To be an architect in concrete required creative organization and timing far beyond those needed for building in cut stone. For stones could be cut to size in advance, set aside, and then fitted as needed. But precisely because concrete was formless it was more demanding, taking shape only as it was put in place. At some stages one layer of concrete had to be fully dried before another was put on, at other points the layers were to be merged. At still others, like the top horizontal circles of the dome, the concrete had to be still tacky to take the rings of tiles around the oculus. The disciplined gangs of labor in Rome were put to good use. Scores of workmen were timed to arrive at the point where the mortar had dried, while others were climbing up and down ramps to deliver the concrete and the supporting bricks. Some manipulated cranes, and still others clambered up the inner wooden scaffolding, ready to fit facings of marble or trims of bronze.
Once the forest of timbers was removed, the visitor felt himself in a man-made cosmos. When the sun, “the eye of Zeus,” streamed through the oculus at the crest of the dome the whole building became a planetarium. Some called the effect of this heavenly light in the man-made cosmos an “epiphany”—a sudden manifestation of an otherworldly being. “Pantheon” meant temple of all the gods (templum deorum omnium). “Perhaps it has this name,” the historian Dio Cassius (155?–post 230) observed a century later, “because it received among the images which decorated it the statues of many gods, including Mars and Venus; but my own opinion of the name is that because of its dome the Pantheon resembles the heavens.” Religious and imperial symbolism combined, for the Roman dominions were as extensive as the heavens, which were both the habitat of the gods and “the canopy of empire.” Only a temple of all the gods could celebrate a state that encompassed the world, and Romans called their Pantheon the temple of the world.
It still carried this message a millennium later. Stendhal found it the very embodiment of the sublime. Shelley, while confessing his “propensity to admire,” reported his impressions on March 23, 1819:
The effect of the Pantheon is totally the reverse of that of St. Peter’s. Though not a fourth part of the size, it is, as it were, the visible image of the universe; in the perfection of its proportions, as when you regard the unmeasured dome of heaven, the idea of magnitude is swallowed up and lost. It is open to the sky, and its wide dome is lighted by the ever-changing illumination of the air. The clouds of noon fly over it, and at night the keen stars are seen through the azure darkness, hanging immoveably, or driving after the driving moon among the clouds. We visited it by moonlight.…
While the Pantheon remains wondrously intact in its domed perfection, it has suffered minor pillages. The Pantheon we see today is not all that Hadrian dedicated in 128. The building was originally fronted by an extensive rectangular columned forecourt as long as the Pantheon itself. Some modern visitors have been disturbed by the present angular pedimented porch. But a circular building needed a clear signal of its entrance. This the Grecophile Hadrian supplied by a conventional form that might have satisfied Vitruvius, and may even have been built to his textbook specifications. But after this obeisance to tradition, Hadrian made his own radical advance. The first Pantheon, by Agrippa (c.25 B.C.), had been noted for its caryatids in the familiar Greek orders. Hadrian moved on to the dome. And the same subtle relations between the square, the circle, and the human figure, which Vitruvius had explained, were embodied in the Pantheon rotunda. It was these Vitruvian proportions that Leonardo da Vinci would celebrate. The dome rises from a wall above the paving exactly equal to its own height. In the vertical section the rotunda is half a circle inscribed in the upper half of a square. And the radius of the dome appears to be the same as the interior height of the cylinder.
