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The ''Cortile del Belvedere'', the Belvedere Courtyard, designed by Donato Bramante from 1506 onward, was a major architectural work of the High Renaissance at the Vatican Palace in Rome; its concept and details reverberating in courtyard design, formalized piazzas and garden plans throughout Western Europe for centuries. Conceived as a single enclosed space, the long Belvedere court connected the Vatican Palace with the Villa Belvedere in a series of terraces connected by stairs, and was contained on its sides by narrow wings. Bramante did not see the work completed, and before the end of the sixteenth century it had been irretrievably altered by a building across the court, dividing it into two separate courtyards. ==Early history and Bramante's design== Innocent VIII began construction of the Villa Belvedere on the high ground overlooking old St Peter's Basilica, in 1484. Here, where the breezes could tame the Roman summer, he had the Florentine architect Antonio Pollaiuolo, design and complete by 1487 a little summerhouse, which also offered spectacular views to the east of central Rome and north to the pastures beyond the Castel Sant'Angelo (the ''Prati di Castello''). This villa suburbana was the first pleasure house to be built in Rome since Antiquity. When Pope Julius II came to the throne in 1503, he moved his growing collection of Roman sculpture here, to an enclosed courtyard within the Villa Belvedere itself. Soon after its discovery, Julius purchased the ancient sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons and brought it here by 1506. A short time later, the statue of Apollo became part of the collection, henceforth to be known as the Apollo Belvedere, as did the heroic male torso known as the Belvedere Torso. Julius commissioned Bramante to link the Vatican Palace with the Villa Belvedere. Bramante's design is commemorated in a fresco at the Castel Sant'Angelo; he regularized the slope as a set of terraces, linked by rigorously symmetrical stairs on the central longitudinal axis, to create a sequence of formal spaces that was unparalleled in Europe, both in its scale and in its architectural unity. A series of six narrow terraces at the base was traversed by a monumental central stair leading to the wide middle terrace.〔The middle terrace was obliterated by the cross wing of Sixtus V in 1589.〕 The divided stair to the uppermost terrace, with flights running on either side against the retaining wall to a landing and returning towards the center, was another innovation by Bramante. His long corridor-like wings that enclose the ''Cortile'' now house the Vatican Museums collections. One of the wings accommodated the Vatican Library. The wings have three storeys in the lower court and end in a single one enclosing the uppermost terrace. The whole visual scenography culminated in the semicircular exedra at the Villa Belvedere end of the court. This was set into a screening wall devised by Bramante to disguise the fact the villa facade was not parallel to the facing Vatican Palace facade at the other end. The entire perpectivised ensemble was designed to be best seen from Raphael's ''Stanze'' in the papal apartments of the palace.〔This view exaggerated in the engraving (''illustration, above right'') made to commemorate the festive carousel celebrating the marriage of one of Pius IV's nephews in 1565. The illustration reverses the drawing it was made from: the court where the sculptures were displayed appears in the engraving at upper left instead of upper right.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cortile del Belvedere」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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