The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present Read online

  9.3 a and b. Marble reliefs in the entrance hall of the Pantheon; Roman sculptor from the early sixteenth century. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Instituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione [ICCD])

  Today, as a result of modern restoration, and especially the partial reconstitution of the original upper story,28 the interior of the Pantheon more closely resembles Raphael’s drawing, which attempted to reconstruct the interior in its original state. Given these modern changes, there is almost nothing left on site to inspire any appreciation of the young artist’s achievement, which envisioned a reconstruction that is as valid today as it was in his own day. Comparing the present situation of the interior cella with Raphael’s drawing of 1506, we might miss the effort that was required to develop such a clear distinction between antique and Christian arrangement of the space. Endless discussions of the drawing in art historical literature, including the strange resistance to John Shearman’s subtle interpretation,29 make particularly evident what Raphael has accomplished. If we were to reverse the artist’s mental process, we would arrive at a wholly different appearance of the Pantheon cella reflecting the use of the interior in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Relying instead on surviving remains and subtracting traces of the Christian redecoration, which were added to the interior in the course of history and of which fragments can still be found, we are even able to arrive at a quite specific idea of what the draftsman saw.

  One of the earliest remains of the medieval decoration to survive is a fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin, presumably dating to the fourteenth century, in the second aedicule to the right of the entrance (Fig. 9.4).30 It was simply painted as an altarpiece in the ready-made architectural frame. Another fresco, roughly the same in date, had survived until the beginning of twentieth century in the semicircular alcove on the east side of the building’s transverse axis. Here, a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas was installed. It was destroyed at the beginning of the last century to make way for the funerary monument of King Umberto I (see Chapter Twelve). The imagery showed a blessing Christ in a mandorla. Kneeling before him to the left was a female figure, supporting her head with her left hand in a melancholic pose. On the right side stood a bearded saint, perhaps St. Peter. A further fragment of fresco, which might have dated as early as the twelfth century, was also destroyed to make way for the royal monument.31

  9.4. Second aedicule to the right of the entrance; Trecento fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione [ICCD])

  The first side chapel to the right of the entrance was created in one of the oblong alcoves situated on a diagonal axis of the Pantheon. It is dedicated to St. Boniface IV, the pope who converted the Pantheon into a Christian church. Nearly three times broader than it is deep, the proportions of the chapel seem awkward for liturgical functions. Its back wall is articulated with three rectangular niches, whose original architectural decoration is lacking as is the marble incrustation of the whole alcove. The central niche of the chapel, aligned with the central intercolumniation, is painted with a fresco of the Annunciation. The artist belonged to the circle of Melozzo da Forlì or Antoniazzo Romano, and thus the mural can be dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth century.32

  The next diagonal alcove on the right has the same oblong shape as the first. It continues to serve as the chapel of S. Maria della Clemenza. The altarpiece is similarly placed in the central niche of the alcove. It consists of a fresco of the enthroned Madonna between St. John the Baptist and St. Francis of Assisi. Dating to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, it is attributed to an Umbro-Latian follower of Antoniazzo Romano.33 Two tombstones have remained in situ in this alcove: one, dating to the early years of the fifteenth century, is the tomb of the lawyer Paolo Scocciapile (Fig. 9.5); the other is dedicated to the memory of a certain Gismonda, who died in 1476.34 Other tombstones, formerly set into the floor, such as that of Pietro Angelo de Melle and others, in part dating to the fourteenth century, have been restored from fragments and are preserved in the Pantheon.35 As in almost all Roman churches, such marble bas-reliefs were inserted into the pavement of the Pantheon without sparing its ancient pattern of circles and squares. These elements have now been generally removed, and the floor has been reconstructed in the original pattern almost everywhere.

  9.5. Grave of the lawyer Paolo Scocciapile, third alcove to the right of the entrance, early fifteenth century. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione [ICCD]).

