 Today we're going to continue talking about the Baroque, specifically the Roman Baroque, because that is the birthplace of the Baroque. And we mentioned last time that part of this new expression, this new dramatic, energized, multi-sensory experience of the Baroque came up as part of the Counter Reformation. And the Counter Reformation was a realignment of church policy established at the Council of Trent when there was a desire to firm up the position of the church in society. There was a concern that Renaissance humanism made a personal relationship with God too available to people and began to make the clergy irrelevant. And in order to make the clergy central and to make the church more powerful, a series of measures were taken. Let's look at sixes the fifth. Sixes the fifth was really amazing. He was only in the papacy for about five years. It was a relatively short period of time, but during that time he undertook all of these projects to modernize Rome. And one thing that he realized is that the year that the year 16 years, we could have evacuated the building if you kept that going a little longer. I'm really upset you turned it off. He realized that a major holy year was coming up in the year 1600. And he wanted to get Rome in shape. Rome had suffered a terrible blow during the sack of Rome. And even without the sack of Rome, Rome was a mess. He got some of the aqueducts working again that had not been working since Roman times. Before sixes the fifth became Pope, he honed his skills as an administrator as grand inquisitor of Venice and Veneto. He was apparently so harsh that the people in Venice pleaded to the Vatican to have him return there. And he did and instantly his manner switched. He became conciliatory and coddling and flattering and was eventually elected Pope. When he assumed the papacy, the coffers were empty and the Vatican had been ill managed for a number of years. Sixes the fifth increased taxes all over the board and ended up having enough money to spend great quantities of it on these vast civic improvements that he sought to undertake. This is an image of sixes the fifth talking to his architects about and cardinals of course and dwarfs because what would a good Baroque court be without a little dwarf nearby? Talking about plans for expanding things or improving things or making things more hygienic or making things more economic or making things more profitable. Here we see the aqua felice and it might simply look like another piece of pompous and grandiose Baroque architecture but it is much more than that. The aqua felice is an aqueduct, the head of an aqueduct, the old Roman aqueduct, Alexandria. And when Sixes came to Rome, only one aqueduct was still delivering fresh water. Only one Roman aqueduct was still in service delivering fresh water. It was the aquavergine and it was bringing in water near the area where we now have the Trevi fountain. Sixes the fifth had a competent architect Dominico Fontana who he gave the task of restoring the aqueduct and bringing water in and also constructing this glorious fountain head. This is the aqua felice or the old aqua Alexandria 22.4 kilometers long bringing fresh water into Rome quite an accomplishment. More fountains could be made functioning in the city in the city of Rome and more people could have fresh water. He also drained marshes that had been places for malaria to breed and malaria mosquitoes. He reestablished some roads and bridges that had been broken and that had fallen into disrepair. So you think about the Renaissance. The Renaissance was all about we want to be like the Romans. We want to be like the Romans. But they were thinking about that from really an intellectual point of view. They were looking at the forms of the Romans but they weren't so much looking at the infrastructural technology of the Romans. And sixes the fifth picks up this other aspect of what it is to be a Roman and becomes very interested in infrastructure. Building roads, building bridges, building aqueducts, making the city hum. This outline represents the Aurelian walls. The Aurelian walls were the walls of the Roman emperor. So in the ancient times of Rome, Rome was this big. And in the Baroque time of Rome, Rome was about this big. And you had basically cows and geese and chickens. It was agricultural land inside the Aurelian walls. This is mortifying. This is a big disappointment if you happen to be the pope. And so what sixes the fifth wanted to do was make Rome better. We undertook this big project of urbanism which is interesting. It's a term that we really haven't used yet. We've talked about ideal town plans. But the notion of an ideal town plan is really a thing. I'd like it to be circular. I'd like it to be perfect. I'd like it to be a thing. This is a drawing, by the way, that you often see representing the Novi plan of Rome. And I think it's an interesting drawing because it leaves so much out that it really drives home what the big idea is. And what the big idea is, according to this drawing, is that there's something about straight roads and there's something about obelisks. And that's it. The straight roads and the obelisks make Knowable a city that otherwise would have been unknowable. And when you plant all that information on the city of Rome, you see it barely looks like a little diagram. But this explains the big idea. To further clarify, what do you get from sixes the fifth restructuring of Rome? Well, I'll show you. We have the main gates to the city, the Porta del Popolo and Piazza del Popolo and the Porta Pia, establishing