Arnold Nesselrath

No building could have embodied Renaissance principles of ideal architecture more fully than the Pantheon: in addition to being the best-preserved temple from antiquity, the perfect specimen of antique architecture is even a circular central-plan building. The clarity of the stereometric forms of sphere and cylinder, dome and drum, as well as the proportions of diameter and height, had been preserved intact because of its transformation into a Christian church. The Pantheon far surpassed the grandeur of the only other ancient temple of Rome that still stood largely complete, the much smaller Temple of Portunus or – to use the name given to it after its conversion to its new function – the church of S. Maria Egiziaca in the former Forum Boarium.¹ Here, the intercolumniations of its portico had been bricked up and closed, and its interior was drastically altered, so that the effect of the whole building no longer recalled the ancient temple it once was. The contrast between the bare undecorated brick exterior of the Pantheon, which at first sight raises no expectations other than the usual ruins of ancient buildings, and the interior, into which the solemn broad columnar portico invites us and the massive bronze doors admit us, has an astonishing effect on the person entering. The visitor experiences something like a sudden parousia, with a single source of light flooding through the open oculus in the center of the dome, where all of the structural forces and sight lines converge. The Corinthian order of columns and pilasters define and articulate the wall encircling the whole inner space of the Pantheon. The use of an order permitted – also in the primary sense of the word – the development of a homogeneous architectural system in which the curved oblong and semicircular alcoves with their corners and angles and the aedicules could be harmoniously incorporated and fully integrated.²

In the interior of the Pantheon the much-prized richness of ancient marble incrustation was still largely preserved; the polychromy and the variety of marbles employed were unrivaled and, even after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, they continued to conjure up its former greatness.³ This ideal view of the building was perhaps best expressed in an undated quotation attributed to Bramante. On receiving the commission for the new St. Peter’s, the first church of Christendom, he is said to have summed up his plan for the program by saying that he wanted to place the Pantheon on top of the Templum Pacis, that is, the Basilica of Constantine.⁴

Other artists expressed their admiration for the ancient central-plan building of the Pantheon by choosing it as the site for their own burial. A clear statement is also expressed by this practice:⁵ as they anticipated resurrection under the coffered dome with its central oculus, they linked the temple reputedly consecrated to all the pagan gods with the eternity of their own Christian faith. They thus took a personal part in exorcizing the Pantheon.⁶ Reflecting his archaeological investigations and projects in Rome, Raphael was one of the first artists to be buried here;⁷ he was followed by his betrothed Maria Bibbiena⁸ and by friends, disciples, assistants, and followers such as Baldassare Peruzzi,⁹ Perino del Vaga,¹⁰ and Giovanni da Udine¹¹ up to Annibale Carracci,¹² as well as Taddeo Zuccari,¹³ Vignola,¹⁴ and Flaminio Vacca.¹⁵ These Renaissance artists thus founded the tradition of an abstract idea and created the metaphorical meaning of pantheon as a building serving as the memorial of the famous dead: a shrine honoring great men and women.

On the Appearance of the Pantheon in the Renaissance

It is precisely the ideal image of the Pantheon that the draftsmen, the engravers, and the authors of treatises of that period helped to disseminate. Yet the impression that the Renaissance spectator gained on entering the building was quite the opposite of this ideal. As with all reused ancient temples, its appearance had been drastically altered by its transformation into a Christian church or, rather, as a consequence of that operation. Even if the consummate proportions could not be upset by this development, the overall impression of what had once been the ancient cella below the dome had been fractured by the altar layout before the main apse, consisting of a ciborium contained within a kind of columnar screen or pergola, and by the fragmented use of the interior space. The alcoves, tabernacles, and annexes that formally determine the wall rhythm of the rotunda were isolated by their new liturgical functions: each was individually formed, each had its own altar and focal point, and to each was assigned its own individual dedication.

With their numerous altars and with their use as side chapels against or behind the ancient wall, the alcoves generated through their chronologically, stylistically, or chromatically miscellaneous arrangement an altogether heterogeneous impression of the interior, permitting only a faint sense of the uniform concept of the ancient temple to remain. In its transformation, the damage caused to the fabric, original decoration, and marble incrustation of the walls was serious. Even the patterns of the original pavement were upset and interrupted with the insertion of tombstones. Raphael’s famous drawing in the Uffizi (see Fig. 1.16) thus suggests an image of the Pantheon¹⁶ that did not correspond to its actual condition at the time. Although numerous other representations seem to reinforce this image, the appearance of the ancient interior, intact as represented in this drawing, in no way corresponded to what the visitor would have seen around 1506 and already long before.

After the ancient temple had been abandoned and then transformed into a Christian church in the early seventh century, and after it had been used as a church in subsequent centuries, larger and smaller additions built into it had altered the original appearance of the Pantheon considerably. Moreover, the ancient statues with their three-dimensional qualities, which would have engaged with the architectural system and complemented the symmetry of the interior, were by now replaced by flat paintings positioned mainly over the altars in the alcoves or aedicules and executed in part in the form of frescoes.¹⁷ Although the dedication to “Sancta Maria ad Martyres” was frequently used to refer to the building, the alternative “Santa Maria Rotonda” alluded to its architectural form and perhaps its ancient origin. Indeed, the liturgical furnishings for its new cult found hardly any visual record until the seventeenth century.

