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Pantheon
Unless
otherwise indicated, pictures on this page © Marco Prins and
Jona Lendering. Photos can be downloaded and used for
non-commercial purposes, but you have to acknowledge Livius.
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Crossing a
large threshold -the world's largest known piece of Lucullan black and red
marble- the visitor entered the sanctuary itself. The interior
of the Pantheon must have been more surprising than it is today. In the
first place, the Pantheon was constructed between other buildings, and
the visitor can not have known that he was about to enter a spacious
vaulted room; in the second place, the contrast between the dark hall
and the bright cult space -which is striking even today- must have
been even more impressive in Antiquity, because the inner side of the
dome was covered with gilded bronze. Since the conquests of Trajan
in Dacia, this precious metal was in abundant supply. The gold must
have reminded those who knew something about philosophy of the highest
part of the earth's atmosphere, which was believed to consist of pure
fire.
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So the visitor entered the circular sanctuary which the emperor Hadrian
had rededicated to the all-divine, i.e., heaven. Inside the rotunda were seven
apses in which -as was once proposed by Theodor Mommsen- must have stood statues of the seven planets that,
according to the ancients, moved around the earth; there was also
a statue of Julius Caesar, the dictator
who had, after his death, been recognized as a celestial god. It is not
recorded how the statues were arranged, but since the days of the
Sicilian scientist Archimedes (287-212) it was customary to use a
sequence based on revolution: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn. If this sequence was also applied in the Pantheon, the statue of the Sun must have stood in the
central apse, which can be seen on the next photo, to the left.
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On one
side, the Sun had the three male planets: son Mars, father Jupiter, and
grandfather Saturn; on the other side were Lady Venus, the
androgynous Mercury, and Mrs. Moon. Saturn and the Moon were as far
from the Sun as possible, in accordance with the ancient theory that
they were the coldest planets. The favorable planets (Moon, Jupiter,
Venus) and the unfavorable ones (Saturn, Mercury, Mars) constituted two
equilateral triangles. In this way, the seven apses were a copy of the
universe. The most striking aspect of the vaulted space, however, was
the big "eye" (oculus) in the top of the vault. Its function in the cosmological design is described by the Athenian philosopher Plato, whose philosophical ideas were rapidly gaining popularity in the second century.
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The gods see many blessed sights
in the inner heaven,
and there are many ways to and fro, along which the blessed
gods are passing, every one doing his own work; he may follow who
will and can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir.
But when they go to banquet and festival, then they move up to the
top of the vault of heaven. [...] For the immortals,
when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand upon
the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries
them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven
which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever
will sing worthily?
[Plato, Phaedrus, 247a-c;
tr. B. Jowett]
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The point
is that the gods do not only belong to our universe, but are also
transcendental: they are beyond this world. This idea, which can for
the first time be documented in the cult of Amun in ancient Egypt, was
often combined with monotheism: the gods venerated by the Greeks and
Romans were manifestations of the one, supreme being, the all-divine or
Pantheon. (The photo shows the floor of the rotunda ...
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... covered by white and Numidian yellow marble, purple porphyry
and grey granite from Egypt.) The movement of one the seven
planets could be seen in the Pantheon as it was described by Plato: the
projection of the Sun on the gilded ceiling, "moving up to the top of
the vault of heaven" in winter, when the Sun is low...
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... and down
in summer, when the Sun is high. In a sense, the Pantheon is a large
planetarium. This is a special photo, taken on the longest day of the
year, 21 June, at astronomical noon. As you see, the light falls
exactly in front of the entrance. If you would have entered the temple
in Antiquity, you would have been absolutely blinded by the light,
which appeared to come from the statue of the Sun. |
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This photo shows one of the apses in which the statues of the planets were standing. It is known from the Natural History (9.121) by Pliny the Elder that the statue of Venus was decorated with earrings containing pearls that had once belonged to queen Cleopatra.
The building was reckoned among Rome's greatest wonders (Ammianus
Marcellinus, 16.10.14: "a self-contained district under a high and
lovely dome"), but is not often mentioned in our sources. We know that
Hadrian held court in this temple (Cassius Dio, Roman History, 69.7.1) and that the emperor Constantius II visited it in 357, and that's about it. |
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In 609, pope
Boniface IV rededicated the Pantheon to S. Maria ad
Martyres. Today, it is still in use as a church.
Literature
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©
Jona Lendering for
Livius.Org,
2007
Revision: 31 March 2007 |
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