these major axes. Porta Pia goes straight to the Quirinale Palace, and the Quirinale Palace is the Pope's summer palace. I know in my recitation, people were saying, how many palaces does the Pope need for heaven's sakes? Doesn't he have a good one at the Vatican? And one answer to that is that the Vatican is close to the river. There were a lot of mosquitoes. It's not a healthy climate in the summer. So in the summer, you want to get away from that and get up to high ground. And the Quirinale Palace is up on a hill and more salubrious in hot weather. So that's one of the big roads. Then we have the trident, these three roads coming off of Piazza del Popolo, one of which has to negotiate a hill and moves up hill to the Spanish steps, and then shoots straight across to St. Mary Major, Santa Maria Maggiore. How do you know where you're going? Well, you know where you're going because you see obelisks at every point. This is the obelisk here in the middle of Piazza del Popolo, and this is another view of that obelisk. From St. Mary Major, you have two possible destinations. One is Holy Cross, Santa Croce in Jerusalem, and here we have St. John Lateran, San Giovanni Laterano. So we're moving through the city. It's a big city. It's a tangled city, but we're moving with direction and with understanding about how the city works because of these interventions placed there by 6th to the 5th. And notice that you can't quite get to St. Peter's, which is over here on 6th to the 5th's plan. That comes later. It's part of the plan. It's not yet executed, but it's in the works. Here's the river. So we have a river port here, too. If anybody's coming by river called Porta della Repeta, walking down from the Porta del Popolo on this street, now called Baboon Street, Viedel Babuino, had a different name then. Walk up the stairs and you see an obelisk. Thank God, I know I'm in the right place. You're over here. Where do I go? You look down and you see an obelisk in front of Santa Maria Maggiore, and you walk and there you go. And so now you're at a church. In this direction, up around Piazza del Popolo, it's kind of built up. It's not the disinhabited part of Rome, but this stuff over here by Porta Pia has just like farmlands. Nothing going on. 6th this also has fake facades get built here so that if people happen to be coming in through the Porta Pia, they're going to think Rome was built up. There'll be fake facades with chickens behind them. Great idea. The Porta Pia road is a straight shot here to something called the Quirinale Palace. Where the two roads cross, 6th this realizes something special has to happen. And so he puts chamfered corners there. So it's an octagon instead of just a regular crossing of streets. And on each of the chamfered corners, there's a fountain. So this intersection becomes the four fountains, Quattro Fontane. That church we looked at a little bit earlier in class, the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. St. Charles at the Four Fountains is located right here on the site of the Four Fountains. There's a kind of interesting tying together river port, Spanish steps to St. Mary Major, to Santa Croce in Jerusalem, or look for an obelisk and you get to St. John Lateran. And there are a couple of other things that I think are funny. As long as you're in Rome, go see the Coliseum. Or this is a really good shopping street. You better go there too. But for the most part, it makes possible the negotiation of the city by the pilgrims. It's interesting that 6th this is planned does not include St. Peter's, which we see over here. Let's look at 6th this is planned for a moment. And here we have it. This is the Trident at the Piazza del Popolo. And this is the Piazza del Popolo. The three streets going down here at the point where it would have met the river, the Porta della Repete, the Ritoport was demolished in the early 1900s because the river would flood all the time. So they put a big flood wall there. And it's really tragic because the relationship of Rome to its river is really awful now. And once there would have been this kind of wonderful baroque opening up into the river, tragic. Here we have our Trident. Here we are going up Spanish steps, which come later. And then we continue further. This drawing, by the way, is from a book called The Design of Cities by Edmund Bacon, where he's looking at the structure of cities. There are a couple of interesting things about Edmund Bacon. One, he's the father of Kevin Bacon. So if you've ever wondered about the six degrees of separation, like how close are you to Kevin Bacon? The answer is really close because Edmund Bacon was one of my teachers. So I'm your link. I'm your link to Kevin Bacon. Very, very immediate. But also he would talk about the second man principle, that really good urbanism, really good urban design doesn't get built at one time. But rather you put a plan into action that is so powerful that people in subsequent generations will complete your idea. And in many ways, the subsequent development of Rome bears witness to that. For example, over here when we look at the Trident, we now see that there are two little churches here. And these two little churches came after Sixtus by about 80 years. But if you're going to make a trident, why not have two little churches here? It's a great idea. Here you see the two little churches and this trapezoidal piazza that existed during Sixtus' time with the obelisk up here. And I must tell you a story about this church because it's a great story. I was in Rome when the movie The Exorcist