The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present

by Unknown

  There was no need, of course, to await World War I to offer a more skeptical view of the human condition. On the back of his drawing for the Temple of the Earth, which he had dedicated to the concept of human equality, Jean-Jacques Lequeu had sarcastically proposed to the minister of the interior that the edifice be constructed as the central chapel at the new Cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris, recently opened in 1804, “because it is certainly useless to the French, who are enemies of equality, and who will never get along with their fellow human beings.”102 Both Asplund’s cautious skepticism and Lequeu’s cynical black humor serve as potent reminders that the idealism of the architecture considered in this chapter was an appeal to the better aspects of human nature. The final section on Neoclassicism and the sublime will present us with a further encounter with good and evil with respect to the theme of the Pantheon.

  Neoclassicism and the Sublime

  The buildings discussed in this chapter, which took the Pantheon as their model, partook of a new stylistic movement born in the mid eighteenth century and later revived in the twentieth, known as Neoclassicism. Many also were invested with the attributes of an aesthetic category of major importance to the eighteenth century known as “the sublime.”103 Both the style and the aesthetic were often related, sharing common psychological and, at times, even spiritual outlooks.

  Neoclassicism, as a style, favored pure prismatic volumes, surfaces either left plain or adorned with identically repetitious motifs, and freestanding columns that were evenly spaced in long, uninterrupted rows. Simple forms with repetitive features, explained Boullée, make the strongest impression on our minds and present the most harmonious forms.104 To that end, the architects who adapted the interior of the Pantheon to their Neoclassical designs tended to favor the dome rather than the highly articulated lower cylinder with its niches and pairs of columns at different scales.

  With respect to colonnades, Boullée found a source of inspiration in the porch of the Pantheon. Lamenting that “our churches, far from being surrounded by colonnades, are formed by walls with pier buttresses that resemble walls of fortifications,” he then proceeded to praise the Pantheon’s porch, universally admired for “the noble columns and proportions of its architecture.” “Is it not extraordinary,” mused Boullée, “that an example so widely admired has not yet been imitated in our capital?”105 The Neoclassical buildings that adapted the Pantheon’s dome were often, as we have seen, graced with colonnades on the facade or in the interior. When columns were employed in conjunction with the dome, they were almost always a single or double ring that either supported the dome or were placed underneath as a freestanding sanctuary. The model for this latter arrangement was probably Giovanni Baptista Piranesi’s engraving of the Pantheon with a so-called Temple of Vesta in the interior (Fig. 13.13).

  13.13. Giovanni Baptista Piranesi, imaginary ancient Temple of Vesta, 1743.

  For Neoclassical architects, it was important not to copy the Pantheon too closely. Hence, in 1779 a commission of the Académie Royale d’Architecture criticized the design for a palace to serve as a papal conclave by one of its Grand Prix winners sojourning at the Académie de France in Rome precisely for this fault: “The idea of the circular room in the center ... is absolutely the same as the one that, in his project for a palace of justice presented last year, constituted the main meeting room of that building, and for which he was criticized for having imitated too closely the Pantheon.”106 The most extreme cases of abstraction occurred when either the dome without coffers or a spherical cavity was employed, often covered with stars as an expression of a Deist wonder about the magnificence of Nature.

  This Deist attitude also informed many of the projects that engaged the sublime. As explained in the popular treatise published by Edmund Burke in 1757 and soon translated into French, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the sublime in architecture required “magnitude in building”: “To the sublime in building, greatness of dimension seems requisite; for on a few parts, and those small, the imagination cannot rise to any idea of infinity.” Although Burke did not mention the Pantheon, he probably had this edifice in mind when he observed that one way to create the effect of infinity in architecture was through the use of a dome, because the eye would run uninterruptedly over the surface, thereby presenting an unending image of grandeur.107 Boullée further developed this idea, which he applied to the form of the sphere, that he had used in the Cenotaph to Newton:

  The other advantages of a spherical body are to develop under our eyes the largest surface, which makes it majestic; to have the simplest form, whose beauty issues from the lack of interruption to the surface; and to join these qualities with that of grace, because the contour is as smooth and as flowing as possible.108

  The sublime joined the Deist worship of Nature through what Burke termed “magnificence,” as illustrated through reference to the starry sky, a feature that, as we have seen, was popular with Neoclassical architects adapting the Pantheon for their buildings: “The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur.”109

  Thus, the Neoclassical response to the grandeur of the Pantheon’s dome, and by extension to its potentially spherical interior, was marked by a psychological and even spiritual transport. “Let any one reflect,” suggested Joseph Addison in 1712, “on the disposition of mind he finds in himself, at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his imagination is filled with something great and amazing.”110 To some commentators on the sublime, the effect was physical: “Every person upon seeing a grand object,” explained John Baillie in An Essay on the Sublime (1747), “is affected with something which as it were extends his very being, and expands it to a kind of immensity.”111 Boullée exploited this sensation in the interior of his Cenotaph to Newton through recourse to the psychological effects of standing within a vast, dark, star-lit spherical cavity: With curved surfaces at every side and with the tomb as the sole point of focus, the visitor, as Boullée explains, would feel frozen at the center, unable to move:

  He is obliged, as if [held] by a thousand forces, to remain where he is at the center.... Isolated on all sides, his sight can only be directed toward the immensity of the sky.112

  Through this Neoclassical application of the sublime, the visitor to Newton’s tomb would learn about “the expanse of [Newton’s] enlightenment and the sublimity of his genius”113 by having his or her “mind elevated to the contemplation of the Creator and to experience celestial feelings.”114 The resultant feeling would be such that “the spectator would find himself transported into the sky as if by enchantment and carried on the clouds into the immensity of space.”115

  Some manner of these feelings of transport and enchantment recur in various later buildings, especially in the twentieth century with the renewed enthusiasm for Neoclassicism. We sense this in Louis Kahn’s abstracted application of the Pantheon as a model for several of his interior spaces. The same has been observed about Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Library. One critic argued that the fully roofed cylinder of Asplund’s library paradoxically seems less a covered room than the Pantheon with its open, central oculus.116 The result, as another observer has commented, is that “the room disappears without intermission into the diffuse and infinite.”117

  Perhaps it is fitting that in the most drastic departure from the democratic values that informed the cultural institutions of an emerging modern world, in which architects made repeated recourse to the Pantheon as model, the psychological and spiritual effects of the sublime would most likely have been aborted. Adolf Hitler had a long-standing fascination with the Pantheon, which he adapted in modified form in his project for a gigantic Grosse Halle (Great Hall) that he wished to build in a prominent location in Berlin. Subsequently aided in the design of the Grosse Halle by his official architect Albert Speer, who further developed Hitler’s earlier sketches from the 1920s, Hitler envisaged a building so large
that that it would accommodate a crowd of 150,000–180,000 people (Fig. 13.14). With its dome projected to rise 825 feet, the Great Hall, to borrow a phrase from Speer himself, was truly on a “megalomaniac” scale.118

  13.14. Albert Speer, after Adolf Hitler, central axis with Grosse Halle (project), Berlin, ca. 1937–1941.

  For Hitler and Speer, size was significant because it corresponded to their understanding of grandeur, as well as to the need for an appropriate setting for the vast crowd. Both men had relished the electrifying effect that their Nazi festivals with large crowds could have on the psyche, as people were emotionally swept away by the chanting throngs at the Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies, where 100,000 regimented men marched to the approval of 100,000 spectators.119

  Yet grandeur in architecture had its dangers as well as it possibilities. As Boullée had observed when criticizing St. Peter’s in Rome for not conveying adequately its vast size, the parts of this building were simply too “colossal in proportion: ... thinking, as artists say, of ‘doing something grand,’ [the architect mistakenly] made something ‘gigantic.’”120 At one point, Speer came to the same realization about his and Hitler’s Grosse Halle. He began to doubt whether transforming the outdoor rituals of the Nuremberg rallies into an indoor event within the Pantheon-inspired Grosse Halle would be effective. While designing the building, Speer traveled to Rome to visit St. Peter’s, an edifice, as Speer explained, that “would have fitted several times over” in the Grosse Halle. In effect, Speer boasted that the Grosse Halle “would contain sixteen times the volume of St. Peter’s.”121 Yet upon entering St. Peter’s, Speer was surprised to find that its gigantic interior, so much smaller than his and Hitler’s own projected edifice, was scaled in such a way that he found it difficult to relate to its architecture.122 “I was disappointed,” he later wrote in his memoirs,

  that its size has no relationship to the impression on the observer. Already with this order of magnitude, I now recognized, the impression is no longer proportional to the size of the building. I then feared that the effect of our Great Hall would not correspond to Hitler’s expectations.123

  This Nazi project teaches an important lesson about the experience of architecture and points to the source of the Pantheon’s ultimate appeal. As August Schmarsow had written in a prescient essay of 1893, “The Essence of Architectural Creation”:

  As the creatress of space, architecture creates, in a way no other art can, enclosures for us in which the vertical middle axis is not physically present but remains empty.... The spatial construct is, so to speak, an emanation of the human being present, a projection from within the subject, irrespective of whether we physically place ourselves inside the space or mentally project ourselves into it.124

  The Pantheon, with its implied but empty central axis under the light of the central oculus and with its cylindrical chamber capped with a hemispherical dome, presents the archetypical architectural configuration of the “essence” of this architectural experience at the optimal size. For this reason, Louis Kahn was able to correctly opine, with a twinkle in his eye, that the Pantheon was a perfect building except for one fault: it had a door.125

