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So, in this section of the course, we're talking about the way in which the city
was used as a theater space for processional routes for an event.
But just off this route is actually a theater-like space that's one of the most
perfect realizations of the idea of the physical form of the city as a theater.
And we can take a deviation off the Papal route to have a look at the piazza of
Santa Maria della Pace.
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This is the piazza of Santa Maria della Pace,
one of the great theater experiences of the city of Rome.
In fact, the Pope who commissioned it, Alexander VII, actually
described it in his letters as the teatro della pace, the theater of peace.
It's a piazza that was designed actually to satisfy a particular practical need,
but it became an opportunity for
one of the most perfect realizations of this idea of the city as stage.
Originally the church was built in the 15th century under the Pope Sixtus IV, and
it was in a rather kind of wedge shaped space.
In fact, if you like, it was really at a kind of y-shaped intersection,
where the road that approaches would have forked off very tight to the church into
two different directions.
By the middle of the 17th century it'd become one of the most popular churches
for the lawyers of the city, because it was the only church in this area that
actually offered Mass after the courts had closed in the middle of the day.
Now being lawyers, they were well off and
they showed up at this church in carriages.
There was really no place for their carriages to turn around.
So for that practical reason, the Pope thought it would be worthwhile
redesigning the facade of the church and thinking about the piazza.
In fact the piazza was almost the second part of his thinking.
He was also devoted to the church because one of his ancestors had commissioned
a tomb inside.
The first move was introducing this portico to essentially provide a relief
space off of the street network.
But then very quickly, the Pope realized that it needed some breathing room and
he did something that's very typical of the center of Rome.
It's rather hard to understand today, the way we think about urban space, but
if you think of Rome as like a lump of clay.
The way that they reshaped space in the center of the city was really to chop away
bits and pieces of things to create an illusion,
at least, of order and regularity.
And in fact, with respect to the theater,
one of the things that makes the theater the theater is that sense of illusionism.
If you like, the deception,
the convincing of you of something other than the reality of the ordinary world.
And so one of the things that this piazza does is create the illusion
of a kind of order.
Now it's a symmetrical space and the architect was Pietro da Cortona,
a painter who came to architecture later in his life like so many architects did.
Pietro da Cortona chops away at adjacent buildings to create a symmetrical space,
not a simple space.
It's not a rectangle or a circle or an octagon, it's a rather complex shaped
space, but it is symmetrical, so it has at least that sense of balance and symmetry.
He chopped away into a variety of different things on
either side of the church.
On this side is the German college, and
it still is the church of the German community in Rome.
And they chopped away at the residential block around the backside of their
cloister, on the back of the church.
On this side, it was essentially ordinary urban fabric, apartment buildings.
And so, in both cases they were taking away something in order to make positive,
open space.
If you think about it, the buildings are sort of the negative space, and
the piazza, the open space, is the figural, positive space.
Now Cortona also had to deal with these different streets, and
they weren't set up with any degree of order or regularity.
So his gain was in fact finding a way to mask that disparity of entrance and
exit out of the piazza by creating, essentially, opportunities for bays or
rhythms within the architecture that could accommodate different kinds of openings.
And to our perception, at least our first impression of this space,
it seems to be as if we come in and out of the space in similar ways.
In one case,
like I came in, it's a very narrow alley between the two churches essentially,
between Santa Maria della Pace and Santa Maria dell'Anima, the German church.
In the other case, the road peels off to the left and
it goes past the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace.
Belmonte's in fact first project in Rome, the project that predated his project for
the Tempietto, and that cloister's oriented towards the street.
So what did Cortona do?
He masked this entrance with a bay that corresponds to the bay
that enters into the cloister of Bramante.
The rest of the fabrics to the side of that then
contains his opening into the street which is similar
to the opening into the cloister of Santa Maria dell'Anima.
So by a series of slight deceptions, in a way, he's created the sense in which we
enter and exit like actors on a stage from the wings into this piazza.
And very much they are like wings, I mean, they're almost exactly like wings.
And in fact the portico here is not unlike the canopy at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre,
so there are a number of ways in which this is specifically theatrical.
Not vaguely or illusionistically theatrical, it is a theater and
the Pope called it as such.
It was a theater because it was a place for
certain kinds of drama to be played out, both comic in the sense of ordinary life,
but also classical and tragic because of the formal order of the space.
Cortona didn't just cut away at the buildings, he gave them all new facades.
And he did some wonderful, inventive things to mask all the disparities.
So for example, behind me here to the right of the church, is a window,
an arch window, that's in fact the window of the apse of Santa Maria dell'Anima,
the German church.
On the other side there's an illusionistic fake window that essentially creates
the illusion of symmetry.
So the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima is pulled into the composition in a way or
its presence is masked.
At the same time, Cortona wanted to give the church a bell tower, and
being a symmetrical church it would want two bell towers, one on either side.
He built one on this side.
He didn't have to build one on this side because he has the tower,
the actual older tower of Santa Maria dell'Anima to take care of it.
So in fact, we get a kind of impression of symmetry, but
also the weaving together of disparate things into a kind of whole.
The great baroque architectural historian, Irving Lavin, the great scholar of Bernini
said that, of all the ways in which the word teatro is used in 17th century Rome.
To mean both the theater building, the stage, and the performance that takes
place on it, and lots of other vague allusions to teatro.
What he says really constitutes what seems to be the essence of the word teatro,
is a sense of wholeness, completeness.
The sense that we've created a microcosmic environment that is a complete,
perfect kind of world, a better world, in fact, than the ordinary world around us.
And that's the world we get here in this piazza,
one of the most perfect realizations of the idea of the theater in baroque Rome.
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