In 1502 Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, in gratitude to God for the birth of a son, commissioned Donato Bramante to design and erect a monument in Rome on the site of Saint Peter's crucifixion.
According to James Lees-Milne, "the King and Queen were of the most uncompromising orthodoxy in religious matters, but like all royal and noble patrons of Renaissance times, in the forefront of fashion as regards the arts. The sponsors of Christopher Columbus were not afraid of risking a small architectural venture."
(Captions below are quotes from Roman Mornings, published by Lees-Milne in 1956.)
"The body is surrounded by a peristyle of sixteen Doric columns of grey granite, their capitals and bases being of marble."
"The columns are made to diminish at the tops and bottoms and swell to their fullest diameter at the lowest third of their height."
"The exterior of the body is divided into alternate shallow niches with shell heads, and square recesses."
"The frieze of the peristyle is carved with much vigour and delicacy. Between the triglyphs (and you will notice how every third falls accurately above the centre of each column) the architect introduced emblems in flattish relief pertaining to Saint Peter – namely a chalice, lamp, cross, open book, mitre, cross keys, etcetera."
"The peristyle is finished with a feature entirely unknown to the ancients, which gives it a crowning beauty, namely the continuous range of wasp-waisted balusters. Of these every fourth carefully falls into place above a column."
"His peristyle is moreover set on a very squat platform, raised on three steps which descend evenly into the pavement."
"Bramante's need of a balustrade was of course the consequence of his major innovation, the drum and dome. The grace and loveliness of his dome surpass all the tributes that four and a half centuries have lavished upon them."
"To the uninitiated this small, unassuming structure in faded ochre wash, bearing the recent scars and graffiti which are the ubiquitous hall marks of the tourist industry, may at first appear a slight disappointment. Why, you may ask, so much extravagant fuss about this rather pretty toy hidden away in too confined a court? It is not enough for me to answer that if you do not see the point of the Tempietto during your first visit then you surely will after your sixth. There are presumably a number of valid reasons for the fuss. To begin with, howsoever you or I may judge it, the Tempietto was considered by Bramante's contemporaries and successors to be an architectural triumph of the first magnitude. It made him at once famous all over Italy. Sixteenth-century artists amongst the greatest in history, like Michelangelo and Palladio, flocked to see it, measure it, draw it, discuss it and write about it. With what you may think their exaggerated reverence for antiquity these men pronounced that it vied with, no, even excelled the architecture of the ancients. Seventeenth-century artists still remained spellbound by it. Bernini reproduced it in miniature as a tabernacle in bronze enriched with goldsmith's work of lapis-lazuli for the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament in Saint Peter's. Wren reproduced it in his first design for the west towers of Saint Paul's Cathedral, and Soufflot for the drum and dome of the Pantheon in Paris. In the eighteenth century it kept reappearing in modified forms upon garden temples in French and English country gentlemen's parks like Ledoux's Rotonde de Monceaux, Hawksmoor's Mausoleum at Castle Howard, Kent's Temple of Virtue at Stowe, Gibbs' Temple at Hackwood, and Adam's Temple of Victory at Audley End. In the nineteenth century it was still being reproduced. You may see a gilt model of it serving as the tabernacle of Saint Francis Xavier's Catholic church in Hereford, which dates from William IV's reign."
