User:ChrisO/temp
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the town with the same name, see Castel Sant'Angelo (RI)
 Castel Sant'Angelo (Mausoleum of Hadrian) |
|
|---|---|
 The Castel Sant'Angelo by night |
|
| Location | Campus Vaticanus, Rome |
| Built in | circa 139 AD |
| Built by/for | {{{builder}}} |
| Type of structure | Mausoleum |
|
 Castel Sant'Angelo |
|
The Castel Sant'Angelo, originally the Mausoleum of Hadrian, is a towering cylindrical building in Rome that was initially commissioned by the Roman Emperor Hadrian as a mausoleum for himself and his family. The building, located in the rione of Borgo, was used as a fortress for over a thousand years. For centuries it was controlled by the popes as a luxurious refuge from Rome's various conflicts, but it is now open to the public as a museum.
Contents |
[edit] Physical attributes
The mausoleum was started by Hadrian in the AD 120s but was not finally completed until the year 139 in reign of his successor, Antonius Pius. It is situated on the left bank of the river outside the bulk of the ancient city, on imperial lands that were originally part of the Gardens of Domitia. It overlooks the Pons Aelius (named after Hadrian's family), which was built along with the mausoleum and completed in 134. The bridge connected the mausoleum to the Campus Martius and in effect made it an extension of the campus.
It stands more than 50 m (150 ft) high, consisting of a great cylindrical structure some 225 Roman feet (66.7 m / 219 ft) in diameter and at least 72 Roman feet (21.3 m / 70 ft) high. The mausoleum stands on a colossal stone base that stands 300 Roman feet (90.4 m / 296.6 ft) wide and 40 Roman feet (11.8 m / 38.8 ft) high.
The mausoleum was originally situated within an enclosure consisting of a low tufa wall interspersed with travertine posts. These may have supported a bronze fence on which were mounted gilded bronze peacocks, symbols of immortality. Two of the peacock figures have survived and are today in the Vatican Museums.
Much of the exterior of the building, such as the bastions, curtain walls, outworks and battlements, was added between the 13th and 16th centuries when the mausoleum was progressively fortified. The base was originally encased in elaborately carved white marble panels, the last of which were stripped at the end of the 15th century. On the side facing the river were a number of panels inscribed with names of the dead and the names of Hadrian and his wife Vibia Sabina were carved above the entrance. Procopius mentions colossal bronze figures of men and horses being positioned at each corner of the base.
The form of the original roof and parapret is unknown. Procopius describes marble statues being hurled down from above during an attack on the mausoleum by Goths in 537, suggesting that the parapret was ringed with statues. The roof itself may have been a dome, a second smaller cylinder or a tumulus-style earthern mound, which apparently topped by a figure of Hadrian (supposedly in a quadriga).
The core of the building is Roman (with heavy modifications) but the upper storeys are of medieval and early modern date. The base of the mausoleum was hollow, being constructed around the central cylinder as a series of radial barrel-vaulted chambers. These perhaps served to lighten the weight of the structure on the soft soil of the riverside. There were entrances on each side of the structure, with the main entrance giving access to a spiral ramp which leads up to the funerary chamber.
[edit] Papal castle
The modern
[edit] Hadrian's tomb
The tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian was erected on the right bank of the Tiber, between 135 and 139. Originally the mausoleum was a decorated cylinder, with a garden top and golden quadriga. Hadrian's ashes were placed here a year after his death in Baiae in 138, together with those of his wife Sabina, and his first adopted son, Lucius Aelius, who also died in 138. Following this, the remains of succeeding emperors were also placed here, the last recorded deposition being Caracalla in 217. The urns containing these ashes were probably placed in what is now known as the Treasury room deep within the building. Hadrian also built the Ponte Sant'Angelo facing straight onto the mausoleum -- it still provides a scenic approach from the center of Rome and the right bank of the Tiber, and is renowned for the Baroque additions of statuary of angels holding aloft elements of the Passion of Christ.
[edit] Destruction
Much of the tomb contents and decoration has been lost since the building's conversion into a military fortress in 401 and inclusion by Flavius Augustus Honorius in the Aurelian Walls. The urns and ashes were scattered by Visigothic looters in Alaric's sack of Rome in 410, and the original decorative bronze and stone statuary was thrown down upon the attacking Goths when they besieged Rome in 537, as recounted by Procopius. An unusual survival, however, is the capstone of a funerary urn (most probably that of Hadrian), which made its way to Saint Peter's Basilica and was recycled in a massive Renaissance baptistery. That spolia from the tomb had been used in the post-Roman period was already appreciated in the 16th century - Giorgio Vasari writes:
| “ | ...in order to build churches for the use of the Christians, not only were the most honoured temples of the idols [ie pagan Roman gods] destroyed, but in order to ennoble and decorate Saint Peter's with more ornaments than it then possessed, they took away the stone columns from the tomb of Hadrian, now the castle of Sant'Angelo, as well as many other things which we now see in ruins.[1] | ” |
Legend holds that the Archangel St. Michael appeared atop the mausoleum, sheathing his sword as a sign of the end of the plague of 590, thus lending the castle its present name.
[edit] Papal fortress, residence and prison
The popes converted the structure into a castle, from the 14th century; Pope Nicholas III connected the castle to St. Peter's Basilica by a covered fortified corridor called the Passetto di Borgo. The fortress was the refuge of Pope Clement VII from the siege of Charles V's Landsknecht during the Sack of Rome (1527), in which Benvenuto Cellini describes strolling the ramparts and shooting enemy soldiers.
Leo X built a chapel with a fine Madonna by Raffaello da Montelupo. In 1536 Montelupo also created a marble statue of Saint Michael holding his sword after the 590 plague (as described above) to surmount the Castel.[2] Later Paul III built a rich apartment, to ensure that in any future siege the Pope had an appropriate place to stay.
Montelupo's statue was replaced by a bronze statue of the same subject, executed by the Flemish sculptor Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, in 1753. Verschaffelt's is still in place, though Montelupo's can be seen in an open court in the interior of the Castle.
The Papal state also used Sant'Angelo as a prison; Giordano Bruno, for example, was imprisoned there for six years. Executions were made in the small interior square. As a prison, it was also the setting for the third act of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca from whose ramparts the eponymous heroine of the opera leaps to her death.
[edit] Museum
Decommissioned in 1901, the castle is now a museum, the Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant'Angelo.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Preface, "Lives of the Artists"
- ^ Rome (Eyewitness Travel Guides) DK Publishing, London (2003) p. 242
[edit] External links
