View of the Interior of the Pantheon
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Veduta dell'interno del Pantheon
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2024-10-13T12:59:41-07:00
Veduta dell’interno del Pantheon.; Piranesi Archit(etto) dis(egnò) inc(ise).
View of the interior of the Pantheon.; Drawn and engraved by the Architect Piranesi.
The longest entry in the Index to the Map of Rome is dedicated to the Pantheon, but, notably, the “Veduta dell’interno del Pantheon” is largely devoid of text. The print only contains a brief title across the bottom, and a single annotation (F) refers to the column bases around the periphery of the cella. (Annotations A through E belong to the previous two vedute of the Pantheon, placing the prints in dialogue with one other.) This seemingly inconspicuous annotation makes a significant argument about the chronology for the temple’s floor: “II di lui antico pavimento inoggi mancante copriva parte degli orli delle basi delle predette colonne, apparendo tuttavia in alcune di esse basi il segno dell’internamento degli stessi orli, nella guisa appunto che s'internano le basi delle colonne del Tempio; cosicchè il pavimento moderno rimane alquanto più basso, ed è costruito parte con alcune lastre residuali dell'antico, e parte con opera laterizia.” (Index to the Map of Rome, no. 79). Piranesi’s hypothesis that the floor is not original is supported by the fact that the column bases can be seen sitting on raised, square islands on top of the modern walking level. As Piranesi argues in the lengthy index entry, a floor level lower than the pronaos rendered the building “grave e maestosa.” The sunken perspective afforded by this arrangement would contribute to the structure’s sublime effects.
Piranesi’s view is an oddity in terms of what it captures and what it excludes. The vantage point is from the western apse, looking into the cella. Compared to his internal view of the Pantheon in his Vedute di Roma, this view does not capture the entire height of the columns or reveal the ceiling of the side chapel. Similarly, the dome’s oculus, perhaps the most celebrated and impressive feature of the building, is conspicuously cropped. The perspective is skewed and less convincing than that of the image from Le Vedute di Roma. Here, the coffered dome appears to hang like a drape behind the two columns in the foreground, rather than convey its size, magnificence, and curvature.
Since the Renaissance, architects and draftsmen have been fascinated with how to render the interior of the Pantheon. The challenge of capturing curvature in two dimensions became a worthy drawing exercise for artists and architects. Piranesi picks up this challenge several times in his career. Raphael (1483-1520), the Renaissance master active in Rome in the early 1500s, codified the ideal rendering of the Pantheon’s interior. His drawing, now held at the Uffizi (164A), became one of the most celebrated and copied architectural drawings of the Renaissance, in which Raphael masters depicting circular space on paper. As Wolfgang Lotz has argued, Raphael’s drawing combines a perspective and an orthographic view, the former the device of the painter, the latter the device of the architect (Lotz 24-25). Here, Piranesi approaches the Pantheon as a painter, abandoning his architectural rigor and attention. The three prints devoted to the Pantheon are the most dedicated to a single monument in this volume, yet Piranesi never provides a plan or section, the typical conventions of the architect. Rather, plans and sections are largely reserved for aqueducts and their related architecture, such as the reservoirs for the Baths of Caracalla. Piranesi’s historical and aesthetic inquiries of the building were as challenging as his task of making three-dimensional curvature appear mimetically in the two-dimensional realm of paper, and his argument about the sublime effects of the original lower floor appears through the visual composition and supplementary texts of this image. (SAH)
