by Unknown
Santa Maria Rotonda from Outside
Before entering Santa Maria Rotonda, the medieval visitor would have observed a number of ancient statues in the piazza in front of its entrance hall. The Narracio de Mirabilibus Urbis Romae, written sometime during the thirteenth century by an otherwise unknown Magister Gregorius and related to the aforementioned Mirabilia Urbis Romae in that it also describes the topography and ancient monuments of Rome, is the earliest source to describe the following scenario: “It has a spacious portico, supported by many lofty columns, and in front of it remain to this day a basin and other wonderful porphyry vessels, as well as lions and other statues made of the same material.”44 Some of these statues seem to have been in place in front of the Pantheon from antiquity; others were probably added subsequently as spolia from ancient monuments.
Whereas the interior of the Pantheon was left basically untouched except for additions related to the accommodation of the altar, the exterior of the building underwent several important modifications over the course of time. Some of these were functional to the building itself, while others were less well intentioned, as in the case of the Byzantine emperor Constans II (641–668) who came to Rome on a pilgrimage in 663 and had the gilded bronze plates removed from the dome and shipped to Constantinople. This loss was to some extent compensated for in the eighth century when the roof of the cupola was lined with lead sheets.45 The spoliation of materials from the Pantheon is a reminder that its conversion to Christian purpose did not prevent its selective depredation.
Among the early embellishments added to the Christian building was a Latin cross set above the triangular gable surmounting the columned portico. According to a decree issued by Theodosius II in 435, this type of cross was to be erected in cases where a pagan cult building was being reused, as a means of exorcism. The cross of the Pantheon appears in a mural painting by Cimabue in the crossing vault of the choir in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi (Fig. 8.8). The fresco, which dates to the late 1270s, shows the upper part of Santa Maria Rotonda as it appeared prior to this date, since it omits the bell tower (campanile) set up in 1270 on top of the gable that was demolished during Urban VIII’s pontificate (1623–1644). The year of the erection of the bell tower is recorded in an inscription on a stone tablet, still visible within the Pantheon portico. It is reasonable to assume that the cross was mounted on top of the gabled roof immediately following the conversion, and was done not only to follow the aforementioned decree of 435 but also to advertise the new Christian use of the building. It was removed in the sixteenth century.46
8.8. Detail of the Pantheon in a fresco by Cimabue, Upper Church of Assisi. (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
In fantastical medieval descriptions of the edifice, Santa Maria Rotonda was, moreover, surmounted by the famous Pigna; a medieval legend recounted in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae tells us that the Pigna, a huge ancient bronze pine cone that once stood in the atrium of Old St. Peter’s and can now be admired in the Belvedere Court of the Vatican Museum, was placed on top of Santa Maria Rotonda.47 Probably in conjunction with the placement of the cross on the portico gable, alterations were also made to the portico. All that survives today of these medieval modifications, which were obliterated in the seventeenth century, are eight holes in the shafts of the columns, and traces of cuttings into the six column bases (Fig. 8.9). From this exiguous evidence, and supported by the visual traces found in several drawings and prints, Michael Viktor Schwartz has offered a convincing hypothesis. According to Schwartz’s reconstruction, walls rising to a height of nearly 4.5 meters were built between the columns through which one previously entered the Rotunda. The three central openings at the front, however, were left open and turned into a rather impressive portico framed on either side by door frames and topped by entablatures. All the elements seem to have been of marble. The central opening was further monumentalized by being slightly taller and crowned by not one but two lintels, possibly forming a classicizing entablature consisting of an architrave and a cornice with an elaborately carved frieze at the center (Fig. 8.10). If so, perhaps these elements were originally part of another ancient building in Rome, possibly a temple, and reused as spolia in Santa Maria Rotonda, a practice common in church building in Rome and elsewhere throughout the Middle Ages as mentioned previously.48
