The Interior of the Pantheon, Rome, Looking North from the Main Altar to the Entrance, 1732 Giclee Print
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In the Campus Martius, the plain which stretches west from the Quirinal and Capitol hills to the Tiber, stands the best-preserved of Rome’s ancient temples and the only one winch is still used as a place of worship. This is the Pantheon, originally completed or dedicated, according to its inscription, in 27 B.C., by Augustus’ friend, general, colleague, and son-in-law, Agrippa, victor over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Surrounded by the hum of modern Roman life, its time-blackened mass, with the forest of dark columns which forms its portico, confronts the visitor at unexpected moments with a sudden vision of immemorial age. The narrow streets leading to it seem to deflect the eye rather than to attract it toward the great building lost in their labyrinth. To emerge from them into the Piazza della Rotonda, which surrounds the temple, is a surprise. As Hawthorne wrote almost a century ago it ‘often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in search of some other objects’. It seems equally often to withdraw itself into some hidden world from those who seek it, only to confront them finally with a closed and secret air.
Pantheon Illuminated at Night, Rome, Italy Photographic Print
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The temple was dedicated especially to Mars and Venus, the patrons of the Julian family, to which Caesar and Augustus belonged; statues of these deities were set among those in the niches of the interior. ‘Agrippa, for his part,’ says Dio Cassius the historian, ‘wished to place a statue of Augustus there also and to bestow upon him the honour of having the structure named after him; but when the emperor would not accept either honour, he placed in the temple itself a statue of the former Caesar and in the vestibule statues of Augustus and himself.’ The statue of Venus in this temple, according to Pliny, wore in her ears the cut halves of one of two famous pearls which had belonged to Cleopatra; the queen had dissolved and drunk the other, says the author, to win a wager from Antony.
The Pantheon was burned twice; after the second fire, about A.D. 110, it was completely rebuilt by Hadrian, who, scrupulous about claiming for himself a structure which he had merely rebuilt, had the original inscription bearing the names of Agrippa and his father copied on the new building.
Restaurants Near the Ancient Pantheon in the Evening, Rome, Lazio, Italy Photographic Print
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