MICHELANGELO S ST. PETER S

for the duplication of the centre columns is of course an utterly
un-antique conception. Bramante's cupola was to be a perfect semi-
sphere, Michelangelo's (pi. LXH)—if we can take it (in spite of the
emphatic denial by some scholars) that its present shape is Michel-
angelo's and not della Porta's who completed it in 1588-90—
is elongated and with the projecting coupled columns of the drum,

60.

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: PLAN FOR THE COMPLETION OF ST. PETER S IN ROME,

1546.

the ribs up the dome and the coupled columns and concave top of
the lantern a revision in very personal Renaissance forms of the
essentially Gothic design of Brunelleschi's Florentine dome. Now
the triumphant soar of this dome is not Mannerist. This superhuman
victory of gigantic forces against huge masses points towards the
Baroque. To admit that does not mean invalidating the thesis that
Mannerism was the predominant tendency of kter 16th-century
architecture. It merely means admitting die vastness of Michel-
angelo's genius. He—and the same is true of the other greatest
masters of his generation, of Raphael and Titian—in growing out