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3.2 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Opere varie… vol. 7: Campus Martius. Rome, 1762. Tav. V-X, Ichnographia. Detail of area around Pantheon |
Although the building had served a variety of functions in its lifetime and had, for some twelve centuries, been a church consecrated as Santa Maria ad Martyres, by Piranesi’s day it was, in the main, a tourist destination. It had been the object of varying studies for centuries, studies of which Piranesi was well aware. Artists and architects had long used it for inspiration. Its distinctive design, comprised of a portico and a rotondo connected by a tall rectangular block, was often copied and appropriated, even while it was criticized for the awkwardness of the composition.3 The Pantheon is the recognizable formal source for works as disparate as Palladio’s villas, where it served to lend prestige to a new breed of gentlemen farmers in sixteenth – century Vicenza,4 and churches such as Bernini’s Santa Maria dell’Assunzione in Ariccia, 1662-4, where it marked just one of its many uses as a model
for the centralized church, its dome in particular rich with Christian symbol – ism.5 The Pantheon was miniaturized and appeared as a pavilion in sundry English gardens, such as that at Stourhead in 1753-4, where it signalled the patrons’ acquisition of a good taste and their embrace of a ‘modern Augustanism’, high-stakes gestures in the socially and politically attentive English society.6 Robert Adam, Piranesi’s friend, fellow archaeologist and the person to whom Il Campo Marzio is dedicated, was instrumental in promoting such a taste.7 Studies of the Pantheon note the plethora of uses to which the design was put.8
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3.3 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Opere varie. . . vol. 7: Campus Martius. Rome, 1762. Tav. XLVIII, Ichnographia. Bird’s eye reconstruction of the Pantheon and surroundings |
The Pantheon had also been under the scrutiny of scholars, antiquarians and archaeologists since the Renaissance. The ancient literary sources, while many, supplied only so much information. For example, it was believed that the building was completed by ad 25 and consecrated two years later, and thus dated to the time of Agrippa (not to that of Hadrian, as we currently believe9) as was evidenced by the inscription in the entablature. The ancient writers made clear that it had been destroyed by an annihilative fire during Titus’ reign (ad 80) but rebuilt by Domitian. After another fire razed it in 110, Trajan rebuilt it anew. The chapter on Hadrian in the late fourth – century Historia Augusta recorded that this Emperor restored both the Rotondo and the adjacent Baths of Agrippa, although this was usually not mentioned as significant in the eighteenth-century guidebooks.10 The restoration of Hadrian’s descendant Antoninus Pius was regarded as remarkable by the cicerone, as was the early third-century restoration by Septimius Severus and Caracalla, a deed documented in the small inscription on the entablature.11 The assumption seems to have been that the first-century emperors rebuilt the temple to its original design,12 while the later emperors altered the interior and exterior decoration slightly.
Some details referred to in the literature, e. g. Pliny’s mention of the Pantheon’s caryatids, seemed to have no place in the then-current building, nor did archaeological finds evince any evidence of them.13 Other decorative details of the temple, such as the pediment figures, had not been referenced by the ancient writers but had been conjectured based on such finds.14 The two towers on the fagade were the work of Bernini. (They were removed in the 1880s.) They replaced a single campanile built in 1270 at the apex of the pediment, and were never considered part of Agrippa’s design.15
The dating of the portico was a matter of some debate. As many pointed out, its design was not in harmony with the intermediary block nor the rotondo. Specifically, the lines of the horizontal elements did not match the rotondo. One can see this in Piranesi’s view of the Pantheon (Figure 3.4). The portico’s entablature is carried through to the intermediary block, but it ends abruptly between two cornice lines on the rotondo.
