Cortile del Belvedere
Cortile del Belvedere | |
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City square | |
Étienne du Perac has exaggerated the vertical dimensions, but Bramante's sequence of monumental axially-planned stairs is visible. | |
Location | Rome, Italy |
Click on the map for a fullscreen view | |
Coordinates: 41°54′15″N 12°27′17″E / 41.90417°N 12.45472°E |
The Cortile del Belvedere (Belvedere Courtyard or Belvedere Court) was a major architectural work of the
Bramante did not see the work completed, and before the end of the sixteenth century it had been irretrievably altered by a building across the court, dividing it into two separate courtyards.
Early history and Bramante's design
When Pope Julius II came to the throne in 1503, he moved his growing collection of Roman sculpture here, to an enclosed courtyard within the Villa Belvedere itself. Soon after its discovery, Julius purchased the ancient sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons and brought it here by 1506. A short time later, the statue of Apollo became part of the collection, henceforth to be known as the Apollo Belvedere, as did the heroic male torso known as the Belvedere Torso.
Julius commissioned Bramante to link the
A series of six narrow terraces at the base was traversed by a monumental central stair leading to the wide middle terrace.[2] The divided stair to the uppermost terrace, with flights running on either side against the retaining wall to a landing and returning towards the center, was another innovation by Bramante. His long corridor-like wings that enclose the Cortile now house the Vatican Museums collections. One of the wings accommodated the Vatican Library. The wings have three storeys in the lower court and end in a single one enclosing the uppermost terrace.
The whole visual scenography culminated in the semicircular exedra at the Villa Belvedere end of the court. This was set into a screening wall devised by Bramante to disguise the fact the villa facade was not parallel to the facing Vatican Palace facade at the other end. The entire perpectivised ensemble was designed to be best seen from Raphael's Stanze in the papal apartments of the palace.[3]
Subsequent history
Shortly after, the court was home to the papal menagerie. It was on the lower part of the courtyard that Pope Leo X would parade his prized elephant Hanno for adoring crowds to see. Because of the pachyderm's glorious history he was buried in the Cortile del Belvedere.[4]
The court was incomplete when Bramante died in 1514. It was finished by
The lowest, and largest level of the court was not planted. It was cobbled and paved with a saltire of stones laid corner to corner and had semi-permanent bleachers set against the Vatican walls to serve for outdoor entertainments, pageants and carousels such as the festive early-17th-century joust depicted in a painting in Museo di Roma,
In 1990, a sculpture of two concentric spheres by Arnaldo Pomodoro was placed in the middle of the upper courtyard.[6]
See also
- Belvedere (structure)
- Italian Renaissance garden
- Index of Vatican City-related articles
Notes
- JSTOR 750353. Retrieved 2014-01-24.
- ^ The middle terrace was obliterated by the cross wing of Sixtus V in 1589.
- ^ This view exaggerated in the engraving (illustration, above right) made to commemorate the festive carousel celebrating the marriage of one of Pius IV's nephews in 1565. The illustration reverses the drawing it was made from: the court where the sculptures were displayed appears in the engraving at upper left instead of upper right.
- ISBN 978-0140288629. Retrieved 2014-01-24.
- ^ Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Harper & Row, 1969. p. 117.
- ^ "Vatican Courtyards". Vatican City State. Retrieved 2014-01-24.
References
- James Ackerman, 1954. The Cortile del Belvedere (Vatican City: Biblioteca aspostolica vaticana) OCLC 2786997.
- Roberto Piperno, "Giardino e Casino Pontificio del Belvedere": the Cortile as seen by Giuseppe Vasi
- Hans Henrik Brummer, 1970. "The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere" (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell)
- JSTOR 3047705.
- Matthias Winner, 1998. "Il Cortile delle Statue : Akten des Internationalen Kongresses zu Ehren von Richard Krautheimer" (Mainz : Von Zabern)
Further reading
- Piana, Marco (2019). "Gods in the Garden: Visions of the Pagan Other in the Rome of Julius II". Journal of Religion in Europe. 12 (3): 285–309. .