RAPHAEL'S TEMPLE in the MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN

RAPHAEL's TEMPLE in the  MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN

A previous blog entry discussed the building on the left by Bramante. This entry will compare Bramante's Tempietto to Raphael's painted temple in his 1504 painting of the Marriage of the Virgin

(now in the Brera Gallery in Milano) seen on the right. These two art works, begun around the same time, one created of stone and one fictionalized in paint, are by artists from the same region who were related by family, and the two temples have enough similarities to warrant close analysis.

    As we have shown in the previous blog, the Tempietto, begun in 1502, was established to mark the spot where St. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome. Designed by Donato Bramante

(1444-1514), it was paid for by the Spanish royals, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella 10 years after

they had celebrated Columbus' discovery of the New World. (See Jack Freiberg's book, Bramante's Tempietto, the Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown, 2014, Cambridge University Press.)

The Tempietto is a circular temple with steps and a colonnaded walkway around it. The dome resembles a papal cap to remind the viewer of the first Pope, Peter. Raphael's temple is not a replication of Bramante's building, but there are enough features similar to it to make us wonder if Raphael saw Bramante's designs for the building, or if he saw the building itself under construction.

They are both rounded inner structures topped by a dome with a peristyle (outer colonnade) around them.
 

 A series of steps leads up to both colonnades. 

The central structure appears to be two storeys in both and the windows on the second level provide some of the light for the interior. Each has a central doorway set between columns in the colonnade. The space in each is a human space, meant to accomodate humans easily. How is Raphael's temple in the painting different from Bramante's actual Tempietto structure?

To begin, it has many more steps (8 instead of 3) up to the colonnaded arcade, Ionic capitals rather than Doric, no metopes or triglyphs as in the Tempietto, and rounded arches lifting up the walkway around the building.

Its central entrance shows the landscape beyond in the exit door, and Raphael's inner structure is a 16-sided polygon room rather than a cylinder.

He keeps windows on the second storey but has no balustrade; instead he imagines scroll volutes that 
move out like ribbons from the inner cylindrical shape to the outer colonnade, much like those Alberti attached to the facade of Santa Maria Novella in 1470; they are not identical, but one perhaps inspired the other:

Raphael's temple is still a rounded domed structure with outdoor colonnade up a series of steps, very like the actual realization of the Tempietto.
When could Raphael have been in Rome, though? Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) was born in Urbino, near Bramante's hometown of Fermignano, and he knew Bramante as a fellow artist and family relation. Raphael's own early training was not as an architect, however, but as a painter in Perugia with Perugino, then in Siena with Pinturicchio. After helping Pinturicchio paint the Piccolomini Library in the Siena Cathedral between 1502-3, where Raphael might have also made designs even for the buildings in those frescoes, Raphael travels to Florence and stays awhile for more training, perhaps even with Leonardo da Vinci. He must have kept in contact with Bramante, who was in Milano from 1474 to 1499, because after Bramante moves to Rome in 1499, the older architect writes to Raphael in Florence to come to Rome for work.

In Vasari's Life of Raphael, Vasari tells us:

 E questo avvenne perché Bramante da Urbino, essendo a' servigi di Giulio II per un poco di parentela che avevano insieme e per essere di un paese medesimo, gli scrisse che aveva operato col papa che, volendo far certe stanze, egli potrebbe in quelle mostrare il valor suo. Piacque il partito a Rafaello, e lasciò l'opere di Fiorenza, trasferendosi a Roma;

Translation:  And this happened (Raphael went to Rome from Florence) because Bramante from Urbino, being in the services of Pope Julius II, wrote to Raphael, since he was related to Raphael by family and since he was from the same town, that he (Bramante) had worked with the Pope who wanted to do certain rooms (in the Papal Palace), and that Raphael could prove his worth if he painted those. Raphael liked the idea of leaving, and abandoned the works in Florence, and moved to Rome. (trans. mine)

Raphael starts painting the Stanze (rooms) for Julius II in 1508 in Rome. But he must have been familiar with Bramante's ideas and construction of the Tempietto before that date because he paints the temple in the Marriage of the Virgin painting four years before arriving in Rome for work. Bramante is much older, 56 when he starts the Tempietto, while Raphael is 19 and at the beginning of his career in the same year, 1502. Raphael regards Bramante as another mentor in his early stages of employment. So on the one hand, we could see the painted temple as his way of paying homage to Bramante as the older architect, but, on the other hand, Raphael has ambitions of his own to be an architect and his painting of the temple in the Marriage panel signifies his own interest in the same problem that occupied Bramante, the central-plan church.

