 Good morning. We talked about Alberti. We talked about Alberti's treatise on architecture, the ten books on architecture. And one thing that Alberti emphasized in his treatise is the idea that church plans should in fact try to attain the ideal geometries to the best extent possible. For example, the whole idea of the circle is emphasized by Alberti as the ideal form for a church plan. And he looks at antiquity and he says, look at the ancients. The ancients are the greatest authority that we have. And we have, in the work of the ancients, buildings like the Pantheon, circular. And then they begin to look at early Christian buildings, like martyria. And they really can't tell the difference. These look pretty Roman to them. So they say, Santa Costanza, circular, Santo Stefano Rotondo, circular, every little martyrium anywhere, circular. And then they say, look at nature. There are three great authorities to which Alberti looks. Nature, antiprecident, and geometry. And all of these things authorize the circle. You look around nature and everything is circular. The trunks of trees are circular, the moon is circular, everything is circular. And certainly geometry, and geometry codified through the philosophy of the Platonists and the Neoplatonists, tells us that the circle is not only an ideal, clear geometrical form, but it's also representative of the heavens. So if you want to make a church and you make it circular, you're already building a microcosm of the heavens. What does microcosm mean? Anybody remember? Corey, is your hand up? A small universe, right. And so is it really a small universe that he's making? Like a tiny little planetarium? Yeah, a small version of the cosmos, something that exemplifies the principles of the cosmos and makes it small enough to exist here on Earth and be contemplated. So if you walk into a centralized church plan, you have the opportunity to reflect on the ideality of heaven. And one of the reasons that the architects are so interested in articulating and clarifying the relationship of parts to the whole is that this makes it easier to contemplate the divine order of heaven. Plus, we also know through Vitruvius that the circle does not simply exist apart from man, but is part of man, produced by man, containing man, and these are the Vitruvian men that we have here. These are just a few sketches from Leonardo, and his notebooks are just full of sketches like this. And what he's doing is just playing out the possibility of what can a circle get you? How can a circle become a church? And he's just really doing variations on the theme of if you have one circle in the center, how can you expand upon that? You might say, well, why does Leonardo want to even expand on it? Isn't the circle perfect? Didn't Alberti tell us that the circle is perfect? And it's kind of true from a conceptual point of view that the circle is perfect. But from a practical point of view, the circle stinks. And the circle stinks because you cannot very well celebrate Christian liturgy inside of a circular plan, or at least you can't celebrate the liturgy of the Western Church because the Western Church involved procession. The Western Church liked to be axial. Typologically, the Western Church was connected to the idea of the basilica. And if you look at the plan, and this is not a standard plan, this is, of course, Francesco di Giorgio's anthropomorphic rendering of a longitudinal church, but it gives us the basic idea that there's a lot of hierarchy built into a longitudinal church plan. A hierarchy, for example, that this part seems extraordinary and this part seems ordinary. So if you had to say, where does the most important part of the church go? The most sacred thing in the church, where would you put it? In the ordinary part or the extraordinary part? You can all say it at once. Thank you very much. This is very useful. It's extraordinary. Of course, that's how architecture works. You make difference within a field of uniformity and that difference calls out specialness. So here in a longitudinal church plan, we have this highly elaborated eastern end of the church. And here there would be the altar. Here there would be the space for the clergy. Sectionally, there would probably be a really fabulous dome at the crossing. And the congregation would be arranged here in the nave, the ordinary part. But when you get to these centralized church plans, what do you do? Where do you even enter? Where's the door? And it's not that just some dope was drawing these sketches because it's Leonardo for heaven's sakes. Nobody was smarter than Leonardo. No door. Big mistake. Aren't these things fabulous? How he begins to look at this? Okay, over here he says circle. At the perimeter, I can make more circles. And here he says four square with a circle. At the perimeter, I can make more four squares with circles. And here he just goes insane, right? He keeps making more and more denser and denser recursions of the geometry. Not that it solves any problems, but Leonardo was just having fun with the system that he's put into operation. But you see that the centralized plan has serious flaws in terms of accommodating Christian liturgy. No door or no good place for a door. No good place for the altar. No good place for the congregation. No room for the procession. And there are also these ancillary spaces that you would need in the Western liturgy, like a place to put the sacrament, the sacristy, a place to put the robes of the clergy, the vestry. If you have a perfect circle, there's no place for that. And so it's not unreasonable that Leonardo would play around with ways of taking the circle and embroidering the circle in such a way that more things can be accommodated. None of these ever got built. These are just in the sketchbooks of Leonardo, which are pretty fabulous. And very few of these ideal centralized church plans ever did get built, in spite of the fact that they were highly authorized by not only Leonardo, but every person who tackled the task of thinking about architectural theory critically at the time. This