opened. And there was a little cinema right over here. And on the day that The Exorcist opened, there was a terrible storm and a bolt of lightning knocked the cross off the church and it slashed through the marquee. That's a good way to open a movie. In fact, lots of the stuff around Piazza del Popolo gets rebuilt. If we see it here, we see it's an ovalized space. And the ovalization of this space is something again that happened much, much later. Second man principle, subsequent generations fleshing out the implications of the early work. Here we have the Noly Plan of Rome. And it's an interesting diagram. We've looked at it a little bit before, but it really reveals properties of the Baroque, this notion of the interconnection, the notion of the continuity of space, the notion that things are not isolated objects, but that the city is like a stage set. The city is scenographic. The city has to do with the continuity of fabric, revealing new experiences to you. And many of those experiences are not objects but spaces. So here we have the Piazza Navona, great space, or the square in front of the Pantheon, or even the volume of the Pantheon. These are some of the destinations that you get in Sixtus' Plan of Rome. This is the Piazza del Quirinale. And the Quirinale Palace is this pope palace that we have over here, right over here on the map. We see the Quirinale over here. And it's interesting because it almost has like the trace of the fake facade walls, because there are these incredibly thin walls with gardens behind them. The ambition is to find the street edge, give a street edge, and it doesn't matter what happens behind the street edge. Here it goes. And you open it up into the Piazza del Quirinale, great square. And what do we have to help us negotiate our path? We have an obelisk. This is the Spanish steps. And these Spanish steps were not put in until the Set de Cienzo, that is to say the 1700s. But you get the idea that the old Spanish steps used to pull you up along the side here. And they're called the Spanish steps because the Spanish embassy is right near there. Let's say we're taking the really good Spanish steps. We'll talk about these later in detail. You come up here. Oh, I see an obelisk. And from here, you look down and you say, whoa, big obelisk. And off you go to find your next step. Moving on down the line. Here we have the Quatro Fontane, the intersection of the Strada Felice and that's whatever the other one is. Where they intersect and you have a special moment carved out in the city and that special moment is the four fountains where the corners get chamfered and celebrated. If we see the way they all hang together, these early Christian churches form a cross, a kind of new Roma quadrata, a new inscription of the four square of the cross plan into Rome connecting the churches and they come together in the Colosseum. And so the Colosseum itself becomes a point of some interest. For example, this is what it looks like on the outside, but 6th is the fifth head is Pat architect, Domenico Fontana, actually do a project to put inside the Colosseum a church. And this is kind of interesting. You remember the Tempietto plan by Bramante, where Bramante wanted to put a little round church inside a little round courtyard and was never able to build the round courtyard. It's as though through the designs of Domenico Fontana, 6th is the 5th was going to give himself the round courtyard to beat all round courtyards by appropriating the space of the Colosseum. Fabulous. And so that becomes interesting because the idea of an ovalized courtyard already suggested here by this appropriation of the Colosseum is something that the second man or other people begin to operate on. We'll look at this at length when we talk more about Bernini Valedier puts a giant ovalized courtyard at Piazza del Pulpolo, obelisk in the middle, and Bernini puts a giant ovalized courtyard in the Vatican, obelisk in the middle. This is old St. Peter's and we've seen this many times before, but I just want to point out one thing that's going on in old St. Peter's. This thing, this tiny little dot, and this tiny little dot is a obelisk, transported to Rome by the Romans, pillaged from the Egyptians. And this is what it would have looked like in its original situation in the center of the Circus of Nero. And a circus is like a track, could be a race track, could be for chariot races, for example. The Circus of Nero is located right here at the margin of old St. Peter's or overlapping old St. Peter's and here's the obelisk. One thing that Sixtus wants to do is move the obelisk. And some of the obelisks in Rome are not unitary pieces of stone but stacked pieces of stone and they're kind of easy to move because of that. But the obelisk here in the Circus of Nero is one giant shaft of stone. So it's not an easy project. How do you move a giant shaft of stone? One thing we talked about way back when we were discussing Egyptian architecture is how bad stone is in tension. And you might say, well, it's an obelisk. It's not in tension. It's completely in compression. All the forces are being translated straight to the ground. There's no problem here. And that's true as long as the obelisk is standing up straight. But the minute you try to move the obelisk, you have to incline it on an angle. And then it begins to act like a beam and it can snap under its own weight. This is a big problem. Transporting the obelisk from its original location at the side of St. Peter's to a new desired location in front of St. Peter's proves to be quite