       Once Raphael gets to Rome, he immediately demonstrates his own architectural ambition in the design for the church of Sant' Eligio degli Orefici, begun in 1509 in Rome on the Tiber River. It is meant to be Raphael's presentation of his ability to compete with his compatriot as an architect. He stays close to Bramante's simple central plan and spare lines in Sant'Eligio.

The church is based on a Greek cross circumscribing a circle

(the extended altar area may have been added later) and topped with a dome much like the dome of the Tempietto, capping a cylinder.  

 

 

He does not finish the church before his death, and it is completed by other architects, but this simple structure persuaded people he could be an architect as well as painter because when Bramante dies in 1514, Raphael is made director of the construction of the new St. Peter's instead of Michelangelo.

        His Marriage of the Virgin is painted five years before the start of Sant'Eligio, and when we compare the two temples by him, they seem to come from different sources:

 
The cylinder is obscured behind walls in Sant'Eligio, whereas the Marriage temple appears light and airy because of its slender arcade so like Bramante's colonnade.

The commission for the Marriage painting came from the church of San Francesco in a small town west of Urbino called Citta di Castello. And we know the date because Raphael signs the work and dates it, right on the temple building in the background of the marriage scene.
RAPHAEL URBINAS, he writes on the architrave over the central doorway, M in the spandrel on the left, DIIII in that of the right, Roman numerals for the date, 1504.

         It is hard to believe that Raphael felt it was important to sign and date this particular painting of a common Christian subject in an out-of-the-way Franciscan church in a backwater town like Citta di Castello. And he signs it on the BUILDING!   No, like all artists, Raphael is speaking through the signature and date, to other artists, and in particular to another architect, his
compatriot and rival, Bramante. He is signing, not just the painting, but the architectural idea he has offered behind the signature.
        Raphael knows the important challenge for architects of his era. He wants to display his own centralized church plan, way before his actual construction of Sant'Eligio, not just to compete with Bramante's Tempietto, but to compete with all the architects who are talking about the big reconstruction project of the age, the expected renovation of St. Peter's itself. Bramante and others conceived of the new St. Peter's as a centrally-planned church, too, a Greek cross around a central circle.

 (If you doubt that architects compete with other architects, all you have to do is witness the two major buildings in London, the Gherkin and Lloyd's of London, on the same corner and 18 years apart by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers respectively; they both went to Yale Architecture School and are marking each other with intensely
innovative buildings a block away from each other.)

 

With his painted, signed, and dated building here, Raphael announces his intention to be an architect as well as painter, and eventually he is papal architect from 1514 (Bramante's death) until his own death in 1520. And, although his painted temple and constructed one prepare us to think he will make St. Peter's a central plan, too, like Bramante's, the reconstruction of his idea for St. Peter's, once he becomes papal architect, seems to be a Latin-cross shape for the Basilica, perhaps to differ with Bramante's ideas:

It must be admitted that Raphael's idea of a temple like Bramante's in his Marriage painting may have been inspired also by his painting teacher's painted temples. In Perugino's Marriage of the Virgin (now in Caen) an octagonal temple is imagined behind the scene, again up a series of steps,
 










 and in
Perugino's more famous Christ Giving the Keys to Peter in the Sistine Chapel (1482-83,) an octagonal temple with arcaded side entrances sits between two triumphal arches and it, too, is raised
up from the piazza by several steps.

Raphael's temple in 1504 has none of the fancy pretension of Perugino's 1483 three-storey gilded stage set. But he has thought beyond his teacher to the mentor who came from closer to home, so his temple has more of the simplicity of Bramante's actual temple.
And Raphael's temple is not meant to be a representation of the basilica of St. Peter's, as it is in Perugino's painting, more appropriate for the subject of Christ Giving the Keys of the Church to Peter. For the subject of the marriage of the Virgin, Raphael's temple is merely symbolic of the church, LA CHIESA, a feminine noun which is associated with the Virgin herself:

Most Renaissance marriages did not take place inside a church, so the church behind the figures is only meant to give the scene a sacred space. Strange, even for the 16th-century, to see the marriage enacted in a piazza while the communal passeggiata goes on behind it!

The women attending the Virgin stand on the left, the male suitors on the right. The priest in the middle watches as Joseph places the ring on the finger of Mary. Joseph holds a rod that is flowering, the sign that he was favored to marry her, and the male suitor in the foreground breaks his unfruitful rod over his own knee in frustration.

