The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present Read online

  The leaders and supporters of these revolutions were themselves engaged in a human effort that, they believed, accorded with the very nature of the cosmic order. Hence, architects in both countries made recourse to the cosmic symbolism of the Pantheon for their government buildings. In Washington, DC, the American Capitol, though subject to the changing designs of successive architects, has always offered a version of a central rotunda on its skyline, originally modeled upon the Pantheon and then in the mid nineteenth century upon the successor domes to the Pantheon as found in St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London.34 This was a symbolic space, which the architect Benjamin Latrobe in 1806 had dubbed the “Hall of the People.”35

  In Paris, before a new government headquarters could be designed ex novo, there was an outpouring of projects, often for the site of the rapidly demolished Bastille prison, a symbol of prerevolutionary tyranny. These proposals to house the legislative branch of the government placed the chamber for deliberations and votes either under a coffered dome modeled after the Pantheon, as in projects by Boullée and Jean-Baptiste Lahure, or under a cosmic dome showing the globe or filled with stars, in one case showing the constellations as they had appeared on the night of July 14, 1789, the day of the storming of the Bastille as signaling the onset of the revolution.36 Under the Directory (1795–1799), the legislative hall for the Council of Five Hundred was retrofitted into previously existing royal palaces in Paris, first the Palais Bourbon and then the Luxembourg Palace, the latter serving successive revolutionary governments under the Consulate and the Empire. Each of these two assembly halls appropriated Gondoin’s half-Pantheon anatomy theater as model.37 Similarly, Benajmin Latrobe, between 1803 and 1812, arranged the meeting rooms in the U.S. Capitol for the House of Representatives and the Senate with variations of this half-Pantheon theme.38

  The new democratic societies had not only new forms of government but also new social institutions for which appropriately symbolic edifices were needed. Not surprisingly, since the American and French Revolutions arose from prerevolutionary Enlightenment ideals, many of these new social forms had already been proposed in previous years. Enlightenment meant goodwill to all human beings across the globe in opposition to tribal exclusiveness. Thus, in 1785, the architect Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer had designed a House for a Cosmopolitan whose exterior presented a star-studded cosmic sphere elevated off the ground and surrounded by a Doric colonnade carrying an entablature covered with the signs of the zodiac.39

  During the French Revolution, the notion of cosmopolitanism was readily conflated with that of equality. As J. P. L. Houël explained when proposing a monument to equality in the form of a globe floating above the clouds: “A globe ... is the most perfect emblem of equality.”40 This dramatic piece of public statuary followed upon comparable architectural designs, such as Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s revolutionary-era projects for a Temple to Equality and for a Temple of the Earth.41 The exterior of both projects – with an elevated sphere surrounded by a colonnade – was based on Vaudoyer’s House for a Cosmopolitan. Each of Lequeu’s edifices was to have an entrance covered by a carpenter’s level, the common revolutionary symbol for equality. The Temple to the Earth actually presented a globe of the Earth as the outside surface. Unlike Vaudoyer’s house, which had been furnished with rooms in the interior, Lequeu’s two designs maintained a spherical cavity within. One featured a globe in the center, supported on symbolic carpenter’s levels; another also had a globe, this time set upon a stubby columnar base, yet with the dome above punctured with holes to admit the twinkling light of “stars,” after the manner of Boullée’s previous design for the Cenotaph to Newton. In an accompanying note to the Temple of the Earth, Lequeu referred to “eternal equality,” leaving no doubt that he understood this principle to belong to the cosmic realm of natural law. The pediment over the entrance carries the inscription “To Supreme Wisdom,” a revolutionary term for Divinity.42 Either one or both of Lequeu’s spherical temple projects were associated with the competition of the Year II (1794) for a Temple to Equality in which various contestants used some variation of the Pantheon, the most literal by Crozier with its coffered dome and central oculus.43