  What has not survived of the medieval decoration, on the other hand, are the ciborium over the high altar, supported by four porphyry columns, and the surrounding columnar screen or pergola, supported in turn by another six porphyry columns. Placed on the central axis and projecting into the rotunda, this pergola would have been the first feature to strike the eye of anyone entering the Pantheon. From this feature, the visitor would have immediately recognized that the ancient cella had been transformed into a Christian sanctuary. Raphael preferred to exclude from his drawing such elements that characterized and obstructed the interior at the start of the sixteenth century, and he simply did not record them. Instead, he tried in his mind’s eye to reconstruct the pagan state of the temple interior in restored form in his Uffizi drawing (Fig. 1.16). To produce this impression on his sheet, he had to walk around the inside of the Pantheon in order to look from behind the altar screen. Presumably, this detour explains why the interior view of the Rotunda was drawn in two separate installments, giving rise to the well-known error36 that led him to omit a whole alcove with its massive columns and a part of the wall with its pedimented aedicule. In other words, Raphael combined two separate elevations in his drawing. To draw both parts of the elevation, he needed observations from different standpoints from which he could look behind the medieval altar screen; in the process, he omitted a third portion of the elevation that would have completed his view of one side of the interior.37

  In his altarpiece for the Cappella Dei in S. Spirito in Florence, the Madonna del Baldacchino, dating from 1508, Raphael succeeded in evoking an imaginative reconstruction of the Pantheon interior, using the motif of the main apse as a niche for a sacra conversazione.38 Although he again represented the original antique state of the architecture and used it as a background, the Virgin and Child take the place of the medieval high altar: sitting on the throne of an antique statue of Jupiter39 she holds the Christ Child in her lap as the Mother of the true God.

  So far as we know, only one Renaissance draftsman, namely, the Nuremberg artist Hermann Vischer the Younger (ca. 1486–1517), recorded the medieval layout of the cella with ciborium and altar screen, at least in a plan (Fig. 9.6). The drawing is dated 1515. Vischer represented the Pantheon not as an ancient monument but as a Christian church. In the accompanying inscriptions, for example, the ancient name of the building is not mentioned: Hie leit die gantz kapelln marija Rodunda im grunt mit der borten oder Eingang.40 Along with the high altar, the aedicules are also expressly described as altars: das sin altar.

  9.6. Ground plan of Pantheon; drawing by Hermann Vischer, sixteenth century. (The Louvre, inv. 19051 verso. Photograph: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

  A few later sources document the central altar setting in greater detail. In 1588, Pompeo Ugonio described its elevations and the varieties of precious marbles used in its incrustation.41 Giovan Carlo Valloni provided similar information in 1670.42 The report by Giovanni Antonio Bruzi dating to the second half of the seventeenth century is still more detailed, comprising even the inscriptions.43 The literary descriptions are closely matched by the visual documentation. The well-known orthogonal elevations and ground plan (see Fig. 10.7 and Plate V), drawn by a contemporary of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and produced as part of Pope Alexander VII’s proposed remodeling of the Pantheon,44 enable us to determine the dimensions of the altar screen.45 From the pasted-on flap in these drawi
ngs showing the section of the pergola, we can clearly see what had obstructed Raphael’s observation of the interior in 1506 and how far he had to walk around it to see and be able to draw the aedicule that lay hidden behind it.

  A similar orthogonal section through the Pantheon in the Raccolta Martinelli in Milan (Fig. 9.7) represents the pergola even more precisely.46 Since the sheet belongs to a series also comprising an elevation of the facade with the two belfries added by Urban VIII,47 this section should not be dated earlier than the surveys and projects from the Bernini shop. The section in question analyzes the altar setting in a very precise way. It thus records the right side of the two presumably symmetrical ambones, or reading desks, as described by Bruzi, and also shows the elevation and section of the altar ciborium. According to a marble inscription on the screen, the altar pergola was donated by Stephanus Philippi48 and thus may perhaps date back to the Pantheon’s consecration as a church.49 The ciborium, however, is significantly later, since descriptions of it mention coats of arms and inscriptions on it that record Pope Innocent VIII as the patron of a renovation of the central feature of the altar layout and its installation here in 1491.50 The print of Giuseppe Tiburzio Vergelli and Pietro Paolo Girelli of 169251 confirms the layout of the sanctuary area that existed till the erection of a new high altar under Clement XI in 1711,52 but provides us with less detailed information (see Fig. 11.3).

