Piranesi’s reconstruction did not staunch the flow of appropriations of the Pantheon’s design by architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Europe, the Americas, and in the colonies. One scholar put it succinctly: ‘The Pantheon motif can be seen wherever authority, ecclesiastic or political, demanded a recognizable, stately architectural imagery.’72 Nor did Piranesi’s research have any influence on papal policy, which continued to rend the Pantheon from its ancient and its then-current urban setting. Tourists today flood the building whose history was once so contentious, a matter which evoked decisive action by the papacy. Most are unaware that much is still unknown about its position in the Campo Marzio. Piranesi’s Ichnographia, of which the Pantheon is just a part, has been dismissed as inaccurate by today’s historical and archaeological standards, and has been labelled with both denigration and appreciation as fanciful and imaginative. But in it he provided one image of the Pantheon – his Pantheon – whose memory had been dissolving for centuries and was close to forgotten in his day, that it was a mere player in a vital network of ancient Roman architectural greatness.
Notes
1 These include Francesco di Giorgio, Raphael, Palladio and Peruzzi. See W. MacDonald, The Pantheon: design, meaning and progeny, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 108-23; and T Marder, ‘Bernini and Alexander VII: criticism and praise of the Pantheon in the seventeenth century’, Art Bulletin 71, 4, 1989, 635-8.
2 Even the reconstructions by antiquarians such as Pirro Ligorio, who rendered many of the surrounding buildings in his Anteiqvae Vrbis Imago accvratissime ex veteribvs monvmenteis formata, Rome, 1561, did not capture the urban setting in a reasonably accurate or proportionate manner. See H. Burns, ‘Pirro Ligorio’s reconstruction of ancient Rome’, in Pirro Ligorio: artist and antiquarian, R. W. Gaston (eds), Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 1988, pp. 19-92.
3 The literature on this issue is best summarized in P. Davies, D. Hemsoll and M. Wilson Jones, ‘The Pantheon: triumph of Rome or triumph of compromise’, Art History 10, 2, 1987, 133-6.
4 J. S. Ackerman, Palladio, Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1978, pp. 81-7. The Vicentines ‘aspired to an air of ancient grandeur and an affiliation with Northern [Imperial] Europe’. See also, idem., The Villa: form and ideology of country houses, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
5 R. Krautheimer, ‘Sancta Maria Rotonda’, in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art, New York and London: New York University and University of London, 1969, pp. 107-14, on the significance of the dedication of centralized churches to Mary.
On centralized churches, see R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1971, pp. 1-32, and in particular, p. 5, n. 4.
6 M. Kelsall, ‘The iconography of Stourhead’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46, 1983, 133-43, and J. D. Hunt, Grove and Garden: the Italian Renaissance garden in the English imagination, 1600-1750, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986, p. 219. On the matter of taste, see among others, G. Beard, The Work of Robert Adam, London: Bloomsbury Books, 1978, 3, citing an eighteenth-century critic who advocated the Neoclassical in order to ‘improve the taste of our countrymen’.
7 On Adam’s relationship with Piranesi, see D. Stillman, ‘Robert Adam and Piranesi’, in Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, D. Fraser, H. Hibbard, M. Lewine (eds), London: Phaidon, 1967, pp. 197-206; and J. Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
8 See MacDonald, op. cit., pp. 94-132, among others.
9 This was not known until the late nineteenth century. R. Lanciani, The Ruins and Excavations
of Ancient Rome, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1897, p. 474, n. 1 (citation of the results of his 1881 and 1882 archaeological excavations) and pp. 478-81.
10 For example, this information is not found in R. Venuti, Accurata e succinta descrizione
topografica delle Antichita di Roma, 2nd enlarged edn (1803), vol. 2, fasc., Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1977, p. 115.
11 Information regarding the various rebuildings and refurbishings of the Pantheon is found in much of the secondary literature, but is best outlined in P. Godfrey, D. Hemsoll, ‘The Pantheon: temple or rotonda?’ in Pagan Gods and Shrines of the Roman Empire, M. Henig and A. King (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 195. See also G. Lugli, The Pantheon and Adjacent Monuments, trans. J. Tickner, Rome: Bardi Editori, 1963, pp. 5-23.
12 Based on archaeological explorations of the late nineteenth century, most scholars today believe that Agrippa’s Pantheon was rectangular and oriented on the east-west axis, with its entryway facing south and, thus, nothing like Hadrian’s building, see MacDonald, op. cit., pp. 60-2. But of like mind with the eighteenth-century scholars, Lugli, op. cit., pp. 15-16, states that Agrippa’s building must have been circular because ‘the gods would not allow any change to be made in the original form of temples when they were rebuilt’.