  The democratic French government wished to honor its great citizens who had contributed the most to society. To this end, in 1791 it voted to convert the Neoclassical-style Church of Sainte-Geneviève, located on an eminence in Paris, near the Luxembourg Palace and gardens, into a Panthéon, named after the Roman Pantheon not only to designate its cosmic significance but also because the Roman edifice had been transformed to serve a similar function. As Susanna Pasquali explains in this volume, since the death of Raphael in 1520, artists had chosen to be buried in the Pantheon. Then, around 1780, busts of painters, sculptors, architects, and literati who had been inspired by Rome were placed in the Pantheon, thereby transforming it into a hallowed memorial for great men.44 The French adapted this model and added other professions as well, dedicating the French Panthéon to the French benefactors of humanity.

  This notion of bienfaisance had been a major value of the prerevolutionary Enlightenment era and had been subject to a variety of architectural projects, which had taken their inspiration from the monuments to British worthies in Westminster Abbey. As Voltaire had written, “I am convinced that the mere view of these glorious monuments has inspired more than one soul and has formed more than one great man.”45 Of particular significance to the history of the Pantheon in the modern era was the prerevolutionary notion of bestowing funerary honors in the cemetery according to merit rather than to wealth and social status. In 1765, just two months after the Parlement of Paris had ordered, albeit ineffectually, all cemeteries of the city closed by the end of the year, the Académie Royale d’Architecture sponsored a Prix d’émulation for a cenotaph to Henry IV, symbol of the exemplary ruler, where the “empty tomb of this prince would be surrounded by vast peripheral galleries for the tombs of the famous men who had made France illustrious.” Then, in 1766, Louis-Jean Desprez won a Prix d’émulation for a major Parisian parish cemetery conceived in the same spirit. The young architect dedicated his burial ground to Voltaire not only as a great writer but also as the champion of funerary honors accorded to merit, an ideal fully applied to the design itself.

  It is likely that the Pantheon-like interior chapels in cemetery designs from the Grand Prix of 1785, as well as those by Boullée discussed previously, had also been conceived according to this humanitarian and democratic ideal. The same is true of the cemetery projects from the Grand Prix of 1799; the program had called for an amphitheater where the merits of the deceased would be proclaimed as part of the ceremony honoring the worthy dead, whose monuments would encircle the central chapel. Recall that the various contestants had availed themselves of the Pantheon’s form, either as an exterior dome or sphere or as an interior room, often covered with stars.46

  The Public Museum

  Both the public museum and the public library are institutions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and once again the Pantheon served as a model for the central space of many of the most important of these new institutions. In place of the private collections and private libraries, which were signs of the wealth and learning of their owners, usually royal or noble, we find the idea of a public museum of art and of a public library, each the pride of a city or country, and each important for the education of its citizenry. Even the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment figured centrally in the thought of the reformers who called for such public institutions. In this vein, the eminent art historian Aloys Hirt petitioned Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III in a memorandum of 1798:

  May I be permitted to say that it is below the dignity of [ancient art] to be displayed as an ornament. [These works] are a heritage for the whole of mankind.... Only by making them public and uniting them in display can they become the object of true study, and every result obtained from this is a new gain for the common good of mankind.47

  The very concept of a
museum of art was new. Traditionally, private collections were gatherings of works of art along with objects from natural history, often valued for their rare or curious forms, a collection named after the room in which it was often kept, Kunstkammer in German or cabinet de curiosités in French. Dating from the sixteenth century onward, these collections received a dual impetus from the newfound interest in classical antiquities, known as the Renaissance, and from the exploration of the far reaches of the globe by the new colonial powers, where exotic examples of vegetable, animal, and mineral specimens were gathered and sent back to Europe.