is the little one that got built in the town of Prato, just to the north of Florence. Santa Maria della Carcere. Remember, S.M. means Santa Maria. And it's used so frequently in Italian that the Italians no longer bother to say Santa Maria. They just say S.M. della Carcere means at the prisons. And so that's a great location. So this is a little church at the edge of town, really built into the city wall or built at the city wall near a place that a prison had been located. And it's usually the case when you find these ideal centralized churches that get realized. They're not getting built in the middle of town. They're getting built at the periphery. And that's the case here, certainly. Giuliano da Sandallo. The architect of this church is a member of an extensive family of architects. You'll see the name Sandallo. Giuliano the younger, Giuliano the elder. Antonio the younger, Antonio the elder. And that just is a glimpse into the way that the trade of architecture or the trade of masonry was communicated in those days. It would be really father to son, grandfather to grandson, uncle to nephew. And so you had these big architecture clans, and the Sandallos were among the biggest. In any case, he's a Florentine, and this is in Tuscany. And when you look at the language of this thing, you can begin to say, wow, this looks a lot like Tuscan vernacular that we've seen. It looks a lot like the polychromatic patterned, panelized marble that we saw in old Tuscan churches, like say the Romanesque church San Minato al Monte, but also in stuff like Alberti's Santa Maria Novella. This is maybe a bit misleading because it's not completed. This is unfaced. It's only faced in part. So if you think about what the plan gave us, it was this kind of ideal notion of the center. And it's the kind of geometry and really the kind of articulation that you might associate with early Quattrocento, people like Brunelleschi, this obsession with the square module. Here's a square. Here's half a square. So we have this one to two organization helping us with the proportions in plan and also in section, this one to two is going on here. I've made a little dancing Vitruvian man and stacked them up here to show you that the square organizes the section as well as the plan, which is always going to be the case. And if you look at the interior articulation of Santa Maria delle Carcere, it looks very much like Brunelleschi could have done it. It's clear that Sangallo at this point is looking at Brunelleschi and just appropriating Brunelleschi's discoveries. I would say there's not much new going on here. It's a beautiful thing because it's so perfect. It's more of a perfect ideal centralized church plan than Brunelleschi was ever allowed to execute. Tell me what kind of Brunelleschi in language you guys see here. Anybody see anything in here that looks sort of Brunelleschi in? And Brunelleschi in means as the Brunelleschi might have done it. Jacqueline, was your hand up or was your head itching? You always must shampoo before class or you will get nailed. Good. The bands across the arches, this gray, warmish gray Pietro Serena banding around the arches is right out of the playbook of Brunelleschi. We think about things like say the Pazzi Chapel. We would have seen that there. What else? The pilaster is exactly right. It's a flat language. It's not the kind of plasticity we would associate with Roman or even Albertian articulation, but it's kind of all about the wall. But an articulated wall and he uses pilasters to articulate the wall. Good. Can you be more specific about the pilasters or would somebody like to jump in and say exactly what are the pilasters doing that recalls Brunelleschi? Yeah? Yes, wrapping around the corner. There's this kind of moment of awkwardness or moment of struggle that we saw in the Brunelleschi where he's trying to balance the visual weight of the pilasters with the role of the pilasters to articulate the surface. And these look pretty good, right? Kind of same, same, same. That's what you want to see. But in fact, there's this weird wrapping of like one quarter going to one wall and three quarters going to the other wall. And that's straight out of Brunelleschi. And even some of this decorative stuff that we see here, these little medallions by the De La Robbia family, these bluish background white figure glazed ceramic medallions are by another group of Florentine architects and Brunelleschi uses them a lot and Sangallo is using them here too. Fabulous. And here maybe this elevation shows you a little bit better how this Florentine vernacular is being used to try to get some sense of classicism. He's trying to get a classical facade. He's trying to do it within this very flat, very panelized polychromatic marble convention that we see in Tuscan. And his technique is stacky, stacky, temple on the top. Couldn't be a temple all the way to the bottom because the proportions of the temple would have been inconsistent with what Sangallo would have wanted. The situation in the centralized church plans gets interesting with Bramante, I think. Because I think something by the La Corte is a beautiful thing, but it's not really an interesting thing. It just does what you think it should do. And so it's worth knowing about because it's a good example of a quadrocentro-centralized church plan, but it's not very provocative. But Bramante adds something to the whole discourse of the centralized church plan. And I think that's because Bramante was really trained as a painter. Last time we mentioned that when he was a young boy he was brought into the painting workshop at the Ducal Palace in Urbino. And there, who knows who he talked to, could easily have been Piero della Francesca, really one of the greatest masters of perspective anywhere. Certainly the false perspectives, the tromploi perspectives of the studiola were being done while Bramante was there. He very well may have contributed to the layout of the perspective design. So when Bramante starts dealing with this question of the centralized church plan, a whole new issue comes