by Unknown
9.14. Lead roof tile from the former cover of the cupola of the Pantheon. (Musei Vaticani, inv. 56231 and 56232. Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Like the original form of the tabernacles inside the Rotunda, the bronze roof trusses of the porch, removed and melted down under the Barberini Pope Urban VIII in 1625 and replaced by wooden ones,78 are known only from Renaissance depictions. In addition to the woodcuts in Sebastiano Serlio’s Third Book,79 originally issued in 1540, we have two even more precise illustrations of the lost roof trusses in their original state. A hitherto unidentified Portuguese artist, active around 1568–1570,80 and another anonymous draftsman, conventionally known as Hand F in the so-called Goldschmidt Scrapbook with French drawings of the later sixteenth century,81 provide two impressively comprehensive records of the Pantheon, studied in minute detail. The drawings include several surveys showing the rare antique construction with all its peculiarities (Fig. 9.15).82 All that remains of it is a bronze rivet formerly in the possession of the seventeenth-century antiquarian, collector, and biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori.83
9.15. Timbering in the portico of the Pantheon; anonymous French draftsman, late sixteenth century. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Goldschmidt Scrapbook, fols. 84 v–85 r. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY)
On the Interest in the History of the Pantheon during the Renaissance
In some sense, the frequency with which the interior of the Pantheon was remodeled and refurnished as a church could be construed as antithetical to the idealized descriptions and representations that Renaissance artists have left in their vedute, surveys, and drawings. Indeed, some of the same architects, sculptors, and painters who recorded or “reconstructed” the ancient building and the piazza in front of it also participated in or contributed to their remodeling during this period. Yet it becomes evident that reflections on the pagan building were combined with the consciousness of the Christian alterations made to it over time and that both came to bear on attempts to understand the Pantheon. Thus, an astonishingly differentiated knowledge of the building was obviously available in which both traditions – pagan and Christian – were analyzed.
On the basis of legends enshrined in the mirabilia tradition, around 1450–1453 the English pilgrim John Capgrave maintained that Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa dedicated the building as a votive monument to the goddess Cybele, the legendary mother of the gods in the Greco-Roman pantheon. After Cybele had appeared in a dream to Agrippa, the general and son-in-law of Augustus vowed that in the event of his conquest and victory over the Persians, he would build this temple. Capgrave was understandably impressed by the domed building and repeated the story that it had been vaulted without scaffolding over a mound of earth in which gold coins had been buried. The Roman population, having been promised that they could keep any coins they found in it, then eagerly removed the earth from the building after the dome had been completed.84 The Augustan tradition of the Pantheon, as transmitted through the Middle Ages, could easily be verified in the inscription commemorating Agrippa on the entablature above the portico. But it is especially remarkable that Capgrave was at least vaguely informed about the history of the building, or the one that had preceded it, for he also reports a dating of the Rotunda to the principate of the emperor Domitian, leaving the reader to determine the correct chronology.85 Capgrave ends his account by introducing the new dedication of the Pantheon as a church for all martyrs and saints whose feast day (All Saints Day) had been shifted from its original date of May 13 or 15 to November 1 because, he said, it was more appropriately celebrated with the blessing of the harvests in the autumn.86
Such legends,87 drawn from the local tradition, testify to the continuous fascination of the Pantheon, even for the inhabitants who lived around it. That was natural enough, for it was situated in the Campo Marzio, the main medieval residential quarter in Rome, which had shriveled in size following the decline and fall of the empire, the cutting of the aqueducts, and the abandonment of the hills of the city.88 Following their return from Avignon, the Popes and their city planners were aware of this urban situation and privileged it in their remodeling of the piazza and their embellishment of it with antiquities and statues, which we have already mentioned. Thus in 1444, Eugenius IV ordered the rearrangement of the two basalt lions, the large porphyry tub, and the round porphyry basin that had been sitting on the piazza in front of the Pantheon since the Middle Ages. Almost a century later, those ancient Roman pieces were again relocated as part of a new scheme for the piazza under Leo X.89 The antiquities led into the portico in front of the Rotunda; in this sense, both popes sought visibly to engage the Pantheon in a dialogue with the urban space in front of it and to present the ancient building in its public role.90
The various initiatives to restore and renovate the Pantheon since the Renaissance are thus expression of the evaluation and appreciation of its architectural mastery. The building’s new users could hardly resist that appeal, which may also have attracted them to the building in the first instance. But at the same time, it also inspired them to embark on their own remodeling of it. Raphael strikingly manifests this duality: He reconstructed the ancient state of the temple interior during his short visit to Rome in 150691 and later studied the Pantheon in greater detail, as shown by his one surviving autograph sheet now in London92 and by more copies in the Fossombrone book of drawings from his other now-lost surveys (Fig. 9.16 a and b).93 Yet after his archaeological studies and his distinctly scientific approach, Raphael commissioned the altar with the statue of the Madonna del Sasso to be erected over his tomb in his last will and testament in 1520. The form of the sculpture pays tribute to the pagan past, while its iconography contributes to the temple’s Christian use.