The preservation of the Pantheon, despite the anti-pagan enthusiasms of the early Middle Ages, was itself a miracle. It was luckily still standing in 608, when Emperor Phocas in Constantinople allowed Pope Boniface IV to consecrate it as a church “after the pagan filth was removed … so that the commemoration of the saints would take place henceforth where not gods but demons were formerly worshipped.” For the five intervening centuries, while the surrounding buildings fell into ruin, the Pantheon had survived. Its metal fittings tempted robbers. The Byzantine emperor Constans II visited Rome long enough to take away its gilded bronze roof tiles, of which he was promptly robbed by Arab pirates off Sicily. The popes tried to improve the structure by adding towers to the front. The belligerent and profligate Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644; pope, 1632–1644) of the aristocratic Barberini family of Florence, the ally of Richelieu—and who first supported, then condemned, Galileo—was an architectural enthusiast. Patron of Bernini, he adored the Pantheon. In 1632 he inscribed on the back of the porch, “Pantheon, the most celebrated edifice in the whole world” (Pantheon aedificium toto terrarum orbe celeberrium). Then he proceeded to strip off the bronze from the roof beams of the Pantheon porch for one of his own projects. “What was not done by the barbarians,” the Roman wits quipped, “was done by the Barberinis” (Quod non fecerunt barberi, fecerunt Barberini). The Pantheon metal appears to have been used to cast eighty cannon to be emplaced on the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the colossal circular stone mausoleum that Hadrian had built for himself. Urban VIII argued that it was better to use the metal to defend the Holy See than simply to keep rain off the Pantheon porch. Still somehow the Pantheon has managed to retain its original bronze doors.
Despite minor desecrations, the Pantheon has remained the grand symbol of a new age in architecture. Until the twentieth century it was reputed to be the largest dome ever built (141 feet in diameter). While Hadrian left a bold mark on the architecture of Rome and the West, he was curiously reluctant to leave his name. Having rebuilt Agrippa’s Pantheon, instead of inscribing his own name, he misled historians by restoring Agrippa’s original inscription, “Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, three times consul, built this” (M. AGRIPPA, L.F. COS. TERTIUM fecit). But the dated bricks leave no doubt that the Pantheon was built between 118 and 128, under Hadrian. Probably it was less modesty than willfulness that made him refuse to sign the greatest architectural monument of the age. No wonder the ancients found him a baffling character—“niggardly and generous, deceitful and straightforward, cruel and merciful, and always in all things changeable.” In 1520 the artist Raphael (1483–1520) chose to be buried there. In the nineteenth century, it became the tomb of the first two kings of the new Italian nation.
One of the versatile Hadrian’s most memorable creations was the plaintive verse he wrote on his deathbed:
Animula vagula blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula,
Nec ut soles dabis iocos. Ad animam suam
(Little soul, wandering gentle guest and companion of the
body, into what places will you now go, pale, stiff, and
naked, no longer sporting as you did!)
And Hadrian did create a grand resting place for his body. His mausoleum, employed as the core of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, begun in 135, three years before his death, remains even more conspicuous and more familiar to the tourist than the Pantheon. Mausoleums were usually round, and this too was a rotunda, a vast stone drum faced with marble and surrounded by statues. On top in the middle was a roof garden in the Babylonian style. He made it rotund to imitate the tomb of his idol Augustus, but far exceeded it in magnificence. This was also a final monument to the departed architecture of mass, for it had no significant interior, only a burial chamber. It would provide the setting for the tragic last act of Puccini’s Tosca. And the future of Western public architecture lay in the fertile afterlife of the Pantheon.
15
The Great Church
CHRISTIANITY created its own reasons for transforming architecture. In the Greek and Roman cults, which Christianity would displace, the temple was the dwelling of the god. Athena’s statue was housed in the cella, the inmost chamber of
the Parthenon, to which only the priests had access. The public offered devotions on an altar outside, and in games, horse races, or musical contests, climaxing every year in a festive Panathenaean procession. In Christianity the temple became a church, a place of indoor assembly. It took its name from the Greek word for assembly, ekklesia (from which derives “ecclesiastical”), which could mean either the building or the community gathered within.