In addition, some, including Piranesi, noted that there was a perceivable gap – 5.5 cm was noted in 1894 – between the portico and the block.16 There were various attempts to explain the oddity of the design, and most commonly it was stated that the porch was built at a different time.17 A popular opinion was that it was a later addition. According to the literary sources, Caesar Augustus declined to have his likeness displayed inside the rotondo alongside those of the gods to whom the temple was dedicated, and Agrippa
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3.4 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Opere varie. . . vol. 7: Campus Martius. Rome, 1762. Tav. XXIII, Ichnographia. View of Pantheon from the northeast |
constructed the portico as an afterthought, to accommodate the statues of the Emperor and himself.18
It was understood that the building was not at the level of the then current piazza fronting the Pantheon, and that the porch had been elevated at least five steps. The level of the rotondo vis-a-vis that of the porch was also in question. Based on some archaeological findings, there were a few scholars who believed that the cella pavement was multi-levelled, with stairs arranged much like the seating in an amphitheatre so that the central area was much lower than the porch.19 Piranesi was not among these scholars.20
The Baths of Agrippa were known to lie to the south of the Pantheon as many remains, some contiguous and others not, could be found in the area (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). The Basilica of Neptune was more often than not identified as the structure whose remains were tangential to the back of the building,21 and in the eighteenth century, this structure was generally believed to be an annex to and part of the bath complex, along with the garden and lake of Agrippa. From the ancient sources, it was known that the entire thermae were destroyed in the far-reaching fire of ad 80, but that had been restored almost immediately, and then again in the time of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius.22
One unusual debate regarding the accuracy of the history of the Pantheon took place in the mid-eighteenth century, and ultimately evoked the intervention of papal authority. As the literary sources narrate, the building was donated to Pope Boniface X by the Emperor Foca and was subsequently converted into a church dedicated to Mary and the Early Christian martyrs in the early 600s.23 This was one of the many stories revisited in the eighteenth century when a renewed interest in paleochristian history was developed as a means to establish an unassailable authority for an increasingly politically enervated papacy. The phenomenon flourished under Clement XI Albani (reigned 1700-21), who fostered intellectual inquiry into the Early Christian period and who restored many of its churches and monuments.24 One consequence of this interest was an attempt to reconcile the sacred visual evidence of the first three centuries ad with the remains of Imperial Rome. There had been numerous attempts at this. Benedict XIV Lambertini (reigned 1740-58) established four academies dedicated to the study of both the Early Church and Roman history, and many of these dealt with the artefactual evidence.25 In the early 1750s, Giuseppe Bianchini published a paper museum in which the history of the first centuries ad is proved by artefacts; Early Christian and Roman Imperial works co-exist in the same illustrated space.26 There was also an attempt to fashion history so that the Early Christians of the fourth century appeared not to destroy pagan culture but to possess and redefine it.27 One attempt, however, caused some consternation. In 1744, Giovanni Marangoni issued Delle cose marmi gentilesche e profane trasportate ad uso e a ornamento delle chiese in which he listed ancient Roman artefacts that had been reused in a Christian context, in particular when pagan objects used in ritualistic ceremonies were found in a dozen Christian churches. He identified Santa Maria ad Martyres as one of these artefacts. We take this appropriation as unremarkable when we teach Early Christian art today, but at the time, the suggestion was deemed by some to be heretical in that it insinuated the pagan influence on the rituals of Christianity.28 Maragnoni’s publication solicited one highly polemical reaction. The Jesuit Pietro Lazzeri belonged to the Accademia della storia ecclesiastica dei romani pontefici, one of Benedict XIV’s four academies. He successfully argued for the right to deal with the Pantheon in his academy which dealt with the study of the lives of the popes, rather than in the Accademia di storia romana which was dedicated to the study of ancient Rome. In 1749, in the published results of that study entitled Della consacrazione del Panteon, he asserted that the building had never been a pagan temple, and surely was not one in the seventh century when it was dedicated to Mary. Rather, it had been the caldarium of the Baths of Agrippa.29 He cited as evidence those who believed that the floor of the Pantheon was multi-levelled, and that the seating created by the flooring was for the bathers. The domed cella was unusual for a Roman temple before and after Agrippa’s day, but was common in ancient thermae.30 In addition, he noted what many could easily observe in the mid-1700s: the close proximity of the ruins of the baths to the Pantheon.31
