Antonio da Sangallo the Younger

• 1. Introduction

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  Antonio da Sangallo the Younger was born in Florence on the 12th of April 1484, and he now lies buried inside St. Peter's Basilica. He became an Italian architect of the Renaissance, working mainly in Rome and the Papal States. Yet he began life in poverty, and his training came from carpentry rather than from studying under a celebrated painter or sculptor. How does a boy from that background end up shaping the Vatican? Why did popes and cardinals keep calling him back to solve their hardest problems? And what does one man's work on palaces, fortresses, a famous well and the machinery of mills tell us about the world he lived in?

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• 2. Carpentry Before Rome

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  Francesco Giamberti, a woodworker, was the grandfather of the boy who would become Sangallo, and two uncles, Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo, were respected architects. The boy was born Antonio Cordiani, the son of Bartolomeo Piccioni. Even with those family ties, he spent his early years in poverty, a result of the political and religious turmoil of the fifteenth century.

  In 1503, at around the age of twenty, Cordiani followed his uncles to Rome to pursue a career in architecture. There he took the name Sangallo and became known as Antonio da Sangallo the younger. His apprenticeship was not with an artist at all. It consisted of carpentry work.

  After about three years of that, in 1506, he began working with Donato Bramante. Bramante's disability meant that sketches had to be prepared for him, and Sangallo did much of that drawing. Bramante valued him as a draftsman and let him handle the design work on some of his minor projects.

  Sangallo's success earned him charge of the Passetto di Borgo, the passage between the Papal apartments and the Castel Sant'Angelo. That project was left unfinished. It still gave him a working reputation as an architect, and a church commission followed within a year.

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• 3. Patrons and Palaces

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  Santa Maria di Loreto in Rome gave Sangallo his first major commission in 1507. He designed it with a square first story and an octagonal second story, built in travertine and brick. The dome and lantern were finished many years later.

  Pope Leo X's papacy let Sangallo meet great artists, but his strongest encouragement came from Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who later became Pope Paul III. Farnese likely gave him his first independent commission, the fortress of Capodimonte on Lake Bolsena. Next came the renovation of a house on the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, later known as the Palazzo Farnese.

  The Palazzo Farnese was not completed until after Sangallo's death. Even so, it became one of the most important palaces in Rome, and its structure influenced a later code of academic rules. It was this building that established Sangallo as a mature architect.

  In the Farnese town of Gradoli, he designed a palace, since destroyed, and the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena. He also designed fortifications for Capo di Monte and Caprarola, and Caprarola eventually became a country estate known as the Villa Farnese.

  Melchiore Baldassini commissioned the Palazzo Baldassini near the Basilica of Sant'Agostino. Sangallo also designed a tomb for Cardinal Jaume Serra i Cau in San Giacomo degli Spagnoli. Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Clement VII, hired several artists for the Villa Madama, and Sangallo was personally responsible for the final design of the building itself.

  For his own use, he designed the Palazzo Sacchetti on the Via Giulia. Not everything survived, and the Palazzo del Governatore di Borgo was demolished in 1936. Sangallo obeyed his patrons but always stamped his own style on their projects, and his originality made his name in Rome. Leo X would soon give him a task far larger than any palace.

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• 4. St. Peter's and the Vatican

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  When Bramante died in 1514, Pope Leo X appointed three men to oversee the construction of St. Peter's Basilica: Sangallo, Raphael and Giovanni Giocondo. Leo X also used Sangallo as an engineer, tasked with restoring and saving a number of buildings. Working beside Raphael forced compromises, and Sangallo had to search for his own approach.

  The basilica had earlier been entrusted to his uncle Giuliano da Sangallo. Antonio served as capomaestro, which put him in charge of the day-to-day construction for many years. He collaborated on the design with Bramante, Raphael Sanzio and Baldassarre Peruzzi. He also produced a design of his own, and a wooden model of it exists today.

  Good relations with the popes kept him involved in the project until at least 1536. After he died, Michelangelo became the chief architect.

  Inside the Vatican apartments, Sangallo built the Pauline Chapel and the Sala Regia, which serves as the entryway to the Sistine Chapel. He also worked on the Scala Regia, the staircase that forms the main entrance to the Apostolic Palace. The biographer Vasari claims that Sangallo modified the Sistine Chapel by raising its roof, although exactly what he changed is unclear.

  Not all of his Vatican work was decorative. Some of it was meant to keep buildings from falling down.

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• 5. Engineer of Hard Problems

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  On the bank of the Tiber, the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini demanded a foundation that few builders would have wanted. Jacopo Sansovino's design called for the church to extend out into the river, and the bank was unstable. Sangallo completed the foundation, but at such great expense that no money remained to build the church. His own model for it was never built. Construction of Giacomo della Porta's designs began later, in 1583.

