The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present

by Unknown

  During this transition, which was to culminate with the exclusion of the superintendent of antiquities, Ridolfino Venuti, works were unexpectedly extended to include operations for which no estimates had been previously carried out. In the course of 1756, after the completion of repairs on the ceiling, executed by making use of a spectacular mobile scaffold fixed to the oculus (Fig. 11.6), the attic also underwent restoration. The first step probably involved an attempt to remove all marble veneer in order to fix the fragile pieces on bigger slabs before remounting them at their original place, a procedure successfully employed by Specchi a few decades earlier for the restoration of the lower walls of the rotunda. However, this approach failed, and most of the marble slabs of the attic, already badly damaged, crumbled irremediably when removed.34 Thus, as it seemed too difficult to remount the original marbles, it was further decided to remove all of the ancient veneer. Little is known about what happened to these original marble and porphyry pieces. A last mention of them describes the pieces left in heaps in front of the portico ready to be taken away.35 Only the most recognizable parts, such as the 64 capitals crowning the pilasters, left a more durable memory. By September 1779, most of them were documented in the property of someone in Rome, possibly a master mason. However, when the then–superintendent of antiquities, Giovan Battista Visconti, tried to secure them for the newly established Vatican Museums, they swiftly vanished in the meanders of the antiquarian market. They disappeared from Rome, only to reappear a few years later in prominent antique collections in London, Potsdam, and elsewhere in Europe.36

  11.6. Mobile scaffolding invented and realized in 1756 by Tommaso Giovanni Corsini to restore the interior of the Pantheon dome. (Piranesi 1790, Figs. I–II of Plate XXIX)

  Was the complete destruction of the attic a deliberate act or the result of a succession of improvident decisions? The contracts drawn up with the master builders specify that the final color of the repaired dome was to match the color of the only section already restored by order of Alexander VII (Fig. 11.7). Yet upon the completion of works in 1756, the ceiling had been rendered uniformly white with “two or three layers of whitewash” (due o tre mani di calce).37 It is then possible that the new brightness of the whitened dome, paired with the gleaming marbles of the walls, as restored under Clement XI up to the first entablature, contrasted too starkly with the attic. Perhaps the desire to lessen the contrast led to the unexpected extension of the restoration program. In any case, Fontana’s documents showed that by 1666–1667, extensive areas of the original marble and porphyry were already missing, and that the sections replaced with painted stucco, as accurately documented in Pannini’s paintings in the eighteenth century, were already in a poor state.38 Moreover, the attic was universally believed to date from well after the Augustan Age, when the existing Pantheon was supposed to have been built. An accurate restoration of this section of the rotunda may have been thought a waste of time and money, both by Cardinal Colonna, who was in charge of works, and by Antonio Baldani, a protégé of Cardinal Alesandro Albani who, as canon of the church of Santa Maria ad martyres, had assumed the unofficial role of antiquarian in guiding the enterprise.39

  11.7. Detail of Figure 11.1 showing traces of decoration in the interior of the dome that were added by Carlo Fontana’s workshop during the reign of Alexander VII, 1655–1667. (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, inv. 4694)

  The demolition of the attic revetment marked the beginning of a new phase of work. For the second time in a matter of decades, works undertaken in the interior of the Pantheon had created a void that needed to be filled, just as was the case when the old high altar was demolished. Moreover, while Clement XI’s campaign had involved the replacement of the medieval ciborium that was thought to clash with the original antique setting, the detachment of the marble veneer again affected a part of the fabric as it had been universally known for centuries. In order to conceal the now-bare masonry cylinder between the first and second entablature, an effort would be made to coordinate all vertical alignments by creating a new architectural scheme. For this historic task the Vatican overseers proposed a rather ordinary solution: they summarily awarded responsibility for the design to the committee’s chief architect, the Sienese Paolo Posi (1708–1776), who was mainly distinguished for his personal attachment to Cardinal Gerolamo Colonna.40

  During the early months of 1757, Posi proposed various projects documented in two presentation drawings (one seen in Fig. 11.8)41 and a medal struck for the occasion (Fig. 11.9).42 All of the designs are distinguished by their reliance on the antiquarian tradition of the immediate past, consistent with Fontana’s reconstructions of the Pantheon. The attic windows were transformed into niches housing statues, while their frames were surmounted by pediments. In the definitive design (Fig. 11.10),43 the window frames were lengthened to create niches evoking the same features in the aedicules below, at the expense of the ancient porphyry band above the first entablature. Their shape, far from being directly inspired by ancient examples, was simply drawn from Fontana’s “Augustan Pantheon”(Fig. 11.2) and therefore reflect the proclivities of the late seventeenth century rather than an ancient model. Seventeenth-century tradition is also evident in one of the architect’s proposed schemes (Fig. 11.9), where a richer ornamentation was presented, especially evident in the arch of the main exedra, which is surmounted by a huge cartouche held by two reclining figures.

