MICHELANGELO -- Campidoglio

Speranza






Michelangelo' made important contributions to the directions of building in both the civic and the religious spheres during the 16th century in Rome.

 The two projects under examination are the Campidoglio or the Capitoline Hill and the resumption of work on the new St. Peter's, begun under Bramante and Pope Julius II.



In ancient Rome, the hill above the Forum (known as the Capitoline Hill) had several prominent usages within public life.

It was site of the chief temple of state religion, dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

It was the location of the state archives.

It held various sacred relics, including a bronze statue of the she-wolf who nursed the infants Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome.

During the middle ages, the hill served as the center of political life in the much-reduced city of Rome.

In 1144, a communal palace was constructed for the Senators of Rome (Palazzo Senatorio).

But the focus of the hill, the ancient Forum Romanum, had turned into a cow pasture with some protruding ruins.

Newer medieval buildings faced away from the Forum towards what was left of the shrunken former metropolis.

In the 15th century, the Palazzo dei Conservatori (Palace of the Conservators of Rome) was built into the ruins of the great temple of Jupiter.

Sixtus IV donated some antiquities to the city and from that time on one function of the Capitol was to house a public art museum.

However, there was no comprehensive architectural concept or form to this civic center.

Indeed, there was not even a paved access to it.

In 1536, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V decided to visit Rome and entered the city in grand procession , expecting to be received officially at the communal palace.

The approach was such a muddy mess that the procession had to detour around the hill and go up the back way.

The then reigning pope, Paul III (a member of the Farnese family), decided it was time to correct this ignominious situation.

In 1538, he compelled Michelangelo to move a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius -- at that time thought to be a portrait of the first Christian emperor Constantine -- from the Church of St. John in the Lateran to the Capitol.

The statue is in the centre of the open space in front of the Senators' Palace and faces the normal approach from the city.

It thus becomes a sort of pivot point or nucleus of a new symbolism: the symbol of the wolf is replaced by the symbol of the Roman emperor converted to Christiantiy.

The totemic and barbaric are replaced by the imperial and the Christian.

Michelangelo at the time designed a base for the statue and a new double staircase to the Palazzo Senatorio as improvements to the civic center.

Still, a more suitable architectural setting was necessary and in 1539, Michelangelo was commissioned to design an appropriate environment.

The exact stages of the design process are unknown, but Michelangelo may have been asked to create an "entrance to the city" with a piazza and to restore the existing buildings.

His personal involvement with the project was doubtless spurred on by his being made a citizen of Rome on December 10, 1537, a ceremony enacted on the Capitol.

Whatever he may have been asked to do, he doubtless exceeded the limits of the commission.

The project began with the difficult angular relationship of two existing buildings, the Senators' Palace and the Conservators' Palace as seen in the plan below.



Thriving on constraints, Michelangelo used the position of the Conservators' Palace and its angular relationship to the Senators' Palace as an organizing theme and designed another palace opposite the Conservators' to serve as the Museo Capitolino.




The three buildings were thus arranged on a dynamic


trapezoidal piazza


held together by an oval centered on the statue of Marcus Aurelius.

The axis of symmetry is also the axis of approach up the hill and both the stairs and the piazza open up to the Senators' Palace as the architectural focus.



















The design of the pavement with its radial patterning enlivens the space and makes the experience of entering it from any of several points both dynamic and interesting.







The lower buildngs flanking the piazza are important in their own right. Based on the precedent of city palaces like Bramante's Palazzo Caprino-Raphael, Raphael's Palazzo Vidoni-Cafarelli, Sansovino's Library of San Marco in Venice and the work of Andrea Palladio, these buildings establish important criteria for public architecture.



From the the use of solid over void in the individual bays (and the articulation of the open spaces at ground level by flat beams supported by widely spaced columns) to the sculptural quality of the architectural vocabulary and the introduction of sculpture on a rooftop balustrade to punctuate the bay divisions, the buildings are important. Yet, nothing is as important as the creation of a two story building with a single giant order that sits on podia and spans the entire height of the two floors, supporting an entablature scaled to its own proportions. This utterly simple decision is radically important to the general development of architecture in the later 16th and on into the 17th centuries and later.



















The elegant layering of the wall, the careful construction of the proportions and interrelationship of sculptural and graphic detailing are all typical of Michelangelo's architecture at all stages, but here projects a monumentality worthy of the civic center of a great city like Rome.