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.