by Unknown
10.9. Project for glazing the oculus of the Pantheon; ink and wash drawing from Bernini workshop. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi P VII, 9, fol. 114 r)
Evidently, the notion of glazing the oculus survived into the early eighteenth century, when James Gibbs claimed that “there can be no reason against it, unless it to be the folly of some whimsicall Antiquarys” and indeed the proposal resurfaced only to be rejected in 1758 (see Chapter Eleven). So far as the literature indicates, the oculus has remained open from antiquity to our day, still a surprising fact for visitors who arrive on a rainy day to discover the center of the pavement wet, slippery, and roped off for safety.
Alexander VII and Piazza della Rotonda
As in other aspects of the Pantheon’s history, there was a long background to seventeenth-century efforts to clear Piazza della Rotonda. Flavio Biondo’s De Roma instaurata, published by 1446, explains how Eugene IV (1431–1447; the book is dedicated to him) uprooted the “squalid little market stalls” in the portico and cleared the portico’s column bases of their accumulated filth “to better reveal the beauty of this wonderful building.”47 He probably also had the piazza paved. This in turn must have given rise to questions about jurisdiction over the piazza, for in 1442, during Eugene’s exile in Florence, Romans protested the execution of two citizens by papal authorities. Part of the protest involved ransacking Piazza della Rotonda and the portico when, according to the diarist Stefano Infessura, “all the roofs of Santa Maria Rotonda were destroyed, and the piazza was ruined, and afterwards, all the market stalls alongside the columns of the portico were demolished.”48 I take this to refer to the roofs of vendors in the portico, which are so prominent in Figures 1.7 and 9.1, and to the market stalls that were located on the piazza. These merchants paid rents to the Chapter of Santa Maria della Rotonda, and destroying their booths and stalls was a form of rebellion against religious authority. New ordinances to clean the piazza at least once a week and to restore the paving realized by Eugene IV were issued under Clement VII (1523–1534).49
The intersection of finances and jurisdictions often conspired to limit the power of successive popes to rid the Pantheon of the encroachments that weakened its structure and compromised its appearance. More than any other force, it was the Chapter of Santa Maria della Rotonda that insisted on the presence of the markets and vendors on the piazza, despite the goal of antiquarians to liberate the building of parasitic activities. Their vision is the one most often recorded in Renaissance drawings, which often indicate that commercial activities were fully accommodated within the portico (Arnold Nesselrath characterizes it as a kind of “covered market”), while the piazza was barren but for two Egyptian lions in granite and a massive porphyry urn. The lions were commandeered for the Moses Fountain in 1586, and the urn was first put under the portico and then incorporated in the Corsini Chapel in S. Giovanni in Laterano. In truth, the record over time suggests a battle between economically healthy squalor and a comely space barren of commerce.
A key step in the development of the piazza took place in 1575 when Della Porta constructed the fountain that still provides an ancillary focus of interest on the site. A measured plan made for Alexander VII illustrates how the fountain was situated with reference to the dimensions of the piazza, rather than to the axis of the Pantheon (Fig. 10.10. The fountain, which has never been moved, is located slightly to the west of the north–south axis of the Pantheon in order to conform more closely to the center of the space than to the Pantheon’s axis. Moreover, Della Porta rotated the axes of the fountain to be more closely aligned to the flanks of the piazza than to those of the portico. Some of these subtleties can be observed on the site: standing at the north side of Piazza della Rotonda and looking south, one sees that when the apex of the dome is aligned with the peak of the pediment, the fountain (and its eighteenth-century embellishments, including the obelisk) will appear offset to the west.50
10.10. Plan of Piazza della Rotonda with proposed changes on east border; anonymous drawing, ca. 1660. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi P VII 9, 106 r)
