(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)