The Christian church followed the tradition of the Jewish synagogue, which also was an assembly hall. “Synagogue,” for the Jews’ ancient gathering place, a place of worship and study, came from the Greek word “to bring together” (synagein). But in the long run church architecture would owe less to the synagogue than to Roman public buildings. The Roman basilica, as we have seen, with its large rectangular interior, designed for baths or law courts, was well suited for Christian assembly, prayer, and liturgy. The apse at one end, with its raised platform where the judges sat, was easily adapted for the altar on which all could see the priest perform the Mass. The needs of Christian liturgy were not well served by the classic Greek architecture of post and beam, of masses ornamented to impress the viewer on the outside. Still, some early Christian churches (such as San Paolo in Rome) were of post-and-beam construction with trussed wood roofs. Christian churches needed large interior spaces. And they would be served, too, by heaven-shaped ceilings, arches, and domes emphasizing the common upreach of the praying congregants to another world. But vaults and domes did not appear in Western churches before the sixth century.
The dome, which Roman concrete had made possible, gave a new grandeur to the aspiring interior. Still, the diameter of even so grand a dome as the Pantheon was not ample enough for the thousands of Christian worshipers expected to assemble for pomp and prayer, nor was it suited for the Christian liturgy. There had to be another idea. But the Pantheon had left an indelible mark on architecture. And for eighteen hundred years the Pantheon motif, a high domed rotunda behind a templelike entrance, would reappear across the West, and outlive changing styles—Renaissance, baroque, rococo, modern. A domed rotunda of stone was built by Roman legionnaires in remote Scotland, a Pantheon-like mausoleum for Diocletian arose at Split in Yugoslavia, and the first Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem was said to be on a similar plan. Countless early Christian churches still remind us of the Pantheon. The greatest Renaissance architects modeled their work on this building that they called Santa Maria Rotonda, “Round Saint Mary.” The Pantheon was reincarnated again and again and in delightful variants by Palladio and his disciples and imitators on the English countryside. No architectural design after classic Greece had so widespread, so versatile, and so enduring a power.
In his long reign Emperor Justinian (483–565; reigned 527–565) made the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake, and celebrated the climax of ancient Roman Christianity. He restored the fabric of empire across Africa, Spain, and Italy with his phenomenal generals Belisarius and Narses, and rebuilt the Eastern capital at Constantinople. His lasting monument was the Great Church.
But in the cultural panorama of the West, Justinian, the emperor of grand Christian hopes, has received less than his due. Byzantium survives only in our peripheral vision. Which is unfortunate, because Byzantium’s very location on the eastern edges of the Roman Empire was a Fertile Verge where Roman ways met the novel and exotic. Justinian’s enduring work bridged time and space, this world and the next, the sacred and the secular. His career revealed the social mobility in the Eastern Empire of this period and showed that, with enough luck, the career was open to talents, even onto the imperial throne. Born Petrus Sabbatius to an obscure peasant family in a village in what became Yugoslavia, he was lucky in his uncle, the able and ambitious Justin, who had gone to Constantinople and risen in the army of the emperor. Young Petrus Sabbatius (later known as Justinian) must have been about eight when his uncle sent for him and catapulted him into the high life of the capital. Justin himself had little education, and was said to need a wooden stencil to sign his name. But he provided his nephew with a solid education in Greek and Latin, and had him trained for a military career. When the aging Justin (452–527) became emperor in 518 he made Justinian his chief counselor, then his co-emperor in 527, a few months before his death. And when Justinian became emperor in his own right, he had the grandiose hope to reunify the Empire and give a new unity to Christendom.
Much of what Justinian created came from his orderly, organizing mind and his ambitious, if volatile, imagination. Inspired by the power of ideas, he fancied himself a theologian, but his great talent was as a lawmaker. When he became emperor in 527, the institutions of Roman law were a disordered inheritance. To codify and clarify Roman law and make it teachable he found a talented lawyer, Tribonian (died 545), who shared his passion for legal order and possessed the necessary technical knowledge and experience. Six years’ labor by Tribonian and the sixteen lawyers on his commission produced the most influential secular codification in history. Justinian hoped “with the help of Almighty God … to cut short the prolixity of lawsuits by pruning the multitude of enactments.” Justinian’s Code (Codex, 529) provided a definitive selection of imperial enactments, and copies were sent to all the provinces.