  Yet even when paintings, for example, were kept together in the same room, they filled the wall, in the words of one scholar, “like pieces of a puzzle.” The idea of displaying art according to a temporal history of regional and national traditions only emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, apparently inspired by “the advent of new taxonomies in the study of natural history (especially the binomial genus/species classifications of Linnaeus and Buffon).”48 Indeed, the British Museum, which originated in 1753 by Act of Parliament, had its origins in the bequest of the private natural history collection and library of Sir Hans Sloane, to which were joined two collections of manuscripts, one already in the country’s possession since 1700. Opened to the public in 1759, the British Museum only began to purchase works of art, in the form of antiquities, in 1772. Housed originally in a seventeenth-century mansion, the museum received its own new building, designed to represent a public museum rather than a private residence, according to a design of 1832 by Sir Robert Smirke. Between 1854 and 1857, Smirke’s younger brother Sydney, who had succeeded him as the museum’s architect, constructed in the building’s courtyard a domed circular Reading Room for the British Museum Library, which has been considered a progeny of the Roman Pantheon.49

  In France, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea spread that the royal collection of art was actually a national treasure, which had to be shared with the people. Between 1750 and 1779, part of the king’s collection was placed on public display in Paris in the east wing of the Luxembourg Palace. During this time, it was widely believed that the Luxembourg Gallery was only a temporary measure before a grander museum would be opened in the Louvre Palace.50 In the same year that the Luxembourg Gallery was closed, a portrait of the king’s director general of royal buildings, Count d’Angiviller, was displayed at the Salon, which showed the count at a table with the floor plan of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, thereby indicating to the public that there was a project to create an even more extensive public museum in the king’s palace. “I know that His Majesty,” reported the count to the Académie Royale d’Architecture in 1785, “personally wants nothing short of perfection in the design of [this] national monument.”51

  Always attentive to the latest social and cultural developments, the Académie Royale d’Architecture sponsored design competitions not only for cemeteries but also for museums at critical moments in the history of such institutions. Thus, in 1753, shortly after the opening of the Luxembourg Gallery, it assigned to its students for the Grand Prix the problem of a gallery for the display of art, a type of room that conceivably would belong to a royal palace. The Grand Prix was awarded to Louis-François Trouard, who placed a coffered dome, as a miniature reminiscence of the Pantheon, at the center of the design.52 The subject for the Grand Prix in 1754 was a “salon” for the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Later, just as the Luxembourg Gallery closed, the Grand Prix of 1779 had as its subject a museum, which, in addition to rooms for the display of painting, sculpture, and architecture, would also house the sciences (notably geography), with their library, and natural history.53 The four winning designs each had a modestly sized Pantheon-like rotunda at the center of the edifice.54 In the designs of 1753 and 1779, this central Pantheon-like space was less a functional room than a temple dedicated to the noble concepts of art, culture, and science. This symbolic use of the Pantheon was codified in J.-N.-L. Durand’s Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique (1802–1805),55 which circulated widely throughout European and later American schools of architecture and was to echo throughout the subsequent history of museum design, all the way into the twentieth century with John Russell Pope’s National Gallery of Art (1937) in Washington, DC.

  In 1783, after the Treaty of Paris, which recognized the new American nation and settled peace between Great Britain and France, the French king promised a considerable sum of money for the new museum project in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre.56 At this time, Boullée offered his own design for a museum, which gave much greater prominence to the central rotunda than had any of the earlier student projects for the Grand Prix of 1753 and of 1779 or the prototypical museum based on these Grand Prix designs that Durand subsequently would publish in his Précis. Anticipating the Cenotaph to Newton of 1784, Boullée’s museum, with limited space for exhibitions, was primarily a giant Deist temple to Nature where, under the central dome, a pyramid of steps rose in the guise of a metaphorical Mount Parnassus, crowned with a “Temple of Fame” made of an honorific ring of columns carrying statues of the great men of France carved by France’s most eminent artists.57 The ceremonial and symbolic aspect of Boullée’s domed interior of the museum project was echoed in Charles Percier’s Grand Prix of 1786, whose subject was a modification of the Grand Prix of 1753, now redefined as a building to house the three academies of painting and sculpture, architecture, and letters. Whereas the nominal function of the central rotunda, with its Pantheon-like coffering and oculus, was an auditorium, its scale revealed its essentially symbolic character. In elevation, Percier’s edifice strongly resembled Boullée’s museum, as well as aspects of Boullée’s public library project of circa 1784, thereby further suggesting the influence of the older architect’s work.58

