he never committed the prevalent blunder of the 16th century, which was a fruitless attempt to obtain magnificence by mere size in a building, without multiplying its parts. His principal works in Rome are the Palazzo della Cancelleria, built for Cardinal Riario (1495-1505), with its stately church of S. Lorenzo in Damaso; the so-called Palazzo di Bramante in the Governo Vecchio, built in 1500; and the Palazzo Giraud, near St Peter's, once the residence of Cardinal Wolsey, built in 1503. He also built the cortile of S. Damaso in the Vatican, the toy-like tempietto in the cloister of S. Pietro in Montorio (1502), and the cloisters of. S. Maria della Pace (1504).[5] In 1503 Bramante was appointed architect to St Peter's, and made complete designs for it, with a plan in the form of a Greek cross. The piers and arches of the central dome were the only parts completed at the time of his death in 1514, and subsequent architects did not carry out his design.[6]
Baldassare Peruzzi (q.v.) of Siena was one of the most talented architects of the first part of the 16th century; the Villa Farnesina Peruzzi. and the Palazzo Massimi alle Colonne are from his designs. His later works bear traces of that decadence in taste which so soon began, owing mainly to the rapidly growing love for the dull magnificence of the pseudo-classic style. This falling off in architectural taste was due to Michelangelo (q.v.) more than to any other one man. His cortile of the Farnese palace, though a work of much stately beauty, was one of the first stages towards that lifeless scholasticism and blind following of antique forms which were the destruction of architecture as a real living art, and in the succeeding century produced so much that is almost brutal in its coarseness and neglect of all true canons of proportion and scale. During the earlier stage, however, of this decadence, and throughout the 16th century, a large number of fine palaces and churches were built in and near Rome by various able artists, such as the Villa Madama by Raphael, part of the Palazzo Farnese by Antonio da Sangallo the younger, S. Giovanni de' Fiorentini by J. Sansovino, and many others.[7] (J. H. M.; H. S. J.)
Later Development
The transformation of Roman architecture after the 16th century was marked by the abandonment of classical models. The works of Michelangelo were too grand to be accused of exceeding the extreme limits of good taste, but his scholars and imitators exaggerated his manner, and the barocco style,
- ↑ See Letarouilly, Le Vatican et le basilique de St Pierre à Rome (Paris, 1882).
- ↑ The absence of a triforium is one of the chief reasons why the large Gothic churches of Italy are so inferior in effect to the cathedrals of France and England.
- ↑ On Mino da Fiesole, see Gnoli in Archivio Storico dell' Arte (1890-91); on Giovanni Dalmata, Fabriczy in Jahrb. der preuss-Kunstammlungen (1901); on Andrea Bregno, Steinmann in the same periodical, vol. xx.; many of the monuments are drawn in Tosi, Raccolta di monumenti sacri e sepolcrati scolpiti a Roma (1853).
- ↑ These two churches were the first in Rome built with domes after the classical period.
- ↑ The upper storey of the latter is varied by having horizontal lintels instead of arches on the columns.
- ↑ See Geymüller, Projets primitifs pour le basilique de St Pierre à Rome (Paris, 1875-85).
- ↑ A valuable account of Raphael's architectural works is given by Geymüller, Raffaello come Architetto (Milan, 1882). Drawings of many of the finest palaces of Rome are given in the fine work by Letarouilly, Édifices de Rome moderne (Brussels, 1856-66).
