As a Snake Sheds its Skin

Among the ruins of ancient Rome Bramante found the pieces he needed to assemble a much more rigorous system of forms than the one known to him in Milan. His repertoire changed, the solutions typical of the Lombard period were abandoned. This change of style is perhaps the most striking aspect of Bramante's artistic production and has not failed to attract the attention of historians of architecture. To understand his work it is necessary to start from right here, from this glaring fact-and a fairly unusual one with respect to the kind of behavior that, after centuries of romantic idolizing of the self, we tend to expect from an artist. And yet these choices were fully conscious, as is evident from an unequivocal passage in a letter from Guglielmo della Porta to Bartolomeo Ammannati (circa 1560): "Bramante asserted that anyone who came to Rome to practise as an architect had to strip himself, as a snake sheds its skin, of everything he had learned elsewhere, and he proved this himself with his own example, saying that before he saw this city he used to think himself an excellent painter and architect, but that after practising for many years he became aware of his error, and this was the reason that, after having drawn a great number of the buildings of ancient Rome, of Tivoli, of Praeneste, and many other places, studying, noting and learning something new every day, he opened the way to the good and regulated architecture of antiquity." It is precisely the shedding of skin that took place in the move from Milan to Rome which we need to take as the starting point in our observation of Bramante's work. Just what changed? And what did not change?