SAINT PETER'S, History Of The Basilica

And now I'd like to tell you about the basilica's history, which involved the greatest architects living in the 1500s and 1600s. The architect Donato Bramante from the Marche region was appointed by Pope Julius II as the superintendent of the papal constructions, and he established the huge mole of St. Peter's new basilica in the early 1500s. The project included a square-shaped building with a huge, covered, central compartment with a 40-meter diameter dome. Bramante tore down the entire ancient early-Christian church and set the colossal pillars that would later be maintained as the main supporting structure.

Pope Julius II decided to place his own great funeral monument under the dome of the new basilica. He called Michelangelo to Rome to create the tomb.. After stopping his work on it for four years to paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo continued to adapt, move, and reduce it: the monument was only completed forty years later, and now you can admire it on the right wall of the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, or St. Peter in Chains. The only remaining sculpture from the original project is that of Moses, which was conceived as the ideal portrait of the pope.

Slowed down by Bramante's death and the invasion of Rome of 1527, work on the basilica resumed with Pope Paul III, who commissioned Michelangelo to take up Bramante's structure and continue developing it. But above all, his main task was to make the dome, the most important part of the new basilica....