into play. And that is the issue of pictorial vision being projected onto architectural space. And that's kind of the opposite, right? You think about perspective. You think about perspective as having as its task the representation of the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. That's the conventional way that it works. That's certainly the way that it's working here in things like the Urbino panels, where we see something like a centralized building in something like a rectilinear square. And it's all done two-dimensionally and it's all done with mathematical perspective. But in the hands of an architect, it can actually work in the opposite direction. Certain features that were conquered, say, in the space of painters can be borrowed back again. And we saw when we looked at the town of Pienza, the little town of Pienza by Bernardo Rosalino, this odd device that he uses to organize the four buildings that he places in this town. And we noticed that the device was not an idealized square, but rather a trapezoid. And at one level that's baffling, given the love of ideal geometry on the part of the architects here, but it's not baffling if you begin to think about pictorial space and the idea that what happens in a painting could also begin to enforce stronger views of things in the real world. So if you think about a vantage point and you think about a cone of vision, the trapezoid in Pienza becomes a really powerful technique for making more immediate the presentation of facade and also collapsing the distant background with the immediate foreground in a way that is enforced by the canted edges of the buildings. It's almost as though in Pienza this cone of vision imagined by Alberti in this perspectival construction actually gets built. And so with his training as a painter it would be impossible for Bramante not to be thinking this way all the time. Young Bramante has the opportunity to build a church after he goes to Milan and starts studying painting. And Milan at that time was an interesting place. Some of his contemporaries in Milan in the late Quattrocento would have been Leonardo da Vinci and Cesareano to name two people whom we've already discussed. And of course Milan is a city and Milan is full of stuff. So the young Bramante does not have the opportunity to build an ideal object in an ideal landscape. There is a street right over here. And in fact this is a retrofit. Nobody gets a new commission. The original building is a linear church like this. And over here we have a martyrium of San Satiro. San Satiro gets to be a saint because he was the best friend of Saint Ambrose. And Saint Ambrose was a very pious and important man. Doesn't seem like San Satiro did anything particularly pious. And if your name is San Satiro, like satire, those are like the drunken goat boys that Bacchus hung out with. I imagine he was very lucky to become a saint. I can't imagine he did any good works at all. But look at what a weird set of circumstances that Bramante has to work with here. You have to somehow deal with a martyrium of San Satiro which inclines in this direction. It's got its own structure that is not on the line of the old church of Santa Maria. By the way, the SM here means Santa Maria. And it happens so often when you talk about Italian churches that not even the Italians write Santa Maria anymore. Just SM. His task is to make it somehow modern. Make it bigger. Accommodate other pieces of program like a sacristy. Accommodate a nave. Because in its original condition there is this early Christian martyrium and there is this Hall Church which is really not very accommodating and really not very hierarchical either. If you'll notice it's got kind of a center and an altar and it's hard to know how this thing would really organize anything other than veneration of the martyr. So if you want to change it into a parochial church where you can actually have services and processions and a congregation, it becomes complicated. A little martyrium seen from the exterior. Fabulous. Bramante has the task of really extending only in one direction. This is the direction of the nave. And his challenge is to somehow meet the aspirations of architects in the late Quattrocento. That is to say to build something ideal to make a microcosm. And his method of doing that is this clever use of techniques of the painter, the perspectival tricks. He takes this end wall and he really carves it and makes it dense. Bramante creates a trompe l'oeil. He creates a fake perspective. He builds this edge, the edge that abuts the street in a thickened fashion so that in the space of maybe about, I don't know, let's say two feet he layers back things. You can kind of see the carving over here. So that standing here at your ideal vantage point in the nave it looks as though you're in a centralized church. He's created the illusion of a centralized church out of something that's in no way centralized. In the space of that end wall there's this kind of intense layering that makes you get this perspectival sense that the space is going back. That it is in fact a cruciform church. It is one of these variations on the theme of ideal centralized church that Alberti authorizes. And it seems as though without the sensibility of a painter, Armante wouldn't have been able to do this. This is really a painter's kit of tricks being deployed to serve architectural ends and operating really in the opposite way that we've seen it happening before. These are just some views of what you would see standing from an ideal vantage point. Everything lines up. Everything recedes. And really if you have kind of bad vision or if you forget to take your sunglasses off you think, yeah, this is continuing. But if you get slightly off kilter, if you're slightly askew in the system you can see how bizarre it is. How there's this hyperminiaturization of elements as they recede into this shallow niche of space. If you get close to it you can see that this is crazy geometry because things are compressed, things are shrinking, columns are baby sized. But if you