The same could be said, although to a lesser degree, of the exterior. The Pantheon is situated in the Campo Marzio, a quarter of Rome that remained inhabited even in periods when the population of the city declined.¹⁸ The piazza in front of it was somewhat smaller before its baroque remodeling; the streets around the building were narrower, and the medieval houses crowded closer to the Rotunda than the buildings now surrounding it. The left (east) flank of the columnar portico had been destroyed. The corner of the pediment, the corresponding row of columns, or at least their capitals, and the roof had here collapsed, and a temporary retaining wall filled the entire intercolumniation (Fig. 9.1) to shore up the porch. The other intercolumniations had been partly blocked with low retaining walls, both to defend against floods and to demarcate the various activities transacted there. The portico was a popular place for an extraordinary variety of functions and, as such, was repeatedly invaded by unauthorized structures and uses.¹⁹The roof of the portico was topped by a squat medieval belfry (Fig. 9.2). These visual documents illustrate this situation only from a relatively late date, principally the sixteenth century. The first image, one of the earliest vedute, is found in the famous Codex Escurialensis. It shows the walled-in intercolumniations. Unfortunately, however, it did not copy the view in every detail and thus fails to give a full impression of the Pantheon’s exterior at the time.²⁰ Another drawing by an anonymous hand, perhaps dating to the mid sixteenth century and now in Paris, gives a fuller record of the monument and shows in an impressive way how the Pantheon had gradually merged into its quarter and its surrounding structures (see Fig. 1.7).²¹ When this sheet was drawn, the Piazza della Rotonda had already been adorned and articulated with the antiquities installed there during the Middle Ages: namely, the two Egyptian lions, the large porphyry tub, and the round porphyry bowl, documented there at least since the twelfth or thirteenth centuries and described by the famous Master Gregorius.²² They are mentioned again in the time of Pope Eugenius IV around 1444,²³ and Pope Leo X commissioned them to be reinstalled between 1517 and 1520 in the way they are shown in the drawing.²⁴

9.1. Exterior view of the Pantheon; hand of the Anonymous Escurialensis, sixteenth century. (Codex Escurialensis, fol. 43 v, Monastery of El Escorial, Spain)

9.2. Exterior view of the Pantheon; drawing from circle of Baldassare Peruzzi. (Uffizi A 160 r, Uffizi Gallery. Copyright: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino)

The sculptures were separately displayed on rather unprepossessing squat pedestals. The feet of the porphyry tub stood on two marble panels decorated in relief, and inscriptions (Fig. 9.3 a and b), now walled into the portico, commemorated the Leonine installation of the ensemble.²⁵ The veduta (“view”) of the Pantheon exterior from the Uffizi by an assistant of Baldassare Peruzzi (Fig. 9.2),²⁶ is earlier than the drawing in the Escorial. The embarrassmentor indecisiveness of the Uffizi draftsman is apparent. On the one hand, the drawing tries to provide a really precise impression of the situation after the installation of the antiquities in front of it by Leo X. On the other hand, it highlights and isolates the ancient building and the antique sculptures. The stonework is represented rather coarsely, although the ashlar of the tympanum is represented in detail. In order to reveal the floor of the portico, the artist has deliberately omitted the low retaining walls in the lower part of the intercolumniations, which are especially clear in the somewhat later views of the interior of the portico by an anonymous Netherlandish draftsman (see Fig. 1.4).²⁷

9.3 a and b. Marble reliefs in the entrance hall of the Pantheon; Roman sculptor from the early sixteenth century. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Instituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione [ICCD])

Today, as a result of modern restoration, and especially the partial reconstitution of the original upper story,²⁸ the interior of the Pantheon more closely resembles Raphael’s drawing, which attempted to reconstruct the interior in its original state. Given these modern changes, there is almost nothing left on site to inspire any appreciation of the young artist’s achievement, which envisioned a reconstruction that is as valid today as it was in his own day. Comparing the present situation of the interior cella with Raphael’s drawing of 1506, we might miss the effort that was required to develop such a clear distinction between antique and Christian arrangement of the space. Endless discussions of the drawing in art historical literature, including the strange resistance to John Shearman’s subtle interpretation,²⁹ make particularly evident what Raphael has accomplished. If we were to reverse the artist’s mental process, we would arrive at a wholly different appearance of the Pantheon cella reflecting the use of the interior in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Relying instead on surviving remains and subtracting traces of the Christian redecoration, which were added to the interior in the course of history and of which fragments can still be found, we are even able to arrive at a quite specific idea of what the draftsman saw.

One of the earliest remains of the medieval decoration to survive is a fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin, presumably dating to the fourteenth century, in the second aedicule to the right of the entrance (Fig. 9.4).³⁰ It was simply painted as an altarpiece in the ready-made architectural frame. Another fresco, roughly the same in date, had survived until the beginning of twentieth century in the semicircular alcove on the east side of the building’s transverse axis. Here, a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas was installed. It was destroyed at the beginning of the last century to make way for the funerary monument of King Umberto I (see Chapter Twelve). The imagery showed a blessing Christ in a mandorla. Kneeling before him to the left was a female figure, supporting her head with her left hand in a melancholic pose. On the right side stood a bearded saint, perhaps St. Peter. A further fragment of fresco, which might have dated as early as the twelfth century, was also destroyed to make way for the royal monument.³¹

9.4. Second aedicule to the right of the entrance; Trecento fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione [ICCD])

The first side chapel to the right of the entrance was created in one of the oblong alcoves situated on a diagonal axis of the Pantheon. It is dedicated to St. Boniface IV, the pope who converted the Pantheon into a Christian church. Nearly three times broader than it is deep, the proportions of the chapel seem awkward for liturgical functions. Its back wall is articulated with three rectangular niches, whose original architectural decoration is lacking as is the marble incrustation of the whole alcove. The central niche of the chapel, aligned with the central intercolumniation, is painted with a fresco of the Annunciation. The artist belonged to the circle of Melozzo da Forlì or Antoniazzo Romano, and thus the mural can be dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth century.³²

