The pantheon revisited

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.
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.
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 troublesome
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.

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 in
1748.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-squaremeter
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 the
1740s 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 ichnographic
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 moderna 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 architectural
splendor. 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.

Alessandro Galilei and San Giovanni Laterano

One of the contemporary monuments featured in Nolli’s vignettes
was a new facade for the church of San Giovanni Laterano.The
basilica, along with its baptistery, was erected by the Emperor
Constantine in the year 315. It was, and still is, the pre-eminent
liturgical seat in the Christian capital, where the relics of Saints Peter
and Paul—specifically, their heads—are preserved.The popes resided
at the Lateran through the Middle Ages and it remains today the
cathedral of the city of Rome, though it does not enjoy a preeminent
urban position or architectural stature; indeed its peripheral
site along the city’s western walls and eccentric orientation facing
out across the open countryside make the maintenance of its rightful
stature, let alone its aging physical structure, extremely difficult.The
Church of Saint Peter’s, on the other hand, also Constantinian in
origin, had been entirely reconceived under Pope Julius II in the
Renaissance and became the preferred papal seat. Meanwhile, the
Lateran remained in constant need of repair, revision, and reform.
Pope Sixtus V reconfigured the site by adding an obelisk, a new
palace and benediction loggia on the side and later Pope Innocent X
set Francesco Borromini to reintegrate the body of the church, its
nave, and its double aisles, but his plans for the facade and eastern
piazza were left unexecuted. Dozens of projects to complete the
facade were proposed over the next seventy-five years until Pope
Clement XII announced in 1731 an architectural competition for it.
Clement XII’s idea of a competition was a novelty for Rome,
with a published program and projects presented anonymously before
an expert jury. It would indeed provide an opportunity for exposure
of new ideas and for stimulating discussion. In 1732, nearly two dozen
proposals were put on display in a gallery of the papal summer palace
on the Quirinal Hill. All the prominent architects of Rome
participated, as well as architects from Florence, Bologna, and Venice.
Participants drew up a variety of alternatives ranging, as tastes ran,
between a stern classicism to fulsome baroque images after Borromini.
Jury members from the Accademia di San Luca found the projects
that followed Borrominian inspiration excessively exuberant and
preferred the sobriety of the classical inheritance, and Alessandro Galilei emerged the winner.These expressed opinions delineated a
polemical moment dividing the baroque from a new classicism.
Galilei was a remote relation of the famous astronomer and
followed the papal court from Florence to Rome. Galilei had been
active in the rediscovery of classic achievements in the arts and letters
in the eighteenth century re-examining Giotto, Dante, and
Brunelleschi with renewed appreciation. For example, when asked in
1723 for his opinion on a new baroque-style altar for the Florentine
baptistry, Galilei favored preserving the original Romanesque
ambience of the interior despite the tastes of his day. A renewed
classical sense stigmatized the frivolities of the rococo as uncultivated,
arbitrary, and irrational. Clement XII’s competition for San Giovanni
may merely have been a means to secure the project less flagrantly
for Galilei and to introduce a rigorous cultural policy to Rome.
Roman architects petitioned the pope, livid that their talent
went unrewarded, and Clement responded with, in effect, consolation
prizes to some of them with commissions for other papal works.
Construction on the Lateran facade was begun in 1733.
Galilei’s facade of San Giovanni Laterano is a tall and broad
structure in white travertine limestone.The structure is entirely open
to the deep shadowed spaces of a loggia set within a colossal
Corinthian order. In a manuscript attributed to Galilei, the architect
articulates his guiding principles of clear composition and reasoned
ornament, functional analysis and economy. Professional architects,
Galilei insists, trained in mathematics and science and a study of
antiquity, namely the Pantheon and Vitruvius, can assure good
building. Galilei’s handling of the composition has the rectilinear
rigor and interlocking precision one might expect from a
mathematician.The ponderous form is monumental merely by the
means of its harmonious proportions of large canonical elements. It is
a strong-boned, broad-shouldered architecture, a match for Saint
Peter’s. It demonstrates in its skeletal sparseness and subordination of
ornamentation the rational architectural logic attributed to Vitruvius.
Galilei’s images are derived primarily from sources in Rome: the two
masterpieces of his Florentine forefather Michelangelo, Saint Peter’s
and the Palazzo dei Conservatori at the Capitoline. Galilei’s classicism
is a constant strain among architects in Rome who built their monumental church facades among the vestiges of the ancient
temples. Galilei refocused that tradition upon Vitruvius and in his
measured austerity contributed a renewed objectivity to Roman
architecture of the eighteenth century.
Galilei’s austere classicism is emblematic of a search for a
timeless and stately official idiom at a point in time where these
qualities were found lacking in contemporary architecture. Reason,
simplicity, order, clarity—the essential motifs of this modern
discussion—set into motion a reasoned disengagement from the
baroque.With Galilei’s monumental facade, guided in many ways by
the pressures of Saint Peter’s, the Cathedral of Rome takes its
rightful position, as Nolli’s vignette suggests, a triumphal arch over
enthroned Roma moderna.

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