8.9. Columns and shafts. (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome)
8.10. Reconstruction drawing of medieval Pantheon facade based on elevation drawing of Antoine Desgodetz. (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome)
Comparisons with several surviving monuments may help us to further envisage the no-longer extant medieval portico of the Pantheon. In Rome itself, the original portico of the Lateran Baptistery built by Pope Sixtus III (432–440) consists of two central porphyry columns creating three intercolumniations (Fig. 8.11). The middle of these forms a central portal created by cutting away parts of the column bases and adding jambs and a crowning carved entablature. Flanking this portal are two adjacent ones that are lower, but again with jambs supporting carved lintels. In contrast to the Pantheon, however, these openings are each fitted with two door-like marble plates. Throughout, the materials utilized in the Baptistery are reused marble spolia from other buildings. Thus, though both the overall design and the construction method strongly recall the Pantheon, the uncertain dating of the Lateran portico to a500-year period between the middle of the fifth and the tenth centuries undermines any attempt to specify when the original Pantheon portico could have been modified or what its models were.49 Only by looking to Constantinople do we find a viable prototype for the Pantheon portico, that is, the portico of the Studios Church, which dates to the fifth century. Here, analogously to the Pantheon, three intercolumniations create a portico comprising a central doorway and two lateral ones enriched by door frames that cut through the column bases and support a lavish entablature inserted between the columns (Fig. 8.12). It also seems that the central intercolumniation once held door frames that were later removed.50 As argued by Schwartz, Constantinople thus seems to have furnished the inspiration for the type of portico introduced at the Pantheon, and could have already done so during Pope Boniface’s pontificate when the Pantheon assumed its official new function as a church.51 Besides the interior of the Rotunda itself, the modified portico is the only space that could have accommodated a sacristy, but this possibility remains hypothetical since no trace of such a sacristy survives. As we shall see, it is in fact questionable whether Santa Maria Rotonda needed a sacristy at all.
8.11. Porch of Lateran Baptistery. (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome)
8.12. Porch of Studios Church, Constantinople. (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC)
Although the change to the original portico was modest in scale and did not affect the exterior of the Rotunda, it transformed the aspect of the ancient building in one significant way: whereas previously visitors could choose to enter the portico through the intercolumniations on its three sides, they were now limited to one of the three central ones, with the middle of the three being most conspicuous due to its height and decoration. In other words, accompanied by the cross on top of the gable and the much later bell tower, the medieval entrance hall gave extra emphasis to the main axis of the Rotunda as originally established by the barrel-vaulted vestibule in front of the great door. The impressive bronze doors, indeed, have always provided the only truly magnificent access to the splendid interior.52
Santa Maria Rotonda in Ritual Life
We may well wonder what prompted Pope Boniface to convert an ancient circular building into a church in the first place. To respond to this question, we must consider the role played by Santa Maria Rotonda in the liturgical calendar of medieval Rome.
Almost as unusual as its design was the status that Santa Maria Rotonda held within the city’s ritual life. It was neither a presbytery chur
ch nor a diaconia (a church where food to the poor was distributed), and thus had neither a clergy nor a congregation of its own. Instead, it was made a stational church, that is, one in which the pope held services on certain feast days during the liturgical year rather than in his cathedral.53 The days on which the pope held station service in Santa Maria Rotonda were January 1, Easter Friday, and May 13 (consecration day).54 For these station services, the pope arrived in the Campus Martius as part of a solemn procession that included the entire clergy of the Lateran, other clerics, and laymen.