  The Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto had been poorly built, with cracking vaults and an unstable foundation. Sangallo redesigned the church and shored up its foundations. Vasari called it "the best that Antonio ever executed", and he said so despite the difficulty of rebuilding rather than starting fresh.

  The Vatican loggias had also shown signs of weakness from poor construction. Sangallo reinforced them, and his reinforcements stand today.

  In Orvieto, Pope Clement VII asked him to build Saint Patrick's Well, now noted as a marvel of engineering. Two ramps wind in a double helix around a central open shaft. Oxen carrying water could walk down one ramp and up the other without ever turning around. The well is 175 feet deep, yet the ramps are well lit by windows cut into the centre section.

  The Well of Joseph in the Cairo Citadel also had a double spiral staircase, and it may have inspired the design. In other cities, Sangallo's clients wanted walls rather than water.

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• 6. Fortresses and Machines

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  In 1534, Sangallo began the Fortezza da Basso for Alessandro de' Medici, the new Imperial Duke of Florence. He almost completed it within two years. He also worked on the fortifications of Parma, Piacenza and Ancona, and he is credited with the Old Fortress in Livorno.

  Military building was a different kind of architecture. It needed strong defenses and a vast labor force to dig ditches and carry materials. His fortifications were designed to resist cannonballs and explosive mines. The work taught him to coordinate hundreds of skilled and unskilled workers and to plan the complex network of spaces inside a fortress.

  Between 1527 and 1532, Sangallo turned to mechanical engineering. He studied pulleys and drew many types of mechanisms with a straight edge and compasses. His drawings include part of a silk-spinning wheel, a fulling mill for the cloth industry, and a large circular mill with four pairs of cogwheel lanterns.

  Some of his sketches show machines that he only imagined. One is a gristmill powered by horses walking a tread wheel. Another is a tread wheel that drives four mills at once through a single shaft, worked by just two men. Such a range of work needed more hands than his own.

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• 7. Workshop and Method

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  The Sangallo circle began with Antonio Labacco, born in 1495 and dead by 1567, along with Antonio's brother Giovanni Battista da Sangallo, who lived from 1496 to 1548. Their cousin Giovan Francesco da Sangallo, who lived from 1485 to 1530, was also part of it. After 1530, Bartolomeo Baronimo joined, as did Giovan Francesco's brother Sebastiano, also called Aristotile.

  The members brought skills ranging from building tools, pumps and mills to digging whole canals and raising buildings. They even moved the Vatican obelisk. Antonio kept control by visiting and surveying every construction site the group worked on together. His colleagues sent him drawings for approval, and they grew upset when the drawings lacked enough information.

  Antonio worked through his projects in six stages. First he measured the site and any existing structures that would be affected. Next he worked with the patrons funding the project to sketch ideas, not to scale. Third came sketches of plans and elevations.

  The fourth stage produced detailed plan, section and elevation drawings to present to the patrons. In the fifth, he built wooden presentation models and drew details of spaces such as atriums, stairwells and windows. The last stage was working drawings at a scale of 1:1 to instruct the construction workers.

  He wove mathematics into his designs and favored orthogonal drawing over perspective views. Watching his uncles as a child gave him an early education, and he likely learned arithmetic and Latin then. That helped with the complicated calculations of his later projects. His training in draftsmanship and carpentry was more thorough than that of many Renaissance architects, and it left geometrical patterns throughout his work.

  Sangallo remained highly critical of the Renaissance he lived in. He was both influenced by and critical of ancient Roman buildings, including the Pantheon. He practiced what is called "operative criticism", which examined architecture through a historical and societal lens. It let him admire the works he studied while faulting drawings of them for distorted proportions. The ancient works inspired him to make more accurate drawings.

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• 8. Fever in the Marsh

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  The Rieti Valley was Sangallo's last project, commissioned by Pope Paul III. The work took place in a marshy environment, and there Sangallo contracted malaria. He died in Terni before he could finish.

  His epitaph in St. Peter's was set up in 1546 by his deeply grieving wife, Isabella Deta. It names him as an architect from Florence and credits his work on fortifying the city, on public works, and on adorning the temple of St. Peter. It calls him easily the foremost of architects. It also records that he died at Interamna, today's Terni, while preparing the outflow of the Velino lake at the order of Pope Paul.

  Vasari wrote, "In truth Antonio, who was a most excellent architect, deserves to be celebrated and extolled, as his works clearly demonstrate, no less than any other architect, whether ancient or modern."

  His legacy survives in the buildings he worked on, many of which inspired later architectural methods. His surviving drawings remain a source of insight for architects who hope to learn from his forms.

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