Great Churches of the World:
Bramante's Tempietto

The Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio is by far one of the most perfect buildings ever conceived by the mind of man: the first truly all' antica building of the Renaissance, so brilliant that it was the only modern structure to be included in Palladio's and Serlio's treatises on Roman architecture. That's the official story, anyway, and with an introduction like that, it would seem disappointment is inevitable.

However, my visit to the tiny shrine, a martyrium bearing witness to the legendary site of the inverted crucifixion of St. Peter, proved that nothing is ever inevitable. We had spent the day, as always, on a long lecture-hike around Rome discussing the Quattrocento, and this was journey's end. I can't think of any better way to experience it.

The first thing a traveller notices is that San Pietro, the adjoining parish church, is the site of the Spanish Academy in Rome. Indeed, this quintessentially Roman oratory is a monument to the piety and glory of the Catholic Monarchs Fernando and Isabel, who, celebrating the splendor of their newly-united Christian Spain endowed this elegant reliquary in stone at the close of the fifteenth century, under the pontificate of the Spanish Alexander VI. The eagle of St. John and the lions and castles of Leon and Castilla stud the restrained stained-glass of the little church, but the building itself still points indelibly to the Prince of the Apostles commemorated within.

It's also extremely small, setting you up to disregard it as an oversized model; a stone version of some immense Italian tabernacle too little to be a building, too big to be a piece of sacred furniture. Don't be fooled.

It is a triumph of Christian humanism: the pagan form of the round temple, the tholos is transformed into a shrine of witness, with the stalwart Doric columns of a warrior-god becoming signs pointing instead to the fortitude of St. Peter, a warrior by his conquest of the crown of martyrdom. Doric was said by Vitruvius to be the most difficult of the antique orders to proportion, with its curious triglyphs and metopes, and Bramante's own triumph is here by using it with such elegance and perfection. Nearly none of the contradictions inherent in that style of architecture can be glimpsed.

Around the frieze, above the perfect number of sixteen columns, run the emblems of the liturgy: incense boat, Gospels, cross, aspergillum, torches, replacing the ewers and sacrificial knives on the portico of another perfect round structure, the pagan Pantheon. All is restraint and balance: as opposed to the dramatic contraposto of Baroque architecture, we see the smoothness and ease of Renaissance intellect, a Palestrina motet in stone.

Within, in the tiny sixteen-foot-wide sanctuary (no bigger than the oculus of that same Pantheon) there are traces of opulence and even, at first glance, gaudiness, as fragments of riotous frescoes, moldering in the darkness, still cling to the encircling architraves and the eight pilasters (a halving of the outer sixteen). Overhead, the wooden inner dome is studded with gilded stars, and the ghostly outline at the apex of what might have once been the dove of the Holy Spirit. But even then these bright colors, dimmed by age, have elegance to them, no curve of the painted fretwork without its symmetrical counter-curve, no color without its complement.

We were all crowded in there, listening to Professor D. lecture. I pretended to look down through the inset grillwork into the crypt and knelt at the altar's predella. And I considered the marble St. Peter before me, enthroned and aureoled by an enormous carved seashell, and thought that only the sacrificial triumph of the first Pope was worthy of this triumph by the first authentic architect of the antique revival.