By the standards of the Roman church,
St Peter’s Basilica is relatively new, being only five hundred years old, a young
home for a Religion founded two millennia ago. But it is not the first
church to occupy this site. The original basilica was built
around the year 315 by Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor. Constantine became a Christian after
having a vision on his way to battle. He saw a cross in the sky with
the words "in hoc signo vinces": "under this sign thou shalt conquer". Constantine triumphed and he
converted, and in thanksgiving, he founded a basilica over
the tomb of Saint Peter. At the Vatican hill, Roman
emperor Nero had built a Circus. A Roman circus was a long stadium that
was used mainly for chariot races, but it could serve also for gladiatorial
combat and other important events. Countless Christians were killed in
this place, and their bodies were then buried in a necropolis that
was located north of the circus. It was there, the legends tell, that
the body of St Peter was brought after having been crucified near what is now
the Church of San Pietro in Montorio. Old St Peter’s was a typical Early Christian
basilica, whose plan and elevation resembled those of Roman basilicas with aisles and naves, and it
was about half the size of the current church. It used to have a courtyard with a fountain
in the center and a portico called a narthex, destined for those who weren’t baptized, as
they were not allowed inside of the church, and the basilica had a Latin-cross plan. St Peter’s tomb was placed in the center
of the crossing, beneath the altar. In 1505 Julius II, a pope who wanted to
leave a great legacy, made the daring and controversial decision to demolish the Old St
Peter’s completely and build a new basilica. By that time, Old St Peter’s
was more than 1000 years old, and it had been pillaged many times,
so the church was falling into ruin. Also, Julius II wanted a large basilica that could house the massive and magnificent tomb
that Michelangelo was carving for him. The pope commissioned Donato Bramante, one of the most talented architects of the
time to draw up plans for the new basilica. And Bramante had a difficult task, tearing
down and reconstructing the most important Church in Christendom, so of course
certain things have to be conserved. Work on the new church began in 1506,
the same year that another long-standing Vatican institution, the Swiss Guard, was founded. Since then, these guards, the uniforms
of whom were designed by Michelangelo, are responsible for the pope’s security. Before his death in 1514, Bramante was
able to complete the four central piers and the arches between them to support the dome. These are drawings by a Dutch artist who was in
Rome at the time called Maarten van Heemskerck, showing you St. Peter’s as designed
by Bramante under construction. You see these big barrel vaults coming up,
with old St. Peter’s still intact underneath. Over the next forty years, several
architects and popes had their own ideas that differed from Bramante’s
for how the church should look, and thanks to this endless debate,
Rome got used to the unfinished church. So much so, that Raphael used the domeless center of St Peter’s as the background
for his most famous painting: a fresco he did in the Vatican apartments. This is the classicist architecture of
antiquity, this is the architecture of barrel vaults and articulated walls and
carved niches, but it's more than that, it's also the architecture of the Renaissance,
the architecture of St Peter’s as much as Bramante managed to build, and he's putting this
cast of classical characters into that space. It's called “School of Athens”, which suggests
that these are the great Greek philosophers, these are the heroes of antiquity, these
are the people that thought the thoughts, and conceived the ideas that the entire
Renaissance is aimed at recovering. In the center you have Aristotle
and Socrates, having a discussion, over here you have Archimedes and
Pythagoras the great mathematicians, and here you have Heraclitus who
was just grumpy, he was a skeptic. There's not simply a matching of the
architecture of contemporary Rome, the architecture of Bramante’s St. Peter's
with the architecture of classical Greece, but also portraits of contemporary figures
are encoded in the School of Athens, so you look at Socrates, and he is a portrait Leonardo da
Vinci, whom Raphael would have known quite well. If you look down here the grumpy skeptical
guy Heraclitus is a portrait of Michelangelo, and Euclid, the father of geometry is Bramante. And Raphael also includes himself. With this painting, Raphael is
saying: this is the school of Athens, these are the great thinkers of
antiquity and we are them again. What’s great about the plan of Bramante
is its incredible delicacy, and this idea of the centralized plan becoming
elaborated with multiple organizations. Unfortunately though, Bramante's design couldn’t be executed