The explanation for this lack of congruence is clear from the drawing. The placement of the fountain responded more emphatically to the shape and dimensions of the piazza in 1575 than to the presence of the temple front. The columns of the portico were, after all, partially buried, and its pavement was some seven steps lower than the grade of the piazza at this time. In addition, before Urban VIII’s repairs, the east bay of the portico was walled up and cut off from the piazza. The two essential components of the urban tissue – temple and piazza – lay thus side by side without intimate connection. In a sense, the piazza had been lifted away from the Pantheon, which became a powerful but not commanding border to the urban space. Things might have been different. Urban VIII had dreamed, as had Eugene IV in the fifteenth century, of isolating the Pantheon from the buildings attached to it and clearing the piazza of the scourge of vendors, thus to unify the temple and the area that served as its forecourt in antiquity. But this was not to happen, not even partially, until the time of Alexander VII.51
Alexander’s vision for Rome is legendary, the stuff of scholarly books and rafts of articles. His ambitions at the Pantheon were no less impressive than at other sites and, in some senses, even more grand, but they did not always come to fruition. In 1661, for example, we have evidence of his dream to knock down the block of houses between Piazza della Rotonda and Piazza Maddalena in order to enlarge the piazza/forecourt to its ancient dimensions. Like Urban, Alexander knew this to be the northern extent of the ancient piazza from reports of excavations made for the church of the Maddalena in the 1630s, when large sections of paving were found to match the paving dug up directly in front of the Pantheon. By 1662, however, the plan to unify the piazza was abandoned, probably because it was too expensive.52 Nonetheless, Alexander did pursue the notion of grading the piazza to the ancient level.
This last project must have been tantalizing, but it too had to be scaled back. To bring the piazza down to its ancient level would have required reburying sewer lines; moreover, new sets of stairs would be necessary in front of every building around the piazza, and they would have intruded on the liberated space. Surrounding streets would have required stepped or ramped access points. For all of these reasons, the pope’s ambitions had to be reconsidered. Instead, he ordered the existing piazza to be graded progressively from north to south, so that the bases of the columns on the venerable front would finally be cleared and the full height of the facade revealed. That work was begun in 1662 and terminated only in 1666. Early in the course of this campaign, Alexander had hoped to clear and widen the streets to either side of the Pantheon, effectively liberating the building in a manner related to the ambitions of Eugene IV and Urban VIII, as mentioned. At one moment during the planning process, the road on the east (left), connected to the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, was to be flanked by porticoes (logge). The expense estimated for this operation, some 17,000 scudi, proved to be too great, however, and the enterprise was abandoned.53
Late in 1662, Alexander set plans in motion to restore the two missing columns on the east side of the portico. Replacement columns were found in pieces near the church of S. Luigi dei Francesi in 1662, but they were set in place only in 1667, using traditional techniques rather than the ancient procedure for piecing that was employed on other columns of the portico.54 Operations for the restoration of the portico were carried out between February and April 1667, a month before Alexander’s death. A drawing in the Chigi archives suggests that, initially, he envisioned restoring all three east-facing columns and refitting their capitals (Fig. 10.11). Even the corner capital (right in the drawing), with the Barberini bee, was to be replaced, perhaps in part to efface the distasteful recollection of Urban VIII’s activities here. When the work was finished, the bee capital remained in place although the two new columns adjoining it and the new entablature do bear the emblems from the Chigi escutcheon.55
10.11.
Study for the capitals and entablature to repair the east side of the Pantheon portico, with Chigi star and mounts; anonymous ink and wash drawing. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi P VII, 9, fol. 109 r)
Perhaps the most potent and intractable challenge to Alexander’s efforts in restoring the Piazza della Rotonda related to its function as a market. Alexander’s dealings with the vendors and with the Chapter of Santa Maria della Rotonda illustrate just how far a pope could or could not go to realize urban ambitions. The Chapter rented spaces in the portico and on the piazza to merchants, who in turn found the location exceptionally lucrative. How could Alexander dissuade the Chapter from exercising its perceived rights? How could he induce the vendors to ply their arts elsewhere? Alexander tried his best, but his efforts were destined to be thwarted. Here, in short order, is what occurred:
June 1656: vendor’s table removed from the porphyry sarcophagus.
March 1657: vendors’ booths confined by edict to travertine lines laid in the ground.