The next diagonal alcove on the right has the same oblong shape as the first. It continues to serve as the chapel of S. Maria della Clemenza. The altarpiece is similarly placed in the central niche of the alcove. It consists of a fresco of the enthroned Madonna between St. John the Baptist and St. Francis of Assisi. Dating to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, it is attributed to an Umbro-Latian follower of Antoniazzo Romano.³³ Two tombstones have remained in situ in this alcove: one, dating to the early years of the fifteenth century, is the tomb of the lawyer Paolo Scocciapile (Fig. 9.5); the other is dedicated to the memory of a certain Gismonda, who died in 1476.³⁴ Other tombstones, formerly set into the floor, such as that of Pietro Angelo de Melle and others, in part dating to the fourteenth century, have been restored from fragments and are preserved in the Pantheon.³⁵ As in almost all Roman churches, such marble bas-reliefs were inserted into the pavement of the Pantheon without sparing its ancient pattern of circles and squares. These elements have now been generally removed, and the floor has been reconstructed in the original pattern almost everywhere.

9.5. Grave of the lawyer Paolo Scocciapile, third alcove to the right of the entrance, early fifteenth century. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione [ICCD]).

What has not survived of the medieval decoration, on the other hand, are the ciborium over the high altar, supported by four porphyry columns, and the surrounding columnar screen or pergola, supported in turn by another six porphyry columns. Placed on the central axis and projecting into the rotunda, this pergola would have been the first feature to strike the eye of anyone entering the Pantheon. From this feature, the visitor would have immediately recognized that the ancient cella had been transformed into a Christian sanctuary. Raphael preferred to exclude from his drawing such elements that characterized and obstructed the interior at the start of the sixteenth century, and he simply did not record them. Instead, he tried in his mind’s eye to reconstruct the pagan state of the temple interior in restored form in his Uffizi drawing (Fig. 1.16). To produce this impression on his sheet, he had to walk around the inside of the Pantheon in order to look from behind the altar screen. Presumably, this detour explains why the interior view of the Rotunda was drawn in two separate installments, giving rise to the well-known error³⁶ that led him to omit a whole alcove with its massive columns and a part of the wall with its pedimented aedicule. In other words, Raphael combined two separate elevations in his drawing. To draw both parts of the elevation, he needed observations from different standpoints from which he could look behind the medieval altar screen; in the process, he omitted a third portion of the elevation that would have completed his view of one side of the interior.³⁷

In his altarpiece for the Cappella Dei in S. Spirito in Florence, the Madonna del Baldacchino, dating from 1508, Raphael succeeded in evoking an imaginative reconstruction of the Pantheon interior, using the motif of the main apse as a niche for a sacra conversazione.³⁸ Although he again represented the original antique state of the architecture and used it as a background, the Virgin and Child take the place of the medieval high altar: sitting on the throne of an antique statue of Jupiter³⁹ she holds the Christ Child in her lap as the Mother of the true God.

So far as we know, only one Renaissance draftsman, namely, the Nuremberg artist Hermann Vischer the Younger (ca. 1486–1517), recorded the medieval layout of the cella with ciborium and altar screen, at least in a plan (Fig. 9.6). The drawing is dated 1515. Vischer represented the Pantheon not as an ancient monument but as a Christian church. In the accompanying inscriptions, for example, the ancient name of the building is not mentioned: Hie leit die gantz kapelln marija Rodunda im grunt mit der borten oder Eingang.⁴⁰ Along with the high altar, the aedicules are also expressly described as altars: das sin altar.

9.6. Ground plan of Pantheon; drawing by Hermann Vischer, sixteenth century. (The Louvre, inv. 19051 verso. Photograph: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

A few later sources document the central altar setting in greater detail. In 1588, Pompeo Ugonio described its elevations and the varieties of precious marbles used in its incrustation.⁴¹ Giovan Carlo Valloni provided similar information in 1670.⁴² The report by Giovanni Antonio Bruzi dating to the second half of the seventeenth century is still more detailed, comprising even the inscriptions.⁴³ The literary descriptions are closely matched by the visual documentation. The well-known orthogonal elevations and ground plan (see Fig. 10.7 and Plate V), drawn by a contemporary of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and produced as part of Pope Alexander VII’s proposed remodeling of the Pantheon,⁴⁴ enable us to determine the dimensions of the altar screen.⁴⁵ From the pasted-on flap in these drawings showing the section of the pergola, we can clearly see what had obstructed Raphael’s observation of the interior in 1506 and how far he had to walk around it to see and be able to draw the aedicule that lay hidden behind it.

A similar orthogonal section through the Pantheon in the Raccolta Martinelli in Milan (Fig. 9.7) represents the pergola even more precisely.⁴⁶ Since the sheet belongs to a series also comprising an elevation of the facade with the two belfries added by Urban VIII,⁴⁷ this section should not be dated earlier than the surveys and projects from the Bernini shop. The section in question analyzes the altar setting in a very precise way. It thus records the right side of the two presumably symmetrical ambones, or reading desks, as described by Bruzi, and also shows the elevation and section of the altar ciborium. According to a marble inscription on the screen, the altar pergola was donated by Stephanus Philippi⁴⁸ and thus may perhaps date back to the Pantheon’s consecration as a church.⁴⁹The ciborium, however, is significantly later, since descriptions of it mention coats of arms and inscriptions on it that record Pope Innocent VIII as the patron of a renovation of the central feature of the altar layout and its installation here in 1491.⁵⁰The print of Giuseppe Tiburzio Vergelli and Pietro Paolo Girelli of 1692⁵¹ confirms the layout of the sanctuary area that existed till the erection of a new high altar under Clement XI in 1711,⁵² but provides us with less detailed information (see Fig. 11.3).