stand back in the ideal vantage point the thing hangs together in a convincing way. Armante did a number of churches in Milan including the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and these churches are really interesting not only because of the painter tricks that he deploys but also because of these domes that he's solving. Back here in Santa Maria Presso San Satiro we spend a lot of time talking about the perspective trick but there's also this kind of amazing dome that's being placed over the central space. And in Santa Maria delle Grazie his challenge here is to add a really massive dome. This is a Gothic church that is in given condition. It's got these pointed arches marching along the nave and he takes the space of the nave and the space of the aisles and tries to build a dome over that space and that's really an ambitious proposal. It's kind of the project that Brunelleschi had in the Duomo in Florence where Arnaufo had not simply chosen to put a dome over the nave but over this kind of amplified space. The technique that is used is really a vernacular Lombard technique. This area around Milan is called Lombardy. You can see an early example of it in this early Christian church called San Lorenzo where a drum, this vast drum, rises up and on top of the drum you put a dome and it's really quite different from all the churches we've been seeing so far. We've seen, say, the Pantheon which is immediate stacking of these rings on top of a circular support or we've seen the Duomo, the cathedral in Florence where ribs come down to a system akin to pendentives and here there's a strategy to get more verticality out of the system to really pump it up by making this giant drum and the language is not very classicized. This is kind of early. This is Quattrocento. So just as we saw in the Alberti churches, a kind of negotiation between Tuscan vernacular, the polychromatic marble in Sant'Arenovella and an impulse to classicize so too in these Milan churches by Bramante there's a negotiation between Lombard vernacular, particularly Lombard Brick vernacular and a classicizing impulse. So we get this kind of great polychromy but it gives us the orders in a way that is trying to be correct that you might say not correct enough for you. But if Bramante is interested in this notion of agreement of interior and exterior by adhering to the materiality of Lombard vernacular in a sense he's making an agreement, plus it's possible that Bramante did not know how to build a dome and he had to rely on the masons and so the masons would say, yeah, you want a dome? We can build you a dome. Donato, no problem. We build you one right now. And so this is like other domes in Lombardy but quite extraordinary in its scale and quite extraordinary in its ambition. And the interior is also quite extraordinary. It's this pattern making, these little rondelles, these little round figures that decorate the whole system and make it seem not so classical because the surface is so fragmented through pattern that it almost seems to break down the massiveness of it. There's a painting in this monastic complex in the refectory. The refectory is the dining hall of the monks and it's a famous painting. I'm sure you all know this. This is The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. It's a great painting and it shows you, A, how smart Leonardo was and B, how dumb Leonardo was and the B part has to do with the fact that Leonardo was a tinkerer. Leonardo did not take anything as a given. So there were certain techniques in creating a painting on a wall called fresco where you have this wet field of plaster and into the wet plaster you put pigment and the pigment soaks into the wet plaster and it stays there forever. Now Leonardo thought, well, what that does is dull down the colors because every time you do a fresco there's a kind of desaturation of the colors, the whiteness of the plaster mixes with the pigment. Everything gets a little bit kind of washed out. Leonardo's trying to figure out ways to get denser, brighter colors and so he's pretty much like boiling a pig, taking the pig fat, throwing in some olive oil, you know, taking mud off his shoe. He's just making a new emulsion to try to make the colors more saturated and really even during Leonardo's lifetime the stuff began to fall off, the pigment began to fall off the painting. So if you happen to go to Milan and stand in line for seven hours to see this, you'll find just little flakes of paint, many of which have been put there by, say, 18th century restorers because not only was this painting doomed from the get-go but it also was bombed during the war so that all the walls of the chapel, of the refectory fell except for the wall with the last supper. But it took a beating there, too. So it's a little bit sad. There's another big fresco by Leonardo called the Battle of Angelara and it's a great equestrian battle scene, really fabulous. We know it from sketches done by his contemporaries and there Leonardo was still tinkering with the material and in tinkering with the material it was said to have been bubbling off the surface and burning his fingers as he was putting it there. So another bad idea. In certain instances, convention is a good idea but we see enough of the last supper to understand what Leonardo was doing and I'm just showing you this diagram to show you it's composed of the other Renaissance pictures that we've seen. We've got this technique of lining everybody's heads up and using that line to begin to divide the painting in half. You know, the half that occupies the people and the everyday life of the world and the half of architecture or the half of kind of pure evacuation of human presence, let's say presence of spirit and the whole vertical and horizontal are organized around the head of the Christ and the perspective, likewise, is organized around the head of the Christ and if you see this triangular shape of the Christ's arms reaching out and blessing people it is also giving you a sense of how the perspective continues in a two-dimensional sense to