The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present Read online

  Desgodetz presented his observations in brief texts as commentary for his large-scale copperplate engravings, which illustrated the building with a degree of accuracy in measurement and detail hitherto unknown. Fontana’s approach was different: rather than merely providing a series of comments on the existing building, he wrote the first illustrated history of the monument. Using a process of subtraction, he gradually removed from the existing Pantheon all of the elements that he believed to have been added over the years, ending up with the depiction of a hypothetical Republican Age temple, as distinguished from the one thought to have been built by Agrippa under Augustus. He visualized the former as a building without an external portico and without interior columns, a temple whose archaic severity was based on the absence of all elements belonging to the architectural orders. The building that he proposed as Augustus’s Pantheon resembled the existing edifice, with the addition of elements described in classical texts but presumed lost, replacing, for example, the much-discussed pilasters in the attic with the bronze caryatids described by Pliny. Accepting a possible location for the statues of the gods of the underworld between the heavens and the earth, as proposed in 1585,5 he envisioned the floor at a much lower level than the one in the existing building (Fig. 11.2). As a result, none of Fontana’s reconstructions of past Pantheons showed the controversial attic, thus reaffirming doubts about it.

  11.2. Cross section as reconstructed by Carlo Fontana depicting the Pantheon under Augustus, with caryatids in the left half, near the entrance (top), and reconstructed cross section depicting the Pantheon during the Republic (bottom). (Fontana 1694, Book 7)

  The tourists represented in Pannini’s views would have been familiar with such antiquarian speculation. The painter portrayed them in the act of observing the interior of a building whose individual elements they had learned to date according to the theories of the day, while reserving their greatest admiration for those parts that they believed to have originated in the Augustan Age. Nevertheless, as other figures depicted by the painter in pious attitudes near the altars show, the Pantheon was also a church. It was an extremely ancient church, whose history as such belonged to a special category: Christian antiquity. Reliable documents as well as legends and miracles narrated in hagiographic literature on the Pantheon – better known at the time as the church of Santa Maria ad martyres – had been collected since the late sixteenth century, when the early history of Christianity gained special appeal. In this field of inquiry6 – whose diffusion was limited to Roman Catholic countries – the salient event in the Pantheon’s history was its consecration as a Christian temple. This much-admired ancient edifice had been saved from the destruction inflicted upon so many famous monuments thanks to the intervention of Pope Boniface IV, who had converted it into a church.7 This event came to symbolize the survival of ancient Rome in the Christian era: after the fall of the empire, the papacy had imposed one religion that managed to ensure the city’s preservation and avoid its complete ruin. Nowhere was this more evident than at the Pantheon.

  The significance of the Pantheon as an ancient monument preserved through Christian reuse was to have an important effect in the evaluation of medieval and later transformations made in order to change the pagan temple into a church. Notwithstanding the emphasis that Christian antiquarians usually put on archaeological evidence, in the case of the Pantheon no descriptions or images of altars were written or drawn. Because the edifice had become the model of perfect conservation of ancient Rome through papal authority, there was no impetus to describe small-scale, yet important, transformations that presumably occurred during the intervening centuries. Like Raphael and all artists and architects who drew the interior of the Pantheon after him, Christian antiquarians also failed to include in their books any representation of such a prominent feature as the high altar, which was surmounted by a ciborium and a series of columns with an architrave forming a pergula separating the choir from the rest of the church. The only known image that includes these elements was issued for liturgical purposes, a curious engraving representing the church exactly as it was in the late seventeenth century (Fig. 11.3).8

  11.3. Interior and exterior of Pantheon showing medieval high altar, its pergola, and other decorations in the apse; drawing by G. T. Vergelli, etched by P. P. Girelli. (Arrigoni and Bertarelli 1939, no. 2574).