9.7. Section of the Pantheon; drawing by anonymous draftsman of the seventeenth century. (Milan, Civico Gabinetto dei Disegni, Raccolta Martinelli, vol. V, fol. 99 r)

Because the pair of original columns has been replaced by granite columns in the two aedicules with segmental pediments closest to the entrance, it has been inferred that the original porphyry shafts of these aedicules had been used by Innocent VIII and his architects for the new altar ciborium.⁵³ In fact, the spolia were not simply wrenched from their site but carefully replaced by other columns. Instead of the former Composite bases, we now find Attic bases supporting both shafts, while the new shafts themselves were hewn from granite; Corinthian capitals were then added to the shafts of the aedicule to the right (west) of the entrance, but these are later than the Hadrianic originals. On the aedicule to the left (east) side of the entrance, Corinthian-like acorn-wreath capitals dating to the second half of the first century AD⁵⁴ were used. They are at variance with the repertoire of forms of the Pantheon and are clearly spolia.

Since four columns were needed for the support of the ciborium, it may be assumed that its builders did use the Pantheon itself as the source for these materials. It is less probable that the four columns from the aedicules flanking the entrance had also been used in the medieval altar pergola, for it consisted (as we have seen) of six columns, and the spolia from the two aedicules would not have been sufficient. Three copies of a drawing of an aedicule in the Pantheon with a segmental pediment – located respectively in the Codex Escurialensis,⁵⁵ in the Royal Institute of British Architects in London (Fig. 9.8),⁵⁶ and in the Uffizi⁵⁷ – all show Attic bases with acanthus leaf capitals resembling the Corinthian order. If their consistent representation in all three drawings is not overinterpreted, the aedicule represented in these drawings should be one to the left (east) side of the entrance, which would have been spoliated or altered by Innocent VIII shortly after 1491.⁵⁸

9.8. Aedicule in the Pantheon; by anonymous draftsman from the circle of Giuliano da Sangallo. (London, Royal Institute of British Architects, inv. VIII/6)

Suddenly, in the aftermath of this spoliation, an active restoration, especially of the aedicules or the tabernacles, began in the early years of the sixteenth century, funded by endowments of the altars. The best-known example in the series is the aedicule containing Raphael’s tomb (Fig. 9.9). In his last will and testament, the artist had asked that he be buried in the ancient, now Christianized, building that had been so crucial for his art.⁵⁹ The fact that all eight aedicules could be restored and liturgically converted into funerary monuments within just two to three decades perhaps indicates that the Roman Renaissance had reached its artistic but also its economic high point.⁶⁰

9.9. Tomb of Raphael, likely after his own designs. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

All of the early drawings of the Pantheon, starting with those of Francesco di Giorgio Martini (see Fig.10.5),⁶¹ show the lower part of the tabernacles as an open recess between separate pedestals and not as a closed socle. The earliest known drawing that shows a continuous socle, with the pedestals connected beneath the columns, is a page in the Codex Barberini, a book of drawings assembled by Giuliano da Sangallo (Fig. 9.10).⁶² This impressive frontal view is drawn on an enlarged folio of the codex, and so it cannot belong to the early studies in the Libro. Given that the individual drawings in the codex are difficult to date,⁶³ we can only rely on the terminus ante quem of Giuliano’s death in 1516, that is, within the period of the aedicules’s restoration.

9.10. Aedicule from the Pantheon; drawing by Giuliano da Sangallo. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 4424, fol. 27 v)

At about the same time, in the years around 1514, Bernardo della Volpaia represented the triangular and segmental aedicules with an open recess between the pedestals in his so-called Codex Coner (Fig. 9.11),⁶⁴ as did Antonio da Faenza in the architectural treatise he wrote between 1520 and 1535 (Fig. 9.12).⁶⁵ Toward 1519–1520, the closed socle appears more frequently in drawings after the antique, as for instance in a drawing by Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo datable to this period.⁶⁶ By April 1523, work on Raphael’s tomb was still in progress, suggesting that the open socle existed until this moment in time. During this period, the statue of the Madonna del Sasso (commissioned by Raphael in his will) was installed over the tomb, and that tabernacle, with its segmental pediment, received its present form.⁶⁷ Thereafter, the visual records transmit the form familiar to us today in the representations of the aedicules with closed pedestals, as in the book of drawings by Raffaello da Montelupo in Lille.⁶⁸

9.11. Two aedicules from the Pantheon; drawing by Bernardo della Volpaia. (London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, fol. 52 r)

9.12. Flank of the portico and detail of interior elevation; drawing by Antonio da Faenza, 1520–1535. (Private collection. Photo Antonia Weisse)

The alterations of the aedicules can no longer be verified by inspection of the physical evidence, since all eight of the pedestal zones have been damaged by later interventions in the crucial area. A typological comparison with buildings or parts of buildings of the Hadrianic period is complicated by the rarity of such architectural elements, although it can be noticed that the use of pedestals seems more playfully ornamental in character than to follow a strict typological pattern: the classical emphasis of the horizontal member is not always privileged; the intention instead was to experiment with soaring, almost diaphanous-seeming structures.⁶⁹

The original form of the aedicules can best be gauged from the study of drawings after the antique. Of particular interest is a sheet attributed to Gregor Caronica whose present location is unfortunately unknown (Fig. 9.13). It was contained in a codex, whether an album or a homogeneous book of drawings, dating to 1577 that was owned by O. Baer in Frankfurt before 1940.⁷⁰ An inscription on an orthogonal elevation of the lower story of the rotunda showing an aedicule with triangular pediment and its flanking pilasters seems to confirm these observations on the divided pedestals. The draftsman remarked on the sheet: Il basamento d[ell’] altare è moderno dalla base della colonna in giù (“The dado of the altar is modern from the base of the column down”). Independently, Pirro Ligorio reported che i tabernacoli degli altari furono restaurati, l’uno dopo l’altro, a spese di pie persone (“that the tabernacles of the altars were restored, one after the other, at the expense of pious persons”).⁷¹ Both notations may depend on the reports of eyewitnesses or on information from drawings by such people. In opposition to current archaeological thought,⁷² therefore, the notations explicitly seem to confirm the information presented by the individual drawings when arranged in a chronological order.