organize the painting. So fabulously, Leonardo, too bad about the bad choice of pigment. This is another example of one of those idealized, centralized churches that succeeded in getting built, Sant'Ambria della Consolazione in Tauri. It's, as you can see, out in the middle of nowhere, built on the outskirts of town and not forced to deal with the kinds of pressures that Sant'Ambria presso San Satiro in Milan had to deal with and so it really, I would say, unlike Sant'Ambria della Cacere in Prato by Sangallo, is ideal and interesting. It's more ambitious. It takes for liberties in trying to invent an architecture that's appropriate to this. In fact, you look at this and it's a kind of fusion of ideal geometries. There's a cube. There's a drum, which seems like a kind of lumbard idea. Nice hemicyclical domes clipping on. It's anonymous. Nobody knows who built it, but many people think it might have been Bramante. And if you look at the use of the orders here, this kind of flattened, decorative pattern-making, it seems really sympathetic to the paintings that Bramante was doing. So this is the dream. The dream is the centralized church. The dream is to follow as closely as possible Alberti's directive to make the church round. And if you can't make it round, let it somehow issue forth from the idea of a circle. In the case of Sant'Ambria della Concellazione, it does that quite well. We have the circle as the center and the tower, and we have these circular lobes octagonal lobes on three edges and a circular lobe on one edge. And that's odd. Why do you think that there's one lobe of this Greek cross-plan that's different than the others? Any ideas? Yes. Absolutely right, to formalize where the apps would be. You know, you want this thing to be centralized, but you also want to make the hierarchies clear. And so we know that the circle is a more perfect form than the octagon in Platonic thinking, and so the altar would go over here. And that also brings forward a big problem with these centralized plans, and that is, is that really the best place to put the altar? You know, we saw Byzantine plans that were centralized, but Byzantine ritual operated quite differently than the congregational structure of the Western church, where people, at least in the early days, were at the margin of that. In a congregational church, where do you put the congregation and where do you put the priests? Here it's kind of solved by saying, eh, we'll put it over there. But it's still funny. It's a funny disposition of forms, because where do other things that you need to have in a church get located? Things like the vestry, where the robes of the priests are kept, or things like the sacristy, or the Christian church. It's good at being really beautiful, and it's good at following Alberti's directives of what a church should be. This whole question of Kon Kinkitas, the agreement of parts to the whole, the agreement of interior and exterior, we have not seen anybody do that very well so far, because most churches that we've looked at have been retrofits. They've been renovations of Gothic foundations or Gothic interiors, but this is a new build. And this is a new build at a very particular location, and that is on the outskirts of town. So it doesn't have to deal with the complexities of an urban fabric. It can allow its envelope to unfold in an ideal way. And so look, we get a direct expression of the interior space of the church on the exterior of the church. And one reason it doesn't have to solve the program very well is that it's not a parochial church. It is a shrine more than a parochial church. So different kinds of things can be used to create it. This thing also more or less works because it's huge. And if you make any plan... this is a Mies van der Rohe statement. When people are saying, Mies, how do you make your buildings work so perfectly? And he says, if you make them big enough, they will work really well. And that's the technique here. It's giant. Santa Maria della Cartia is pretty small, and it kind of has a hard time because Santa Maria della Cartia means St. Mary of the Consolation. And if you prefer to speak English, you can call it that. Notice the articulation. It's this really kind of flat, panelized articulation. But it's making a big effort, nonetheless, to call out bays. Not to simply give you wall, but to call out bays so that your eye can understand how all these different proportions go together. And it's a flattened architectural language in Bramante's paintings. I always like early stuff because people are kind of struggling to figure out how to do it. And if you look at, for example, the capitals of the palasters on the outside, they're a little bit sweet and crazy. Like, this is my favorite. It's the little winged cow column capital, a plaster capital. This is not really classical, right? You couldn't go to Rome and find a little winged cow capital. But these are very similar to the kind of cows that would have been grazing in the meadow. It's a way of taking the language of classical antiquity and particularizing it. Similarly, there are these other kind of interesting moments, like screaming man. And also these liberties that are being taken by the architect, maybe Bramante, maybe we don't know, that fold it and begin to allow transformation of the normal condition into something abnormal or special. The most ideal of all the ideal centralized churches from that period is something called the Tempietto. And the Tempietto is really the Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio. Because San Pietro in Montorio is the mother church. It's the Spanish church upon the hill, upon the geniculum. And in a courtyard, this is San Pietro in Montorio, in a courtyard, a little chapel or a little temple is being built. And its purpose is to commemorate the place where Saint Peter was crucified. Saint Peter was famously crucified upside down. So at this point, the upside down cross that held Saint Peter was planted in the ground. The task of the Tempietto is a fairly modest task. That is to say it has to mark a