Basilica - The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St Peter's

Basilica - The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St Peter's

by R.A. Scotti

Plume, HK$120

Kenneth Clark, in his TV programme Civilisation, stood in front of Rome's St Peter's and declared it 'perhaps the greatest piece of architecture ever built'. It's an awesome edifice that transcends the religiosity of its purpose as the anchor of a re-emergent Roman Catholicism in the 16th century. Basilica - The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St Peter's is an example of how popular history should be done. R.A. Scotti does an excellent job explaining the architectural, artistic, financial and religious challenges that dogged and drove this achievement. Michelangelo was but one of the architects, but he provided what Clark calls 'its unifying stamp'. Bramante, Raphael, Giacomo della Porta (he did the dome) and Bernini all left their marks. Scotti ventures into faith as a source of inspiration, but also of corruption. St Peter's was a money pit - many grew rich from it and the papacy was debased by it, leading to the Protestant Reformation. At the end of her story, she takes the reader on walking tours of Papal Rome, straddling the Renaissance and the Baroque and, as Clark put it, celebrating an 'outpouring of human genius in the service of God, which is made triumphantly visible to us'.