The Pantheon
The Pantheon was begun in 27 BC by the statesman Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, probably as a building of the ordinary classical type, rectangular with a gabled roof supported by a colonnade on all sides. I t was completely rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian sometime between AD 118 and 128, with some alterations made in the early 3rd century by the emperors Lucius Septimius Severus and Caracalla. It is a circular building of concrete faced with brick, with a great concrete dome rising from the walls and with a front porch of Corinthian columns supporting a gabled roof with triangular pediment.Beneath the porch are huge bronze doors, 24 feet (7m) high, the earliest large examples of this type.The Pantheon is remarkable for its size, its construction, and its design. The dome was the largest built until modern times, measuring about 142 feet (43m) in diameter and rising to a height of 71 feet (22m) above its base.The Pantheon has been an inspiration for architects and architecture. It is renowned as one of the most celebrated edifices in the world. How right this is can be seen by leafing through the illustrations of any standard history of architecture, noting how domed rotundas with temple-front porches appear. These progeny of the
The black rotunda walls had disappeared, not to be seen again until the eighteenth century. The cylinder was of cut stone and the dome of brick. The Pantheon, from being thought as an awesome wonder, one of mirabilia, became a building seen as designed and constructed not by demons but by men, to be studied and utilized. However, it was France that the Pantheon was to find the most fervent and radical of all its interpreters, beginning with Goudoouin, whose anatomy theatre of 1765-75 at the Ecole de Medecine in Paris is an exact half Pantheon, a half cylinder covered by a quarter-sphere. Palladio inspired it, for Palladio was Burlington's passion. Continuing into the Revolutionary years Boullee designed the Paris Opera, which was a half-Pantheon within a sphere. The rotunda is sixty Roman feet in diameter, and the seven niches of the Pantheon appear, though of rather different shapes. It has gaiety and verges on the Rococo. This came to stimulate and challenge architects almost as much as its imagery and design, especially from the early Renaissance onward when they began, through detailed measurement and study to try to decipher its ancient mysteries and make direct use of their findings. The chapel at Maser is almost frivolous in appearance, an impression due as much as anything to the sculptured swags that depend from the porch capitals. The porch had only four columns; the intermediate block was elongated and apparently given a pitched roof, and the interior diameter of the rotunda was eighty feet as opposed to the Pantheon's one hundred and fifty. One of the great architects of this time was Andrea Palladio. Another, somewhat smaller version was built in Rome quite early in the fourth century, the so-called temple of Romulus beside the ancient Sacred Way.
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