Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Scala Regia in the Apostolic Palace, Vatican, 1835


The Scala Regia, or "royal staircase," is part of the formal entrance to the Vatican and connects the Apostolic Palace to St. Peter's Basilica. Commissioned to Bernini for restoration in 1663, it was actually built by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.


Combining art and architecture, sculpture and decoration in an illusionistic ensemble, this monumental staircase served as the main entrance to the Vatican Palace, as well as the principal connection between the palace and St Peter's basilica. The monument also encapsulates the essence of Bernini's working procedure as architect and designer as well as his creative response to both structural challenges and iconographic concerns.


The Scala Regia, the ceremonial staircase, is one of Bernini’s most brilliant concepts. Exploiting the fact that the existing walls within which it had to be inserted were not parallel, he dramatized the perspective effect by making the two rows of ionic columns which flank the staircase converge and gradually diminish in height as they rise. Light falls from a concealed source at the half-landing and from a window at the top of the lower flight.

At the bottom landing Bernini placed an equestrian statue of the Emperor Constantine at the moment of his conversion, at the top, where the staircase was narrowest, Bernini set them against the wall and farther down where it widened, and he moved them toward the middle, a little away from the wall. That way they were all in line and when you came from below and looked up, your eye followed the columns and you assumed the steps were the same width all the way up. The columns weren’t the same height either. At the top of the long funnel where the ceiling was lower they were necessarily shorter. You noticed that but figured they only looked shorter because of perspective.


In Bernini's statue of Constantine, he is awed and his horse rears, as Constantine realizes that he will win only with the power of the Christ. The moral of this story would not have been lost upon royal visitors to the pope, or for that matter, Cardinals accompanying a deceased pontiff's cortege, who are meant to see the leader of the church as the embodiment of the divine power that over-rules the kings of the world. This theme is often repeated in Vatican artworks such as Giulio Romano’s fresco of The Battle of Milvian Bridge, located in the Sala di Costantino "Hall of Constantine “as well as the marble relief in St. Peter's.

Bernini’s decoration of the stairway didn’t end here. He sculpted an equestrian statue of Constantine for a landing just where the columns start.



A History of Western Architecture, 4th edition by David Watkin.

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