  11.8. Design proposal for Pantheon attic; drawing by Paolo Posi, ca. 1757. (Archivio di Stato di Torino, Archivio Castelli Berroni, cart. 5, fasc. 109)

  11.9. Commemorative medal by O. Hamerani, officially represented in 1757, showing proposed attic design by Paolo Posi. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Gabinetto numismatico)

  11.10. Posi’s attic design. (Represented in Visentini 1771, p. 20)

  The design of the attic as finally realized is simpler than any of the projects initially proposed by Posi. Once he had determined the limited potential of a solution obtained by adding engaged columns corresponding to the columns and pilasters below (Fig. 11.8), he abandoned any further attempt at creating vertical alignments and restricted the ornament to squared panels. As a result, all of the parts long considered critical to the character of the composition, such as the intersection of the attic with the arches of the entrance and main exedra, were sacrificed to the decision to avoid difficulties rather than thoroughly resolve them in a manner reflecting the building as inherited. This strategy, possibly motivated by the need to curtail expenses or the duration of the work, was to have other consequences. The new attic was realized in painted stucco, even though Posi himself installed large amounts of fine marble veneer in the Museo Sacro in the Vatican for Cardinal Colonna during the same years. The statues that were to have been housed in the niches were replaced by less expensive grisaille paintings in trompe l’oeil, which soon deteriorated. Extant documentation suggests that the attic as seen today was the result of compromises in design resulting from the desire to create an architecture relying on the authority of Carlo Fontana’s reconstruction but addressing the contradiction in formal logic so often noted in the attic register.

  Criticisms Whispered in Rome and Proclaimed Abroad

  Pope Benedict XIV fell seriously ill in the spring of 1756 and died two years later without having recovered his health. The accession of Clement XIII Rezzonico did not lead to any changes in the progress of the work, which remained under Posi and Cardinal Colonna’s charge. In 1758, a proposal to glaze the oculus was rejected,44 and all masonry work was completed. Finally, in 1759, repairs began on the large bronze doors that had collapsed while being taken down two years earlier, killing the unlucky master mason Corsini. Neither of the two popes paid an official visit to inspect the works, nor was any special ceremony organized to mark the reopening of the church for worship. There may have been little to celebrate. The events that had taken place, including the clumsy removal of the marble from the attic, the disastrous fall of the door, and the evident disregard for t
he fate of ancient stones (two huge granite slabs fixed on either side of the main entrance were removed only to become two tables in the Museo Sacro in the Vatican)45 provoked criticism. Behind the rigid screen of censorship controlling the official Roman press, at least two libels were circulated. One accused the master masons of having undertaken work with the sole aim of taking possession of the ancient lead that still lined the coffers; the other directly attacked the work of the architect Posi.46 Even the canons of Santa Maria ad martyres raised objections, but these were confined to their own recorded minutes. One of them reported that although Benedict XIV had on several occasions expressed the intent “to bring the church to perfection without removing its ancient parts,” it was precisely “the ancient” that seemed to have been removed.47

  Opinions of the connoisseurs who may have directly observed the outcome of the work are harder to detect. No public statements on the subject are known to have been made by the antiquarian Ridolfino Venuti, the superintendent excluded from surveying the works in the Pantheon. Nor did Johannes Joachim Winckelmann, living in Rome from November 1755 onward and a close associate of Antonio Baldani, the canon of S. Maria ad Martyres involved in the works, apparently write anything on the matter. Nonetheless, a letter, sent from Rome in February 1757 and published in The Monthly Review in London, gave voice to criticism that the strict censorship of papal government did not allow to be expressed in Rome.48 According to this letter, published anonymously, the restoration of the interior surface of the dome and the subsequent removal of ancient marbles from the attic were held to be part of a comprehensive plan to restore the church at the expense of the ancient temple. For the sake of the church, some of the ancient marble slabs of the floor were to be replaced, the oculus of the dome was to be covered by glass, and the dome itself was to be adorned with blue mosaics and rosettes in each of the coffers.49 This plan was denounced as a public scandal and blamed on Posi, who was accused of the capital sin of “borrominism,” that is, willful disregard of tradition.