13 On the caryatids by Diogenes the Athenian, see, among others, Lanciani, op. cit., p. 474, referencing Pliny the Elder and Dio Cassius.
14 Piranesi’s reconstruction of the pediment was similar to that by others of his day. Other problematic details mentioned in the literature but for which there was no visual evidence include the bronze capitals, and a statue of Venus said to be adorned with one of Cleopatra’s pearl earrings. See Venuti, op. cit., p. 116.
15 Bernini’s 1667 towers, much derided in their day, can be seen in Piranesi’s prints, e. g. that in Vedute di Roma, fig. 60, represented in J. Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Piranesi, London: Thames and Hudson, 1978, plate 60, among other places. The medieval campanile was represented in drawing from the end of the fifteenth century, represented in Lugli, op. cit., p. 49, fig. 21, and in an illustration of A. Giovannoli, Roma antica, Rome, 1616, reproduced in MacDonald, op. cit., p. 20, fig. 10.
16 Lanciani, op. cit., p. 475.
17 Venuti, op. cit., pp. 115-16, among others.
18 The identification of the gods to whom the Pantheon had been dedicated is still unresolved. It is commonly stated that the planetary gods were figured in the rotondo’s niches. The ancient sources say that the statues of Mars, Venus and the deified Julius Caesar were in the rotondo. MacDonald, op. cit., pp. 76-93, very plausibly suggests that it might include Mars, Venus, Fortuna, Roma and Romulus, the gods figured on the Temple of Mars the Avenger in the Forum of Augustus. The twelfth-century Mirabilia noted that the temple was built at the insistence of Cybele, and this perception has been explored by T Buddensieg, ‘Criticism and praise of the Pantheon in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, in R. R. Bolgar (eds), Classical Influences on European Culture ad 500-1300, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 260, and Krautheimer, op. cit. In the eighteenth century, this suggestion was still powerful, and Venuti, op. cit., p. 114, stated that the temple was dedicated to Cybele, the Avenging Jupiter and Mars.
19 Among those who entertained this idea were Carlo Fontana, Templum Vaticanum et Ipsius Origo, Rome, 1694; Famiano Nardini, Roma antica, Rome, 1665, and Antoine Desgodetz, Les edifices antiques des Rome mesures et dessines tre exactement, Paris, 1682. See S. Pasquali, Il Pantheon: architettura e antiquarian nel Settecento a Roma, Modena: F C. Panini, 1996, pp. 12-13.
20 Venuti, op. cit., pp. 118-19, cites Piranesi’s opinion, that what the archaeologists found were, in fact, the remains of the temple’s interior columns. This fact undermines one of Pasquali’s arguments regarding Piranesi’s imagery. See Pasquali, op. cit., pp. 15-16.
21 Venuti, op. cit., pp. 133-4. The Basilica was recorded by Dio Cassius, among others. Lanciani, op. cit., p. 490, lists many sixteenth-century artists, including Palladio, who considered the building to be the Basilica of Neptune. See Palladio’s reconstruction in E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, vol. 1, New York: Hacker Books, 1981, p. 196, fig. 221.
22 L. Richardson Jr, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 386. It was probably also restored in the midfourth century.
23 Buddensieg, op. cit., p. 259. The source is the Venerable Bede.
24 C. Johns, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the age of Clement XI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 26-54. Many of the Paleochristian studies of the sixteenth century were driven by spiritual concerns; those of the eighteenth ‘were often invoked in response to the contemporary political situation’.
25 M. Pia Donato, Accademie romane: una storia sociale, 1671-1824, Rome: Edizioni scienti – fiche italiane, 2000, pp. 86-105. See also Notizia delle accademie erette in Roma per ordine della Santita di N. Sig. Papa Benedetto Decimoquatro, Rome, 1740. The academies were: Accademia dei concili, dedicated to the history of the Church councils; Accademia della storia ecclesiastica dei romani pontefici, to the lives of the popes; di liturgica, to the Church’s sacred rites and liturgy; and della storia e della antichita romana, to the study of ancient Roman history. The academies were suspended at the Pope’s death in 1758.
26 G. Bianchini, Demonstratio Historiae Ecclesiasticae quadripartitae comprobatae monumentis pertinentibus ad fidem temporum et gestorum, 3 vols, Rome, 1752-4; and its attendant G. Cenni, Breve dichiarazione delle sei tavole in rame. .. che rappresentano la storia eccles – asitca a delprimo e secondo secolo, Rome, 1753. On this publication, see S. Dixon, ‘Piranesi and Francesco Bianchini: capricci in the service of pre-scientific archaeology’, Art History 22, 2, 1999, 201-4.
