Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/74

 CHAPTER IV

THE DOME OF ST. PETER'S

When in the year 1503 Pope Julius II came to the papal chair, the architect Bramante had recently settled in Rome. Born in Urbino, he had spent his early manhood in the North of Italy, where he had come under the influence of the Florentine architect Alberti at Mantua, and of the early Renaissance masters at Milan and elsewhere. Under these influences he had acquired a style that was peculiar to the North at that time. But since coming to Rome he had begun to form a new manner under the more direct influence of the Roman antique, and he soon developed a style in which the ancient Roman forms were reproduced with stricter conformity to the ancient usage, and with smaller admixture of mediæval features than had before prevailed.

An early work in Rome in which he exhibits this more rigorous classic tendency is the small building known as the Tempietto in the cloister of San Pietro in Montorio. It consists of a circular cella with shallow pilasters, surrounded by a colonnade of the Roman Doric order, and surmounted by a hemispherical dome on a high drum. It is thus in form like a Roman temple of Vesta with its dome raised out of the abutting drum and set upon its top without abutment. A glance at Figures 21 and 22, a part section and part elevation of the temple of Vesta at Tivoli, and an elevation of the Tempietto, respectively, will show how great a change Bramante made in the adjustment of the vault to the supporting drum, while it will show also the essential likeness in other points between the two monuments. In Figure 21 it will be seen that the vault is well abutted by the roof of the portico, and by stepped rings of masonry 44