because the structure was insufficient. Bramante had this idea that he would build a
dome somewhat like the dome of the Pantheon, and given his plan, you simply cannot
support a compression dome on piers, particularly not piers this delicate. The dome of the pantheon is
still standing after 2000 years because of its massive thick
wall supporting the whole thing. So after Bramante died, other architects
came in to do projects for St Peter’s. Believing that the new church should more
closely approximate the old St Peter’s, Raphael submitted to Pope Leo X a design that
was in the shape of a Latin cross in 1514. But when he died in 1520, Baldassare Peruzzi
took over and reverted to the Greek cross. In 1538 under pope Paul III, Antonio da Sangallo
submitted another version of the Latin cross plan, which is essentially a revision
and expansion of Raphael's design. He even went so far as to construct an
enormous wooden model of his design, but its scale was so big that there
would be a great lack of light inside. So when Sangallo died in 1546, the pope appointed
the aged Michelangelo to finish the church. Michelangelo returned to Bramante’s design, adopting once again the Greek cross, but
he simplified his predecessor’s layout, creating a more organic flow that tied the
corner chapels more closely to the larger church. And notice the amount of structure that
Michelangelo puts in his plan compared to what Bramante had anticipated in his plan. He strengthened the church's central piers
and its outer walls so that they could carry the building's massive weight, and he
reduced the inner walls to allow more light, giving the immense interior a lighter
feel and a greater sense of space. He designed a facade based on the Pantheon using two rows of massive columns,
and he reimagined the dome. As a Florentine Michelangelo knew the
dramatic silhouette of Brunelleschi’s Dome on top of the church of Santa
Maria del Fiore in Florence and understood what a profound impact such a
silhouette can have on a city’s skyline. The dome envisaged by Bramante
is this series of stacked rings, and the dome envisaged by Michelangelo is much
closer to the Florentine model by Brunelleschi, a double dome more ovoid in shape than round,
which has the advantage of translating the loads more directly to the ground, and with
ribs and a system of chains that were to go along on the inside, and further work in
tension to counteract the lateral thrust. So Michelangelo raised what had been
built of the dome and revised it. His vision is taller, stronger, more
vigorous, reaching toward heaven. Michelangelo died in 1564, and only the
drum of the dome had been completed. But such was Michelangelo’s reputation that
Pope Pius V personally engaged Vignola, Michelangelo’s assistant, to make sure that not
a stone got changed from Michelangelo's plan. In 1585, Pope Sixtus V appointed architect Giacomo
della Porta, assisted by Domenico Fontana to complete the dome, and the dome was finished
in 1590, as it is inscribed at the top of it. In 1605 Pope Paul V demolished what
remained of the old St Peter’s. And there are a couple of problems with Michelangelo's church by the
time you get to the 1600s: Firstly, it doesn't quite cover all
the holy ground that had been made sacred by the old St Peter's, and
secondly, the counter-reformation insisted upon a Latin-cross layout for
new churches, as the Greek-cross plan disregarded the ceremonial and sacramental
rituals that were a part of the church. So the pope decides that work has to be changed
and a nave has to be added, both to respect the desire for longitudinal churches, and to
cover up all these tombs and all this holy ground and not to let it be made profane by
being cast outside the walls of the church. Carlo Maderno is given the task, and in 1608, his work began by tearing down
Michelangelo’s still incomplete façade. Kind of a tragedy, because Michelangelo
designed the enormous dome surpassing almost everything that had been seen till then. Immediately upon entering you
were under the immense cupula. Maderno added three bays in
front and a great vestibule. The whole idea is destroyed. Nowadays it’s necessary to traverse a tunnel more
than 90 meters long before arriving at the dome. Michelangelo’s church should
have risen as a single mass, the eye would have taken it as one thing,
now the façade bears no relation to the dome, the dome has been hidden, as you cannot see
it when you’re in front of the building. Hagia Sophia at Constantinople is a triumph
with half the superficial area of St Peter’s, because there’s a direct relationship between
the exterior of the building and the interior. Nevertheless, the architecture of St
Peter’s adopted another concept that wasn’t present in Michelangelo’s
plan, and that is procession. As the pilgrim emerged from the
narrow and tangled streets of Rome, he would suddenly find himself
