Michelangelo takes over St Peter’s

The 71-year-old Michelangelo becomes architect of the new St Peter’s. He returns to a centralised plan and designs the great dome.

The dome, completed in 1590, became the model for domed churches from London to Washington.

Work on the new St Peter’s had been going on for forty years when Michelangelo was put in charge. In 1506 Donato Bramante had begun with a plan in the form of a Greek cross beneath a gigantic dome, an idea often described as the Pantheon raised onto a Roman vault. After his death in 1514 came a series of architects, among them Raphael and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who all changed the plans and wanted to lengthen the church. The money was raised partly through the sale of indulgences, one of the triggers for Luther’s attack on the Church in 1517. When Sangallo died in 1546, Pope Paul III appointed the ageing Michelangelo.

Michelangelo demanded complete freedom and declined a salary. He demolished parts of what Sangallo had built and returned to a centralised plan, but clearer and more powerful than Bramante’s, with massive piers for the dome. The exterior was given giant Corinthian pilasters that bind the whole building together. He managed to build the drum, the cylindrical base of the dome, and had a wooden model made of the dome itself before he died in 1564. The dome was vaulted in 1588–1590 by Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana, who made it somewhat taller and more pointed than planned. In the early 17th century the church was nonetheless extended to the east by Carlo Maderno, who also built the façade.

Michelangelo’s contribution was contested in his lifetime. Supporters of Sangallo worked against him, and he was already an old man who was at the same time directing the remodelling of the Capitol. But the dome became his legacy. It became the model for the great domes over St Paul’s in London, Les Invalides and the Panthéon in Paris, and the Capitol in Washington. Maderno’s extension, however, makes it less visible from the square in front of the church, and critics have long argued that Michelangelo’s idea was thereby distorted. In the Nordic countries, the dome of the Marble Church in Copenhagen, begun in the 18th century and not completed until the 1890s, is often cited as an echo of St Peter’s.