  9.7. Section of the Pantheon; drawing by anonymous draftsman of the seventeenth century. (Milan, Civico Gabinetto dei Disegni, Raccolta Martinelli, vol. V, fol. 99 r)

  Because the pair of original columns has been replaced by granite columns in the two aedicules with segmental pediments closest to the entrance, it has been inferred that the original porphyry shafts of these aedicules had been used by Innocent VIII and his architects for the new altar ciborium.53 In fact, the spolia were not simply wrenched from their site but carefully replaced by other columns. Instead of the former Composite bases, we now find Attic bases supporting both shafts, while the new shafts themselves were hewn from granite; Corinthian capitals were then added to the shafts of the aedicule to the right (west) of the entrance, but these are later than the Hadrianic originals. On the aedicule to the left (east) side of the entrance, Corinthian-like acorn-wreath capitals dating to the second half of the first century AD54 were used. They are at variance with the repertoire of forms of the Pantheon and are clearly spolia.

  Since four columns were needed for the support of the ciborium, it may be assumed that its builders did use the Pantheon itself as the source for these materials. It is less probable that the four columns from the aedicules flanking the entrance had also been used in the medieval altar pergola, for it consisted (as we have seen) of six columns, and the spolia from the two aedicules would not have been sufficient. Three copies of a drawing of an aedicule in the Pantheon with a segmental pediment – located respectively in the Codex Escurialensis,55 in the Royal Institute of British Architects in London (Fig. 9.8),56 and in the Uffizi57 – all show Attic bases with acanthus leaf capitals resembling the Corinthian order. If their consistent representation in all three drawings is not overinterpreted, the aedicule represented in these drawings should be one to the left (east) side of the entrance, which would have been spoliated or altered by Innocent VIII shortly after 1491.58

  9.8. Aedicule in the Pantheon; by anonymous draftsman from the circle of Giuliano da Sangallo. (London, Royal Institute of British Architects, inv. VIII/6)

  Suddenly, in the aftermath of this spoliation, an active restoration, especially of the aedicules or the tabernacles, began in the early years of the sixteenth century, funded by endowments of the altars. The best-known example in the series is the aedicule containing Raphael’s tomb (Fig. 9.9). In his last will and testament, the artist had asked that he be buried in the ancient, now Christianized, building that had been so crucial for his art.59 The fact that all eight aedicules could be restored and liturgically converted into funerary monuments within just two to three decades perhaps indicates that the Roman Renaissance had reached its artistic but also its economic high point.60

  9.9. Tomb of Raphael, likely after his own designs. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

  All of the early drawings of the Pantheon, starting with those of Francesco di Giorgio Martini (see Fig.10.5),61 show the lower part of the tabernacles as an open recess between separate pedestals and not as a closed socle. The earliest known drawing that shows a continuous socle, with the pedestals connected beneath the columns, is a page in the Codex Barberini, a book of drawings assembled by Giuliano da Sangallo (Fig. 9.10).62 This impressive frontal view is drawn on an enlarged folio of the codex, and so it cannot belong to the early studies in the Libro. Given that the individual drawings in the codex are difficult to date,63 we can only rely on the terminus ante quem of Giuliano’s death in 1516, that is, within the period of the aedicules’s restoration.

  9.10. Aedicule from the Pantheon; drawing by Giuliano da Sangallo. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 4424, fol. 27 v)

  At about the same time, in the years around 1514, Bernardo della Volpaia represented the triangular and segmental aedicules with an open recess between the pedestals in his so-called Codex Coner (Fig. 9.11),64 as did Antonio da Faenza in the architectural treatise he wrote between 1520 and 1535 (Fig. 9.12).65 Toward 1519–1520, the closed socle appears more frequently in drawings after the antique, as for instance in a drawing by Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo datable to this period.66 By April 1523, work on Raphael’s tomb was still in progress, suggesting that the open socle existed until this moment in time. During this period, the statue of the Madonna del Sasso (commissioned by Raphael in his will) was installed over the tomb, and that tabernacle, with its segmental pediment, received its present form.67 Thereafter, the visual records transmit the form familiar to us today in the representations of the aedicules with closed pedestals, as in the book of drawings by Raffaello da Montelupo in Lille.68