The station services, which were introduced in the fifth century and increased in number until the twelfth, are best understood as a means of decentralizing the papal liturgy in the Lateran to encompass the other more populated areas of the city. Stational churches were thus extensions of the pope’s cathedral. By the beginning of the seventh century, the most important stational churches of Rome included the five so-called patriarchal basilicas of Rome (S. Giovanni in Laterano, S. Pietro, S. Paolo fuori le mura, S. Maria Maggiore, S. Lorenzo fuori le mura) and, secondary to these, the churches of Santa Maria Rotonda, S. Croce in Gerusalemme, SS. Apostoli, and S. Stefano Rotondo.55
Around the year 1100, the stational liturgy in S. Maria Rotunda underwent a change. The station of January 1 was transferred to S. Maria in Trastevere and replaced by the Dominica de Rosa, a new station service that fell on the Sunday between Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost. The purpose of this Sunday was to announce the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. In the Pantheon, this event was visualized in a spectacular way: while the priest in his sermon announced the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the latter was symbolized by a multitude of roses that were dropped into the church from the top of the cupola. Whether or not the roses actually came down through the oculus, they certainly contributed significantly to the impression of a continuum between heaven and earth during this extraordinary happening.56
The decision to create the Pantheon as a stational church would have had several bases. First, the Campus Martius, after the decay of its public buildings, had slowly developed into one of Rome’s most densely populated districts, but had remained poor in terms of important church foundations. The conversion of the Pantheon, spacious and capable of accommodating the huge congregation that could be expected for a pontifical Mass, may thus be seen as a quick and efficacious way of giving the Roman Church a significant presence in one of the city’s most densely inhabited areas. As an extension of the pope’s cathedral at the Lateran, Santa Maria Rotonda brought the pope closer to the people of Rome. However, as a stational church, it was directly serviced by the papal administration, which meant that services were not held in the church on a regular basis. Thus, prior to the twelfth century, no priests or monks are recorded to have provided daily service in the church.57 This could also explain why the church may never have had a sacristy. In addition, the cupola’s huge open eye would have made regular service rather uncomfortable at times; aside from rain that kept the faithful from standing in the center of the church, the opening in the dome would have rendered the space both damp and chilly during the winter season. Clearly, as long as the open eye was not closed – which it never was – the Pantheon was not really a suitable building for daily services. Quite simply, it did not work as an ordinary church. But precisely because of the shortcomings entailed by its unique architectural form, Santa Maria Rotonda was all the more magnificent as a setting for the pope’s occasional appearances in the center of medieval Rome.
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL), ed. Matthaeus della Corte, vol. 6, Berlin 1970, p. 896; Kjeld de Fine Licht, The Rotunda in Rome: A Study of Hadrian’s Pantheon, Copenhagen 1968, p. 180.
2 Sextus Iulius Africanus, Cesti: the Extant Fragments, ed. Martin Wallraff, trans. William Adler, Berlin 2012, pp. 63–68; Licht 1968, pp. 183, 237–238.
3 Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum gestarum libri, fourth century AD, ed. J. C. Rolfe, Cambridge 1956, pp. 249–250; J. B. Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Urban Public Building in Northern and Central Italy, AD. 300–850, Oxford 1984, p. 39.
4 On the Christianization of Rome, see Richard Krautheimer, Rome – Profile of a City, 312–1308, Princeton 1980, pp. 33–58; Torgil Magnuson, The Urban Transformation of Medieval Rome, 312–1420, Stockholm 2004, pp. 51–64; Hugo Brandenburg, Ancient Churches of Rome from the Fourth to the Seventh Century, Turnhout 2005, pp. 16–36, 91–103.
5 Christian Hülsen, “Delle vicende del Pantheon nell’ultima età imperiale,” Bulletino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 54, 1927, pp. 64–66.
6 Magnuson 2004, pp. 64–67. On the urban transformation of early medieval Rome, see also Roberto Meneghini and Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, Roma nell’altomedioevo. Topografia e urbanistica della città dal V al X secolo, Rome 2004, and on the formidable display in the Crypta Balbi Museum just off Largo Argentina in the center of Rome, see Daniele Manacorda, Crypta Balbi. Archeologia e storia di un paesaggio urbano, Milan, 2001.
7 Licht 1968, p. 186.
8 Procopius of Caesarea, The Story of the Wars, “The Gothic War,” IV 22, 5–6, trans. H. B. Dewing, Cambridge 1924; repr. 2000, p. 5; Ward-Perkins 1984, p. 47.
9 William L. MacDonald, The Pantheon: Design, Meaning and Progeny. London 1976, repr. 2002, p. 18.
10 For summaries of the history of the Pantheon in the Middle Ages, see Christian Hülsen, Le Chiese di Roma nel medioevo, Florence 1927, p. 363; S. B. Platner, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, ed. Thomas Ashby, Oxford 1929, p. 385; Vittorio Bartoccetti, Santa Maria ad Martyres, Rome 1958; Ernest Nash, Bildlexikon zur Topographie des antiken Rom, Tübingen 1962, vol. 2, pp. 170–175; Licht 1968, pp. 237–240.
