Tempietto: Bramante’s High Renaissance Memorial Chapel in Rome
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History
The Tempietto is a small High Renaissance memorial chapel in Rome, Italy, designed and built by the Italian architect Donato Bramante for the traditional site of Saint Peter’s crucifixion. Commissioned by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, it was conceived as a martyrium, a Christian memorial building associated with a martyr’s death, burial, or relics.
A place of pilgrimage and royal patronage
The site stood within the first courtyard of the San Pietro in Montorio monastery on Rome’s Janiculum Hill. The church and adjoining monastery were built for the Spanish monarchs between 1480 and about 1500, at a place that had been venerated by pilgrims since the Middle Ages. An inscription preserved in the Tempietto’s crypt states that the church was consecrated in 1500 under Pope Alexander VI, who held the papal office from 1492 to 1503.
Before the chapel was built, the reputed location of the cross had remained largely undeveloped beneath an earth mound. A small meditation hermitage had been established there by Amedeo Menez de Silva, the abbot who initiated the Amedeite monastery at San Pietro in Montorio. The belief that Saint Peter was crucified at this place came from a relatively late tradition. Later interpretations of the ancient phrase inter duas metas, meaning “between two turning posts,” led to questions about the identification.
Bramante’s foundation
Cardinal Bernardino de Carvajal, the Spanish envoy to the papal court and a patron involved in completing the church and monastery, commissioned Bramante to create the memorial on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs. Bramante had moved from Milan to Rome around 1499 and was serving as a deputy architect for Alexander VI. An inscription dated 1502 provides the most secure surviving evidence for the establishment of the Tempietto. Its construction is variously placed between 1500 and 1508, with estimates ranging from about 1502 to 1505 or later, and one proposed date around 1510.
Bramante planned the chapel as the center of a circular courtyard enclosed by a colonnade. Some reconstructions also include four small chapels in the intended arrangement. This larger composition was never completed, and the existing courtyard is quadrangular. The reason for the change is unknown, although Bramante’s later responsibilities at Saint Peter’s have been suggested as one possible factor.
Influence and continued patronage
The Tempietto quickly became an influential Renaissance building. Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio treated it as comparable with the architecture of antiquity, while Giorgio Vasari praised it as one of Bramante’s most graceful works. Its centralized plan helped establish a type used for later memorial churches, funerary designs, circular gardens, mausoleums, and seventeenth-century funerary catafalques.
The chapel was also represented in works by other artists. Raphael used it as an architectural background in The Marriage of the Virgin and Paul Preaching in Athens. Fra Giovanni da Verona depicted it in inlaid woodwork made between 1506 and 1510. A 1:15 alabaster-plaster model was made by Bernd Grimm in 2001 and is preserved in the Ungers Archive for Architectural Science.
Spanish rulers and their representatives continued to support the wider complex. Emperor Charles V financed an enlargement of the monastery in 1523. Philip III assigned 3,000 ducats in 1604 for restoration of the church, monastery, and access routes, while Philip IV provided a further 6,000 ducats in 1628. Work in the seventeenth century altered the dome, lantern, and access to the crypt. A new two-flight stairway was made in 1628, the crypt was redecorated, and the earlier entrance behind the altar was removed.
Damage, restoration, and present ownership
The complex was nationalized during the Roman Republic in 1798. The church and monastery suffered serious damage, but the Tempietto remained intact, although its metal fittings, including the lead covering of the dome, were stripped. A tiled roof was installed in 1804 and 1805.
Giuseppe Valadier restored the monastery complex and courtyard in 1825 and 1826. The work replaced the courtyard paving, redesigned the entrance portico, and restored lead roofing to the dome. Spain recovered the complex with the Tempietto in 1876, and the courtyard acquired its present appearance in 1879 and 1880 after the convent was raised by an additional story. In 1881 Alfonso XII designated the complex as the seat of the Spanish Academy in Rome, which remains in possession of it.
The Spanish state restored the Tempietto for the Holy Year 2000, removing its former ochre-colored finish. King Juan Carlos I inaugurated the restored building in May 1999. In 1995, a building-history project at the Technical University of Munich, conducted with Christoph Luitpold Frommel, remeasured and technically investigated the chapel.
