Framing St. Peter's: urban planning in Fascist Rome

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

  Maderno created in this way a facade of austere and most solemn lines,
  undoubtedly lively, but disorganized and chaotic, not legible. (Few
  architects would be able to draw it from memory.) There is a series of
  unexplainable molding lines that together seem almost senseless, full
  of varying motifs. Some details are rather tasteful, but others are
  poorly handled and put in spaces not proportionate to them. He
  broadened it [the facade] to an excessive degree beyond the edges of
  the building in order to support the two bell towers which, despite
  numerous attempts, had to be renounced. He kept the stripped quality
  of Michelangelo's main cornice line, which has its logic on the flanks
  and apses under the command of the Cupola, but across the principal
  facade is pulled taut and flat and seems insufficient. He deprived it
  of a strong central accent to the point that, apart from the
  suggestion you get from the symbols and the statuary, it would not
  occur to you to think it the facade of a Church, but rather a pompous
  and monumental public building. (70)

Piacentini's comments on the facade were common for the era. What was uncommon was his attempt to do something about it.

The propylaea so carefully placed to designate a threshold along the thoroughfare also served to mask at left and right the excessive breadth of Maderno's facade viewed between them (Fig. 1). The edges of the vista have been adjusted to provide "an entirely different framing to the composition" (Fig. 2). (71) The cropping focuses the view on the central parts of the facade: the four columns and pediment at its heart, referring to Michelangelo's intention as recorded in the Vatican Library fresco (Fig. 5). The propylaea, however, are not too high to obscure the inscription that runs across the facade nor intrude on the skyline against the dome. The new framing also retrieves from the facade its central vertical accent, which Piacentini thought characteristic of church facades as opposed to palaces. Piacentini and Spaccarelli have provided a way of looking at the complex, specifically the problematic facade, that helps us see beyond its faults and find what logic lay at the origin of Maderno's ideas. In short, to use Piacentini's term, they made the facade legible.

All contemporary critics picked up on the aspect of correcting Maderno's facade. Ceccarius noted that the view up the Via della Conciliazione had the "advantage of framing the Temple and presenting its essential parts, eliminating from the vista the parts corresponding to the bases of the bell towers that, added to the facade, give an excessively elongated appearance." (72) The architectural historian Armando Schiavo, one of the very few Italians to continue to say anything positive about the Via della Conciliazione, was entirely satisfied when Piacentini explained the framing device to him. (73)

Reshaping a place so that its history might immediately make sense to the viewer was a goal of many Fascist-era interventions in the historic center of Rome: from the restoration of the Castel Sant'Angelo, the clearance of the Mausoleum of Augustus, to the vastly more complicated site of the Via dell'Impero through Rome's ancient imperial remains. Among all the projects of urban planning in Fascist Rome, only the Via della Conciliazione controls the vista to the extent of informing the viewer with an articulated understanding of the subtle internal dynamics of the layered site.