The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present

by Unknown

  The “restoration” effected by the temporary decorations for the state exequies conformed to a widespread desire to restore the Pantheon to its ancient state, a restoration that could be achieved only at the expense of its ecclesiastical character. As soon as the government decided in April 1881 to keep the royal tomb permanently in the Pantheon, Guido Baccelli, who had taken over the Ministry of Public Instruction five months earlier, led a campaign to restore the building’s exterior to its presumed “original” state. A radical anticlerical member and a leading enthusiast of ancient sites in the ruling Sinistra, Baccelli advocated the removal of all of the supposedly valueless postantique additions to the Pantheon in order to reveal its distinctive mausoleum-like rotunda. As part of his plans, he hoped to create a large piazza around the temple and call it the “Forum of Vittorio Emanuele.”36 The intended effect was illustrated by a similar project submitted by Pietro Comparini (1833–1882) to the first competition for the Victor Emanuel Monument in 1880 (see Fig. 1.24).37 Baccelli was not the first to have expressed such wishes. In 1810, Pietro Piranesi, son of the famous engraver, anticipated the minister’s own rhetoric:

  the ancient monuments [of Rome] are suffocated by miserable modern buildings which must disappear. The Pantheon, one of the most precious and better preserved monuments of antiquity, requires a grand piazza freeing it of adjacent buildings. To embellish Rome, one must destroy more than build.38

  The Roman architect Giuseppe Valadier expressed the same idea on paper in 1813, with a plan showing an isolated Pantheon set within a larger and regularized piazza.39 In November 1870, just two months after the Italian capture of Rome, architecture critic Achille Monti called for the complete removal of all later additions to the monument, including the bell towers.40 The city incorporated these recommendations into the master plan of Rome of 1873, but financial difficulties, followed by a political dispute with the Ministry of Public Instruction over control of the ancient structure, forced the city to abandon its plans.41

  Minister Baccelli’s restoration technique of isolating and thus monumentalizing the city’s antiquities conformed to the ideals of the French restoration theorist Rigaud de l’Isle, whose “theory of the two cities” demanded that ancient monuments be materially liberated from the living urban tissue down to the ancient soil.42 Contemporary critic Giambattista Demora advocated the same approach, calling on the government to isolate ancient buildings as much as possible in order to render them “inviolate and unhurt,” to demolish surrounding buildings of “minimal value,” and to keep uncovered and open the most noble parts of ancient Rome.43 The explicit historical discontinuity manifested by the French polemic must have greatly appealed to Baccelli, who wanted to erase the intervening Christian history of the Pantheon.

  The physical isolation of the monument carried out by his Ministry of Public Instruction also illustrated an affinity for the ideals of Camillo Boito, Italy’s leading restoration theorist in the second half of the nineteenth century and a member of numerous government building committees in Rome.44While Boito condoned the removal of accretions that distorted the legibility of a structure, he opposed their replacement with reconstructions of a supposed original appearance. In May 1881, Baccelli received official authorization to expropriate the seventeenth-century Palazzo Bianchi, one of the buildings attached to the rear of the Pantheon, despite opposition from the state treasury, which had objected to the enormous cost – 415,000 lire.45 The minister initiated the demolitions himself, taking the first swing of the pick on July 7, 1881,46 in the same way Benito Mussolini would do with great fanfare to uncover Trajan’s Markets in the 1930s. Baccelli’s ambition to uncover the girth of the Pantheon in its entirety had to be abandoned when the demolition of the Palazzo Bianchi between July 1881 and March 1882 revealed the attached but deteriorated remains of what were identified at the time as the Baths of Agrippa47 (but now identified as the Basilica of Neptune), which were conserved with only minor restoration work to ensure their stability.