Remains
Round plan and classical exterior
The Tempietto is a freestanding circular building in the first courtyard of the former monastery, beside San Pietro in Montorio. Built mainly of travertine, it consists of a central cella, the enclosed chamber of a classical temple, surrounded by sixteen closely spaced grey granite columns. The columns stand on a raised stylobate, or platform supporting a colonnade, reached by three steps. The surrounding ring gives the chapel the form of a peripteral temple, a building encircled by columns, and recalls the circular tholos temples of antiquity.
The columns use the Tuscan or simplified Doric order. Above them, the entablature, the horizontal architectural assembly over the columns, contains a triglyph frieze with forty-eight metopes. These panels bear thirteen different Eucharistic and Saint Peter-related symbols, including candelabra, a pyxis, a chalice, a paten, keys, a thurible, a tabernacle, and candles. The symbols recur in irregular numbers and sequences. Pilasters continue the Doric treatment on the outer wall of the cella, while the coffered ceiling of the surrounding ambulatory carries rosettes.
A balustrade above the entablature separates the lower colonnade from the upper drum. Four windows pierce the drum, which is decorated with alternating rectangular niches and niches covered by shell-shaped vaults. The hemispherical dome rests on a high drum whose pilasters continue the vertical lines of the lower order. Its present lantern is Baroque and belongs to a later alteration. The dome is approximately 8.10 metres wide, and the building reaches about 11.17 metres in height.
Bramante’s design draws on ancient circular buildings, including the temples of Vesta at Tivoli, in the Roman Forum, and on the Palatine, as well as the Temple of Hercules Victor near the Forum Boarium and the Tholos at Delphi. It also relates to early Christian circular martyria such as Santa Costanza and Santo Stefano Rotondo, and to the Pantheon. The entablature partly follows the Theatre of Marcellus, while the treatment of the Doric order reflects the architectural writings of Vitruvius, the Roman author whose treatise became an important source for Renaissance studies of classical design.
Interior and altar
The chapel is approximately 5.80 metres in external cella diameter and about 4.5 metres across inside. Four deep, high recesses articulate the interior, three of them containing doors and together producing a rounded Greek-cross arrangement. The altar occupies the niche opposite the entrance. The white-painted walls alternate openings with Doric pilasters, and four smaller niches contain Baroque sculptures of the Evangelists. Their traditional attributes are an eagle for John, a bull for Luke, a lion for Mark, and a human figure for Matthew.
The marble altar faces southwest, at approximately 250 degrees. It includes a seated figure of Saint Peter, a relief of his martyrdom, and heraldic emblems of the Spanish royal house. The statue and altar table date from the sixteenth century, although the attribution of the altar to Bramante remains disputed. Saint Peter is shown holding keys, while the relief depicts his crucifixion upside down.
The dome’s interior displays a starry sky in its present nineteenth-century form. The floor contains polychrome marble inlay modeled on medieval Cosmatesque work, a technique using contrasting stones and small cut pieces to create geometric patterns. The chapel’s circular plan and dome provided a physical and symbolic precedent for Bramante’s work on the new Saint Peter’s Basilica and later became associated with Renaissance ideas of cosmic order and centralized Christian architecture.
Crypt and commemorative center
A circular vaulted crypt lies beneath the chapel and has rich stucco decoration. It contains an altar table, a retable with a statue of Saint Peter, the inscription dated 1502, the inscription associated with Alexander VI’s consecration of the church in 1500, and an inscription of Pope Paul III dated 1536 concerning an indulgence.
A circular opening in the crypt floor and a matching opening in the vault mark the place traditionally identified as the point where Saint Peter’s inverted cross was planted. The crypt may incorporate remains of an earlier structure and may once have been interpreted as the Tropeion Petri, a small chapel or monument associated with Peter’s burial or martyrdom.
The present external double staircase to the crypt was created in 1628. Earlier access was provided by a small stairway immediately behind the altar and outside the cella. The arrangement preserves the crypt’s role as the commemorative center beneath the chapel.
Unbuilt courtyard composition
The existing courtyard does not realize Bramante’s intended concentric design. In the planned arrangement, the Tempietto’s sixteen columns would have aligned radially with a second circular colonnade, placing the chapel at the center of a circular portico. The building’s proportions were based on simple geometric relationships: the dome’s radius is described as equal to both its height and the height of the drum, while the external diameter of the column circle is three halves of the dome’s diameter. Relationships associated with the square root of two and ratios of one to one and one to two also govern the inner and outer cylinders.
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