RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42Q-C. l6OO
him Superintendent of the Vatican Buildings, an all but nominal
appointment at first. In IS37 he was consulted about a more stately
rebuilding of the municipal palaces on the Capitol; but nothing
materialised. Then in 1546 San Gallo died, and now Michelangelo
was called upon almost at once to complete the Palazzo Farnese,
redesign St. Peter's and replan the Capitol. At the Palazzo Farnese
we shall now easily discover his Mannerism in the second-floor
details (pL uv). The triplicating of the pilasters and especially
the odd discordant framing of the windows with corbels on the
sides not supporting anything and special corbels immediately above,
on which the segmental pediments rest, are Michelangelo's personal
expression, individual to an unprecedented extent and impossible
before the breaking up first of the transcendentally ordered world
of the Middle Ages and then of the aesthetically ordered world of
the Renaissance.
Michelangelo's architectural masterpiece, the back and the dome
of St. Peter's, are also an expression of revolt against Bramante
and the spirit of the Renaissance, although they are not to the same
extent Mannerist. When Michelangelo was appointed by Paul III,
the Farnese Pope, to be architect of St. Peter's, he found die church
essentially left as it had been at Bramante's death. Raphael and San
Gallo had designed naves to comply with the religious demands of
the first post-Renaissance generation. But they were not begun.
Michelangelo returned to the central plan, but he deprived it of its
all-governing balance (fig. 60). He kept the arms of the Greek cross,
but where Bramante (fig. 56) had intended sub-centres repeating
on a smaller scale the motif of the main centre, Michelangelo cut
off the arms of the sub-centres, thus condensing the composition
into one central dome resting on piers of a dimension that Bramante
would ha^e refused as colossal, i.e. inhuman, and a square ambu-
latory round. As for the exterior, he altered Bramantc's plans in
exactly the same spirit, replacing a happily balanced variety of
noble and serene motifs by a huge order of Corinthian pilasters
supporting a massive attic and by strangely incongruous windows
and niches surrounded by cediculce and smaller niches of several
sizes—a mighty yet somewhat discordant ensemble. At the west end,
Michelangelo wanted to add a portico of ten columns with four
columns in front of the middle ones. This—it was never built, because
Maderna after 1600 added a nave—would have destroyed Bramante's
ideal symmetry, and in fact the classic ideal of symmetry altogether;
114.