9.16 a and b. Pantheon studies; drawings by the Anonymous Foro Semproniensis(?). (Fossombrone, Italy, Biblioteca Civica Passionei, inv. Disegni vol. 3, fol. 14v–15r)
The decoration of the Pantheon cannot, therefore, be separated from the historical and theoretical analyses of the building, and each observer will differentiate among the elements according to his or her own particular artistic or intellectual ambition. The same can also be said of architectural adaptations that imply or even presuppose a theoretical reflection on the Pantheon. Such adaptations were rarely a recreation of the whole building, as was perhaps most impressively achieved in Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda outside of Vicenza. More often we see manifestations of the desire to replicate details that characterize the architectural system of antiquity. Here, for example, we may cite the corner solution for the Corinthian order, with its angled pilasters in the oblong alcoves, which Filippo Brunelleschi imitated in the Old Sacristy in S. Lorenzo, Florence (Figs. 9.17, 9.18). Bramante did the same in the upper Cortile del Belvedere.94 He again adopted the classical Corinthian order for the new St. Peter’s in Rome.95 In the impressive working drawing of the capitals made for the stonemasons of the new basilica96 we can still feel today, as 500 years ago, the power of inspiration transmitted by the commanding capitals of the Pantheon.
9.17. Capital from rectangular alcove of the Pantheon. (Marvin Trachtenberg, “Why the Pazzi Chapel Is Not by Brunelleschi,” in Casabella 60, 1996, pp. 58–77, Fig. 22; used with permission of the author)
9.18. Capital by Brunelleschi from the Pazzi Chapel, Florence, fifteenth century. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Instituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione)
The same act of transference can directly be grasped in the case of the entablature for S. Biagio alla Pagnotta, Rome. A drawing by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger documents explicitly the juxtaposition of Menicantonio’s study in the Pantheon, executed for Bramante, and Bramante’s own design for the church.97 In Raphael’s Chigi Chapel in S. Maria del Popolo, the appeal exerted by the Pantheon goes beyond the particular forms, as it is manifest even in the materials he employed: Raphael not only used marble incrustation on the walls of the chapel but also matched the distinctive thre
shold made of African marble in the Pantheon98 with a massive step hewn from the same stone for the entrance to his domed, centrally planned, chapel.