27 Pasquali, op. cit., pp. 26-8.
28 There were problems with subjecting Early Christian history to the same scrutiny as secular history. New historical methods called for a critique of the literary sources, and as the sources for Early Christian history included sacred texts, this type of criticism was not tolerated. Also, the history-making was driven by attempts to legitimize the Church Triumphant in both sacred and political terms, a task which did not always respect the facts. Even today, the question is still a pertinent one. See T. F Mathews, The Clash of the Gods: a reinterpretation of Early Christian art, rev. edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 3-22.
29 Pasquali, op. cit., p. 29.
30 The spherical shape was particularly common for laconica, or dry sweat baths; there had been some dubious attempts to link Agrippa’s illusive laconicum with the Pantheon, as the room ‘had to be as high as it was wide, after the manner of the hemisphere – the same proportions encountered in Hadrian’s hall in the Pantheon’. See Lugli, op. cit., p. 60.
31 Venuti, op. cit., 124, mentioned the issue (or rather Filippo Eugenio Visconti, the 1803 commentator of Venuti’s text), but dismissed it. But the thesis was not forgotten. In 1854, Emil Braun argued that the Pantheon structure was a termination of the Thermae Agrippae, but that the designer must have thought the structure too good for the mundane purpose of bathing and altered it to be a temple. Braun’s interpretation helped explain the odd portico, that it was a later addition needed to convert the caldarium into a temple. Lanciani dismissed the idea in 1892 (op. cit., pp. 475-7), but suggested that there was so much alteration over the years in the area between the Pantheon and the Bath, that there would never be any resolution to the question.
32 Pasquali, op. cit., p. 158.
Questo non avea a se unito altro edifizio, se non che dalla parte che riguarda il Collegio Ecclesiastico, le terme di Agrippa, restando il rimanente affato in Isola, onde non essendosi mai state abitazione di sorte alcuna, a niuna di quelle case private, che da tre or meno secoli in qua sono state appogiate alle mura esteriori della Chiesa, non potevano in quelle essere collocate i monaci. . .
That Baldani was canon at the Pantheon, see S. Borsi, Roma di Benedetto XIV: la pianta di Giovan Battista Nolli, 1748, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1993, p. 226. Baldani had a seminal role in the 1748 publication of Giambattista Nolli’s plan of modern Rome (ibid., pp. 15f.), and must have had a remarkable role in helping Benedict XIV clear the area. (Alexander VII’s plans were foiled by the canons at Santa Maria ad Martyres, see Krautheimer, R. The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655-76, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 106.)
33 The removal of the houses in this section of the portico was attempted many times before Alexander VII, e. g. in medieval times, and by Urban VIII, but they kept reappearing like ‘puppies’. Even Alexander’s efforts were not an overwhelming success. See R. Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, pp. 104-9 and 185-7; and T. Marder, ‘Alexander VII, Bernini and the urban setting of the Pantheon’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, 1991, 273-92. For more on the mechanics of implementing papal plans for the restructuring of Rome, see D. M. Habel, The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. These houses can be seen in Giovannoli’s print, cited above, n. 15.
34 Borsi, op. cit., p. 226. Filippo Barigioni was responsible for the work.
35 Lanciani, op. cit., pp. 485-6.
36 B. Bernardini, Descrizione del nuovo ripartimento de’rioni di Roma, fatto per ordine di N. S. il papa Benedetto XIV, Rome, 1744. The map with the new divisions is reproduced in Borsi, op. cit., p. 34.
37 Pasquali, op. cit., pp. 51-4 and p. 93 and Borsi, op. cit., p. 226. There had been much contention between the two institutions as to which one would be responsible for the refurbishing of ancient Roman monuments, e. g. the Aurelian Wall. Borsi, op. cit., pp. 34-5. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was roughly the case that the well being of the interior of the Pantheon was relegated to the popolo Romano, and that of the exterior, to the canons of Santa Maria ad Martyres, who were for the most part members of the Papal Court. Antonio Baldani was one of them. Pasquali, op. cit., pp. 54-6, relates the history of various late seventeenth – and early eighteenth-century papal endeavours to gain control over the canons, who often were at odds with attempts to clear the square.