The suitor bending the rod behind that bending figure may be a self-portrait, since he is looking out and on the right. (We must say that the graceful way the front suitor breaks his rod prefigures many other graceful gestures in the Stanze painted by Raphael later in Rome.)
The temple is also present because Mary's father, Joachim, had been expelled from the temple for being childless, an expulsion remedied when the miracle of Mary's birth occurs. The scrolls that extend from the central structure in Raphael's temple suggest celebration for that birth and then her marriage, but the severity of the perfectly drawn windows and columns tones down that joy with a rigid regularity which owes much to Bramante's somber Tempietto.

 
 
Both Bramante and Raphael are tackling serious subjects in their buildings, the death of Peter, and the marriage of the Virgin, whose son later dies also on a cross, but the restraint they show is a measure of their true intent, to produce a perfect, rounded, central holy building that satisfies aesthetically. Who succeeds in this Platonic quest? Since Raphael's has never been built, it is a perfect virtual question.
 

BRAMANTE'S TEMPIETTO

BRAMANTE's TEMPIETTO

This wonderful Renaissance structure is called the TEMPIETTO, the small temple, and it was designed by Donato Bramante (1444-1514), for the cloister next to the church of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum Hill in Rome in 1502. (In the print just below it is hidden to the right of the church facade, dome just visible.)

The Tempietto, as can be seen on the right in the plan below, sat next to the church, which was built in the shape of a Latin cross, with long nave and short transept arms. The cross shape of the adjacent church reminds the viewer of the importance of the Tempietto site as the putative place where Peter lost his life upside down on a cross planted in the ground. (Peter did not want to be crucified right-side-up because he did not feel worthy to die as Christ had.)
 

 

For the precedent of a cylindrical shape of the temple we only have to look at some early Christian buildings produced in Rome, such as the church of Santa Costanza, 

 

built to house the tombs of Constantine's daughters, who died in the 4th century. It had a two-storey cylindrical shape with columned arcades. In Santa Costanza the ambulatory (colonnaded walkway) is indoors, whereas in the Tempietto, the walkway is on the exterior.

The Tempietto, though, is not just a small round martyrium to Peter's Crucifixion. The shells used as decoration for the niches on the building

proclaim it as a site that was also a pilgrimage location for visitors to Rome in the 16th century. 
A 1575 map of pilgrimage churches in Rome drawn by Antonio Lafreri includes the Tempietto within its courtyard in the lower right corner of the drawing:

 

Pilgrims would come to this place, where St Peter was thought to have died, and also to the Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome, where Peter was buried. Both Petrine sites were renovated by Bramante. 
       In the recent major scholarly study of the building by Jack Freiberg, Bramante's Tempietto, The Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown (2014, Cambridge University Press,) Freiberg adds to this knowledge by establishing that the building also served as a marker for the influential power of the Spanish king and queen Ferdinand and Isabella and their desire to remind the visitor of the royals' ancient privileges and contracts connecting them to the holiest pilgrimage site, Jerusalem. The Spanish crown hoped to garner papal influence by paying for this construction in Rome, the center of papal power, but they also wanted to tell Christians in Rome that Spain had jurisdiction in Jerusalem. Freiberg is the first to uncover the Spanish patronage of the building.
      The construction documents are lost now, (Freiberg, page 137) so it is impossible to establish anything but the year, 1502, as the start date for the building, taken from the foundation stone. (I will return to Freiberg later.)
      The work on the Tempietto probably continued many years past that date since in 1503 Pope Julius II became Pope and immediately hired
Bramante to tear down the fabric of the Old St. Peter's church and start building a newer, grander structure. Bramante's plan for St. Peter's exhibits the Renaissance desire to make a perfect centralized building and his construction of the new St. Peter's must have overlapped his construction of the Tempietto:

In Bramante's plan for St. Peter's Basilica a perfect circle is inscribed in a perfect square with a Greek cross shape superimposed over the intersection of the circle and square. (Greek crosses have the nave, apse, and transept arms the same length.)

      Now let us go back to the Tempietto.

Bramante's Tempietto is a circular temple with a cylinder cella (room for a statue) and a columnar peristyle (or columned porch) around it. When you first see the temple, it appears to have two storeys  because of the balustrade of double-bellied balusters on a second level (seen from below and above in the photos.)

It appears, when you first encounter it, that a visitor could walk around the porch within the columns on the ground floor

and then around the building again at the balustrade balcony level,

 

but that is not the case; there are no stairs to the second level and no doors leading out onto the balustraded balcony, so access to the upper storey would have to be by window or by crane.