  Beyond scientific and aesthetic reasons for the isolation, Baccelli informed the Italian parliament that he also had political motives: revealing its round shape would stress the new function of the building as an imperial mausoleum.48 The king’s chaplain, the Reverend Valerio Anzino, complained to Prime Minister Agostino Depretis that the “isolation work has deprived the priests of their Sacristy, of the Chapter Hall, and all those accessories that are indispensable to the service of a notable church like the Pantheon, such as the living quarters of the Sacristans, the storage areas for church supplies, [and] the archives.”49 In April 1883, the public instruction minister further diminished the ecclesiastical appearance of the building by demolishing the two bell towers commissioned by Pope Urban VIII in 1626 (Figs. 1.22, 1.23). The work received front-page coverage in the press – as well as much public praise, including two proposals to erect a large plaque commemorating Baccelli’s isolation of the building.50 The critic Costantino Maes hailed Baccelli as “the most sparkling personification of the Roman Genius.”51 Naturally, the Vatican took a dimmer view, with one cardinal calling him “a meathead of a minister.”52

  The isolation of the Pantheon removed all signs of Christian significance from the exterior of the building. A complementary profanization of the interior was initiated with the state exequies of 1878. Commemorations held in the king’s memory every subsequent January on the anniversary his death, involving the erection of a large catafalque at the center, became an important event in the official state calendar. Vittorio Emanuele rapidly emerged as the principal object of veneration in a budding secular and highly patriotic “religion of the fatherland”:53 his remains were treated like precious relics to which pilgrimages were made. As with ancient emperors, the king provided the most tangible symbol of the state. Popular epithets applied to Vittorio Emanuele perpetuated his mythologization, such as the “First soldier of the Independence of Italy”;54 the “Great King, founder of the Unity of Italy”;55 the “First Italian citizen”;56 the “Redeemer of the Fatherland”;57 the “Liberator of the Fatherland”;58 and, most frequent of all, the Padre della Patria (“Father of the Fatherland”), the conscious equivalent of the ancient title Pater Patriae accorded to the “good” emperors.

  The first anniversary commemoration of Vittorio Emanuele’s death saw the erection of an impressive temporary catafalque designed by the architect Giuseppe Massuero (Fig. 12.5).59 The structure took the form of a tall baldachin, one of the most widely recognized symbols of imperial power since late antiquity.60 Massuero stressed its identification with imperial antiquity by placing four large smoking tripods at the splayed corners of the podium and no fewer than 20 tripods along the attic between imperial eagles at the corners. Under the canopy, an altar supported a cushion on which rested a royal crown. The lone Christian reference appeared in the crucifix held by the figure at the summit. The annual event reused Massuero’s temporary structure, perpetuating the memory of the king and reinforcing his association with ancient emperors. Alessandro Guiccioli, a member of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house in the Italian parliament), attested to the predominantly secular character of the 1881 commemoration, recording in his diary that “the ceremony was rather arid; the official personages showed off their irreligiosity; all this chills and annoys; it was a civil celebration and not religious.”61 From 1879 to 1884, this annual public ritual offered the capital the most conspicuous display of state imagery, reminding the populace of Rome and any foreign visitors of the imperial stature of the Italian royal house and of the state.

  12.5. First anniversary funeral commemoration for Vittorio Emanuele II in the Pantheon, with a catafalque designed by Giuseppe Massuero, January 15, 1879. (L’Illustrazione Italiana, January 26, 1879, p. 57)

  The progressive mythologizing of Vittorio Emanuele’s reputation to signify the notion of Italian unity intensified during the annual commemorations of the king’s death in 1883 and 1884. The fifth anniversary observance in 1883 diverged from previous years by
including a national pilgrimage. Besides paying homage to the king in the Pantheon, where wreaths were deposited, pilgrims also visited the Capitoline Hill, where the king had first addressed the city in 1870. Within a few months of this event, private organizations around Italy began planning an even grander national pilgrimage to the royal tomb for January 1884.62 The event had the objective of affirming the “Unity of the Fatherland” by honoring its founder, Vittorio Emanuele, together with the “four makers” of national unity – King Carlo Alberto (Vittorio Emanuele’s father), Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi.63 Predictably, the government took over control of the event and removed the homages to the other four in order to avoid weakening the centrality of Vittorio Emanuele.64 The national pilgrimage attracted a large number of participants: 68,635 pilgrims, almost half of whom belonged to 2,061 patriotic associations, as well as 666 representatives from Italian colonies abroad.65 The press devoted considerable attention to the weeklong event and illustrations testified to the enormous attendance. Public Instruction Minister Baccelli used the occasion to display a full-scale model of the permanent tomb for the king that he was at that time promoting in place of Massuero’s catafalque (Fig. 12.6).

