architecture.[1] Thereupon he departed from Milan,[2] and repaired to Kome, where he arrived immediately before the commencement of the holy year 1500.[3] By the interposition of the friends whom he had in that city, some of whom were his fellow countrymen, others Lombards, he received a commission to paint the armorial bearings of Pope Alexander YI. in fresco over the holy door of San Giovanni Laterano, which is opened on the occasion of the Jubilee; these he surrounded with angels and added other figures, as supporters of the escutcheon.[4]
Bramante had brought some money with him from Lombardy and had gained other sums in Rome by certain works which he had executed there; these funds he husbanded with care, expending them with extreme frugality,[5] because he desired to live for a time on his means, and not to be distracted by other occupations from the labours which he proposed to undertake among the ancient buildings of Rome, all of which he was anxious to study, wishing to obtain accurate measurements of them, entirely at his leisure.
He commenced this labour accordingly; in solitude and deep thought he pursued it to its completion, and in no long time had examined and measured all the buildings of antiquity that were in the city of Rome and its neighbourhood, with all that were to be found in the Campagna; he had even
- ↑ From these words Bottari infers that Bramante must previously have been principally occupied with the practice of painting, but it is certain that many of the pictures attributed to him by Scannelli and others were the works of the Milanese Bartolommeo Suardi, called Bramante da Milano or Bramantino, because he had been the scholar of Bramante. De Pagave observes that Bramante studied the architectural details of the cathedral and made himself known to the engineers, not to determine his choice towards architecture, which he had already studied and practised, but rather because he was desirous of an establishment in that city, where, by making himself known to Giovanni Galeazzo, and Lodovico il Moro, he might obtain a sufficiently extensive arena for the exercise of his abilities.
- ↑ After a residence of twenty-two years.
- ↑ In 1499, immediately after the fall of Lodovico his protector, that is to say, when Leonardo da Vinci also left Milan.
- ↑ These arms were destroyed when other changes were effected in the building.
- ↑ Masserizia. Bottari remarks that this word “must here be taken to mean risparmio (frugality), although far masserizia signifies to accumulate.”
