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# 68 • SEPTEMBER 21 , 2015
well captured by Bramante.
With the help of Bartolomeo Suardi,
such a faithful pupil that he will be later
known as Bramantino, Bramante was
very active between Milan and Bergamo
in many works ordered by the Sforza and
the Colleoni. But two other works are
considerably above his pictorial works:
the transformation of St. Ambrose and
the construction of the tribune of Santa
Maria delle Grazie. Even in these masterpieces the classical and the Roman elements are no longer only of secondary
boundary, or small decorations: they
come together in a unified way reinventing the balance between the colors of
the materials, the old Roman solutions
and the new taste of the late fifteenth
century.
The arrival of the new century saw Bramante in Rome, and the proximity to the
ruins of the imperial buildings will have
a definitive influence on him.
In the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace
we have the first solutions on the entablature of pointed arches, entablature
that in the second order does not hold
new arches, but a sloping roof, donating
an unusual domestic lightness to the
cloister. Here, the use of climbing up orders from Doric to composite is a literal
revival of the decorative conception of
the imperial Rome: the Coliseum looks
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