ABSTRACT
The political objectives underlying the design of Via Giulia become fully explicit in the Palazzo dei Tribunali. Sited on the west side of Via Giulia, and located approximately one third along the axis of the street from its northern termination, the new place of law-giving constituted one of the cornerstones of the religio-political initiatives of Julius II. As a testimony to the aspiring hegemony of his pontificate, in which both civic and canon law were to be unified, the Palazzo dei Tribunali provided a further opportunity for Bramante to cultivate symbolic alliances between classical and Christian themes. Such was the splendour and scale of this project that Francesco Albertini considered it one of the Seven Wonders of the New Rome.1 Abandoned, however, in 1511, after only three years in the making, the project was left substantially unfinished with remains of the ground floor rusticated base still visible today, incorporated into later buildings.
