Roman Renaissance
The Roman Renaissance, stretching from the mid-15th to the mid-16th centuries, produced Michelangelo and Raphael, two figures whose work shaped Western figurative art for centuries to come. But Rome was not always a place of artistic ambition. For most of the 14th century, while the popes sat in Avignon, the city fell into anarchy and misery. Its population dropped to its lowest level. The people who remained were starving. The streets were contested by warring noble factions. The great churches and bridges crumbled without anyone to repair them.
How did a city in such ruin become the center of European art and culture? Who rebuilt it, who funded it, and who were the artists who answered the call? The answer begins with a single man from the Colonna family, elected pope at a church council in 1417, who packed his bags and traveled south to a city he had never seen in its prime.
Pope Martin V was born at Genazzano in 1368 and studied at the University of Perugia before rising through the Church's ranks. He was elected unanimously at the Council of Constance on the 11th of November 1417, taking his name in honor of Martin of Tours, whose feast day fell on that very date. King Sigismund of Germany and the French both tried to pull him northward, but he refused. He set out for Rome on the 16th of May 1418 and arrived, after many diplomatic detours, on the 28th of September 1420.
His first project was the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, which had been badly damaged in 1413. By 1421, the church had a new Cosmatesque floor and a repaired ceiling. The painter Gentile da Fabriano received a commission to fill the right aisle with a fresh cycle of frescoes; when Gentile died in 1427, Pisanello completed them. The basilica's pavement and columns were deliberately designed as signature pieces of the Colonna family.
To bring artists north of Rome into the papal project, Martin drew on the Tuscan school. Donatello returned to Rome when Cosimo de' Medici was exiled from Florence, staying until 1433. His two works from this stay, the Tomb of Giovanni Crivelli at Santa Maria in Aracoeli and the ciborium at St. Peter's Basilica, carry a strong imprint of classical forms. Brunelleschi also traveled repeatedly to Rome, drawing inspiration from the ruins. In 1423, the painter Masaccio traveled to Rome at the prompting of Brunelleschi and Donatello, accompanied by his mentor Masolino. The trip freed Masaccio of every Gothic and Byzantine habit, a break visible in his altarpiece for the Carmelite Church in Pisa. He died at twenty-seven, cutting short what had already become a genuinely new direction in Italian painting.
Eugene IV was born in Venice in 1388, nephew to Pope Gregory XII, and his service to Martin V was close enough that he was elected on the very first ballot. His papacy proved turbulent almost immediately. In 1434 a revolution broke out in Rome, driven by the pope's enemies. Eugene escaped by boat down the Tiber to Ostia and took refuge in Florence at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella, sending the militant Bishop of Recanati, Vitelleschi, back to restore order in the Papal States.
Florence at that moment was the literary and intellectual heart of Italy, and the Humanist movement was in full bloom there. Eugene consecrated the Florence Cathedral, then just finished by Brunelleschi, during his stay. Back in Rome he commissioned the Florentine sculptor Antonio di Pietro Averlino, known as Filarete, to cast two bronze doors for the Old St. Peter's Basilica. They were completed in 1445.
Also during this period, Leon Battista Alberti, whose breadth of talent made him a living embodiment of what his contemporaries called the Renaissance Man, wrote the Descriptio urbis Romae in 1443 to 1445. In it, he proposed a geometric arrangement for the entire city centered on the Capitoline Hill. Shortly afterward, Beato Angelico and the French painter Jean Fouquet arrived in Rome and began fresco work in the Old St. Peter's Basilica, bringing Flemish and Nordic currents into what had been a largely Florentine conversation. By the end of Eugene's pontificate, Rome was becoming a meeting ground for artists from multiple traditions, and the outlines of something that could be called a distinctly Roman style were beginning to take shape.
Leon Battista Alberti dedicated his De re aedificatoria to Pope Nicholas V in 1452. This was not a restoration of Vitruvius but an entirely new work, one that absorbed the engineering knowledge of antiquity and built it into a complete aesthetic theory. It became a founding text of Renaissance architecture.
Nicholas V and Alberti conceived a sweeping plan for Rome built around five priorities: restoring the walls, rebuilding or renovating forty churches, resetting the Borgo district, expanding Old St. Peter's Basilica, and restoring the Apostolic Palace. The ambition was to make the city a citadel of religion, its focal point on the Capitoline Hill, demonstrating the continuity between Imperial and Christian Rome.
For the private chapel of the pope, the Niccoline Chapel, Fra Angelico and his assistant Benozzo Gozzoli painted stories of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen. The figures are solid and solemn, the architecture around them borrowing from ancient Rome and early Christian forms without slavishly copying either. The renewal of St. Peter's itself was assigned to Bernardo Rossellino, who expanded the nave to five aisles and added a domed crossing. Work began around 1450 but stopped when Nicholas V died before the plans could be fully realized. What the brief pontificate did accomplish was drawing Tuscan and Lombard artists together in one place, giving their work a growing homogeneity.
A concrete marker of the emerging Roman style is Palazzo Venezia, begun in 1455. Its courtyard takes Roman elements and combines them without strict archaeological accuracy; the overlapping architectural orders echo the Colosseum, and the wide arches are deliberately scaled down so they do not overwhelm the spaces they frame. The Jubilee celebration of 1475 brought in revenue and a new wave of artists, including Vivarini, Bartolomeo di Tommaso, Benedetto Bonfigli, Andrea del Castagno, and Piero della Francesca.