in front of the new St Peter’s. From there he would be drawn forward
past the obelisk in the middle of the piazza up to a flight of steps to a portico
in front of a series of giant marble columns, and along its nave to the dramatic altar. On the frieze that’s on top
of the walls of the nave, you can see verses from the bible that
Jesus said to Peter inscribed in Latin. The altar stands over the remains of St
Peter, and under Michelangelo’s immense dome. When the pope says mass in St Peter’s Basilica, he is literally surrounded by this
inscription on the base of the dome: “TV ES PETRVS ET SVPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM
MEAM ET TIBI DABO CLAVES REGNI CAELORVM”, which translates to: You are Peter and upon this
stone, I will build my church, and I will give you the keys
to the kingdom of the Heavens. These words proclaim the reason
for the church’s existence. The architectural character of the interior
was largely carried out in the seventeenth century under Bernini, who succeeded
Maderno as architect-in-chief in 1629. To reduce the scale of the vast space under
Michelangelo’s dome, Bernini designed the bronze Baldacchino, a symbolic protective canopy
over the high altar above the tomb of St. Peter. To match the scale of the crossing, the
Baldacchino is more than 28 meters high; its twisted columns are not a Baroque
invention but a greatly enlarged version of the marble columns that you see at the
second-floor level of the crossing piers. These used to stand before
the altar of the old basilica. It was believed that the original twisted columns
were brought by Constantine from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, so their continued use
here links St. Peter’s with the Holy Land. In the enormous space of the basilica,
the Baldacchino distinctly marks the spiritual center of the church, which
would otherwise appear insignificant. So large is the interior that
the Baldacchino’s height, equivalent to a nine-story building,
is not overpowering from a distance. Beyond the Baldacchino, and
framed on axis by its columns, is Bernini’s culminating work in the basilica, the
Cathedra Petri, or Chair of Peter, an elaborate reliquary in bronze constructed around the
supposed wooden seat of the first apostle. Lightly supported by four figures
representing Doctors of the Church, those men who established the doctrine
of the faith, the chair floats above the visitor’s head against a glorious
backdrop where golden rays emanate from a brightly illuminated stained-glass center
on which rises the dove of the Holy Spirit. The interior walls have one colossal
order of Corinthian pilasters, crowned with semicircular
barrel vaults, 46 meters high. The walls are faced with
marble producing a rich effect, and the dome is beautifully decorated in mosaic. Bernini was also responsible for the
pavement, the decoration of the piers, and the design of four sculptural
groupings for altars and tombs. Work under Maderno proceeded pretty quickly because
he had more than 800 people simultaneously working on the basilica, and by 1612, as
it says in the inscription of the façade, he completed the elongation
of the nave and the façade. You can see in this drawing what Maderno
was thinking about in designing the façade, he’s showing a relationship of the dome to the
body of the church, and two towers flanking it. But the drawing is highly idealized,
because the dome is way back here and the facade is way up here, there's no
way anybody would be able to see the dome from within the purview of the space
immediately in front of Saint Peter’s. Also, the towers were not
constructed before Maderno’s death. So when Bernini attempted to build the towers,
the whole façade began to come tumbling down. He had miscalculated the weight of the towers, Bernini was formed as a
sculptor, not as an architect. An architect with more knowledge
of building might have made sure that the foundations were fortified before
trying to put extra weight on the system. So they had to stop the towers and that's why when
you look at St Peter's, the proportions look kind of funny, it was meant to have towers that would
give you a more ideal relationship of height to width, but now it just looks long and sprawling,
in fact, here you can see that the rectangle desired by Maderno to be flanked by these towers
would have been a golden rectangle, and there would have been another golden rectangle halfway
through the towers, a perfect square unifying the top of the towers with the façade, and a square
that unifies the whole composition with the dome. A very agreeable geometry, but instead,
it becomes something excessive. Maderno’s strategy for the façade is to
make the center more dense and more plastic, as well as to compress the columns
toward the end of the temple figure, so that when you see an orthographic projection
of the façade, the columns begin to reprise the rhythm you would get in an elevational
