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The Pantheon is one of the most celebrated and most carefully studied buildings of Western architecture.In the modern age,as it had been in the Renaissance,the Pantheon is a crucible of critical thinking.Preservation of the Pantheon had been undertaken in the seventeenth century and continued in the eighteenth during the pontificate of Clement XI.Floodwater stains had been removed and some statues placed in the altars around the perimeter.Antoine Derizet, professor at Rome’s official academy of arts,the Accademia di San Luca,praised Clement’s operation as having returned the Pantheon “to its original beauty.”A view of the interior painted by Giovanni Paolo Panini recorded the recent restorations.From a lateral niche,between two cleaned columns, Panini directs our vision away from the Christianized altar out to the sweep of the ancient space.The repeated circles of perimeter,marble paving stones,oculus,and the spot of sunlight that shines through it emphasize the geometrical logic of the rotunda.Panini’s painted view reflects the eighteenth-century vision of the Pantheon as the locus of an ideal geometrical architectural beauty.

 

 

 Pic. 1. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Pantheon, Rome.

Engraving from Vedute di Roma, c. 1748

 

 

Not everything in Panini’s view satisfied the contemporary critical eye,however.The attic,that intermediate level above the columns and below the coffers of the dome,seemed discordant—ill proportioned, misaligned, not structurally relevant.A variety of construction chronologies were invented to explain this “error.”The incapacity of eighteenth-century critics to interpret the Pantheon’s original complexities led them to postulate a theory of its original state and,continuing Clement XI’s work, formulate a program of corrective reconstruction.

 

 

Pic. 2. Giovanni Paolo Panini, Pantheon,c.1740

 

 

In 1756,during the papacy of Benedict XIV, the doors of the Pantheon were shut,and behind them dust rose as marble fragments from the attic were thrown down.What may have started as a maintenance project resulted in the elimination of the trouble some attic altogether. The work was carried out in secret;even the pope’s claim of authority over the Pantheon,traditionally the city’s domain,was not made public until after completion. Francesco Algarotti, intellectual gadfly of the enlightened age, happened upon the work in progress and wrote with surprise and irony that “they have dared to spoil that magnificent,august construction of the Pantheon....They have even destroyed the old attic from which the cupola springs and they’ve put up in its place some modern gentilities.”As with the twin bell towers erected on the temple’s exterior in the seventeenth century, Algarotti did not know who was behind the present work.

 

The new attic was complete by 1757.Plaster panels and pedimented windows replaced the old attic pilaster order,accentuating lines of horizontality.The new panels were made commensurate in measure to the dome’s coffers and the fourteen“windows”were reshaped as statue niches with cutout figures of statues set up to test the effect.The architect responsible for the attic’s redesign,it was later revealed,was Paolo Posi who,as a functionary only recently hired to Benedict XIV’s Vatican architectural team,was probably brought in after the ancient attic was dismantled. Posi’s training in the baroque heritage guaranteed a certain facility of formal invention.Francesco Milizia, the eighteenth century’s most widely respected architectural critic, described Posi as a decorative talent, not an architectural mind.Whatever one might think of the design, public rancor arose over the wholesale liquidation of the materials from the old attic.Capitals,marble slabs,and ancient stamped bricks were dispersed on the international market for antiquities. Posi’s work at the Pantheon was sharply criticized,often with libelous aspersion that revealed a prevailing sour attitude toward contemporary architecture in Rome and obfuscated Posi’s memory.They found the new attic suddenly an affront to the venerated place.

 

Reconsidering Posi’s attic soon became an exercise in the development of eighteenth-century architects in Rome. Giovanni Battista Piranesi,the catalytic architectural mind who provided us with the evocative engraving of the Pantheon’s exterior,drew up alternative ideas of a rich,three-dimensional attic of clustered pilasters and a meandering frieze that knit the openings and elements together in a bold sculptural treatment.Piranesi,as we will see in a review of this architect’s work,reveled in liberties promised in the idiosyncrasies of the original attic and joyously contributed some of his own.Piranesi had access to Posi’s work site and had prepared engravings of the discovered brick stamps and the uncovered wall construction,but these were held from public release.In his intuitive and profound understanding of the implications of the Pantheon’s supposed “errors,”Piranesi may have been the only one to approach without prejudice the Pantheon in all its complexity and contradiction.

 

The polemical progress of contemporary architectural design in the context of the Pantheon exemplifies the growing difficulties at this moment of reconciling creativity and innovation with the past and tradition. History takes on a weight and gains a life of its own.The polemic over adding to the Pantheon reveals a moment of transition from an earlier period of an innate,more fluid sense of continuity with the past to a period of shifting and uncertain relationship in the present.The process of redefining the interaction of the present to the past,of contemporary creativity in an historical context,is the core of the problem of modern architecture in Italy and the guiding theme of this study.

 

Pic. 3. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Pantheon, design for the attic,1756

Rome of The Nolli Plan

 

The complex layering found at the Pantheon was merely an example of the vast palimpsest that is Rome itself,and there is no better demonstration of this than the vivid portrait of the city engraved in1748. The celebrated cartographer Giovanni Battista Nolli and his team measured the entire city in eleven months using exact trigonometric methods.At a scale of 1 to 2,900,the two-square-meter map sacrifices no accuracy:interior spaces of major public buildings,churches,and palazzi are shown in detail; piazza furnishings,garden parterre layouts,and scattered ruins outside the walls are described with fidelity.Buildings under construction in the1740s were also included:Antoine Derizet’s Church of Santissimo Nome di Maria at Trajan’s Column,the Trevi Fountain, Palazzo Corsini on Via della Lungara. In the city’s first perfectly ichno graphic representation Nolli privileges no element over another in the urban fabric. All aspects are equally observed and equally important.Vignettes in the lower corners of the map,however,present selected monuments of ancient and contemporary Rome:columns,arches,and temples opposite churches,domes,and new piazzas. Roma antica and Roma modern a face one another in a symbiotic union.

 

The Nolli plan captures Rome in all its richness, fixing in many minds the date of its publication as the apex of the city’s architecturals plendor. It is an illusory vision,however,as Rome,like all healthy cities,has never been in stasis. Nolli’s inclusion of contemporary architecture emphasizes its constant evolution.His plan is neither a culmination nor a conclusion but the starting point for contemporary architecture.The architecture of modern Italy is written upon this already dense palimpsest.

 

 

Pic. 4. Giovanni Battista Nolli, La Nuova pianta di Roma,1748