  Up to the First Cornice: Works Carried Out during the Papacy of Clement XI

  By the early eighteenth century, and despite its venerable age, Santa Maria ad martyres was hardly considered an important church. After the eclipse of Pope Alexander VII Chigi’s ambitious project for renewing the whole building under Fontana’s direction,9 the Pantheon as a religious site had but modest attractions. All of the altars were rather ordinary, except the two which were connected to Raphael’s memory. In his will, the artist asked to be buried in one of the aedicules; in 1674, the painter Carlo Maratti (1625–1713) celebrated the artist’s memory by placing a bust to either side – one depicting Raphael himself and the other Annibale Carracci.10 In 1541, an altar standing in an adjacent exedra was assigned to the Confraternity of Saint Joseph of the Holy Land, a religious association accepting only artists and granting its members the opportunity of being buried in the church.11

  The lack of any estimable work of art on these two important altars – indeed on any of the Pantheon’s other altars – was due to the fact that the Rotunda was constantly under threat of flooding, an eventuality that discouraged any artistic endeavor in the church. In fact, because its floor still remained at a far lower level than the modern city, every time the Tiber burst its banks, the Pantheon would be one of the first buildings to be flooded. When the river rose past the level of the sewer outlets, the water would start running back up the pipes that normally channeled rain water down to the Tiber, to be released from the large drain cover in the center of the rotunda. In this way, the periodic and occasionally devastating floods had caused the dispersal of many of the slabs in the antique floor,12 menaced all of the altars, and continuously deposited layers of slime on the antique marble of the columns and paneling, particularly on the lower sections. A drainage system carried out in 1662–1667 proved only partially successful.13

  It was not until the cleaning of a small area of one of the columns framing Raphael’s tomb that the church was to experience a major change. A contemporary chronicle reports that in the spring of 1705, on the occasion of maintenance work on the altar carried out at the expense of Pope Clement XI Albani, a small area of one of the giallo antico columns was cleaned.14 The gleaming surface that was thus revealed became an object of admiration on a par with an archaeological discovery: the same chronicle mentions that the pope himself, rushing to the church with a group of cardinals in order to admire the column, gave an order to extend the work to the entire inner circle of the rotunda, up to the first cornice. Accounts show that work started on the left and continued at a fair pace for a whole year, slowing down until 1711 when the renovation was concluded. The total cost of this project – organized mainly by the pope’s brother, Orazio Albani, and Monsignor (later Cardinal) Niccolò del Giudice – was considerable.15

  The generic term pulitura (cleaning) of marbles mentioned in the chronicles actually covered a whole range of activities. Francesco Bartoli, who as superintendent of antiquities was in charge of the conservation of Rome’s ancient monuments,16 drew up a list of work considered necessary and included precise instructions on how it was to be carried out, with the intention of preserving as much of the ancient monument as possible. From this precious document, we know exactly what was scheduled for the restoration of the interior of the rotunda. Apart from cleaning all of the porphyry and marble surfaces, to be done without the use of any acid, the damaged entablature and capitals were to undergo extensive repairs using stucco so as to avoid driving metal holding rods into the antique marble; reintegration of missing pieces in the marble veneer was also proposed, but without altering the original layout.17 Unfortunately
, Bartoli’s instructions relative to reintegration seem to have been largely ignored. The original porphyry and marble slabs in the band immediately below the first entablature – as documented by Inigo Jones in 161418 and by Carlo Fontana’s workshop in 1662–166719 – were in fact rearranged. Under the program of works promoted by Clement XI, all the porphyry slabs were replaced by the African marble slabs in situ today. Further extensive replacement work – recognizable by the different techniques used to anchor the pieces to the wall – was identified on the occasion of the restoration campaign carried out in 1992–1995.20 As a result, much of the marble veneer up to the first entablature of the interior, which is generally held to be ancient and extraordinarily well preserved, has been revealed to be the fruit of this extensive program of works carried out less than 300 years ago.