This episode might have been inconsequential. Lazzeri is not known today as a respected antiquarian, and the research completed in Benedict’s academies has not received much scholarly attention. But it had some ramifications. In a brief written on 18 February 1756 in anticipation of a pontifical bull entitled Ad Summi Sacrorum Christianorum, the papal secretary Antonio Baldani, then a canon at Santa Maria ad Martyres, and founding member of Benedict XIV’s Accademia di storia romana, outlined a brief history of the building. He asserted the opposite of Lazzeri: the Pantheon was in fact ‘isolated’, not attached to any other building, and not ever a part of the Bath of Agrippa.32
Motivations for the pronouncement from the papal office are not clear. Perhaps they were to silence the contentious arguments in the academies. However, it tacitly acknowledged and concurred with the policy of many past Pontiffs who attempted to clear the area around the Pantheon. In 1625, when the Barberini Pope Urban VIII infamously stripped the bronze from the interior portico roof, and rebuilt it with wooden trusses, the deficiencies of the east corner of the portico – it was missing three columns and a portion of the tympanum – were exacerbated. In the 1660s Alexander VII Chigi removed some of the lowly houses that had been appended to the east flank of the portico and repaired it using two red granite columns recently unearthed near the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, originally from the ruins of the Baths of Nero. He also widened and cleared some of the surroundings streets.33 In 1711, Clement XI continued the work begun in the late sixteenth century and systematized the square fronting the Pantheon, placing the obelisk recently found near Santa Maria sopra Minerva into the extant basin there to act as a visual focus.34 (Only in the nineteenth century were the buildings attached to the Pantheon’s left flank destroyed and, thus, was it isolated so completely.)35 The 1756 papal bull was issued a dozen years after a major redistricting of the city. The Pantheon was thereafter situated in Rione IX, that of the Pigna, instead of Rione VIII, that of Sant’Eustachio.36 The bull also removed the building from the jurisdiction of the popolo Romano, the Roman republican state, and placed it under ecclesiastic control, a decision that caused some rancour.37 Surely these efforts made it easier for the papacy to restore or renew the appearance of the Pantheon – one of the city’s most visited monuments by a flock of Grand Tourists – to its specifications, and in the process, to control the presentation of its history. The Pantheon was to be exhibited as a polished gem of ancient Rome, one gifted willingly, respectfully and suitably to the Church. No doubt this was to underscore the historical Imperial cession of property to the Church at a time when the Austrian court ruled a good portion of Italy.38 The renovations of the attic by Paolo Posi of 1756-7, so roundly condemned by later archaeologists, should be seen in the context of this triumph of ecclesiastic authority over the historical monument.39
As both an artist and an archaeologist, Piranesi was well aware of these goings on. The 1762 text of Il Campo Marzio was, in the main, a listing of the salient information on each of the buildings reconstructed in this section of ancient Rome: what was written by the ancient authors, and what issues were considered problematic by the modern ones. When he came to the history of the Pantheon, he wrote that he would issue a separate publication, tacitly acknowledging that the material was dense, but also perhaps understanding that just six years after the papal bull, the subject could be controversial, and would be under scrutiny by papal authorities.40 That publication was never issued. However, his son Francesco did publish a collection of twenty-nine prints dedicated to the Pantheon in 1790, twelve years after his father’s death. There is no appended text to the Seconda parte, although the images are well described in the accompanying keys.41 It is highly likely, based on what we know of Francesco’s activities, that many of the prints were by the design, if not necessarily the hand, of Giovanni Battista and, therefore, reflect the father’s ideas of whether or not the Pantheon was an isolated building in ancient Rome.42
In the following sections, I will first describe Piranesi’s reconstruction of Il Campo Marzio with special focus on the Pantheon, and then outline the methods by which he derived that reconstruction. In the conclusion, I will conjecture that Piranesi, aware of the competing histories and the various misprisions of the Pantheon outlined above, opted to present his own Pantheon, one constructed to suit his own polemical interests: establishing the grandeur, variety, and boldness of ancient Roman architecture.