9.13. Aedicule from the Pantheon; drawing by Gregor Caronica of a missing folio from a codex of 1577 whose whereabouts are unknown.

The appearance of the Pantheon today comes close to the ideal image that people in the Renaissance had of it. This fact in turn could mislead us into thinking that the building has survived from antiquity in its present condition. But what seems original and ancient is often an ex post facto reconstruction, based on varying levels of subjective interpretation. Not all interventions in the Pantheon were as spectacular as the installation of the medieval high altar or the alteration of the tabernacles. A close analysis of the early drawings from the Renaissance can make us aware of alterations and renovations of quite specific details over the centuries, such as the decorative scheme of its polychrome marble incrustation, that deserve continued study to enhance our understanding.⁷³

From this point of view, the need for care of the exterior of the Pantheon is equally understandable since it faired more poorly over the centuries than the interior due to exposure to the natural elements, but also to the encroachment of neighbors and squatters, as well as spoliation by vandals and conquerors. The popes devoted their attention to the building soon after their return from exile in Avignon, during a phase of political consolidation in early Quattrocento Rome. The Liber Pontificalis attributed the new lead sheathing of the dome, which had long been stripped of its gilt bronze tiles, to the pontificate of Martin V (1417–1431).⁷⁴ During the reign of the successor pope Eugenius IV (1431–1447), Flavio Biondo in his Roma instaurata reports on an overhaul of this new lead roof that was apparently already necessary.⁷⁵ Supplementing these written references is documentary proof of another fifteenth-century restoration of the lead tiling under the direction of the humanist pope Nicholas V (1447–1455). From his reign there still survive the relevant payment receipts and even some lead tiles, prominently stamped with the crossed keys, papal tiara, and name of the pope, as well as the date 1451 (Fig. 9.14).⁷⁶ Documents also reveal repeated attempts to free the portico of unsightly and unauthorized stalls and other buildings concurrent with these restorations.⁷⁷

9.14. Lead roof tile from the former cover of the cupola of the Pantheon. (Musei Vaticani, inv. 56231 and 56232. Scala/Art Resource, NY)

Like the original form of the tabernacles inside the Rotunda, the bronze roof trusses of the porch, removed and melted down under the Barberini Pope Urban VIII in 1625 and replaced by wooden ones,⁷⁸ are known only from Renaissance depictions. In addition to the woodcuts in Sebastiano Serlio’s Third Book,⁷⁹ originally issued in 1540, we have two even more precise illustrations of the lost roof trusses in their original state. A hitherto unidentified Portuguese artist, active around 1568–1570,⁸⁰ and another anonymous draftsman, conventionally known as Hand F in the so-called Goldschmidt Scrapbook with French drawings of the later sixteenth century,⁸¹ provide two impressively comprehensive records of the Pantheon, studied in minute detail. The drawings include several surveys showing the rare antique construction with all its peculiarities (Fig. 9.15).⁸² All that remains of it is a bronze rivet formerly in the possession of the seventeenth-century antiquarian, collector, and biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori.⁸³

9.15. Timbering in the portico of the Pantheon; anonymous French draftsman, late sixteenth century. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Goldschmidt Scrapbook, fols. 84 v–85 r. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY)

On the Interest in the History of the Pantheon during the Renaissance

In some sense, the frequency with which the interior of the Pantheon was remodeled and refurnished as a church could be construed as antithetical to the idealized descriptions and representations that Renaissance artists have left in their vedute, surveys, and drawings. Indeed, some of the same architects, sculptors, and painters who recorded or “reconstructed” the ancient building and the piazza in front of it also participated in or contributed to their remodeling during this period. Yet it becomes evident that reflections on the pagan building were combined with the consciousness of the Christian alterations made to it over time and that both came to bear on attempts to understand the Pantheon. Thus, an astonishingly differentiated knowledge of the building was obviously available in which both traditions – pagan and Christian – were analyzed.

On the basis of legends enshrined in the mirabilia tradition, around 1450–1453 the English pilgrim John Capgrave maintained that Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa dedicated the building as a votive monument to the goddess Cybele, the legendary mother of the gods in the Greco-Roman pantheon. After Cybele had appeared in a dream to Agrippa, the general and son-in-law of Augustus vowed that in the event of his conquest and victory over the Persians, he would build this temple. Capgrave was understandably impressed by the domed building and repeated the story that it had been vaulted without scaffolding over a mound of earth in which gold coins had been buried. The Roman population, having been promised that they could keep any coins they found in it, then eagerly removed the earth from the building after the dome had been completed.⁸⁴ The Augustan tradition of the Pantheon, as transmitted through the Middle Ages, could easily be verified in the inscription commemorating Agrippa on the entablature above the portico. But it is especially remarkable that Capgrave was at least vaguely informed about the history of the building, or the one that had preceded it, for he also reports a dating of the Rotunda to the principate of the emperor Domitian, leaving the reader to determine the correct chronology.⁸⁵ Capgrave ends his account by introducing the new dedication of the Pantheon as a church for all martyrs and saints whose feast day (All Saints Day) had been shifted from its original date of May 13 or 15 to November 1 because, he said, it was more appropriately celebrated with the blessing of the harvests in the autumn.⁸⁶

