Cortile del Belvedere, Vatican 1506

Image: Google Maps

Designed by Donato Bramante, the Belvedere courtyard in the Vatican was a major architectural work of the High Renaissance beginning from 1506 onward.  Innocent VIII began construction of the Villa Belvedere overlooking old St. Peters Basilica, in 1484. Florentine architect Antonio Pollaiuolo designed the villa which offered spectacular views and was the first pleasure house to be built in Rome since Antiquity. When Pope Julius II ruled in 1503, he moved his collection of roman sculpture to the enclosed courtyard within the villa itself. The ancient sculpture of Laocoon and His Sons was brought in 1506 and the statue of Apollo soon joined the collection. Julius commissioned Bramante to connect the Vatican Palace with the Villa. The design is commemorated in a fresco at the Castel Sant’Angelo- the set of terraces are linked by symmetrical stairs to create a sequence of formal spaces that was unparalleled in all of Europe. An innovation of Bramante was the divided stair to the upper terrace with flights running on either sided against the retaining wall to a landing and returning to the center. His corridor-like, three storied wings that enclose the Cortile now house the Vatican Museums Collection and the Vatican Library.

The whole courtyard culminated in the semicircular exedra at the end of the court. This was set into a screening wall devised to disguise the facades misalignment to the facing Vatican Palace façade at the other end. The project was designed to be best viewed from the pope in the papal apartments of the palace.

Plan and Section of Belvedere Courtyard

Bramante died in 1514 when the project was still unfinished. It was finished by Pirro Ligorio for Pius IV in 1562-65. He added a third story to the open-headed exedra at the end of the upper-most terrace, enclosing the central space with a half-dome and created a large niche visible from several elevated outlooks around Rome today. He completed the structure with a loggia that repeated the heicycle of the niche and took its cue from reconstructions of the ancient sanctuary dedicated to Fortuna Primigenia, south of Rome.

Image of the bronze pinecone

The lowest and largest level of the court was cobbled and paved with a saltire of stones laid corner to corner and had semi-permanent bleachers set against the Vatican walls for outdoor entertainment. The upper two levels were laid out with patterned parterres set in wide graveled walkways. The four sections of the upper courtyard have the same pattern that appears in sixteenth century engravings. Sixtus V corrupted the unity of the Cortile by erecting a wing of the Vatican Library which occupies the former middle terrace and bisects the space. It has been suggested that this was a conscious move intended to separate the secular or pagan nature of the Cortile and the collection of sculptures that Pope Adrian VI had collected. Today, the lowest terrace is called Cortile del Belvedere but the separated upper terrace is called Cortile della Pigna after a large, bronze pinecone, mounted in the niccione proposed to have been the finial of Hadrian’s Tomb or to mark the turning point for chariots in the hippodrome.

In 1990, a sculpture of two concentric spheres by Arnaldo Pomodoro was placed in the middle of the upper courtyard. 

Sources:

1: http://www.vaticanstate.va/content/vaticanstate/en/monumenti/musei-vaticani/cortili-vaticani.paginate.1.html