  12.6. Views of the 1884 national pilgrimage to the tomb of Vittorio Emanuele II, seen (clockwise from upper left) in the Piazza Barberini, behind S. Maria Maggiore, at the Pantheon, at Termini train station, and in Piazza del Popolo. (L’Illustrazione Italiana, January 27, 1884, p. 53)

  The patriotic fervor for the royal cult displayed in the national pilgrimages ensured the permanent tomb for Vittorio Emanuele a place of great symbolic importance in the capital. Yet the Sinistra government had done little to facilitate its completion for several years after the king’s death, presumably due to the inherently Christian character of sepulchers. Public impatience for a suitable permanent tomb stirred the journalist Ugo Pesci in January 1882 to criticize the government for spending 500,000 lire on the expropriation of one house on the exterior of the Pantheon and to suggest that that sum could have paid for a great porphyry urn in the center of the temple.66 Significantly, he saw the tomb as a key symbol of Italy’s permanent possession of Rome and thus encouraged its rapid completion “so that all the foreigners will see that even in death Vittorio Emanuele affirms the conviction of wanting to remain in Rome.”67

  Responsibility for the permanent tomb initially belonged to the Royal House of Savoy. After several unsuccessful attempts to stir government interest, the Reverend Anzino, the king’s chaplain, “finally found the strong support of the Minister of Justice, Commander Villa,” who provided a budget of 150,000 lire for moving the royal remains to the first chapel to the left of the door.68 Anzino had chosen that unobtrusive location “so that visitors will be free to visit the tomb, without disturbing the functions of the church.”69 Furthermore, he sought a discreet design that maintained the curving lines of the Pantheon, and he wished to avoid using allegorical statues that might provoke ecclesiastical authorities.70 In similar deference to the church, he commissioned Giuseppe Massuero, author of the annual catafalque, to design “not a monument, but a simple deposit worthy of the Great King.”71 Massuero’s design, the drawings for which have been lost, consisted of a porphyry urn resting on a marble and porphyry podium and flanked by a pair of bronze candelabras.72 This scheme was approved by royal decree on April 10, 1881.

  In late 1881, the Ministry of the Royal House inexplicably passed responsibility for the permanent royal tomb to Public Instruction Minister Baccelli.73 One can only imagine the delight with which this anticlerical zealot greeted the opportunity to meddle with the interior of the venerable structure. Baccelli acted swiftly: in January 1882 his ministry’s Fine Arts Commission promptly rejected the proposal of the royal house to relocate the tomb within the first chapel to the left of the door, because it lacked “the majesty of concept and of form” implied in the royal decree of April 1881.74 Instead, the commission supported Baccelli’s idea of erecting the royal sepulcher in the middle of the Pantheon, which emulated the placement of an emperor’s ashes at the center of an ancient mausoleum. Due to the threat of flooding, the project called for a tall structure, with the king’s body resting 5.2 meters above floor level, just above the five-meter-level achieved by the disastrous Tiber flood of December 1870.75 Giulio Monteverde, a professor of sculpture at the Istituto di Belle Arti in Rome, began designing the tomb in mid-1883. By November, the project was sufficiently advanced for the ministry to receive an offer of free marble from the proprietor of an ancient Roman quarry.76

  Even more than the exterior restoration, the tomb would have allowed Baccelli to challenge the ecclesiastical purpose of the building with a function that responded to its round shape. Whereas other Sinistra leaders recognized that the tomb would inevitably have a sepulchral character with Christian overtones that distinguished it from the purely civil purpose of a national monument (in keeping with the two-bodies tradition), Baccelli, however, either misunderstood or ignored this distinction. Instead, he saw the tomb in the secular terms of the religion of statehood and asserted to parliament in December 1882 that the competition for a national monument to the king on the Capitoline was a useless endeavor, since the Pantheon already “had all the qualities to be rebaptised with the name National Monument.”77 His agenda was clear: the royal tomb offered the opportunity to take over the Pantheon completely, with a massive monument erected at its center. That the highly controversial idea confused sepulcher and civil monument probably accounted for the absence of support from his government colleagues.