the task. Sixth is the fifth has this architect, Dominica Fontana. And the Fontanas, by the way, are another one of these prodigious architecture families, just like the family of the Sangalos, who we've talked about before. Here we see the obelisk. It did, in fact, eventually get erected. But these are some of the devices that Dominico Fontana made to transport and to erect the obelisk. This is the transportation of the obelisk in this tower. They've got the whole thing kind of moved in. And here you see people pulling with ropes, trying to move this thing from one place to the other. And, you know, you don't have good materials. The ropes you have are, you know, vegetable ropes, fibers twine together. The kind of friction you get pulling on this massive lump of stone can make a lot of friction heat up the rope fibers and you risk fire. These are devices to actually lift up the obelisk into its vertical position. These are all cranks. You have all these people cranking the wheels simultaneously. This was such a scary operation that nobody was allowed to talk because you knew that if anybody was distracted and not listening to the boss of the job, if one of these wheels had more tension or less tension than the other, the whole project could fail. Sixth is the fifth set. Anybody who talks gets excommunicated. Pay attention for heaven's sakes. I wish I could do that. That would be such a good way to enforce obedience. However, when they're doing this, the ropes begin to smoke. The story, as told by the contemporary sources, says one guy sees smoke coming up from the ropes and he needs to do something. He's afraid he'll be excommunicated. But he eventually shouts, throw water on the ropes. Then somebody threw water on the ropes and they got the obelisk up and the guy was not excommunicated. But it would have been incredibly unlucky to have this thing break. It would have been a bad omen. It would have suggested that all of these ambitions for the new church to re-establish itself after the sack of robe and to regain power would be doomed. The fact that the obelisk was erected was considered to be a lucky sign and off they went. Kind of amazing scaffold. And where they erected it was almost in the right place. As you can see from this, it's almost exactly where you want it to be, but not quite. A great annoyance and a great inconvenience for 6th as the 5th was that when he assumed the office of Pope, St. Peter's, the new St. Peter's initiated by Julius, was still under construction. And in fact, the situation was dire since Michelangelo had died in 1564 and very little work had been done since that point. This is an image of the state of St. Peter's at the time that Sixtus was coronated. We see the pageantry of Sixtus's coronation with all this grandeur and marching ponies and so forth, but no dome. Rather disappointing. And this little ragtag collection of facades that had made the gateway to the early Christian courtyard, still in place. And quite a lot of the early Christian church, still in place. Because it's a problem. What do you do? Inside the Church of Old St. Peter's, you have the tombs of a thousand years worth of cardinals and bishops and saints and holy people. It's not an easy task simply to demolish it and bring in the big shovels to get the new building going up. At 1585, when Sixtus the 5th takes office, there is no dome. It's one of these miserable experiences that the Italians confront from time to time. Like Florence with no dome on the cathedral there. The Vatican has no dome. And it is Sixtus the 5th's desire to make Rome a show play. So he's got to get a dome up. He does amazing things. He has people working night and day. Hard to do if it's an age before you have electricity. He has 800 people working on the job of building the St. Peter's dome. He's the pope. Money is no object. This is another image, an earlier image from 1540 showing you St. Peter's under construction. Kind of crazy looking thing. A bit of St. Peter's here. Allegorical figures examining plans, the pope pointing at the plans, and a river god who conveniently has a towel on his lap lounging around. Here we see the facade of the old St. Peter's hunkering down inside some of the arches put up according to Bramante's design. And Bramante's design unfortunately was not one that could be executed. The structure was insufficient. And also Bramante had this idea that he would build a dome somewhat like the dome of the Pantheon. And given his plan that's insane. You simply cannot support a compression dome on piers. Particularly not piers this delicate. By the time Sixtus came into office the St. Peter's that was going up was Michelangelo St. Peter's. Just a couple of differences between Michelangelo St. Peter's and Bramante St. Peter's. I think you can see here quite easily. The dome envisaged by Bramante is this series of stacked rings with a lantern on top instead of an oculus. And the dome envisaged by Michelangelo is much closer to the Florentine model by Brunelleschi. A ribbed dome more ovoid in shape than round which has the advantage of translating the loads more directly to the ground. So Michelangelo is putting on his thinking cap and he's figuring out ways to really make possible this perforation at the base of the drum to bring light in. Using ribs, using the geometry of the dome and also using a system of chains that were to go along on the inside and further work in tension to counteract the lateral thrust. This drawing shows you a debate about what the true geometry of the dome would have been. There is a wooden