point. All of the complex actions of where do you put the altar, where do you put the congregation, where do you put the vestry, where do you put the priest, not so important. It has to mark a point. The plan of the church is smaller than this room. It's tiny. And it does an incredibly good job of marking its point. What we see here is an ideal plan for the positioning of the Tempietto in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio. As proposed by Bermontae. But it didn't actually get built that way, unfortunately. As you can see from here, it's not that ideal square courtyard. It's not the ideal wrapper of radial space, but rather a kind of rectilinear mush with fairly irregular edges around it. But had it been this, it would have been really great. Because it would have been obeying the dictates about church architecture that Alberti set forth more straightforwardly than anybody else managed to accomplish. It would have been circular. And it would have been circular in this kind of, I don't know, nested figure ground of what it counts to be circular. We have a circular object on a circular platform inside a circular courtyard with a circular ambulatory. Fabulous! And these little carvings in the wall begin to extend the idea of circle and to continue the investigation. Bermontae is being a good archaeologist here, but he's not simply slavishly copying antique models. And when I say he's being a good archaeologist here, I mean he's looking at things like the Temple of the Vesta in Rome. Which isn't supposed to have this little Chinese hat on. But this is just what archaeologists put there to protect the columns. The dome is missing. But this is a reconstruction of what it would have looked like according to Palladio actually, in Palladio's treatise. So you get the idea that there would have been some kind of cella and some kind of ring of columns surrounding this on an elevated platform or stylovate. It would be a classic pholos. And that's kind of what we have here. A classic pholos. Interesting problems happen because it's so small. Because it's so small in a sense the ideality gets compromised because things just keep getting squished and squished and squished. That when you project these columns back into the wall you begin to get niches. But there's not enough room for every inter-columniation to have a niche. So in a regular rhythm it ensues. These are some studies of proportion. And if we put a diagonal in this direction we would find this volume is proportional or the same as this volume and this volume is proportional to this volume. The whole thing is being locked together with this thorough going study of a geometry that is in fact the golden rectangle. So we have a more complex attitude about what geometry can do. It's not simply the adding together of modules in the early Quattrocento but it is this geometric proportioning system. We also see that it is becoming more fully plastic. Not only that it's an object in the round but the columns are free and there's a real kind of sculptural carving of the wall and liberation of the figure in the field. It's fabulous. These are some of the weird details that you get when you go inside of it where it's so small that you have to create this varied rhythm. You see on the exterior this kind of hyper-ideality same, same, same, same and when you go inside there is this kind of oscillation between carved niche that expands and it can contain a little shrine and the tight doubling of the little niche down below. Clever. And this is actually a section of what it would look like because what this is showing is that this is the spot in the crypt down below where it was meant to have been crucified and that's possible because if you look around Rome you'll find this very odd thing and I can't understand it actually see if any of you have a better idea about it but when you look at the ruins the ruins are on a different ground plane than the contemporary city. As the city builds up over time the ground plane is constantly being reconfigured and rebuilt so the ruins tend to be way down and there are a handful of cats that are being fed old spaghetti by ladies who live in Rome. So what I don't understand is why doesn't the world become giant if the ground plane constantly expands why don't we live in a giant world now or does that only happen in cities? Who knows? I don't know. These are some early projects by Bramante all about the centralized church and Bramante gets quite a lot of good press let's say on that and is given a commission to expand than the pope to design a number of projects. Bramante becomes the favorite architect of Pope Julius Dallarovere and Pope Julius is a kind of warrior pope Pope Julius is to the papacy what Federico da Monte Feltro is to little regional Duke that is to say constantly claiming territory constantly engaged in battle constantly defending his position but also a humanist who wants to have the things of a humanist the ideas of a humanist and the lifestyle of the humanist and one thing that he particularly is interested in is the idea discussed in Pliny about country houses about the villa and that one thing that the humanist would do that classical humanist the Roman humanist is walk in a garden in these very specifically designed spaces having learned conversations in a relaxed way and contemplating nature and contemplating refined ideas so the idea of a garden becomes interesting to the pope and the commission for Bramante is to build a garden. Here's the task here's old St. Peter's because that's all we really have at the time this old thing and the project is to take this little villa called the Belvedere which means pretty view and connect it with the papal apartments and you can see the papal apartments are mush they're just organized in a fairly random, accretive way around several courtyards. As Bramante entrenched himself in the court of Julius he becomes, as I said the favorite architect and the scope of his work is expanded to also rebuilding St. Peter's which we'll talk about in a moment. So this is the Bramante