  Apart from this anonymous critic and the architect Vanvitelli writing to his brother50 expressing minor reservations concerning Posi’s design, the Pantheon’s most attentive observer was the architect and antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). His interest in the restoration is attested by his possession by 1757 of the original drawings related to Corsini’s innovative scaffolding.51 It was probably while the work was still in progress that Piranesi, observing the dome and attic stripped of their revetment, first advanced his long-debated hypotheses concerning the arrangement of the building’s inner structure (see Fig. 4.7). In addition to these speculations, he left precisely measured drawings of the demolished attic. It is also probable that, in 1757, he intended to write an entire book dedicated to the Pantheon, presenting all of the new evidence that had emerged during the renovation. But at a time when any treatise on the Pantheon ran the risk of being interpreted as contributing to the controversy surrounding the renovation, he preferred to set this project aside. His related drawings were to be published, deprived of any polemical text, long after his death by his son, who incorporated them in the plates of the Seconda parte de’ templij antichi (1790).52

  Compared to the building project promoted by Clement XI 40 years earlier, the works in 1756–1759 produced an uncomfortable compromise between the renovation of the Christian church and the ancient temple that it occupied. Such an unprecedented conflict between the needs of the Pantheon as a church and an ancient monument was to create a rift in public opinion outside of Rome.53 Far from the papal court, all comments were radically negative. The Abbot of Saint-Non, when visiting Rome in 1759, barely recognized the ancient building:

  Yet what is most painful for those who have received from Nature some sentiment and taste is the bad idea recently proposed, to whiten the entire vault of this building; the stateliness that struck anyone who entered has disappeared; one no longer finds the mysterious, the beautiful, respectable tones that thousands of years had contributed to spread; now the building is no more than a large, round hall, a huge coffee-house amazing only for its shape and vastness.54

  In particular, the destruction of the ancient attic shocked the illustrious cosmopolite Francesco Algarotti, who in August 1757 wrote: “What would Serlio, Palladio and Desgodetz say, after all the toil they endured to measure the parts of this classical edifice? What will Pannini say, he who so many times represented it?”55

  Algarotti’s rhetorical questions vividly evoke the general disdain for Posi’s restoration. It is also worth noting that in his formulation, only Serlio, Palladio, and Desgodetz are cited as the leading authorities on ancient architecture, while during the late 1750s, outside of Roman circles where his renown as architect was still esteemed, Carlo Fontana’s hypothesis on the Pantheon seems to have fallen out of favor. A most striking feature in Algarotti’s text is the inclusion – with the same authority as the authors of long-celebrated books on Roman antiquities – of a living painter like Gian Paolo Pannini. Calling upon his authority implies that his views of the interior of the Pantheon were widely trusted representations of that building. Pannini had added to the architecture, already presented in analytical detail by authors such as Palladio and Desgodetz, the color deposited by the passing of time on its marbles and ceiling, the very color that the most recent restorations had banished. After the destruction of the ancient attic, Pannini’s paintings preserved the memory of what had disappeared, giving rise to a curious paradox: most of the criticisms expressed by visitors to the Pantheon in the second half of the eighteenth century were based not upon a comparison of the restored building with its previous appearance but on the building as depicted in the canvases of this painter. Even today, modern observers, admiring the representation of the Pantheon in Pannini’s canvases, still mourn the loss of the attic of one of the few classical monuments to have otherwise survived in all its parts.

  In view of these reactions, it is ironic that Pannini’s interiors of the Pantheon are more than objects of nostalgia for what had been lost for, in truth, each of the versions shows elements that never existed while omitting elements that did exist. The two statues that he shows in the aedicules to either side of the entrance were never there, although in his time, two paintings did hang above their altars. Furthermore, the wall decorations and altars in the exedras represent Specchi’s intentions, not reality. In at least two of the versions, the existing floor – whose documented losses of marble were never shown by Pannini in any of his canvases – is replaced by a more regular floor with a radial design (Fig. 11.1). Thus, Pannini’s views did not accurately portray the scene in front of him, but rather as he would have liked it to be. In the Rotunda, either of his own choice or on the advice of a special patron, the painter included all of the elements added during Clement XII’s refurbishing, as well as others that had only been planned. In accordance with what was believed to be the original ancient arrangement, for example, each of the aedicules was to have a statue, and the chapels in the exedrae were to be uniform in design. Moreover, none of Pannini’s versions of the interior shows the renovated choir, probably because the painter refused to represent the new high altar surmounted by the baldachin, which he thought clashed with the architecture of the ancient temple. Consequently, his views of the Pantheon’s interior illustrate something more and less than the coexistence of pagan temple and Christian church as it had evolved over the course of centuries. He pictured the monument not as it was but as it might have looked if it had been restored according to the project conceived but never fully executed by Clement XI.

  With these realities in mind, Pannini’s omission of Posi’s executed work becomes even more striking. The refusal by both the painter and his public to cultivate or indulge an image of the Pantheon as restored gives evidence of a larger issue. Until the first decades of the eighteenth century, it was generally assumed that contemporary Roman architecture could rival the ancient monuments, yet by the second half of the same century, this was
no longer the case. In the eyes of many artists and Grand Tourists in Rome, the failure of the restored Pantheon came to represent a broader crisis in contemporary Roman art.