Even more than these drawings and similar artistic responses to the Pantheon, an episode recounted by Vasari in his vita of Andrea Sansovino gives a vivid insight into the different aspects discussed about the Pantheon in their day. According to Vasari, criticism soon began to circulate about the coffers of the barrel vault in the sacristy vestibule of S. Spirito in Florence with the coffers designed by Cronaca in 1492 while the vestibule had been built based on the plans of Giuliano da Sangallo since 1489; the criticism was aimed at the fact that the arrangement of the coffers was not aligned with the columns.99 Andrea Sansovino, who had sculpted the column capitals, had apparently justified the solution by explicitly citing Cronaca’s ancient prototype and referred to precedents in the Pantheon. Cronaca, Vasari reported, had adopted the method of the coffering in the Rotunda interior, “where the ribs that radiate from the oculus high in the center, from which that temple gets its light, serve to enclose the square, sunk panels containing the rosettes, which diminish little by little, as likewise do the ribs; and for that reason they do not fall in a straight line with the columns.”100
In this anecdote not only did Vasari demonstrate the sort of criticism to which architects were exposed and needed to defend against, but he also used the episode to explain the role played by the archaeological/art-historical and theoretical discussions of contemporaries. On the one hand, Vasari vividly described the intensity of the controversy by quoting the justification of one of the protagonists, Andrea Sansovino. On the other hand, he distanced himself from Andrea’s explanation by reporting Michelangelo’s hypothesis about the building history of the Pantheon that rebuts Sansovino’s interpretation. For, according to Vasari and other sources, Michelangelo believed that the Pantheon had been built by three architects, the first of whom carried it to the large cornice, the second continued from the cornice upward, and the third built the portico. This explanation accounted for the lack of alignment between the coffering and the vertical members below it. Thus, Vasari:
Nevertheless many craftsmen, and Michelangelo in particular, have been of the opinion that the Rotonda was built by three architects, of whom the first carried it as far as the cornice that is above the columns, and the second from the cornice upwards, the part, namely, that contains those windows of more graceful workmanship, for in truth this second part is very different in manner from the part below, since the vaulting was carried out without any relation between the coffering and the straight lines of what is below. The third is believed to have made the portico, which was a very rare work. And for these reasons the masters who practice this art at the present should not fall into such an error and then make excuses, as did Andrea.101
In sum, Michelangelo had made the same formal observation as Sansovino, but adopted an equally skeptical attitude with respect to the architecture of antiquity as the critics did to his contemporary architecture, explaining the peculiarities of the Pantheon in historical – that is, diachronic – terms. As Capgrave a half century earlier had been aware of the question of the preceding building, Michelangelo posed the possibility of changes in plan during the course of the Pantheon’s construction in antiquity. Such discussions are examples of the varying attitudes toward these questions. The theories and reflections about the Pantheon that still occupy modern research on the building were thus already being eagerly debated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.102 With methodologically quite similar approaches, observations were made throughout the centuries and inferences drawn from them, which led to the hypothesis – as controversial then as now – that more than one architect had designed the Pantheon.103
In surveys of the Pantheon, in the ground plan, elevation, and section, as well as in drawings of numerous details, architects and artists of the Renaissance often acquired precise knowledge of the building as a necessary premise to evaluate it. In order to achieve so comprehensive a grasp of details and the whole, as authoritatively displayed by Baldassare Peruzzi in his rendering in Ferrara (see Fig. 10.5) of a longitudinal section through the entire temple and portico, innumerable individual studies were required. He needed systematically to penetrate the architecture and to understand the principles that had inspired it.104 This becomes clear in the pilaster that he drew behind the door, where none actually exists and apparently as a correction, presumably because, according to his understanding of ancient architecture, he thought it was missing.105 Sometimes in the detailed surveys of the Renaissance, parts of the building that are no longer extant were recorded, and it is from such documents that we can reconstruct the marble incrustation of the vestibule.106
Ideal Versions of the Pantheon
Apart from theoretical approaches, historical analyses, and imitations of the building both as a whole and in detail, numerous artists and architects in the Renaissance found the Pantheon a challenge to their artistic and architectural invention. They could enter into creative dialogue with the building as a total organism, at least in their drawings, or might seek their own solutions to the task of building. Without anyone having commissioned them to do so, they created variations of the Pantheon theme. In the Addendum to his Turin Codex, for example, Francesco di Giorgio Martini altered the proportions and aligned the lower and upper order of the Pantheon with the ribs between the coffers of the dome (see Fig. 10.4).107 The steep, almost gothic, shapes in this drawing give rise to a distinctly Quattrocento variant of the Pantheon. Francesco di Giorgio established the overall architectural system by using a classical syntax but, in contrast to the ancient building, relocated all vertical elements that connect the stories in axial alignment. At the same time, he limited the polychrome marble incrustation to an intermediate zone between the two stories and dealt in his drawing only with a half section of the rear third of the rotunda. In these ways, he indirectly showed how conscious he was of the enormous complexity of the ancient solution.