June 1657: papal orders for demolition of houses abutting the Pantheon.
January 1659; January 1661; June 1661: corresponding entries in Alexander’s diary, the last of which says, “For the third time let’s chase that flower seller from in front of the left column of the portico.”
October 1659: Alexander considers issuing a commemorative medal depicting la rotunda accomodata.
July 1662: booths and stalls were demolished at Piazza della Rotonda.
January 1663: new facilities for the vendors built at nearby Piazza di Pietra were torn down.
February 1663: new stalls and booths were laid out on Piazza della Rotonda.
March 1663: the new accommodations at Piazza della Rotonda were complete.56
Because the vendors in the portico and on the piazza produced rents for the Chapter of Santa Maria della Rotonda, the loss of this income became a point of contention. The idea of transferring the vendors en masse to the nearby Piazza di Pietra was mooted in 1662, but despite careful preparations to accommodate them there, they returned to Piazza della Rotonda by the end of the year.57 Opposed by the persistence of fruit, vegetable, and spice sellers, fish-mongers, butchers, and bakers, as well as the Chapter, the pope retreated. He ordered the construction of new booths and stalls in orderly fashion behind the fountain, as we see in a plan of 1663 (Fig. 10.12. Steps down into the porch are still shown here, and so the piazza had not yet been graded.)58
10.12. Plan of Piazza della Rotonda; drawing by Felice della Greca, 1663, with handwritten additions of 1704. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pantheon II.19, fasc. 3, fol. 688 r)
Yet another impediment to the liberation of the Pantheon from its urban context was the claim of the Chapter of Santa Maria della Rotonda to adjoining properties it used to house its canonry. In a sketch plan by Bernini, we see the architect experimenting with a location for rebuilding the Chapter house on either side of the portico (Fig. 10.13). We can also see that diagonal sightlines on the sides of the portico take into account the location of the fountain, for the lines converge where the fountain (not depicted) was located. As we recall, Della Porta had located the fountain to the west of the Pantheon’s principal axis, and this is why, despite the urge for regularity, Bernini feathered the lines on the west (right) side of the portico, as they oscillate between symmetry and reality, where the fountain is and where Bernini wanted it to be. The Chapter house was ultimately located on the east (left) side of the rotunda and behind the portico, as depicted in Bernini’s elevation sketch of the site, an elevation that not incidentally does not include the twin bell towers so often misattributed to him (Fig. 10.14). The Chapter house was rebuilt here between 1663 and 1665.
10.13. Sketch plan for the Pantheon and flanking streets; chalk drawing by Gianlorenzo Bernini, 1662 to early 1663. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi a.I.19, fol. 29 v)
10.14. Elevation project for the facade and flanking blocks; chalk drawing by Gianlorenzo Bernini, 1662 to early 1663. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi a.I.19, fol. 30 r)
In recounting the antiquarian interests stimulated by the Pantheon in the seventeenth century, we need to mention a last pair of drawings that record the musings of Alexander VII, likely in the presence of his favorite architect, Bernini. A sketch plan of the building and its immediate urban context, drawn in a somewhat shaky, thoroughly economical style, can be attributed to the pope on the basis of his characteristic handwriting (Fig. 10.15).The plan is undated, but at this stage the attached buildings will have been stripped from the rotunda and the Chapter house is designated where it was actually built on the east side of the portico. Dotted lines across the front of the portico indicate a desire to adjust the opening of the flanking streets onto the piazza in a symmetrical manner. Most interesting of all, Alexander drew the portico as a hexastyle front, rather than the octastyle front that we know it was. Could he have been thinking about reducing the number of columns across the front, possibly inspired by the missing columns on the east? We cannot be sure. What is interesting is that the pope shared the idea with Bernini, who responded with one of the most lyrical architectural drawings of his career, a rapid, shimmering vision of the Pantheon (Fig. 10.16). His temple stands isolated in space and time, a simultaneous evocation of interior and exterior shapes stripped to their essences. The Chapter house is reduced to a single horizontal roofline, the pediment ornamented only by imagined statuary, and the facade reduced, like Alexander VII’s, to a hexastyle front.
