BRAMANTE IN ROME
have been crucified. One can thus call it an enlarged reliquary. In
fact the intention had been to alter the courtyard in which it stood
into a circular cloister to house the little temple. The first impression
of the Tempietto after the churches and palaces of the I5th century
is almost forbidding. The order of the colonnade is Tuscan Doric,
the earliest modern use of this severe, unadorned order. It supports
a correct classical entablature, again a feature that adds weight and
strictness. There is, moreover, except for the metopes and the shells
in the niches, not a square inch of decoration on the whole of the
exterior. This in conjunction with the less novel but equally telling
simplicity of the proportions—the ratio between width and height
of the ground floor is repeated in the upper floor—gives the Tem-
pietto a dignity far beyond its size. Here for once the classic Renais-
sance has achieved its conscious aim to emulate classic Antiquity,
For here is—beyond motifs and even beyond formal expression—a
building that appears as nearly pure volume as a Greek temple.
Space—that all-important ingredient of Western architecture—
seems here defeated.
But Bramante did not stop there. Only four years after he had
accomplished the ideal Renaissance expression of architectural
volume, he set out to reconcile it with the ideal Renaissance expres-
sion of space, as it had been evolved by the 15th-century architects
from Brunelleschi to Leonardo da Vinci. In 1503 Julius II commis-
sioned him to rebuild St. Peter's, the holiest of Western churches.
It was to be a building on a strictly central plan, an amazing decision,
considering the strength of the tradition in favour of longitudinal
churches on the one side and the immense religious significance of
St. Peter's on the other. With the pope adopting this symbol of
worldliness for his own church, the spirit of Humanism had indeed
penetrated into the innermost fortress of Christian resistance.
Bramante was over sixty when in 1506 the foundation stone was
laid of the new St. Peter's (fig. 56). It is a Greek cross, with four
apses, so extremely symmetrical that on the plan nothing indicates
which of the apses was to hold the high altar. The main dome was
.to be accompanied by minor domes over corner chapels. And just
as in the Leonardo sketch of fig. 55 the rhythm is amplified by
enlarging the corner chapels into Greek crosses so that each of
them has two apses of its own, the other two being cut off by the
arms of the major Greek cross. Thus a square ambulatory is created
framing a huge central dome, designed to be semispherical like
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