The panoramic framing of this veduta impressively conveys the sense of awe experienced by the tourist, then and now, when taking in this famous site in Rome, but its selective omissions also allow Piranesi to focus our attention on his points of interest. The Pantheon was a first-century CE Roman temple that underwent several campaigns of reconstruction and renovation over succeeding centuries, a history that Piranesi explores in his minuscule annotations to the inscriptions of the facade. In Piranesi’s print, as in life, the looming hulk of the ancient building appears, almost unexpectedly, on rounding the corner into one of modern Rome’s most trafficked squares, the Piazza della Rotonda. As he does in an the previous image on the volume’s previous page, Piranesi often insists on the inextricability of ancient and modern in Rome’s urban landscape, to the confusion and delight of the viewer, but also makes selective omissions and points of emphasis through visual techniques.  

Piranesi’s emphasis on the grandeur of the ancient edifice and its embeddedness in the hubbub of contemporary Rome is accomplished in the first place by tricks of perspective. The ancient building is viewed in Piranesi’s print from ground level, emphasizing its impressive height (43 m) and bulk, features further highlighted by the diminutive modern buildings at the rear of the square, which produce another trick of perspective. The building is set at an angle, in order to capture both the rectilinear portico and façade of the temple, and the curved walls of the domed cella. From Piranesi’s perspective as an architect and that of his contemporaries, the expanse of the dome was an engineering marvel and a model that deserved study. Piranesi’s annotation of the walls (C) emphasizes their “portentosa grosseza” and the arches of brick that reinforce the walls of the cella in order to support the span and tremendous weight of the Pantheon’s dome (Index to the Map of Rome, no. 79).  

The print is bracketed, on either side, by hints of modern architecture; on the left the corner of a modern building with a shop sign above, on the right another corner of a building with a jumble of ruins at its base. These give the viewer the impression of peering at the Pantheon from one of the narrow alleys leading into the square. As is the case with so many of Piranesi’s vedute—a genre traditionally concerned with documentary truth—the perspective here is in fact a creative fiction that reworks the urban landscape. The view, while recognizable, is impossible to create from the vantage point of either of the alleys leading to the Pantheon from the west; Piranesi has rotated the building in order to give the viewer a simultaneous view of the façade and its annotated inscription as well as the ancient construction techniques.  

At the same time, Piranesi makes a few notable omissions. The image does not include the corresponding text for the group of annotations in this and the two following images, which appear instead in the Index to the Map of Rome. This signaled but absent text, where Piranesi’s theories about the temple’s construction and restoration appear, embeds an alternating sense of presence and absence in the structure of the book (Britton 2021). The image also lacks the sixteenth-century fountain and its ancient obelisk that stand in front of the Pantheon and were added to the piazza as part of a Papal renovation campaign. The choice of panoramic framing of the image and vantage point also deemphasize the seventeenth-century addition of bell towers, roundly panned and derisively known in Piranesi’s day as the “ass’s ears.” Piranesi’s decision to effectively remove these later additions was eventually echoed in reality; the bell towers were removed in the late nineteenth century as part of an effort to restore the ancient edifice. (CB)