Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

_{14. The Pantheon, Rome, Italy (AD 118–25); architect: anonymous, but worked under the direction of the Emperor Hadrian. The Pantheon was not a typical Roman temple, but was unique in its design, though it drew on traditional models. Its entrance front for example is not unusual in its conception, though it is larger and more magnificent than an ‘ordinary’ temple would have been. Like the Parthenon (Figure 7) it had eight columns across the front instead of the more usual six (octastyle instead of hexastyle). The entrance doorway itself is flanked by two niches that once held statues, and remarkably the ancient bronze doors that close off the interior are still in position. The interior is unexpected and spectacular: a circular domed space, with a great coffered ceiling, illuminated from a circular hole in the roof (the oculus) that has no covering. The dome is a triumph of Roman engineering achievement, built in concrete and covering a vast expanse. No dome larger than this would be built for well over a thousand years, when Brunelleschi’s dome at the cathedral in Florence was made — begun in 1420. Originally each coffer in the ceiling had a gilded rosette fixed in it, making the dome an image of the heavens. One way in which the building was unusual for a temple was in the elaboration of the interior, which suggests that the rituals that went on here would have made use of the internal space more than was usual. It was this aspect of the building that made it so readily adaptable into a church, which happened at an early date, soon after the official adoption of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and which accounts for the building’s remarkable state of preservation. The gilded bronze tiles that once covered the roof were taken away to Constantinople (‘New Rome’), the Christian capital founded in the east by Constantine, where treasures accumulated around the Byzantine court as the role of old Rome waned, and the city became depopulated during the Middle Ages.}

Palladio and his Four Books