plan for St. Peter's and this is the garden this rebuilding of Pliny's dream of a garden for a humanist scholar called the Belvedere so the little Belvedere villa is incorporated at one end and the Vatican palace is incorporated at another end and all of these ragged edge conditions are locked into place by these large exedras it's a word that we use when we talked about the fora the imperial fora in Rome and it just means these large arched spaces that lock the axis together so he's kind of rebuilding this frame to organize the garden and he's trying to tap classical sources of course he would try to tap classical sources because he is a classicist he's a Renaissance guy and so what sources is he looking at for these gardens of Pliny he just has verbal descriptions and that's maybe not enough but he certainly knows what fora look like so this notion of building a wall cutting big exedras in it seems sympathetic with the idea of fora other antiquities like the garden of Fortuna Primagenia which we'll look at in a moment which has this kind of stepping across a landscape what he does to get to the Belvedere which is on high ground and the papal palace which is lower is create this series of stepped terraces and what that does is pretty fabulous if you look at this section over here high up are the papal apartments and across this datum of this walled edge that he builds over here is the large niche that organizes the far end of the Belvedere garden line of sight from the papal apartments directly across to the Nikione which means large niche to the large niche over here it's kind of a painter's technique he's using the positioning of an eye in space to begin to bring things together and to reconfigure things by the way these are just some 18th century reconstructions based on Pliny's description of his villas his villas for relaxing the term is otium and that is this relaxed reflective state of mind that a classical scholar would have had in Roman times that Pliny would have had and these are just some drawings showing you this system of terracing as you move from the papal apartments up to the Belvedere so a lot of themes are introduced in the Belvedere because as we move forward into the Cinquecento which we are already moving into because it's 1504 the idea of the garden becomes more and more interesting as a theme for architects and I think one reason for that is the idea of perspective doesn't simply mathematicize space but it begins to enforce some kind of relationship between the subject and the object the space between the viewer being viewed is activated and that's kind of cool and so you want to have something that's really spatialized so the garden begins to allow you these long vistas these long lines of sight you also have this idea when you build a garden of nature and culture coming into direct confrontation so you have the earth you have the trees you have water all these things that belong to nature it's really hard to make a frame and hold it in and an interesting argument can be set forth in this kind of coming together of nature and culture the kind of negotiation between the two to find out which one comes out on top and in the later Cinquecento nature usually comes out on top I would say in the Belvedere it's still culture coming out on top there's also an idea here of the ground plane that becomes really interesting we mentioned earlier in Rome you find older and older and older things and there is this interest in archeology that we've already identified just in terms of language here's a temple, here's a column but the very manipulation of ground plane is an archeological act ground plane is not neutral and what Belvedere begins to show you is that you can manipulate ground plane not only to orchestrate a strong procession but also to begin to make transformations along that procession to another this is a sad photograph of what the Belvedere looks like now and it's sad because this extra bar of program was thrown in here so you no longer get the long view this is the Nicchione, the big niche down by the old Belvedere Palace and this is the papal apartments and now you get this fairly mundane courtyard and another fairly mundane courtyard you can no longer experience the sectional changes through the garden because right over here where the really interesting stuff happens it gets blocked up with banality tragedy but look at the plan down here because this idea about nature versus culture or what it is to be controlled by architecture and what it is to release yourself into a landscape is almost being set up here by these two more or less equal planes this one totally bounded by its architectural wrapper and this one elevating upwards beginning to have the trees creep over it this one paved and urbane this one a kind of four square paradise garden but one that even begins to dismantle from one center to multiplied centers and so forth here's the antique precedent that Bramante probably would have been looking at the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia way back when we talked about Rome we looked at this and a lot of the themes that we admired in Belvedere that is to say a series of bounded spaces that are organized sectionally with respect to each other in the case of the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia there's a theater on the top but effectively the theater is a large niche so the idea of terminating the axis with a large niche could easily have come to Bramante from that precedent and here's the large niche at the top the big exedra that terminates this whole thing and what do you do in a Belvedere you might say what kind of things can be done and on one hand of course you have the scholars debating philosophical questions but if you get tired of that you can just flood the whole thing and have water battles or you can fill it with horses and do some jousting because popes like to have fun too for having sakes don't deny the popes an opportunity to have fun these are some moments within the scheme that I think are really quite nice we saw the idea