Such legends,⁸⁷ drawn from the local tradition, testify to the continuous fascination of the Pantheon, even for the inhabitants who lived around it. That was natural enough, for it was situated in the Campo Marzio, the main medieval residential quarter in Rome, which had shriveled in size following the decline and fall of the empire, the cutting of the aqueducts, and the abandonment of the hills of the city.⁸⁸ Following their return from Avignon, the Popes and their city planners were aware of this urban situation and privileged it in their remodeling of the piazza and their embellishment of it with antiquities and statues, which we have already mentioned. Thus in 1444, Eugenius IV ordered the rearrangement of the two basalt lions, the large porphyry tub, and the round porphyry basin that had been sitting on the piazza in front of the Pantheon since the Middle Ages. Almost a century later, those ancient Roman pieces were again relocated as part of a new scheme for the piazza under Leo X.⁸⁹ The antiquities led into the portico in front of the Rotunda; in this sense, both popes sought visibly to engage the Pantheon in a dialogue with the urban space in front of it and to present the ancient building in its public role.⁹⁰

The various initiatives to restore and renovate the Pantheon since the Renaissance are thus expression of the evaluation and appreciation of its architectural mastery. The building’s new users could hardly resist that appeal, which may also have attracted them to the building in the first instance. But at the same time, it also inspired them to embark on their own remodeling of it. Raphael strikingly manifests this duality: He reconstructed the ancient state of the temple interior during his short visit to Rome in 1506⁹¹ and later studied the Pantheon in greater detail, as shown by his one surviving autograph sheet now in London⁹² and by more copies in the Fossombrone book of drawings from his other now-lost surveys (Fig. 9.16 a and b).⁹³ Yet after his archaeological studies and his distinctly scientific approach, Raphael commissioned the altar with the statue of the Madonna del Sasso to be erected over his tomb in his last will and testament in 1520. The form of the sculpture pays tribute to the pagan past, while its iconography contributes to the temple’s Christian use.

9.16 a and b. Pantheon studies; drawings by the Anonymous Foro Semproniensis(?). (Fossombrone, Italy, Biblioteca Civica Passionei, inv. Disegni vol. 3, fol. 14v–15r)

The decoration of the Pantheon cannot, therefore, be separated from the historical and theoretical analyses of the building, and each observer will differentiate among the elements according to his or her own particular artistic or intellectual ambition. The same can also be said of architectural adaptations that imply or even presuppose a theoretical reflection on the Pantheon. Such adaptations were rarely a recreation of the whole building, as was perhaps most impressively achieved in Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda outside of Vicenza. More often we see manifestations of the desire to replicate details that characterize the architectural system of antiquity. Here, for example, we may cite the corner solution for the Corinthian order, with its angled pilasters in the oblong alcoves, which Filippo Brunelleschi imitated in the Old Sacristy in S. Lorenzo, Florence (Figs. 9.17, 9.18). Bramante did the same in the upper Cortile del Belvedere.⁹⁴ He again adopted the classical Corinthian order for the new St. Peter’s in Rome.⁹⁵ In the impressive working drawing of the capitals made for the stonemasons of the new basilica⁹⁶ we can still feel today, as 500 years ago, the power of inspiration transmitted by the commanding capitals of the Pantheon.

9.17. Capital from rectangular alcove of the Pantheon. (Marvin Trachtenberg, “Why the Pazzi Chapel Is Not by Brunelleschi,” in Casabella 60, 1996, pp. 58–77, Fig. 22; used with permission of the author)

9.18. Capital by Brunelleschi from the Pazzi Chapel, Florence, fifteenth century. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Instituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione)

The same act of transference can directly be grasped in the case of the entablature for S. Biagio alla Pagnotta, Rome. A drawing by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger documents explicitly the juxtaposition of Menicantonio’s study in the Pantheon, executed for Bramante, and Bramante’s own design for the church.⁹⁷ In Raphael’s Chigi Chapel in S. Maria del Popolo, the appeal exerted by the Pantheon goes beyond the particular forms, as it is manifest even in the materials he employed: Raphael not only used marble incrustation on the walls of the chapel but also matched the distinctive threshold made of African marble in the Pantheon⁹⁸ with a massive step hewn from the same stone for the entrance to his domed, centrally planned, chapel.

Even more than these drawings and similar artistic responses to the Pantheon, an episode recounted by Vasari in his vita of Andrea Sansovino gives a vivid insight into the different aspects discussed about the Pantheon in their day. According to Vasari, criticism soon began to circulate about the coffers of the barrel vault in the sacristy vestibule of S. Spirito in Florence with the coffers designed by Cronaca in 1492 while the vestibule had been built based on the plans of Giuliano da Sangallo since 1489; the criticism was aimed at the fact that the arrangement of the coffers was not aligned with the columns.⁹⁹ Andrea Sansovino, who had sculpted the column capitals, had apparently justified the solution by explicitly citing Cronaca’s ancient prototype and referred to precedents in the Pantheon. Cronaca, Vasari reported, had adopted the method of the coffering in the Rotunda interior, “where the ribs that radiate from the oculus high in the center, from which that temple gets its light, serve to enclose the square, sunk panels containing the rosettes, which diminish little by little, as likewise do the ribs; and for that reason they do not fall in a straight line with the columns.”¹⁰⁰

In this anecdote not only did Vasari demonstrate the sort of criticism to which architects were exposed and needed to defend against, but he also used the episode to explain the role played by the archaeological/art-historical and theoretical discussions of contemporaries. On the one hand, Vasari vividly described the intensity of the controversy by quoting the justification of one of the protagonists, Andrea Sansovino. On the other hand, he distanced himself from Andrea’s explanation by reporting Michelangelo’s hypothesis about the building history of the Pantheon that rebuts Sansovino’s interpretation. For, according to Vasari and other sources, Michelangelo believed that the Pantheon had been built by three architects, the first of whom carried it to the large cornice, the second continued from the cornice upward, and the third built the portico. This explanation accounted for the lack of alignment between the coffering and the vertical members below it. Thus, Vasari:

Nevertheless many craftsmen, and Michelangelo in particular, have been of the opinion that the Rotonda was built by three architects, of whom the first carried it as far as the cornice that is above the columns, and the second from the cornice upwards, the part, namely, that contains those windows of more graceful workmanship, for in truth this second part is very different in manner from the part below, since the vaulting was carried out without any relation between the coffering and the straight lines of what is below. The third is believed to have made the portico, which was a very rare work. And for these reasons the masters who practice this art at the present should not fall into such an error and then make excuses, as did Andrea.¹⁰¹

In sum, Michelangelo had made the same formal observation as Sansovino, but adopted an equally skeptical attitude with respect to the architecture of antiquity as the critics did to his contemporary architecture, explaining the peculiarities of the Pantheon in historical – that is, diachronic – terms. As Capgrave a half century earlier had been aware of the question of the preceding building, Michelangelo posed the possibility of changes in plan during the course of the Pantheon’s construction in antiquity. Such discussions are examples of the varying attitudes toward these questions. The theories and reflections about the Pantheon that still occupy modern research on the building were thus already being eagerly debated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.¹⁰² With methodologically quite similar approaches, observations were made throughout the centuries and inferences drawn from them, which led to the hypothesis – as controversial then as now – that more than one architect had designed the Pantheon.¹⁰³

In surveys of the Pantheon, in the ground plan, elevation, and section, as well as in drawings of numerous details, architects and artists of the Renaissance often acquired precise knowledge of the building as a necessary premise to evaluate it. In order to achieve so comprehensive a grasp of details and the whole, as authoritatively displayed by Baldassare Peruzzi in his rendering in Ferrara (see Fig. 10.5) of a longitudinal section through the entire temple and portico, innumerable individual studies were required. He needed systematically to penetrate the architecture and to understand the principles that had inspired it.¹⁰⁴ This becomes clear in the pilaster that he drew behind the door, where none actually exists and apparently as a correction, presumably because, according to his understanding of ancient architecture, he thought it was missing.¹⁰⁵ Sometimes in the detailed surveys of the Renaissance, parts of the building that are no longer extant were recorded, and it is from such documents that we can reconstruct the marble incrustation of the vestibule.¹⁰⁶

Ideal Versions of the Pantheon

Apart from theoretical approaches, historical analyses, and imitations of the building both as a whole and in detail, numerous artists and architects in the Renaissance found the Pantheon a challenge to their artistic and architectural invention. They could enter into creative dialogue with the building as a total organism, at least in their drawings, or might seek their own solutions to the task of building. Without anyone having commissioned them to do so, they created variations of the Pantheon theme. In the Addendumto his Turin Codex, for example, Francesco di Giorgio Martini altered the proportions and aligned the lower and upper order of the Pantheon with the ribs between the coffers of the dome (see Fig. 10.4).¹⁰⁷ The steep, almost gothic, shapes in this drawing give rise to a distinctly Quattrocento variant of the Pantheon. Francesco di Giorgio established the overall architectural system by using a classical syntax but, in contrast to the ancient building, relocated all vertical elements that connect the stories in axial alignment. At the same time, he limited the polychrome marble incrustation to an intermediate zone between the two stories and dealt in his drawing only with a half section of the rear third of the rotunda. In these ways, he indirectly showed how conscious he was of the enormous complexity of the ancient solution.

A quite different claim was made by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, whose architectural understanding was orientated toward or based on a dogmatic canon. From countless in situ drawings he was familiar with the Pantheon down to precise details. No one perhaps has ever measured and drawn it so pedantically as he did. He took the ancient architect to task even for infinitesimal departures from the architectural theories of Vitruvius, down to the smallest unit of the minute, that is, down to less than 0.5 millemeters.¹⁰⁸ Apart from his surveys of the building, drawn either in situ or worked up in his studio, there exist five sheets with proposals for improvements, culminating in a megalomaniacal but pettifogging scheme that made him raise the Pantheon on a podium of no fewer than 20 steps fronted by a portico packed with a forest of 36 columns. His elevation becomes entangled in a jumble of axes, alignments, and projecting entablatures. It is forced into the modules and ideological preconceptions of a procrustean set of rules. This group of five drawings is rightly interpreted as Antonio’s criticism of the ancient Pantheon.¹⁰⁹ Of the inspired structure of the original building, developed from the circle and able to resolve any conflict of the architectural organism by the dynamic inherent in the curve, nothing is left. Sangallo’s central-plan building is a caricature of the Pantheon.¹¹⁰

Nor could Bernardo della Volpaia, who worked together with Antonio da Sangallo, resist the fascination of the Pantheon. In his so-called Codex Coner, among the most subtle surveys of ancient architecture, we find a section through the building in which the author tried all syntactic possibilities of the ancient architectural system in a single drawing (Fig. 9.19).¹¹¹ The wall elevation runs evenly around the interior. The roughly rectangular and semicircular alcoves alternate in the opposing sequence on either side of the middle axis. Thus, Volpaia can show a section of both shapes in the foreground. In the ancient building, the aedicules articulate the rhythm of the wall, since those with segmental pediments flank the semicircular alcoves, while the triangular pedimented aedicules determine the ends of the sides in the semicircles of the complex organization of the Pantheon’s ground plan and elevation. Volpaia only alludes to the alternating aedicules by showing just one type on either side of the middle axis. Thanks to his skill in architectural representation, he manages to convey a systematic scheme of theme and variation that embraces consistency in rhythm.