  Section by section, as the restoration of the interior progressed, the church, too, underwent a major transformation. Missing columns were replaced in the aedicules; all altar settings carried out on behalf of families or corporations during the previous centuries were removed; and the exedras, which had at the time already lost most of their original marble facings, were stripped of their remaining ornament and subjected to a new unified decorative scheme. The architect charged with carrying out the work was Alessandro Specchi (1668–1729), who had collaborated with Fontana on his Templum Vaticanum and was famous in his own right for having designed the new Porto di Ripetta (1703–1704). The general intent – as stated in the 1711 Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia – was to enhance both the much-admired antique architecture and its Christian reuse. The project would restore the Pantheon – described as a “corpse bared of all its ornaments” – to its earlier beauty; the church, stripped of any material memory discordant with the ancient building, would be endowed with renewed altars and chapels in harmony with the overall ancient scheme.21 Specchi’s drawings show that the altars and chapels were to be distinguished by simple forms, though richly decorated (Fig. 11.4);22 but only a small part of these Baroque stucco garlands, scrolls, and putti – criticized by Commissioner Bartoli in 1705 as “ornaments of very hackneyed elements,” would actually be realized.

  11.4. Project for Chapel of S. Giuseppe di Terrasanta in the Pantheon; drawing attributed to Alessandro Specchi. (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Italienische Zeichnungen, Kdz. 23821)

  In the most important exedra, the one opposite the entrance, extraordinary care was needed. The demolition work in this area after 1711 had resulted in the destruction of the high altar, the ciborium above it, and the pergola. All were architectural features dating from the Middle Ages and renewed as late as the fifteenth century. They had been made of ancient marble slabs and columns taken from elsewhere in the building or from the Baths of Agrippa nearby (Fig. 11.3). Although this altar composition testified to the antiquity of Santa Maria ad martyres, in a renovated church where all of the marbles had been returned to their original positions, the use of spolia had come to be seen as historically inconsistent. Now, the removal of every trace of the church’s postclassical past raised new questions: Should the altar be replaced? And what was to be put in its stead? An amateurish project, drawn up as a sketch plan with written notes, provides a possible solution (diagrammed in Fig. 11.5). The anonymous designer suggests occupying the empty exedra with the great porphyry urn that was a celebrated antiquity long associated with the Pantheon, documented as being located on the exterior since the Renaissance, and traditionally believed to have been Agrippa’s sarcophagus. Both the project23 and a contemporary chronicle24 reveal that the urn was proposed either as the base of the new main altar, for which it was to prove too high, or as part of a sculptural group depicting the Virgin at the moment of her assumption. These two rather different proposals would both have served the same purpose, placing within the exedra an ornament in keeping with the rest of the building, as well as recalling the Church’s definitive victory over the pagan world by the conversion of the urn to Christian use. Employing the urn to hold the remains of the holy martyrs, as specified in the chronicle, would have repeated the theme of the ritual adopted 12 centuries earlier to convert the entire Pantheon into a church.25

  11.5. On left: reconstruction of altar and related components predating the restorations of Clement XI (1700–1721), including the high altar and its pergula in the choir. (Scheme based on Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi P VII 9, f. 108). On right: the choir as described in an anonymous drawing of 1711, including choir and passage from the choir to the altar platform, a porphyry urn, a trench showing the original floor, the altar platform, an altar and altar step (predella), a bench for the clergy during solemn mass, and steps to the altar. (Based on Royal Library, Windsor Castle, Albani vol. n. 188, fol. 10636).

  The works actually carried out differed somewhat from the schemes inspired by pious Christian antiquarianism. The urn remained at the portico of the Pantheon until 1732, when it was taken to S. Giovanni in Laterano to be used as the sarcophagus of Pope Clement XII. The choir of Santa Maria ad martyres was not refurbished until 1724 when, following the deaths of both Orazio Albani (1713) and his brother Pope Clement XI (1721), the project passed into the hands of Del Giudice, now a cardinal. Drawings by Specchi are related to this late period, and the work proceeded as designed with some significant variations. They show the apse decorated with a new mosaic, and in it a rather traditional altar dedicated to the Virgin, surmounted by a baldachin presumably intended to recall the older ciborium. A program intended to enhance the church’s early Christian history was carried out only in the two aedicules to either side of the tribune, for these two altars were consecrated to Saints Erasius and Anastasius, whose relics had been rediscovered during the restoration project.26 The decision to place a statue by the artists Bernardino Cametti and Francesco Moderati in each of the two aedicules was dictated by the intent to evoke elements from the ancient temple. The two aedicules were supplied with new column shafts made of giallo antico marble, finely fluted to resemble the two ancient columns to either side of the main exedra. Between them, the new statues were intended to replace those of the ancient gods.