Pope Sixtus IV created the Vatican Library and appointed the humanist Melozzo da Forlì as its painter. Melozzo's fresco Pope Sixtus IV Appoints Platina as Prefect of the Vatican Library, completed in 1477, portrayed the pope surrounded by relatives in an opulent classical setting. A few years later, working under Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, Melozzo painted the apse of the Basilica dei Santi Apostoli with his Ascension of the Apostles between Playing Angels, considered the first example of a dramatic upward perspective from viewer to ceiling.
The Sistine Chapel takes its name from Sixtus IV, who had the older Cappella Magna restored between 1477 and 1480. The original plan was to use artists from Umbria and Marche, but through the intervention of Lorenzo de' Medici, the wall decoration went instead to the leading Florentines of the day: Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Roselli. They painted a series depicting the Life of Moses and the Life of Christ, with papal portraits above and trompe-l'oeil drapery below. The fresco work began in 1481 and was finished in 1482; the marble screen, choir stalls, and pontifical coat of arms over the entrance door were also completed that year. On the 15th of August 1483, Sixtus IV celebrated the first mass in the newly consecrated chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
The chapel that Sixtus built would become the physical address of the Roman Renaissance's greatest commission, one that Julius II would press on a reluctant sculptor two decades later.
Pope Alexander VI came from the Spanish Borgia family and turned his early energy toward the city's defenses, converting the Mausoleum of Hadrian into a fortress and fortifying Torre di Nona against naval threats. His Via Alessandrina, today known as Via della Conciliazione, still forms the grand approach to St. Peter's.
Alexander commissioned Pinturicchio to paint a suite of rooms in the Apostolic Palace with lavish decoration; these rooms survive today as the Borgia Apartments. During his reign, Bramante designed the Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio for Ferdinand II of Aragon, on the traditional site of St. Peter's martyrdom. Bramante also built the Palazzo della Cancelleria for Cardinal Raffaele Riario.
The year 1500 brought a wave of national church building. The ambassador of Emperor Maximilian laid the cornerstone of Santa Maria dell'Anima, the church of the Germans. The French Cardinal Briconnet built Trinità dei Monti. The Spaniards raised Santa Maria in Monserrato degli Spagnoli. A more unusual distinction belongs to the ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore, whose gilded decoration Alexander funded using the first gold brought from America by Columbus, a detail that places the Roman Renaissance squarely inside the wider shock of the Age of Exploration.
Julius II was elected pope in 1503, following the brief reign of Pius III. He was primarily a military man, known above all for re-establishing the Papal States and pushing French forces out of Italy. His patronage of the arts was nonetheless transformative. He laid the cornerstone of the new Basilica of St. Peter on the 18th of April 1506 and engaged Bramante to connect the Vatican Palace with the Villa Belvedere.
Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and Raphael's paintings in the Stanze of the Apostolic Palace both date from Julius's pontificate. So do the Court of St. Damasus with its loggias, and the Via Giulia and Via della Lungara. The statue of Moses, carved for Julius's own tomb in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, stands as a final testament to his instinct for commissioning enduring work.
Under Julius's successor, the Medici pope Leo X, Raphael became the dominant figure in Rome's artistic life. An ambassador wrote in 1518 that everything pertaining to art the pope turned over to Raphael. Raphael completed the Stanze begun under Julius, painted cartoons for Sistine Chapel tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, and directed the decoration of the Vatican Loggia from his own designs. Bramante remained chief architect of St. Peter's until his death in 1514, when Raphael took over; in six years of that office, little was accomplished for lack of funds. Leo X had spent the savings left by Julius II, and his decision to sell indulgences to cover the deficit fed the grievances that would fuel the Protestant Reformation. The Sack of Rome by the troops of Emperor Charles V in 1527 brought the High Renaissance to an abrupt end, scattering artists and patrons alike; when the city recovered, Mannerism and eventually the Baroque carried the tradition forward.
Common questions
When did the Roman Renaissance take place?
The Roman Renaissance occupied the period from the mid-15th to the mid-16th centuries. It began in earnest when Pope Martin V returned the papal seat to Rome in 1420 and ended abruptly with the Sack of Rome by the troops of Emperor Charles V in 1527.
Who were the most important artists of the Roman Renaissance?
Michelangelo and Raphael left the deepest mark on the Roman Renaissance and on Western figurative art as a whole. Other central figures included Bramante, Botticelli, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Fra Angelico, Melozzo da Forlì, and Donatello, most of whom came originally from Florence and other northern Italian cities.
What role did Pope Martin V play in starting the Roman Renaissance?
Pope Martin V, elected at the Council of Constance on the 11th of November 1417 and arriving in Rome on the 28th of September 1420, launched the rebuilding of Rome's churches, bridges, and public buildings. He engaged masters of the Tuscan school for this reconstruction, laying the foundation for the Roman Renaissance.
Who painted the original frescoes inside the Sistine Chapel?
The original wall frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were painted between 1481 and 1482 by Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Roselli. Pope Sixtus IV celebrated the first mass in the completed chapel on the 15th of August 1483.
What was Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria and why was it important to Renaissance Rome?
De re aedificatoria, dedicated to Pope Nicholas V in 1452, was a wholly new work of architectural theory, not a restoration of Vitruvius. It incorporated the engineering knowledge of antiquity into a fully developed aesthetic theory and became a foundational text of Renaissance architecture.
What ended the Roman High Renaissance?
The Sack of Rome in 1527, carried out by the troops of Emperor Charles V, brought the Roman High Renaissance to an abrupt end. Some artists were killed and most of the rest fled to other cities, as did their patrons in the Curia. When artistic activity revived, it was primarily in the Mannerist style.
All sources
11 references cited across the entry
- 2newsMartin V pope
- 3ce1913Arthur Stapylton Barnes
- 10webCATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Pope Leo X1910