11 The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to AD 715, trans. Raymond Davis, Liverpool 1989, p. 62 (translation of Liber pontificalis, ed. Louis Duchesne, 3 vols.; vol. 1, Paris 1886; vol. 2, Paris 1892; vol. 3 ed. Cyrill Vogel, Paris 1957); Caecilia Davis-Weyer, “S. Stefano Rotondo in Rome and the Oratory of Theodore I,” Italian Church Decoration of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, ed. William Tronzo, Bologna, 1989, p. 62. On this source, see most recently Herman Geertman (ed.), Il Liber Pontificalis e la storia materiale, Assen 2003. The dedication is also mentioned by Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, trans. William Dudley, Philadelphia 1974, pp. 177–178, and repeated by John the Deacon, Chronicon Venetum, I, 21, ed. and trans. Luigi Andrea Berto, Bologna 1999. On Pope Boniface and the consecration of the Pantheon, see Mirella Colucci, Bonifacio IV (608–615): momenti e questioni di un pontificato, Rome 1976, pp. 25–37; see also Ferdinand Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, ed. Waldemar Kampf, 7 vols., Munich 1978; vol. 1, pp. 286–290.
12 Paul Godfrey and David Hemsoll, “The Pantheon: Temple or Rotunda?” Pagan Gods and Shrines of the Roman Empire, ed. Martin Henig et. al., Oxford 1986, pp. 195–209.
13 On the transformation of temples to churches in the Christian East and West, see Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, “Frühchristliche Kirchen in antiken Heiligtümern,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 54, 1939, pp. 105–136; Brandenburg 2005, pp. 233.
14 For the earliest source mentioning the dedication on a May 13, see Theodor Klauser, Das römische Capitulare Evangeliorum, 2nd ed. Münster 1972, p. 73; in favor of 613 are Herman Geertman, More Veterum. Il Liber Pontificalis e gli edifici ecclesiastici di Roma nella tarda antichità e nell’alto medioevo, Groningen 1975, p. 226, n. 135.1; Sible De Blaauw, “Das Pantheon als christlicher Tempel,” Bild und Formensprache der spätantiken Kunst. Hugo Brandenburg zum 65 Geburtstag, Münster 1994, pp. 13–26; however, he does call attention to the fact that the dedication did not necessarily have to happen on a Sunday.
15 Francesco Gandolfo, “Luoghi dei santi e luoghi die demoni: Il riuso dei templi nel Medioevo,” Santi e demoni nell’alto medioevo occidentale, 2 vols., Spoleto 1989; vol. 2, pp. 883–916. Martin Wallraff, “Pantheon und Allerheiligen,” Jahrbuch für Antik
e und Christentum, 47, 2004 (appeared 2006), pp. 128–143; for the column of Phocas, see Franz Alto Bauer, Stadt, Platz und Denkmal in der Spätantike, Mainz 1996, pp. 43–47. For Pope Boniface and Emperor Phocas, see Colucci 1976, pp. 77–87.
16 Pierre Jounel, Le culte des saints dans les basiliques du Latran et du Vatican au douzième siècle, Rome 1977, pp. 103–106; De Blaauw 1994b, p. 14; Wallraff 2004, pp. 139–140, relates the May 13 dedication date to the feast day of all martyrs in Syria.
17 Venerable Bede, “Chronica,” in Chronica Minora, ed. Theodor Mommsen, 3 vols., Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Berlin 1892–1898; vol. 3, pp. 309–310. Gandolfo 1989, p. 899; Tilmann Buddensieg, “Criticism and Praise of the Pantheon in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at Kings College, Cambridge, April 1969, ed. R. R. Bolgar, Cambridge 1971, pp. 259–267; Wallraff 2004, pp. 139–140.
18 Susanna Pasquali, Il Pantheon: architettura e antiquaria nel Settecento a Roma, Modena 1996, pp. 24–25; she attributes the story to Cardinal Cesare Baronio in 1586 on p. 215. See also Pietro Lazeri, Della consecrazione del Pantheon fatta da Bonifazio IV, Rome 1749, p. 24. On relic translations in early medieval Rome, see J. M. McCulloh, “From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Continuity and Change in Papal Relic Policy from the 6th to the 8th Century,” in E. Dassmann and K. Suso Frank, eds., Pietas: Festschrift für Bernhard Kötting, Münster 1980, pp. 313–324; Alan Thacker, “Rome of the Martyrs: Saints Cults and Relics, 4th–7th Century,” in Roma Felix: Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome, ed. Eamonn O’Carragain and Carol Neuman de Vegvar, Aldershot 2007, pp. 13–49.