  Applying Schmarsow’s explanation to the Pantheon, we can see, as Kahn subtly hinted, that having arrived at the threshold of the Pantheon’s interior, we already occupy the space fully, imagining ourselves at the center and filling the vast cavity with our sense of self, what the Germans in Schmarsow’s circle of Einfühlung philosophers termed Raumgefühl, the feeling of space, which, in turn, involved Körpergefühl, the feeling of the body, and Vitalgefühl, the feeling of life forces. This Boullée understood when he designed his Cenotaph to Newton with entrance into the spherical cavity immediately at the center, alongside Newton’s sarcophagus, “the only material object”126 in the enveloping space. In this way, the visitor identifies with the central tomb while projecting himself or herself, to use Schmarsow’s terminology, into the circumambient space. Boullée, like Kahn, had intuited what Schmarsow would elucidate with the words of a philosopher of aesthetics: “As soon as we have learned to experience ourselves and ourselves alone as the center of this space, whose coordinates intersect in us, we have found the precious kernel ... on which architectural creation is based.”127 In the Pantheon, these coordinates are infinite and all-encompassing, expanding to all sides of a virtually perfect spherical cavity whose dimensions and whose architectural surface treatment are the embodiment of perfection, a perfection that gives an understanding of the individual’s place in the universe that is unique in the history of world architecture.

  1 William L. MacDonald, The Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny, Cambridge, Mass., 1976 (3d printing 1981), pp. 94–132, Chapter 5. MacDonald’s survey includes a spate of cylindrical and domed temples and tombs of the late Roman and Hellenistic periods; various Renaissance churches, ranging from Bramante’s project for rebuilding the basilica of St. Peter’s to Palladio’s chapel at Maser, as well as Palladio’s Villa Rotunda; numerous Baroque churches of the seventeenth century, including Bernini’s S. Andrea al Quirinale; a host of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Neoclassical edifices of various building types, ranging from the anatomy theater of Jaques Gondoin’s School of Surgery in Paris to Pietro Bianchi’s Church of S. Francesco di Paola in Naples, as well as diminutive pavilions in eighteenth-century gardens; a nineteenth-century historical revival edifice, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda at the University of Virginia, and a utilitarian structure that employed the new building material of iron, such as François-Joseph Bélanger’s dome over the Paris Grain Hall (Halle au Blé); and finally, two twentieth-century churches in Rome by Marcello Piacentini built shortly after World War II.

  2 Nul ne doit être inquiété pour ces opinions, mêmes religieuses, pourvu que leur manifestation ne trouble pas l’ordre public établi par la loi.

  3 David Watkin and Tilman Mellinghoff, German Architecture and the Classical Ideal, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, p. 24; Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture, 1750–1890, Oxford 2000, p. 70.

  4 On the history of this church, see Watkin and Mellinghoff 1987, p. 24.

  5 Watkin and Mellinghoff 1987, pp. 175–176, 223.

  6 Alan Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment, Berkeley 1980, p. 52.

  7 Braham 1980, pp. 54–55 (Fig. 63).

  8 George Wilson Pierson, “Tocqueville’s Essay on American Government and Religion,” excerpt from Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, 1831, available at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/piers152.html.

  9 William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, Garden City, N.Y., 1972, vol. 4, p. 311, repeated in Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Princeton 1996, p. 487 n. 171.

  10 On Wright and classicism, see Patrick Pinnell, “Academic Tradition and the Individual Talent: Similarity and Difference in Wright’s Formation,” in On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles, ed. Robert McCarter, London 2005; on the Unity Temple and Cenotaph project, see Richard A. Etlin, Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy, Chicago 1994, pp. 176–179.

  11 S.v. “Harvey, William Henry,” in Judith S. Levey and Agnes Greenhall, eds., The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, New York 1983, p. 366.

  12 S.v. “Newton, Sir Isaac,” in Levey and Greenhall 1983, p. 596.

  13 Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, pp. 30–31, 33, and 93.

  14 Braham 1980, pp. 138–139 (for the entire paragraph).

  15 Braham 1980, p. 141.

  16 Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, L’Homme-Machine, ed. J. Assézat, Paris 1865, p. 28.

  17 de La Mettrie, p. 124.

  18 Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds,” New York Times, January 10, 2006, F1 and F4.

  19 For a more extensive account of the popularization of Newton’s ideas, see Adolf Max Vogt, Boullées Newton-Denkmal: Sakralbau und Kugelidee, Base
l 1969, Chapter 10, pp. 291–314.

  20 This characterization is found in the program published in Pierre-Louis Van-Cléemputte and Amant-Parfait Prieur, Collection des prix que la ci-devant Académie d’Architecture proposoit et couronnoit tous les ans, Paris 1787–1796, cahier 12, Plate 3, which accompanies the engraving of Pierre-Jules Delespine’s Cenotaph to Newton. Delespine, in a publication dating from 1827, claimed that his project was the winner of a Prix d’émulation in 1785. In “Les Prix de Rome”: Concours de l’Académie royale d’Architecture au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1984, p. 233, Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos explains that this may indeed have been the monthly competition of January 1785, not recorded in the Procès-verbaux edited and published by Henry Lemonnier.

  21 Etienne-Louis Boullée, Architecture, essai sur l’art, ed. Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Paris 1968, pp. 137–138 (fols. 126v-127). My translation here and throughout.