being picked up with a large niche the Nikione but it's being picked up in a double sense because on top of the large niche we have the thing that is hemicyclical hemicyclical means half circle-ish kind of like the hemicyclical space on top of the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia so there's lots and lots of attention to classical precedent going on in the case of Bramante but not classical precedent that gets copied but classical precedent that begins to give him pieces that can be recombined and reimagined in completely new ways here's one moment this is from the upper courtyard it's a feature that you see a lot in Cinquecento Gardens that we'll be looking at and what it does is simultaneously insist on the center in this round thing and it's a stairway but also destabilize the center and by that I mean we have all these stairs pouring out walk walk walk walk center and then suddenly we have the stairs carving in like a theme it's a fragile moment it's a fragile moment of being centered you're being split between these two different worlds of up and down concave and convex and the whole game of these gardens is this tension between being in an organized space and the space being about to get get away from you and become quite quite a different thing the real project the greatest project that Bramante or anybody gets to undertake is the project of St. Peter's St. Peter's as you well recall old St. Peter's is the mother church of Christendom it's the Pope's church St. Peter's in Vatican and by the time Julius gets in there it's a mass it is a rickety old thing a timber church really not in good shape not quite falling down but almost falling down quite dangerous this is what it would have looked like in its in its heyday let's say and even then it would have been this rag-tag collection of pieces on the front it would have had a courtyard so that the facade of the church was hidden from the city by the time you get to 1504 by the time you get to be Pope Julius you really want to be happy to promote the image of the church through architecture it's falling down and it's it's not fancy enough so let's build a better one and I find this to be amazing what would happen if the Pope said this church that we've had this St. Peter's it's been around for a long time I would like to have Frank Gary build me one I'm going to tear it down and get Frank Gary to build me one would that fly, would that even be thinkable it's just so amazing to me that something that held meaning for such a long time and held memory in an essential sense that he or walked all these popes all these important saints tear it down get a new one that was perfectly okay for Pope Julius Pope Julius in a painting by Raphael which I think is an amazingly strange painting of the warrior Pope that I described because he does look like a kind of tired old man in this painting doesn't he he looks like he's just about to fall asleep or that the burdens of the conflicts and the resolutions that he's had to deal with have taken a toll on him and this by the way is Raphael in a self-portrait from School of Athens Pope Julius gives himself a task of rebuilding Saint Peter's and this is the plan that Bramante comes up with here's a medallion that was engraved to celebrate the project for Saint Peter's so had Bramante's scheme for Saint Peter's been built it would have looked like this and if you look at the dome it looks kind of like one of those Lombard domes that we've looked at before that is to say a big drum with lots of columns and a dome on top and even a lantern which was a Brunelleschi normal where you instead of having an Oculus you put a little lantern on top of it with a roof to let light in Bramante's plan is pretty great I have to say it's one of my favorite plans it's so incredibly simple and so incredibly complex at the same time that it's simple if you had to describe this plan what would you say how would you describe it sorry simple simple yeah but you got to be more precise I said simple yes good two squares one square is orthogonal the other square is diagonal nice what else yeah it almost looks like a quincox exactly right we see dome dome dome dome dome good what else Greek cross absolutely Greek cross yes lines of symmetry everywhere Greek cross organized in a big sense but then we get this recursion of like little Greek crosses nested in the corner so that you get this kind of snowflakey miniaturization of the dominant figure at a smaller and smaller scale good so it's great and it also adheres to the basic mesian principle that if you make a building big enough it will work programmatically however that doesn't necessarily mean it will work structurally so unfortunately Bramante's proposition for the structure here was not sufficient and it was going to be very difficult to build a dome on here because because the gears were not sufficient nor were they constructed in a way that was sound as Bramante was building St. Peter's elsewhere in the Vatican complex you had another guy who was working on a project that basically for him seemed like busy work he was really mad about it and that was Michelangelo he was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and this was such an embarrassment like painting it's like you know sweeping the floor he would like to do sculpture he would like to do architecture and instead this guy Bramante is doing the architecture and Bramante cannot even make the piers sound enough for the structure of the dome apparently they were faced with heavy stone and filled with rubble so they're thin to start with but they were really structurally unsound because Bramante did not have enough field knowledge of what it is to work with stone to properly judge the construction this is as far as it got under Bramante really and this is kind of a sweet thing we have old St. Peter's still being preserved so that it could still be used as the mother church of the Vatican and these new arches and these new pieces getting set up that ultimately would have to be refigured so we'll talk about that next time