38 The War of Austrian Sucession (1740-8) was the third conflict in a half century wherein foreign powers, in particular France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, vied for control over Italian lands. Papal allegiance was often torn among these powers. At one point, the exasperated Benedict XIV claimed that he would write a treatise entitled On Martyrdom by Neutrality. S. Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700-1860: the social constraints of political change, London and New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 30-7.
39 The date for Posi’s work is often given as 1747, but he undertook the work in 1756-7, after the Holy Year. On Posi’s renovations, see Pasquali, op. cit., pp. 68-91; and J. Pinto, ‘Architecture and Urbanism’, in Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, E. P. Bowron and J. J. Rishel (eds), Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000, pp. 140-1.
40 Piranesi, Il Campo Marzio, Rome, 1762, ch. V, VI. ‘Non mi trattengo a descriverla, perche son per trattarne in un volume a parte’.
41 The second part of Francesco Piranesi’s Raccolta degli templiantichi, Rome, 1776 (issued two years before his father’s death) is entitled Seconda parte.. . che contiene il celebre Panteon, Rome, 1790. The plates deal exclusively with the Pantheon, and they include highly measured plans, sections and elevations, as well as richly rendered details such as capitals. It is illustrated both as it was in the eighteenth century, and as it might have been in ancient times.
42 This was the case in the posthumous publication of Hadrian’s Villa. See W. MacDonald and J. Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and its Legacy, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 247. Wilton-Ely, op. cit., p. 298, does not include the Raccolta degli templi antichi among Piranesi’s posthumous publications.
43 Piranesi, op. cit., preface.
Sebbene cio di che io piuttosto temer dubbio, si e, che non sembrino inventate a capriccio, piu che prese dal vero, alcune cose di questa delineazione del Campo; … Ma chiunque egli sia, prima di condannare alcuno d’impostura, osservi di grazia l’antica pianta di Roma. . . osservi le antiche ville del Lazio, quella d’Adriano in Tivoli, le terme, I sepolcri, e gli altri edfiizi di Roma, che rimangono in ispezie poi fuori di porta Capena. . .
This passage is often cited, and is translated in Wilton-Ely, op. cit., p. 76.
44 See above, n. 21.
45 It is generally understood that Nero’s bath (ad 62) was heavily restored by Alexander Severus in 227. In Piranesi’s reconstruction, he seemed to distinguish between Nero’s original structure, to the north, and Alexander Severus’, to the south.
46 See Burns, op. cit., and W. Oechslin, ‘Storia d’archeologia prima del Piranesi: nota su Francesco Bianchini’, in Piranesi nei luoghi di Piranesi: vol. 3, Archeologia Piranesiana, Rome: Multigrafica, 1979, pp. 107-20. A. Momigliano, ‘Ancient history and the antiquarian’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13, 1950, 295-315, had noted that in the eighteenth century, the ancient object was gaining stature as historical evidence, competing with that of ancient writings. They were considered more truthful and more immediate sources of information, while the writings were subject to great scrutiny, and often found deficient or misleading. Piranesi used other methods to filter through the information: likelihood – the notion that there were similar objects, similar functions and similar sets of circumstances which could be used to explain and reconstruct another object; and a reliance on ‘ ragionevole congettura’, wherein a storehouse of historical information in a universal imagination, fed by memory and acted upon by fantasy, aids in the reconstruction of the past. On this, see Dixon, op. cit., pp. 189-90.
47 See Tav. II of Il Campo Marzio.
48 E. Rodriguez Almedia, Forma Urbis marmorea, aggiornamento generale, 2 vols, Rome: Quasar, 1981. On Piranesi’s use of the fragments for other structures in the Campo Marzio, such as the Theatres of Marcellus and Pompey, see Il Campo Marzio, Tav. XVI. See Borsi, op. cit., pp. 35-8 on the history of the fragments’ assembly.
49 For a particular study, see I. Campbell, ‘Pirro Ligorio and the temples of Rome on coins’, in R. W. Gasto (ed.), Pirro Ligorio: artist and antiquarian, pp. 93-120. The use of coins to aid in research is sometimes said to have been first employed by J. B. Marliani, Antiquae Romae Topographia Romae, Rome, 1534.
50 See above, n. 41.
51 Venuti, op. cit., p. 135. In the fifteenth century, these lions were used as acroteria figures in or on the portico, but were transferred to the Aqua Felice by Sixtus V (1585-90).
52 Ibid., p. 117.
53 Ibid., p. 116.
54 There was no mention of the vestibule in the ancient literature, but Piranesi asserted that he knew of its remains, and depicted them in Tav. III of Il Campo Marzio. See Catalogo delle opera scriitte nella grande icnografia del Campo Marzio, 1762, entry ‘vestibolo del Panted. ‘Ne rimangono gli avanzi che… si riferiscono nel cap. 5 art. 7’. He did not reference this work in chapter 5.