A quite different claim was made by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, whose architectural understanding was orientated toward or based on a dogmatic canon. From countless in situ drawings he was familiar with the Pantheon down to precise details. No one perhaps has ever measured and drawn it so pedantically as he did. He took the ancient architect to task even for infinitesimal departures from the architectural theories of Vitruvius, down to the smallest unit of the minute, that is, down to less than 0.5 millemeters.108 Apart from his surveys of the building, drawn either in situ or worked up in his studio, there exist five sheets with proposals for improvements, culminating in a megalomaniacal but pettifogging scheme that made him raise the Pantheon on a podium of no fewer than 20 steps fronted by a portico packed with a forest of 36 columns. His elevation becomes entangled in a jumble of axes, alignments, and projecting entablatures. It is forced into the modules and ideological preconceptions of a procrustean set of rules. This group of five drawings is rightly interpreted as Antonio’s criticism of the ancient Pantheon.109 Of the inspired structure of the original building, developed from the circle and able to resolve any conflict of the architectural organism by the dynamic inherent in the curve, nothing is left. Sangallo’s central-plan building is a caricature of the Pantheon.110
Nor could Bernardo della Volpaia, who worked together with Antonio da Sangallo, resist the fascination of the Pantheon. In his so-called Codex Coner, among the most subtle surveys of ancient architecture, we find a section through the building in which the author tried all syntactic possibilities of the ancient architectural system in a single drawing (Fig. 9.19).111 The wall elevation runs evenly around the interior. The roughly rectangular and semicircular alcoves alternate in the opposing sequence on either side of the middle axis. Thus, Volpaia can show a section of both shapes in the foreground. In the ancient building, the aedicules articulate the rhythm of the wall, since those with segmental pediments flank the semicircular alcoves, while the triangular pedimented aedicules determine th
e ends of the sides in the semicircles of the complex organization of the Pantheon’s ground plan and elevation. Volpaia only alludes to the alternating aedicules by showing just one type on either side of the middle axis. Thanks to his skill in architectural representation, he manages to convey a systematic scheme of theme and variation that embraces consistency in rhythm.
9.19. Longitudinal section of the Pantheon; drawing by Bernardo della Volpaia. (London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, fol. 32 v)
In his complex representation, Volpaia combined an orthogonal section with a perspectival view from a raised viewpoint outside the building and tried to convey on one sheet all of the phenomena that occur in the Pantheon. He placed an alcove with a semicircular plan on the middle axis and to the right of it, intentionally deviating from the actual building, and added a rectangular alcove that is followed in turn by a portion of a semicircular alcove. To the left of the central axis, Volpaia reversed the sequence by depicting a semicircular alcove followed by a truncated portion of a rectangular alcove. These deviations from the symmetrical sequences of the actual building help to demonstrate the rhythmic complexity of the ensemble. At the same time, he maintained the counterpoint that underlies the elevation system of the Pantheon interior, carrying it horizontally rather than vertically through the building. Thus, he introduced a symmetrical juxtaposition of the two types of the aedicules, two with segmental gables to the left, two with triangular gables to the right. Omitting the entrance niche and the main apse of the ancient temple, he generated the impression that he overcame a discordant note that many contemporaries had recognized and criticized.112 The creation of his drawing conjures up an ideal Pantheon, a sanctuary in which no human could disturb the deity – or the architecture – because no one could gain access to a space that lacks a door.