 

The 16 Doric columns around the first level 

are set on a base that is lifted from ground by three circular steps that surround the entire temple.

 The spareness of the Doric capitals

 

and the ribbed slope of the dome set on the top of the cylinder, combined with the steps,

make the building very compact and easy to take in by eye, especially in its rectangular cloister.

Though its parts are regulated in restraint, the building seems alive in a way because the space of the various cylinders seems to undulate into the niches and out to the columns, like a simple, quiet dance.

The two niches on either side of the upper window in the front of the temple almost look like eyes on either side of a nose, and the face is capped by a dome that resembles a papal cap, on purpose. 

Since the Tempietto marks the holy spot where Saint Peter, the first Pope, was said to have been crucified in the first century A.D., the building resonates as a symbolic form for the human power of the papacy as well as for the power of death for Christian belief. (St. Peter probably was killed in 64 A.D. in Nero's ancient stadium that was near St. Peter's Basilica, but in the Renaissance Christians believed the Tempietto marked the spot of his death.)

      The proportional system that Bramante employed owed much to ancient pagan architecture, however. The height from floor to top of architrave is equal to the height from the architrave to the top of the dome, a proportional system recommended by Vitruvius in his treatise on Architecture.

 The simple lines of the unfluted columns and the two-storey division give it a composed and serene sense of  resolution.

       This resolution also comes from the perfect circle of the cella set within the perfect circles of both balustrade and colonnade, set within the perfect circles of the steps around them.

     Freiberg (page 105) points out that the use of 16 columns with Bramante's spacing allows for entrances between columns at the front as well as the two sides, perfect ways to go in and out of the cella.

 

Inside, the cella is a shallow, tall cylindrical room housing an altar and statue of St. Peter holding keys and to the side, niches with Evangelist statues. The altar with Peter is directly opposite the entrance door.

As recommended by Vitruvius in his 1st-century treatise on architecture (Book IV, Chapter V, Part 2), the site of the temple (and in this case, also Peter's statue) faces the river, the River Tiber down the hill. Vitruvius also suggests that temples on hills

 

should be sited to look out over the city below, and Bramante obliged here by making the Tempietto entrance face toward Rome below it. (In this photo of the panorama from San Pietro in Montorio, the dome of St. Peter's is visible on the left but would not have been present in 1502.)

     The cella ceiling is a round dome of fictive sky with the windows that are on the balustrade level just below it to let in the light.

Strangely enough, while we anticipate going upstairs to the second level of the Tempietto as we first approach it, we don't anticipate going below ground to a basement grotto level, but at the back of the building,

 there are stairs

that lead down to an underground room

that contains a circle in the middle of the floor where St. Peter's cross was stuck into the ground.

So while we expect the room with the statue on the first level to be the space where the saint was martyred, the actual spot is below the cella room, marked out in Cosmati marble work with a perfect circle mirroring the shape of the building itself:

An entire structure with two rooms and a dome covering over a hole in the ground! And the hole below can be seen through a grate in the middle of the floor on the first level.

     The building is a temple to more than St. Peter.It is a temple to Renaissance architecture's most engaging challenge: to make a perfect centralized Christian building. Squares, perfect circles, and perfect cylinders were thought in the Renaissance to represent the perfection of God, and architects like Bramante aspired to represent that mathematical perfection in the architecture they produced. The building reflects deep thinking about divine perfection.

    Bramante, who was born near Urbino, travelled north to Milan for work, then in 1499 moved back south to Rome in order to examine ancient architecture. He spent the next few years measuring all the ancient buildings in Rome and Tivoli in order to understand their proportional systems. Because of his reputation as expert in the language of ancient Roman architecture, he was hired to build this Christian temple in the ancient mode.
   In the original plan for the Tempietto the building would have been surrounded by another colonnade in the courtyard to emphasize the perfect circular form, but as you can see from these two reconstructions, the building's simplicity would have been lost in the arcade around it and the circular form, rather than being accentuated, would have been muted, so the courtyard colonnade was never built:

The only Bramante drawing of the Tempietto to survive (in the Uffizi in Florence) excludes the colonnade, so perhaps the architect himself realized the power of his own monument standing alone.

Far from Spain, and isolated on the Janiculum, the Tempietto remains a perfect synthesis of Christian and pagan ideals in the service of the story of Peter's life in Rome. Meant as a
reminder of the goodness of the papacy, it is also a memento of Bramante's quest for perfection. Even today the visitor is nourished and inspired by the goodness and perfection of this building. In its beauty we forget the horror of the
death it is meant to remember.