  Not surprisingly, the project aroused bitter opposition from the Vatican. Having seen the zeal with which Baccelli operated, the deacon cardinal of the Pantheon vowed that the “Holy See must never permit the erection of any monument in the center of that Temple, either temporary or permanent.”78 The Vatican took the threat to this church seriously enough to convoke a “Cardinalate Congress”: four cardinals met on October 23, 1883, to devise a strategy to block the endeavor. The cardinals opposed the project on canonical – not aesthetic – grounds, arguing that tombs located at the center of a church or even above floor level were reserved for the bodies of saints.79 The excommunicated monarch was certainly no saint. They noted the same regulations that had prevented the realization of Michelangelo’s tomb for Julius II at the center of St. Peter’s. Recognizing the anticlerical and nationalistic intentions of Baccelli, the cardinals feared that his plan would set a precedent for the deconsecration of other “Christian temples.” They concluded, “such a monument would essentially change the nature and scope of the Sacred Temple. Its principal object is the worship of God, of the Blessed Virgin and of the Martyrs; after the erection [of the monument] it would principally serve funeral homages to a King. At present the Pantheon has all the grandeur of a Basilica; in the new project it would be converted into a great royal tomb, to which the remainder would serve only as a mere accessory.”80

  In flagrant defiance of Vatican opposition, Baccelli achieved temporary fulfillment of his ambitious scheme. For the occasion of the 1884 national pilgrimage to Vittorio Emanuele’s tomb and in place of Massuero’s annual catafalque, Baccelli commissioned Giulio Monteverde to erect a “simulacrum” of his design, as mentioned previously for the royal tomb at the center of the Pantheon (Fig. 12.7).81 Monteverde rejected the baldachin form of Massuero’s catafalque, perhaps to avoid its ecclesiastical associations. Instead, his construction involved a massive ancient-style sarcophagus rising eight meters above a broad ten-meter-wide base anchored at the corners by imperial lions.82 Around the podium appeared bronze plaques of the principal Italian cities. On January 13, 1884, L’Illustrazione Italiana confidently reported that the “new tomb ... will contain the venerated body of King Vittorio” and would require four years for construction.83

  12.7. Giulio Monteverde, “simulacrum” of the proposed tomb of Vittorio Emanuele II in the Pantheon, seen during the national pilgrimage to the king’s tomb, January 1884; engraving by Dante Paolocci.
(L’Illustrazione Italiana, January 13, 1884, pp. 28–29)

  Baccelli’s victory was short-lived. In addition to Vatican protests, the aesthetic and structural concerns of the Fine Arts Commission and Prime Minister Agostino Depretis’s lack of support for Baccelli combined to scuttle the central tomb project. The Fine Arts Commission, having initially supported the project, expressed doubt that the ancient drains under the pavement could support the weight of so massive a monument, and they ruled out the possibility of moving the drains.84 Exposure to the elements under the open oculus further detracted from the appeal of a central tomb. For reasons of aesthetic integrity, the commission opposed glazing the aperture, as it had also done in 1879 at the request of the Pantheon chapter.85 One other factor, possibly the decisive one, undoubtedly contributed to the demise of Baccelli’s proposal – the tradition of the “king’s two bodies.” For several years, Prime Minister Depretis had energetically promoted a grandiose national monument – to become the Victor Emanuel Monument erected between 1885 and 1911 – at a location separate from the king’s tomb in the Pantheon. Depretis illustrated his lack of support for the project by ordering in January 1884, following the national pilgrimage, the prompt removal of the simulacrum to some other location.86 Moreover, he replaced Baccelli as minister of public instruction with Michele Coppino two months later. The move toward a more discreetly sepulchral and less literally monumental tomb assured its distinction from the national monument.