model which we'll see in a moment that was constructed of the dome that had this gentler rounder slope. The actual execution of the dome pulls it up higher. And there is some debate as to whether the initiative to make the dome more vertical was from Michelangelo or from his successor, Giacopo della Porta. Michelangelo's dome, fabulous, gutsy big thing hoisted up on a drum looking great. By the way, compared to the Brumante model, the structure has increased significantly. The structure here is about 59 feet across in the widest direction. Giant. And this is what it was to look like. Quite spectacular. Michelangelo died before the completion of the dome had been executed. And we have a few documents that are used to try to understand what he was after. This is a drawing by a man called Etienne Duperec. And it was drawn in only 1569, just a few years after Michelangelo's death. And already here we can begin to see some of the structural innovations that Michelangelo put into place, namely this double dome system. Another thing he probably learned by looking at Brunelleschi's dome in Florence. This document from Banister Fletcher's Parative History of Architecture shows you a series of interventions that were put in after Michelangelo's initial construction with the chains to stave off subsequent cracking. So even Michelangelo can make mistakes. Or was it Giacopo della Porta? This is a spectacular thing. And just think about this. I don't know if any of you in studio are making models at one to sixteenth. Probably models of some little thing at one to sixteenth, one to thirty second. Who knows what? This is the wooden dome that Michelangelo made to test his project for St. Peter's. And this is a dome at one to fifteenth. It is a giant thing. And it is a giant hinged thing that can crack open to show you the interior of it. Quite an astonishing thing that you could actually put a pope inside this so the pope could look around and understand what the idea of the architecture was. You could refine the detail with incredible specificity when you had models like this. And Michelangelo wasn't the only person to make a colossal model like this one. But every project for St. Peter's, the Sangallo project, the Peruzzi project, all had large giant scale wooden models. Now they are all held at the Fabrica of St. Peter's. There was an exhibit maybe about fifteen years ago in Venice that displayed these amazing models. And I had a chance to see it. And it was spectacular. The exhibition was so amazing that my colleague on this Study Abroad program where we were taking students around decided to go write a dissertation about models. Mr. Mark Morris now at Cornell University. Let's consider the project of St. Peter's at the dawn of the Seicento, the 1600s. This is still what you have. You still have poor old St. Peter's with stuff being built around it. And you can begin to see here ghosted in the footprint of what Michelangelo's church would have been. And there are a couple of problems with Michelangelo's church by the time you get to 1600. One, it's not a bit longitudinal. And two, it doesn't quite cover all the holy ground that had been made sacred by the old St. Peter's. So there are two challenges. And a number of popes were very vigilant in making sure that the great divine Michelangelo's plan got executed perfectly. For example, Pope Pius V personally engaged Vignola and Jacopo della Porta, Michelangelo's two closest allies, to make sure that not a stone got changed from Michelangelo's plan. However, that was immediately following Michelangelo's death. And by the time we get to 1606, Pope Paul V, the Borghese Pope, decides that work has to be changed and a nave has to be added, both to respect the desire for longitudinal churches that the counter-reformation insisted upon and to cover up all these tombs and all this holy ground, and not to let it be made profane by being cast outside the walls of the church. Carlo Maderno is given the task. And Carlo Maderno was the nephew of Domenico Fontana. And Fontana, of course, is the architect that VI is the fifth used for all of his projects, projects like the streets cut through Rome to organize the city or the rebuilding of aqueducts and so forth. Fontana is the uncle of Maderno, and as these great architectural families work, he brings in the boy. He brings in Maderno, and Maderno begins to execute this work. And work goes quite quickly. Work initiates in 1607 and by 1615 you have a completed church. You have a completed elongation of the nave. The idea that Maderno had would have been you have a nave and you have an expanded dome, so you simultaneously get the reading of Great Vault of Heaven represented by the dome and space for the congregation. And a project for a façade as well. This highly pixelated drawing shows you something of what Maderno was thinking about in designing the façade. This is highly idealized. He's showing you a relationship of the dome to the body of the church and two little towers flanking it. There are a couple of problems with the way this drawing is executed. One, the dome is way back here. The façade is way up here. There's no way anybody would be able to see the dome from within the purview of the space immediately in front of Saint Peter's. And two, the towers were not completely executed before Maderno's death. At the time of Maderno's death he had two guys working for him. Well, he had a number of people. He had a huge workshop. Let me say 700 people were working on the completion of the nave. It was a high priority project just like the