  9.11. Two aedicules from the Pantheon; drawing by Bernardo della Volpaia. (London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, fol. 52 r)

  9.12. Flank of the portico and detail of interior elevation; drawing by Antonio da Faenza, 1520–1535. (Private collection. Photo Antonia Weisse)

  The alterations of the aedicules can no longer be verified by inspection of the physical evidence, since all eight of the pedestal zones have been damaged by later interventions in the crucial area. A typological comparison with buildings or parts of buildings of the Hadrianic period is complicated by the rarity of such architectural elements, although it can be noticed that the use of pedestals seems more playfully ornamental in character than to follow a strict typological pattern: the classical emphasis of the horizontal member is not always privileged; the intention instead was to experiment with soaring, almost diaphanous-seeming structures.69

  The original form of the aedicules can best be gauged from the study of drawings after the antique. Of particular interest is a sheet attributed to Gregor Caronica whose present location is unfortunately unknown (Fig. 9.13). It was contained in a codex, whether an album or a homogeneous book of drawings, dating to 1577 that was owned by O. Baer in Frankfurt before 1940.70 An inscription on an orthogonal elevation of the lower story of the rotunda showing an aedicule with triangular pediment and its flanking pilasters seems to confirm these observations on the divided pedestals. The draftsman remarked on the sheet: Il basamento d[ell’] altare è moderno dalla base della colonna in giù (“The dado of the altar is modern from the base of the column down”). Independently, Pirro Ligorio reported che i tabernacoli degli altari furono restaurati, l’uno dopo l’altro, a spese di pie persone (“that the tabernacles of the altars were restored, one after the other, at the expense of pious persons”).71 Both notations may depend on the reports of eyewitnesses or on information from drawings by such people. In opposition to current archaeological thought,72 therefore, the notations explicitly seem to confirm the information presented by the individual drawings when arranged i
n a chronological order.

  9.13. Aedicule from the Pantheon; drawing by Gregor Caronica of a missing folio from a codex of 1577 whose whereabouts are unknown.

  The appearance of the Pantheon today comes close to the ideal image that people in the Renaissance had of it. This fact in turn could mislead us into thinking that the building has survived from antiquity in its present condition. But what seems original and ancient is often an ex post facto reconstruction, based on varying levels of subjective interpretation. Not all interventions in the Pantheon were as spectacular as the installation of the medieval high altar or the alteration of the tabernacles. A close analysis of the early drawings from the Renaissance can make us aware of alterations and renovations of quite specific details over the centuries, such as the decorative scheme of its polychrome marble incrustation, that deserve continued study to enhance our understanding.73

  From this point of view, the need for care of the exterior of the Pantheon is equally understandable since it faired more poorly over the centuries than the interior due to exposure to the natural elements, but also to the encroachment of neighbors and squatters, as well as spoliation by vandals and conquerors. The popes devoted their attention to the building soon after their return from exile in Avignon, during a phase of political consolidation in early Quattrocento Rome. The Liber Pontificalis attributed the new lead sheathing of the dome, which had long been stripped of its gilt bronze tiles, to the pontificate of Martin V (1417–1431).74 During the reign of the successor pope Eugenius IV (1431–1447), Flavio Biondo in his Roma instaurata reports on an overhaul of this new lead roof that was apparently already necessary.75 Supplementing these written references is documentary proof of another fifteenth-century restoration of the lead tiling under the direction of the humanist pope Nicholas V (1447–1455). From his reign there still survive the relevant payment receipts and even some lead tiles, prominently stamped with the crossed keys, papal tiara, and name of the pope, as well as the date 1451 (Fig. 9.14).76 Documents also reveal repeated attempts to free the portico of unsightly and unauthorized stalls and other buildings concurrent with these restorations.77