Michelangelo’s Campidoglio: Rome’s Most Underappreciated Architectural Masterpiece

George H. Sullivan, author of Not Built in a Day: Exploring the Architecture of Rome and a regular lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC

 Almost everyone who visits Rome visits the Piazza del Campidoglio, atop the Capitoline Hill beside the ancient Roman Forum. Most of those visitors know that the Campidoglio was designed in the 1500s by none other than Michelangelo, painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the greatest sculptor of his era. What many visitors don’t know is that Michelangelo was also one of the greatest architects who ever lived, and that the Campidoglio is one of the greatest pieces of European architecture ever constructed. Its complex design rejected the High Renaissance precedent and set architecture down a new path; its revolutionary details included features that had never been seen before in the history of architecture. George Sullivan’s extensively illustrated lecture analyzes the Campidoglio in detail, exploring its architectural concepts and explaining its revolutionary place in architectural history.

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