completion of the dome of Saint Peter's was a high priority project for Sixth as the Fifth. But two particularly trustworthy lieutenants. One, of course, was his nephew. Why wouldn't you hire your nephew? Francesco Boromini. And the other was this sculptor kid who was very flashy. Gian Lorenzo Bernini. At the death of Maderno, all the big projects, all the papal projects, all the big church projects, all the high-placed family projects go over to Bernini. And Boromini is left to be Bernini's helper, which is particularly galling because Bernini is a sculptor. He understands quite a lot about stone. He understands quite a lot about the luminosity and texture of material. But he does not understand how static forces move through a complex architectural system. So if any of you out there are bad at structures, you can feel very happy that you're in good company with Bernini. Because when he tried to build the towers, the whole facade came tumbling down or began to come tumbling down. And work was stopped. Could be that simply here the foundations weren't solid enough, but an architect with more knowledge of building might have made sure that the foundations were fortified before trying to put extra weight on the system. They stopped the towers. And that's why when you look at St. Peter's, you would have to say the proportions are kind of funny. I don't know if you would say that, but I would say that. I would say the proportions are kind of funny. It was meant to have towers here that would give you a more ideal rectangle and a more ideal relationship of height to width. Right now, it really looks long and sprawling. In fact, if you superimpose a little geometry on top of this thing, and this is just a golden rectangle downloaded from the internet, you see that the rectangle desired by Moderna to be flanked by these towers would in fact have been a golden rectangle, a very agreeable geometry. And instead it becomes something excessive. What's Moderna's strategy? This is what it looks like. It looks okay. In fact, you have to say there's something kind of interesting going on with a columnation and with the piling up of material as you move toward the center. Plaster. Layered plasters. Engaged column layered on a plaster. Plaster engaged column and three-quarters engaged column layered on a plaster. Freestanding column, freestanding column. And not only does the material density of this become thicker and more plastic, but the rhythm has this kind of strange compression toward the end of this central temple figure and expansion toward the middle. You think about orthographic projection, and by orthographic projection I mean the drawing of elevations. This becomes a fairly interesting figure in that the compression and expansion of columns here on a surface begin to reprise more or less the kind of rhythm you would get in an elevational drawing of a round thing. And in this case it's Bramante's drawing of the tempietto, an opportunity he had to actually execute around temple. So that's kind of interesting. Poor little dome. Can't see the dome. But maybe you can begin to show the volume through this act of orthographic projection. And to prove it to you, I've taken Bramante's drawing and I've just stuck it over here, and you begin to see something that looks a lot like the rhythm of the columns that we have there. The second challenge, of course, is this is so long, we're too close. Help us. Help us get a view of it. And a strategy is put into play when Bernini gets a second commission at the site of St. Peter's. And that is the commission to design a courtyard, the cortile of St. Peter's, in front of the church. Programmatically this is a good thing. Old St. Peter's had a courtyard. The courtyard was necessary for various rites and rituals. There might be blessings. There might be special holy days when the pope comes outside and greets the people. So you need a courtyard. So Bernini has this ingenious strategy for putting the courtyard in place. And that has to do with making the center not immediately adjacent to the space of the church, but using the location of the obelisk and beginning to create an ovalized space in the adjacency of the obelisk, far enough away to begin to get a glimpse of the dome. The space that he created is also fairly interesting because it's not singular, but it's actually triple. There is this trapezoidal cone of space, let's say, that shoots through an oval. From the oval, the trapezoid begins to bracket away the edges of the building. In fact, the trapezoid clips in so that it becomes an edge at the point that the towers of Maderno's original façade project would have become the edge. Here's the problem. From this photograph, I get an excellent view of the dome of St. Peter's because this photograph is taken from a helicopter. But if I were standing right in front of the building, I would have a hard time seeing the dome. This is as far back as you can get and still look at the façade of St. Peter's. And it's just like this little beanie hat sitting on top, this masterful drum, this great plasticity of columns playing in this syncopated double rhythm. Forget it. You need a helicopter or you need to be way across Rome looking at the thing. It wasn't until Mussolini cut a road through Rome that St. Peter's was actually connected to the Sistine diagram of these straight boulevards. So thank God Mussolini took over and was able to cut some roads in there because spatially I think it's pretty good. Of course he was a terrible dictator, but when architecture can be had, we put up with things.