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Bramante, Tempietto
Donato Bramante, Tempietto, c. 1502, San Pietro in Montorio, Rome. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Why is it called the "Tempietto"? What does that word mean?(18 votes)
- Why wasn't Bramante allowed to design/finish the rest of the courtyard?
What is inside?
At the time of its completion, who would have been allowed to go inside and was it used for? Would pilgrims or regular citizens come here to worship or beg for Peter's blessings or intersession or was it only used by members of the clergy/church officials?(7 votes)- Our friend Wikipedia has an entry on the history of the site, which suggests that there were periods of public access-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pietro_in_Montorio(5 votes)
- What is the Doric Order ?(3 votes)
- The information in the following links may or may not be correct.
The "order" of the style of the columns also appear to be linked to the place names where the style originated as well as the time periods they were created in as Doric appears to have come first, followed by Ionic and then Corinthian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_Greek
it is widely accepted that Doric originated in the mountains of Epirus and Macedonia, northwestern Greece, the original seat of the Dorians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionic_order
The Ionic order originated in the mid-6th century BC in Ionia, the southwestern coastland and islands of Asia Minor settled by Ionian Greeks, where an Ionian dialect was spoken.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_order
The name "Corinthian" is derived from the ancient Greek city of Corinth,(4 votes)
- Why did Rome build a tiny temple to mark the site of St. Peter's crucifixion? Why not something huge and awesome like the basilica?(5 votes)
- The small and concise size of the structure invokes an intimate feeling that this was where St. Peter was martyred; this is again reverberated by the radial construction and the hole within the building marking the specific place. When you erect something as massive as St. Peter's Basilica, it loses its sense of location which is wholly undesirable for a templetto like we have here.(4 votes)
- Early Christian architecture was based on secular Roman architecture (basilicas) as a means of separating from the pagan faith. At what point in Christian architecture did it become acceptable to emulate Roman religious temple forms? Was this part of the Renaissance's rebirth of classicism?(4 votes)
- Yes, it came about with the Renaissance. Similar to how it became more acceptable to create art relating to or about the pagan religion of Rome/Greece, it became more acceptable to look back at the architecture as well such as in the Florence Cathedral where Brunellesche based his design of the dome off of the Pantheon.(2 votes)
- What is it made out of ?(3 votes)
- Why was St. Peter crucified upside-down?(3 votes)
- This is a matter of legend and tradition, rather than of history. The legend goes that he was sentenced to death by crucifixion, but felt himself to be unworthy of the same sort of death as his Lord, Jesus. He asked for something else (a different form of death). His executioners responded by crucifying him upside down. However, though this is a matter of legend and tradition, it is not a matter of historical fact. Whether you accept it or not is a matter of your own faith.(3 votes)
- what do people do in rome in the tempitieo(2 votes)
- Probably they look around, take pictures, and reflect on the story of the faith of the one whose martyrdom is commemorated there. Whether the spot is the actual one of an actual martyrdom or not is less important than the reflection on one's own life and death that may occur there.(5 votes)
- what did they use to build this(2 votes)
- Probably under all that marble you'll find bricks, mortar and plaster.(2 votes)
- why he used closed windows instead of opened ? and why he used on rectangular window and one circular window ?(2 votes)
Video transcript
(jazzy music) Female: We're high up on
a hill overlooking Rome, one of the seven hills of
Rome, the Janiculum hill, in a small courtyard looking at Bramante's small but important
building, the Tempietto. Male: This is one of
the treasures of Rome. It's actually one of my favorite buildings in the entire world. It's tiny. In fact, I'm not even
sure I feel comfortable calling it a building. It's a marker. Female: The Tempietoo marks the site of the crucifixion of St. Peter. Male: Or what Bramante and the Church thought was the site of the
crucifixion of St. Peter. Female: Right, and in
fact, if you go inside, there's a hole that marks
the spot in the ground where the cross was placed. St. Peter was crucified upside down. By marking the site, by making such a beautiful structure here, the Church is, in a way, saying the office of the Papacy goes back to St. Peter, the very first Pope who got that job from Christ himself. Male: It's interesting that it's Bramante who's designing this
space because Bramante will also be one of the
principle architects responsible for the
other major site in Rome that is associated with St. Peter, the Basilica of St. Pietro in the Vatican, the site where Peter was buried. Both of these become markers, but this is a tiny little structure where, of course, St. Peter's is enormous. Female: This looks back to a kind of early Christian building called a martyria, or a marker of the site associated with an early Christian martyr. Male: Those were round buildings. It's interesting that Bramante's borrowing both from that early Christian tradition but also borrowing
directly from Antiquity. In fact, in Rome itself,
if you go to the Forum you can see a small round temple to Vesta, which is not so dissimilar from this. In fact, it's surrounded by columns. Female: That's right.
