St Peters Square as an ellipse...

An oval and an ellipse with the same axes are barely distinguishable at the scale of the drawing. At a scale of 1:1 the difference for a square that has got a width of 240 m is just 1.6 m. It's obvious that the stones with inscription 'centro del colonnato' have got nothing to do with an ellipse. This would have its foci somewhere at the two fountains. And thing for just one moment:

Would you find a rope width a lenght of 240 m totally not elastic to draw an ellipse thats more accurate?
How would you construct molds to cut any stone for an ellipsoid colonnade with an everchanging curvature?
How would you construct parallel ellipses? You could think: "By enlarging the rope a bit."

When trying you'll soon notie that this doesn't work. Ellipses with the same foci but with a slightly different large axis doen't run parallel, not even to speak about the problem to put the colums on the different rows at the same distance to each other along the whole length of the ellipse.

Drag the red points and change the distance between the foci and the length of rope 1.
Drag the green point and change the length of rope 2.

You notice that by increasing the rope length the ellipse you don't get an ellipse on which any point has got the same distance to the first ellipse. Taking all of this into account one has to agree with the remark of Riccardo Migliari: "It's important for me to add that I'm not willing to award a primacy of intellectual nobility to the ellipse an oval wouldn't have."

St Peters Square as an ellipse...

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