Cortile del Belvedere | |
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 A carousel in the Cortile del Belvedere, 1565:Étienne du Perac has exaggerated the vertical dimensions, but Bramante's sequence of monumental axially-planned stairs is visible. | |
| Location | Rome, Italy |
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| Coordinates:41°54′15″N12°27′17″E / 41.90417°N 12.45472°E /41.90417; 12.45472 | |
TheCortile del Belvedere (Belvedere Courtyard orBelvedere Court) was a major architectural work of theHigh Renaissance at theVatican Palace inRome. Designed byDonato Bramante from 1505 onward, its concept and details reverberated in courtyard design, formalizedpiazzas and garden plans throughout Western Europe. Conceived as a single enclosed space, the long Belvedere court connected the Vatican Palace with theVilla Belvedere in a series of terraces connected by stairs, and was contained on its sides by narrow wings.
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.
Innocent VIII began construction of theVilla Belvedere on the high ground overlooking oldSt Peter's Basilica, in 1484. Here, where the breezes could tame the Roman summer, he had the Florentine architectAntonio del Pollaiuolo, design and complete by 1487 a little summerhouse, which also had views to the east of central Rome and north to the pastures beyond theCastel Sant'Angelo (thePrati di Castello). Thisvilla suburbana was the first pleasure house to be built in Rome since Antiquity.[1]
WhenPope 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 ofLaocoön 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 theApollo Belvedere, as did the heroic male torso known as theBelvedere Torso.
Julius commissioned Bramante to link theVatican Palace with the Villa Belvedere. Bramante's design is commemorated in a fresco at the Castel Sant'Angelo; he regularized the slope as a set of terraces, linked by rigorously symmetrical stairs on the central longitudinal axis, to create a sequence of formal spaces that was unparalleled in Europe, both in its scale and in its architectural unity.[citation needed]
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 theCortile now house theVatican Museums collections. One of the wings accommodated theVatican 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 semicircularexedra 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 fromRaphael'sStanze in the papal apartments of the palace.[3]
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Shortly after, the court was home to the papal menagerie. It was on the lower part of the courtyard thatPope Leo X would parade his prized elephantHanno for adoring crowds to see. Because of the pachyderm's glorious history he was buried in the Cortile del Belvedere.[4]
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The court was incomplete when Bramante died in 1514. It was finished byPirro Ligorio forPius IV in 1562–65. To the great open-headedexedra at the end of the uppermost terrace, Ligorio added a third story, enclosing the central space with a vast half-dome to form the largestniche that had been erected sinceantiquity— thenicchione ("great niche") visible today from several elevated outlooks around Rome. He completed his structure with an uppermost loggia that repeated the hemicycle of the niche and took its cue from scholarly reconstructions of the ancient sanctuary dedicated toFortuna Primigenia atPraeneste, south of Rome.
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,Palazzo Braschi. The upper two levels were laid out with of patternedparterres that the Italians referred to ascompartimenti, set in wide graveled walkways. The four sections (now grassed) of the upper courtyard have the same pattern that appears in 16th-century engravings.
Sixtus V spoiled the unity of theCortile (1585–90) by erecting a wing of the Vatican Library, which occupies the former middle terrace and bisects the space. James Ackerman has suggested that the move was a conscious one, designed to screen the secular, even pagan nature of theCortile and the collection of sculptures thatPope Adrian VI had referred to as "idols". Today the lowest terrace is still called the Cortile del Belvedere, but the separated upper terrace is called theCortile della Pigna after thePigna, a large bronze pinecone, mounted in theniccione, likely to have been thefinial ofHadrian's tomb or, as supposed in the Middle Ages, to mark the turning point for chariots in the hippodrome where many Christians were martyred.[5]
In 1990, a sculpture of two concentric spheres byArnaldo Pomodoro was placed in the middle of the upper courtyard.[6]
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