55 Piranesi rendered these remains in a veduta, see Antichita Romane, vol. 1, Rome, 1756, plate XIV, fig. 1, reproduced in J. Wilton-Ely, The Complete Etchings of Piranesi, San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1994, p. 354, pl. 304. There were also ancient literary sources which located it near the Aqua Virgo and the Temple of Hadrian, see Richardson, op. cit., p. 228.
56 See ibid., p. 184 for dedication of the ancient sources identifying the temple as that of Hadrian. Piranesi, however, must have relied on the same source that Pirro Ligorio used for the structure, a drawing which labelled the temple as the Basilica of Antoninus Pius. Campbell, op. cit., p. 100, notes that the drawing was an invention. For a reproduction of the drawing, see ibid., p. 117, fig. 12. For a veduta of the temple, see Piranesi, Antichita Romane, vol. 1, Rome, 1756, plate XIII, fig. II, reproduced in Wilton-Ely, op. cit., p. 353, pl. 303.
57 J. Pinto, The Trevi Fountain, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 8-18, on the appearance of the Aqua Virgo from antiquity through the eighteenth century. The arches holding the conduit were as high as thirty feet in the plains of the Campo Marzio. Frontinus stated that the conduit ended at the Septa Julia just east of the Pantheon, and Piranesi ends them just about at this point. However, he has them join with the Aqua Alexandrina, an aqueduct built by Alexander Severus to supply his restored baths in the third century, and whose path within Rome was and remains unknown.
58 Richardson, op. cit., pp. 319-20, referring to the Epigrams.
59 Ibid., pp. 53-4.
60 Hadrian did build a temple to Trajan in Trajan’s forum. On Piranesi’s discovery of the bricks in the attic, see Lanciani, op. cit., p. 487.
61 See above, n. 9.
62 The Thermae Agrippae is rendered in a fragment of the Marble Plans (it is translated into drawing and reproduced in, among other places, E. M. Steinby (ed.), Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, vol. 5, Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1993, p. 324, fig. 26), however, this particular fragment must not have been unearthed in Piranesi’s day; some were recovered later. For the fragments known to have existed in Piranesi’s day, see the artist’s own representation of them from the Antichita Romane, 1756, reproduced in Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Piranesi, p. 49, fig. 72.
63 Venuti, op. cit., p. 135, and Borsi, pp. 227-8. As late as 1929, G. Cozzi also held this to be true (‘Un primitivo atrio meridionale del Pantheon ed una crisi statica dell’edificio’, Bolletino d’arte Ministerio Educazione Nazionale, 1929, fasc. 1, n. p.). Lugli, op. cit., p. 32, casts serious doubt on this hypothesis, and insinuates that the discovery was a hoax. Lanciani did not mention this archaeological discovery at all.
64 Borsi, op. cit., p. 228; and Venuti, op. cit., p. 135.
65 Venuti, op. cit., p. 135. R. Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma e notizie intorno le collezioni romane di antichita (1605-1700), vol. 6, rev. edn, Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1994, p. 27, did not fully quote Venuti, leaving out the suggestion that there might have been a major entrance to the Bath. Lanciani, The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, does not mention the discovery at all. I imagine that as was his habit Piranesi scoured the area to confirm these finds, which had long been hidden, anew in 1740, when he first arrived in Rome.
66 Today we believe that the representation is that of a temple, but Piranesi must have used the medallion as a model for the basilica. See the medallion reproduced in Nash, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 37, fig. 717.
67 See MacDonald and Pinto, op. cit., pp. 246-65.
68 See above, n. 21.
69 See Seconda parte, Tav. II.
70 The key reads: ‘non sono collegati insieme con quelli del Panteon, ma sono poggiato ad esso, e pero dimostrano che le Terme sono state aggiunte posteriorment’.
71 The key reads: ‘muri e concammerazione dei piani superiori delle Terme collegiati e fabbriati insieme con quelli del Panteon, i quali dimostrano che antecedentemente alle Terme vi era unita al Panteon altra fabrica per suo uso, che fu poi incorporata nelle Terme sudette’. The key on the east-west section, Tav. X, reads: ‘profilo dell’avanzo de’muri delle Terme di Agrippa che si uniscono con il Panteon, e formano diversi ripiani’.
72 MacDonald, The Pantheon, p. 131.
Chapter 4