Renaissance Rome

The chief visible reason for Rome’s ‘eternalness’ is its unbroken architectural relationship to its Classical past. This happened for a variety of reasons, the most ironic of which is that, for a over thousand years since the removal of the capital to Byzantium, the city was too impoverished and disorganized to build anything new without recycling something old. Often enough as well, things were simply built into pre-existing structures so that medieval hovels clustered in and around the porticos and bases of ancient Roman temples like barnacles around a ship. Through the centuries, many of these architectural hodge-podges actually survived and developed and are still around today, giving Rome an organic quality and also what I like to call a ‘Blade Runner’ vibe after the movie of the same name – a delightfully impossible pastiche of elements from yesterday and today which is responsible for the sensory overload we feel here when dodging chaotic modern traffic beneath vine-hung ancient arcades.

But there are other reasons for Rome’s architectural continuity, namely the Renaissance, or ‘Rebirth’ of the Classical ideals of décor, proportion, and perspective. Though this movement started in Florence and Lombardy in the thirteenth century and reached what was then a backwater Rome relatively belatedly, the city still has wonderful examples of the Florentine infusion under the Roman Gravitas spell. In truth, the period of Early Christianity, which flowered into that of the Romanesque, does mark a sort of proto-Renaissance particular to Rome itself – the dawn of a revived paganism which developed from the aforementioned recycling of ancient structures and their subsequent emulation. But, for the purposes of this tour, the Roman variant of the inter-Italian Renaissance movement, aside from a remarkable school of painters and workers in mosaic flourishing there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, began to be created in the fifteenth, in large part due to the return from Avignon of the papacy, and in larger to Pope Sixtus IV’s (1471-1484) rebuilding campaign. Then, in 1503, with the election of his nephew, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere as Pope Julius II, the Roman High Renaissance truly got under way.

A man of great vision and determination, Julius immediately set about reforming the Church in head and member, re-establishing law and order in Rome’s crime-ridden streets, and subjugating its rebellious nobles. The unsystematic attempts of his uncle to convert the picturesque agglomerations of medieval Rome into a classical city were increased in intensity, as Julius set about rebuilding whole sections, driving broad avenues through medieval hovels and ancient ruins, and replacing the thousand year old basilica of St. Peter’s with a grand new temple. Though Julius’ was the spirit, the style was his artists’; and he happened to have three of the greatest of all time at his disposal – Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo.

Julius’ uncle, Sixtus IV, built the Sistine Chapel, and thus its name. Yet the painters he summoned for its decoration, though some of the greatest of the Italian Renaissance, failed to create a coherent style – something which bears remarking when visiting the chapel today. On the contrary, Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo, regardless of their personal differences and whether they were aware of it or not, had their artistic individualities to an extent sublimated by the vision and inspiration of their great patron with the result that the Roman High Renaissance was very different from its predecessor in Florence. Grander and more dynamic, they ushered in a true ‘Roman’ style – a style steeped in the power and severity of their ancient predecessors – a style which stamps Rome today, gives it its ‘sense,’ its weight, its Gravitas.

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