  Interior of the Dome and Attic: Work Carried Out during the Papacy of Benedict XIV

  The grandiose scheme envisaged for the Pantheon by Pope Alexander VII (1655–1667) was the first in modern times to call for the renovation of its vault. Some of the plans drawn up by the architect Carlo Fontana for the occasion show new ornaments decorating the bare coffers, and the oculus was to be closed by a glazed lantern. Work on the ceiling, which started in a segment of the inner surface, or intrados, was interrupted immediately after the pope’s death because, as the Senator of Rome stated, “the new ornaments deform the ancient monument instead of improving it.”27 The English architect James Gibbs (1682–1754), who had been a student of Fontana in Rome until 1708, mentions that the planned glazing of the oculus also met with similar resistance:

  There is another thing much wanted, and that is to put some sort of covering over the skylight, which would keep the rain and damps from discouloring the beautiful columns, linings of marble, and the fine paviment and likewise from rotting the pictures.... There can be no reason against it, unless it to be the folly of some whimsicall Antiquarys, who would finde fault with it, by saying, it would take away from the forme of its Antiquity, and make it looke too much like a modern building.28

  With the resumption of work on the building, now according to the program envisaged by Clement XI, the issue was raised again. In 1711, a literary magazine, the Giornale de’ Letterati, expressed the hope that with the marble cleaned, the pope would finally restore the dome to its “ancient splendour, obtained by adding some noble ornaments,” comparable to the gilded bronzes described by the ancient sources. Yet once the level of the first entablature had been reached, work petered out. Count de Caylus, during his 1716 visit to Rome, entered the building and noted the great dome still “toute noire”; Charles De Brosses in 1737 found it to be “a heavy dome made of rough stones.”29 Wh
en restoration was finally resumed in the mid eighteenth century, it was unrelated to these grandiose projects, and was motivated instead by a chance event. In May 1753, a huge piece of lead fell down from the interior of the dome onto the pavement. The lead, which had originally served to anchor the decorations in the coffers, probably broke away from the ancient concrete surface because of dampness or age-related wear and tear. Its weight would have been sufficient to kill a visitor had the church not been empty at the time. Orders were given for repairs to be undertaken without further delay.30

  In the absence of a major papal-sponsored project governing the restoration, the Pantheon lapsed into its usual condition: a building where many could claim rights, owing to the overlapping jurisdictions of the ancien régime. The ancient temple was under the jurisdiction of the Campidoglio, Rome’s local government;31 the operation of the church was the responsibility of the Canons of Santa Maria ad martyres; and some chapels, even after the overall reorganization under Clement XI, were still the property of confraternities. Nevertheless, after the incident of 1753, it was the exceptional scale of the project that determined who would be responsible for the urgent works needed. The representatives of the city government on the Campidoglio, whose right it was to carry them out, claimed to be incapable of even supplying an estimate of the expense involved. Only the Fabbrica di San Pietro that was overseeing the maintenance of St. Peter’s basilica possessed the necessary equipment – wooden scaffolding, ropes, and nails – and the technical skills required to restore the interior surface of the dome. In June 1755, the two leading master builders of the Fabbrica di San Pietro, Tommaso Albertini and Giovanni Corsini, signed an agreement to carry out the work requested for the sum of 600 scudi; in June of the following year, a second contract raised the figure to 1,670 scudi.32 We can assume that jurisdictional disputes took place during the intervening period, for the Campidoglio protested that the works were carried out crudely. As a result, and as a comparison of the estimated expenses shows, methods were then changed. But in response to the criticism, Cardinal Gerolamo Colonna, who was in charge of paying for the works and running the Fabbrica di San Pietro, took advantage of the occasion to eliminate all outside interference. He assigned the jurisdiction of the entire building, first informally and then in a papal bull of February–March 1756, to his office alone.33 From that moment on, the Pantheon was officially removed from the list of antiquities protected since the Middle Ages by the civic government of Rome, thus becoming a church like any other under the jurisdiction of the popes, at least as far as the administration of building works was concerned.