In addition, the prodigious Digest (533) had the Utopian purpose of permanently reducing the number of legal opinions. The commission had examined two thousand books by reputable lawyers, and reduced them to one twentieth their bulk by selecting only items of enduring value. Their new elementary textbook, the Institutes, had the force of law. And the emperor optimistically forbade commentaries. Greek was the language of most citizens of Constantinople, but the commission’s product was in Latin, Justinian’s native language. The Corpus Juris Civilis, as the whole codifying work came to be called, had no effective competition in the West for thirteen hundred years, and the Roman Empire survived in Justinian’s Byzantine legal incarnation.
As we shall see, this inheritance might not have become ours had Justinian never married the bewitching demimondaine, Theodora, one of three daughters of a bear keeper in the Hippodrome in Constantinople. The child Theodora began as a stagehand for her elder sister, who, according to Procopius, “was already one of the most popular harlots of the day.… As soon as she was old enough and fully developed, she joined the women on the stage and promptly became a courtesan, of the type our ancestors called ‘the dregs of the army.’ ” Her sexual energy became a byword. “Often she would go to a bring-your-own-food dinner-party with ten young men or more, all at the peak of their physical powers and with fornication as their chief object in life, and would lie with all her fellow-diners in turn the whole night long: when she had reduced them all to a state of exhaustion she would go to their menials, as many as thirty on occasions, and copulate with every one of them; but not even so could she satisfy her lust.” Who would have predicted that she would become an emperor’s faithful wife, a passionate Christian theologian, and the most powerful empress in the history of the Roman Empire?
Suddenly and unaccountably, Theodora abandoned her lascivious ways, settled in a modest house near the palace, and earned her living by spinning wool. Attracted by Theodora’s beauty, wit, intelligence, and youth, Justinian determined to marry her, and persuaded his uncle, Emperor Justin, to raise Theodora to the rank of patrician. Roman law still forbade any senator to marry an actress, and his straitlaced aunt, Empress Euphemia, would not tolerate a harlot in the palace. But when Euphemia died, Justinian was free to marry Theodora in 525, which he did. He then had her crowned Augusta, which gave her some title to divinity, and for the rest of her life she shared the imperial power.
Since there were no political parties in Constantinople, frustrated political passions were expressed in the sports arena. The Hippodrome of Constantinople—about two thousand by six hundred feet—which became the model of modern circuses, had been completed by Constantine in 330, and was the largest of the ancient world. The Hippodrome took its name from the fact that it was designed
for horse racing, but it was also a place for entertaining the populace with the death struggles of men and beasts. When Justinian came to the throne in 527, the passions of the Blues and the Greens in the Hippodrome were running high. Justinian identified with the Blues, who years before had befriended Theodora and her sisters when their bear-keeper father had died. Rival toughs of both parties united against Justinian’s reforms under the name of Nika (Victory). Assembled in the Hippodrome, they demanded that Justinian dismiss his ministers, and Justinian hastily agreed.
The irresolute Justinian prepared to flee. But the iron-willed Theodora persuaded him to stay and turn his general Belisarius on the mob in the Hippodrome. Some thirty thousand were massacred, but not before much of Constantinople was burned to the ground. Justinian and Theodora remained in power, which made possible their monuments for posterity.
Once again catastrophe was a catalyst to creativity. Like the burning of Rome five centuries before, which gave Nero his opportunity, the Nika holocaust of Constantinople in 532 gave Justinian his invitation.
The church that Constantine had built on the foundations of a pagan temple in 325 had been destroyed by fire in 415 and again rebuilt, only to be demolished by the Nika. “So the whole church at the time lay a charred mass of ruins,” Procopius explained. “But the emperor Justinian built not long afterwards a church so finely shaped that if anyone had enquired of the Christians before the burning if it would be their wish that the church should be destroyed and one like this should take its place, showing them some sort of model of the building we now see, it seems to me that they would have prayed that they might see their church destroyed forthwith, in order that the building might be converted into its present form.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 18