  Both Boullée’s museum project and Percier’s Grand Prix of 1786 for the assembled academies appear to have exerted a decisive influence on the greatest Pantheon-like museum of the entire modern period, Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes (Old) Museum (Fig. 13.8), so-called because a Neues (New) Museum was later built on the same Museum Island in Berlin.59 The essentially ceremonial and symbolic nature of Schinkel’s entrance porch and central rotunda was confirmed by Aloys Hirt’s objections to their nonutilitarian character.60 Shinkel’s facade, with its broad sweep of columns and its deep central entrance loggia enriched with a second row of columns, appears as a variation of Percier’s front facade for his academy design for the Grand Prix of 1786, which, in turn, is a variation on the facade of Boullée’s public library project of circa 1784. As Nikolaus Pevsner has observed, “the eighteen fluted ionic columns between the square angle piers are the noblest introduction to a temple of art.”61 As for the coffered rotunda of the Altes Museum, Shinkel, in his rebuttal to Hirt’s criticism, explained that he considered this “beautiful and sublime room” to be a “sanctuary,” thereby emphasizing its symbolic, temple-like character:

  Finally, so mighty a building as the Museum will certainly be, must have a worthy center. This must be the sanctuary, where the most precious objects are located.62

  13.8. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, Berlin, 1824–1830. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

  Schinkel’s commitment to the sanctuary-like quality of the rotunda prompted him, during construction, not to open the two side doors that had been envisaged on the plan, thereby “endeavor[ing] to isolate the ‘Pantheon’ more from the rest of the building.”63 Schinkel’s evocation of the Pantheon was direct, not only through the coffering of the dome and the oculus but also in the size of the central rotunda: one-half the Pantheon itself.64

  One can only speculate as to the effect that the publication of Percier’s Grand Prix of 1786 might have had on Schinkel, as well as the unpublished museum and public library projects by Boullée, drawings that Schinkel’s teacher and idol Friedrich Gilly might have seen during his trip through Europe in 1797–1799, with a
visit to Paris that had deep repercussions on the subsequent development of German Neoclassical architecture.65 Schinkel’s Altes Museum was, in part, designed to rival Leo von Klenze’s Glyptothek (1815–1830) in Munich so that the Prussians could have an art museum at least the equal to its much-admired Bavarian predecessor. The most important room in the Glyptothek was the coffered Pantheon-like rotunda, whose decoration and art, as von Klenze explained, was to “reflect the most beautiful era of the ancient world.”66

  Frank Lloyd Wright used the Pantheon as the prototype for a museum when he designed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to house a collection of “non-objective art” (Fig. 13.9). Conceived in 1944 but not constructed until after World War II in 1956–1959, the centralized exhibition space with skylight and spiraling ramp that provided uninterrupted passage throughout the entire gallery declared by means of its architecture that this was an entirely new and self-sufficient world of art. We have seen that Wright considered this edifice to be his Pantheon, a remark made to the supervising architect William H. Short.67 Yet credit should also be given to its patron in the person of Hilla Rebay, curator of New York’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting and of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which sponsored the new museum by Wright.68 Rebay not only selected Wright as the architect but also encouraged him to abandon his initial idea about a horizontal design in favor of a vertically oriented building that would impart a sense of spirituality. Asking Wright to abandon his interest in – “this crawling in wide extensions” – she encouraged the architect to combine horizontal and vertical, “a sensitiveness, that will not only spread horizontally, but also vertically, up to the infinite infinity of space.”69 Rebay, explains Neil Levine, “elaborated on her concept of a sanctuary for the spirit, imploring Wright to embody its ‘cosmic breath’ in his design: ‘With infinity and sacred depth create the dome of spirit: expression of the cosmic breath itself – bring light to light!’”70