10.15. Hexastyle facade project in plan, with flanking streets; pen and ink drawing, hand of Alexander VII, 1662 to early 1663. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi M. VIII.60, fol. 168 r)
10.16. Hexastyle facade project; chalk drawing by Gianlorenzo Bernini, 1662 to early 1663. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi a.I.19, fol. 66 r)
What words were exchanged in this exercise of imagination and archaeology? What were these men thinking? Might the image of Palladio’s hexastyle Tempietto at Maser, which was patterned after the Pantheon, have intruded on their thoughts, as it surely did in the contemporary design for Bernini’s church at Ariccia?59 We may never know. Giovanni Battista Falda’s engraving of the site gives a good indication of what Alexander did achieve on the piazza: the terrain was graded smoothly from north to south, the stalls for vendors were reerected systematically behind the fountain, the columns of the portico were replaced, and a Chapter house was rebuilt behind the portico on the east side of the rotunda (Fig. 1.20).
The seventeenth-century history of the Pantheon is important because it reveals a good deal about antiquarian thinking at the time and because it helps to explain the way the monument and its urban context look today. Whereas the period 1400–1600 was critical for the study of the building, these centuries left relatively little that we find in today’s Pantheon. By contrast, as will be seen also in the following chapter, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left a record of many considerations and features that provoke fuller discussion of the Pantheon’s reception over time. Some of those projects and achievements gave form to concepts shared by popes in earlier times – Eugene IV, Nicholas V, and Innocent IX, for example – while others looked forward to works that were again mooted and occasionally carried out. There was the issue of the attic to grapple with, and so too the piazza. In the mid eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758) took in hand the definitive revision of the attic on the interior of the rotunda, hiring Paolo Posi to install the ornament that all visitors now see, its windows neatly aligned with the piers and the alcoves below them, and without any vertical elements that might interrupt a consistent vertical arrangement of decorative elements.
In 1733, Leone Pascoli proposed uniting Piazza della Rotonda and Piazza Maddalena, very much according to Alexander’s ambitions. The idea then came up a hundred years later under the administration of the Comte Camille De Tournon during the Napoleonic occupation in the first decade of the nineteenth century (see Fig. 1.21). Yet again, the first Master Plan of Rome of 18
73, after the unification of Italy, reflected the full extension of the piazza envisioned during the Chigi pontificate. After the death of Victor Emanuel II, first king of united Italy, the architect Pietro Comparini projected a huge “Monumento Nazionale al Re Vittorio Emanuele II” at the Pantheon in 1881 (see Fig. 1.24). It was to be highlighted by an equestrian statue of the king, in some ways uniting the idea and imagery of the Campidoglio with the Pantheon, thus molding imperial, royal, and civic ambitions into a single enterprise. Because nothing was done, the Pantheon and Piazza della Rotonda continued to be a charged canvas on which successive leaders hoped to leave a mark. In the Fascist era Armando Brasini (1879–1965) designed a “Foro Mussolini,” also borrowing heavily from earlier schemes, including Comparini’s (see Fig. 1.25). The vision included a commemorative statue of Il Duce and a sunken plateau to be surrounded by famous ancient statues borrowed from Rome’s best museums. Against these very public imperial pretensions, Alexander VII’s plan to install his name and family emblems around the oculus of the dome seems almost timid. Above all, the works and ambitions of Urban VIII and Alexander VII may serve to demonstrate why any number of far-reaching plans was unlikely to succeed with so many stakeholders to satisfy and so many interests to serve. Moving forward in time, the wonder is that anything at all was realized from the broad corpus of projects, plans, and proposals.
1 Frank G. Moore, “The Gilt Bronze Tiles of the Pantheon,” American Journal of Archaeology 3, 1899, pp. 40–43.
2 David Karmon, The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome, Oxford 2011, pp. 147–169, reviews the preservation history of the Pantheon with valuable bibliographic citations, including a reference to Sible De Blaauw, “Campane supra urbem,” Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia 47, 1993, pp. 367–414.