Main theme: Michelangelo, the esteemed artist and architect during the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Part 5. St. Peter's

• St Peter's. A summary of the preceding decades work, beginning with Julius II's foundation of the new chuch in 1506. Bramante's early design represents the founding of the Roman High Renaissance, a movement away from the strict classical forms. Upon Bramante's death in 1514, Raphael was made the architect of St. Peter's. Raphael died in 1520 and the role as chief architect of St Peter's passed on to Sangallo.
• Michelangelo's St Peter's. Michelangelo redesigned Sangallo and his predecessors' plans for St. Peter's. He led a hands-on approach to the actual building work, which was always difficult due to constant politically charged interferences. The many critics prompted the pope, in January 1552, to issue a brief favouring Michelangelo's wooden scale model. At this time one arm of St Peter's had been completed, another partly finished. Michelangelo's greatest contribution to the final form of St Peter's were his conception of a unified, cross-and-square interior and, in contrast to Bramente's design for a stepped hemispherical dome, a slowly realised plan for a dome with strongly accented ribs. In 1557 there were problems with the vault of St Peter's. In 1558 Michelangelo began his wooden model for the cupola, an attempt to make it more difficult for his successors to change his design. Michelangelo, of course, studied Pantheon for his own work on St Peter's Dome, just like Brunelleschi had done before him. From 1557 the drum was almost finished.
• Counter-Reformation. Pope Marcellus II had been one of the critics of the nudity of the Last Judgement. Marcellus began a regime of austerity within the Vatican but died only after three weeks though in 1555. Under the new pope, Paul IV (1555-9), the inquisition doubled in effort, the spiritual reorientation in the papacy reaching a climax. The Council of Trent, instituted by Paul III in December 1545 in the city of Trent was, an attempt to respond to the theological and ecclesiological challenges of the Protestant Reformation. Some of the objectives were to condemn the principles and doctrines of Protestantism and to affect a reformation in discipline or administration. Pope Paul IV is famous for his resolute determination to eliminate Protestantism and the ineffectual institutional practices of the Church that contributed to its appeal. Two of his key strategies were the Inquisition and censorship of prohibited books.
• Michelangelos's Last Judgement retouched. The building of St Peter's was a symbolically important part of the papacy's project of Catholic revival. However, no longer did the Church accept the adaptation of pagan subject-matter, including nudity. In 1557 a book was published attacking Michelangelo's transgressions against modesty and decorum in the Last Judgement. Several existing works of art in churches throughout Rome which were considered improper had already been removed; as had many books. The Last Judgement was discussed at one of the sessions of the Council of Trent in 1563/4 and in January 1564 the decision was taken to retouch the nude figures.
• Agostino Chigi's villa. To have one's house decorated with nudity and pagan myths like the wealthy banker Agostino Chigi did a few decades earlier could now be downright dangerous. In particular Giovanni da Udine's scene of a bursting fig touched by a priapic pumpkin is evocative.
• Santa Maria degli Angeli. Michelangelo worked to adapt the Baths of Diocletian to a church, consecrated in 1561 as Santa Maria degli Angeli. Michelangelo had made the design.
• Porta Pia. Porta Pia, planned in 1461and constructed in 1563-4 was based on Michelangelo's design, a theatrical masterpiece.

Sights and art works:

St. Peter's

Wooden model of St Peter's Cupola, Museum of St Peter's

Pantheon

Loggia dei Psiche, Raphael and Giovanni da Udine,Villa Farnesina,

Santa Maria degli Angeli, Baths of Diocletian

Porta Pia