Both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans
employed the circular plan. Bramante's very consciously
going back to those, He's consciously going back to the ancient the ancient Roman writer, Vitruvius, who wrote a great treatise on architecture and on correct proportions
in architecture, which Bramante is really
following here in the Tempietto. Male: Bramante really is in love with the ideal geometries of Antiquity, especially of ancient Greece. This building is a radial building. It's a round structure. It's very much unlike the traditional cruciform church which is based on the ancient basilica. It's interesting because
Bramante also used a kind of ideal geometry
in the other building we were talking about,
in St. Peter's Basilica, which was originally a perfect cross. Female: Right. It was Greek cross, employing the circle and the square. This interest in pure geometric forms is something that we really
see in the High Renaissance. Male: Let's talk about that relationship between ideal ancient
geometry and the divine because I think that was really important at this moment that we
call the High Renaissance. If you draw a circle, no matter
how good an artist you are, it's always going to
have some imperfections. But looking at that
circle, we can be prompted to imagine something where
there's no deviation, where there's no imperfection. So geometry was thought
by the ancient Greeks, and again in the
Renaissance, to be a vehicle by which we could imagine
the perfection of heaven. Female: So Bramante,
like many other artists of the High Renaissance,
is really interested in this pure circular plan. Here, of course, the focus of this circle is that important site of
the crucifixion of St. Peter. As we look up at this
building, we have the steps from the stylobate that lead us up toward the circular colonnade,
the cylinder or the drum, and then the dome on top. We really have this focus on a center and that would have been even more true if Bramante had designed the courtyard as he wanted to with
a colonnade around it. Male: One can imagine the amplification if this was surrounded
by yet another colonnade with a series of radial
niches, that would have been a kind of conversation between the space around the building and the
central structure itself that I think would have
been unprecedented. All of those elements that you mentioned: the stylobate, the steps, the colonnade, and of course the dome, are all elements that come from Antiquity. The artist was really careful
to get these things right. If you look at the columns themselves, this was the Doric order. It's not the Doric that we
see from ancient Greece; not what we would see on the Parthenon. This is a Roman variant instead. It's called the Tuscan order. We can see columns like this embedded in the side of the first
level of the Colosseum where, unlike the Greek Doric order, these columns are not fluted. They have even more of a
sense of mass and solidity. Female: And true to
the Doric order, we see triglyphs and metopes in the frieze just above the columns. Bramante's really capturing an authentic Doric order here. Male: Although he does sometimes allow for some variation. For instance, the Greeks and the Romans would not have, inside their colonnade, put plasters that pair with the columns. These were maximizing the radial quality by aligning the true columns
with the false columns. Female: So there's a real rhythm that Bramante's creating here. What makes this so High
Renaissance to me is its grandeur. Even though it's so small, there's a real sense of monumentality. In a way, this is the
architectural equivalent of Michelangelo's figures
in the Sistine Chapel; a real sense of the heroic, looking back to Classical Antiquity, and celebrating a kind of humanism. Male: There is a kind of self assurance in the High Renaissance; this idea that man can actually produce exemplars on earth of the
perfection of the heavenly. Even though this is such a small building, I think its monumentality
comes from its great ambition. (jazzy music)