drawing of a round thing, and in this case, it's Bramante's drawing of the Tempietto, one of
the most influential buildings of the Renaissance. The Basilica was finally consecrated in
1626, but you still need a courtyard. Old Saint Peter's had a courtyard, which
was necessary for various rites and rituals, there might be blessings or special holidays when
the Pope comes outside and greets the people. In the center of what is now the
Piazza of St Peter’s is Sixtus V’s contribution to the shaping of the
space in the front of the basilica, the 25-meter-tall Vatican Obelisk,
which was installed there in 1586. This was the largest intact Egyptian
obelisk moved to Rome during the empire. How the ancient Romans transported them
is unknown, but the presence of several broken ones indicates that their
methods were not always successful. This obelisk was originally situated
in the center of the Circus of Nero. The task of Domenico Fontana, Sixtus V’s
architect, was to move it about 240 meters to its new location in the center of the Piazza,
all without damaging the shaft or its carvings. His solution to the problem involved encasing
the obelisk in a protective timber framework, transferring it to a horizontal position by means
of ropes and pulleys, which were controlled by the coordinated action of men and horses, and
then moving it over rollers to the new site. As the obelisk was raised in front
of St. Peter’s, the entire College of Cardinals along with the citizenry of
Rome turned out to watch the spectacle. Barricades kept the curious at a safe distance, and absolute silence was enforced during the
critical lifting stages so that the workmen could hear and respond correctly to Fontana’s
signals, given by a trumpet and a bell. And they erected it almost in the right place… as you can see it's almost exactly
where you want it to be but not quite. Following his successful
removal of the Vatican Obelisk, Fontana was commissioned to relocate
three smaller obelisks in Rome. Those standing today in the Piazza del
Popolo, at San Giovanni in Laterano, and at the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore
were all positioned by Fontana. For the piazza of St Peter, Bernini
puts an ingenious strategy into play: He makes the center of the courtyard
not immediately adjacent to the church, but he uses the location of the obelisk
as the center of an ovalized space, far enough away from the church so that
you can begin to get a glimpse of the dome. So even though you've been denied the view
of the dome by the extension of the nave, he's going to put you far
enough back to see the dome. So by displacing the center of
the forecourt this far away, he's suddenly making it possible to read
the dome and the façade together again. The edges of the trapezoidal space clip
into the façade at the point that the towers of Maderno’s original project would have
been, and so emphasizing Maderno’s façade. Here's the problem though, this
is as far back as you could get, and still look at the facade of St. Peters, and
you can just awkwardly see the top of the dome. And this masterful drum, this great plasticity of
columns playing in this syncopated double rhythm, forget it, you need to be
way across Rome to see it. It wasn’t until Mussolini cut a road
through Rome in the 20th century that St Peter’s was actually connected to the
Sistine diagram of these wide long streets, and if you stand at the end of the
street, then you’ll be able to fully read the façade and the dome together,
which is really what you want to do. And if you observe the relationship
of the basilica with the piazza, it’s almost as if he flipped it, so that
the spot where the obelisk is located in a sense mirrors the spot where the tomb of
St Peter is located underneath the dome. And this stair that’s adjacent
to the facade becomes like a joining piece between the church and the piazza. And if you stand in these specific points,
which are marked in the pavement, the rows of columns that make up the courtyard, all line
up, and you only see a single row of columns, but if you're walking through the space it's
like walking through a forest of columns. Notice also how Bernini ends
the space of the courtyard, he places the façade of a little Roman temple. It is one of the noblest entrance courtyards
in Europe, a space that embraces the faithful. And this is a drawing made by Bernini, where he
shows you that his concept for the colonnade is to represent the “welcoming, maternal arms
of the Holy Mother Church” as he once said. If you want to better understand how Saint
Peter's Basilica is integrated into Rome's urban fabric, I recommend that you watch
my video explaining the city of Rome. I hope you found this information useful
and enjoyable, please support my work by liking this video and subscribing to my channel. Thank you for watching and I'll
see you in the next episode. Goodbye!