9.19. Longitudinal section of the Pantheon; drawing by Bernardo della Volpaia. (London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, fol. 32 v)

In his complex representation, Volpaia combined an orthogonal section with a perspectival view from a raised viewpoint outside the building and tried to convey on one sheet all of the phenomena that occur in the Pantheon. He placed an alcove with a semicircular plan on the middle axis and to the right of it, intentionally deviating from the actual building, and added a rectangular alcove that is followed in turn by a portion of a semicircular alcove. To the left of the central axis, Volpaia reversed the sequence by depicting a semicircular alcove followed by a truncated portion of a rectangular alcove. These deviations from the symmetrical sequences of the actual building help to demonstrate the rhythmic complexity of the ensemble. At the same time, he maintained the counterpoint that underlies the elevation system of the Pantheon interior, carrying it horizontally rather than vertically through the building. Thus, he introduced a symmetrical juxtaposition of the two types of the aedicules, two with segmental gables to the left, two with triangular gables to the right. Omitting the entrance niche and the main apse of the ancient temple, he generated the impression that he overcame a discordant note that many contemporaries had recognized and criticized.¹¹² The creation of his drawing conjures up an ideal Pantheon, a sanctuary in which no human could disturb the deity – or the architecture – because no one could gain access to a space that lacks a door.

As an embodiment of the ideal of ancient architecture, the Pantheon has also served a provocative function. In Philipp Galles’s print King Josiah Destroys the Temple of Ashtoreth, Chemosh and Milchon, which was based on a design by Maarten van Heemskerck (Fig. 9.20),¹¹³ the ancient Roman central-plan building has been dismantled as a pagan sanctuary and lies in ruins. Heemskerck was very familiar with the Roman monuments since he had extensively studied and documented them in his sketchbooks while resident in Rome from 1532 to 1536. Here, he seems to have given iconographic form to an indictment by John Calvin and propagated its consequences. Calvin had reproached the early Church for idolatry since in his view, it had taken over the pagan monuments, imitated the practices of the ancients, and, instead of christianizing them, had succumbed to the ancient pagan religions.¹¹⁴

9.20. King Josiah Destroys the Temples of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom; Philipp Galles after Maarten van Heemskerck. (Kupferstich, Amsterdam)

The majesty of the Pantheon and its legendary imagery is perhaps most strikingly expressed in an anecdote about Emperor Charles V that is still current in Rome to this day. In 1535 after his campaign in Tunis, the emperor visited Rome and celebrated a triumphall’antica, eight years after he had conquered and plundered the city in his terrible Sack of Rome. With his army, he processed like a Roman emperor along the Via Sacra to the Capitol. His most ardent wish at that time was to climb the dome of the Pantheon. In one version of the story, the son of the monument’s keeper was chosen to accompany the emperor alone during his vertiginous ascent. The feeling, or rather the dread, of standing on the edge of the open oculus, unprotected by any balustrade and looking down into the rotunda, where the dome plummets under one’s feet and one has no visible hold, is more than vertiginous; it is indescribable, unimaginable before one actually stands there. For an emperor, however, it was not possible to approach the wide-open oculus crawling on all fours and still less to turn around before arriving at the opening, particularly when accompanied by an adolescent attendant who had grown up with this cupola and for whom it aroused no fear. Indeed, the majesty of Charles V was meant to be revealed in the solemnity with which the visit took place. Naturally, the keeper later asked his son what it had been like standing there with the emperor on the dome of the Pantheon. According to the story, the son answered that he had suddenly been reminded of the dreadful Sack of Rome and the murderous occupation of the city by the emperor’s troops, for which this man had been responsible, and that at that moment he would have dearly liked to cast him down from the oculus. Knowing that such a remark alone could have spelled certain death equal to the real deed itself, the father is said to have replied to his hotheaded offspring: “My son, one doesn’t say such a thing; one does it!”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) retold the story in a slightly adapted form in his Don Quixote. In this version, the role of the youth was assumed by a Roman knight who accompanied Charles V to the Rotunda,

which in antiquity was called the temple of all the gods and which now bears the better name of Church of All Saints and which is the best-preserved building of all those that were erected in pagan Rome, the one that most fully evinces the grandeur and magnificence of its founders. It takes the form of half an enormous orange, and it is brilliantly lit, even though the only light comes in through a window or rather a round lantern at the top, from which the Emperor surveyed the building. The Roman knight, standing at his side on the edge of the oculus, detailed all the subtlety and skill of that splendid construction and that memorable architecture.

On descending from the dome he then confessed to the emperor the feelings not of revenge but of thirst for fame aroused by the experience: “A thousand times, Most Sacred Majesty, I felt the urge to clasp you in my arms and hurl myself down with you from the lantern, to win eternal fame for myself.”

The Man of La Mancha tells the story to Sancho Panza as a parallel to the destruction of the Temple of Diana in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, by the sinner Herostratus: “he razed it to the ground, so that his name would live in future ages.”¹¹⁵No artist, poet, or humanist of the Renaissance otherwise drew the parallel with the Seven Wonders of the World, although all, even John Calvin, regarded the Pantheon with the same deep veneration as those monuments. Only Michelangelo offered higher praise or perhaps it was only a way of exorcising the pagan temple: he is said to have described the Pantheon or, rather, the lower order of its interior as disegno non umano ma angelico.¹¹⁶

This text was written more than ten years ago. The original, fully illustrated German version has meanwhile been published in PEGASUS – Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike 10, 2008, pp. 37–84.

1 Ernst R. Fiechter, “Der ionische Tempel am Ponte Rotto in Rom (S. Maria Egiziaca),” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 21, 1906, pp. 220–279; Arnold Nesselrath, Das Fossombroner Skizzenbuch, London 1993, pp. 115–120; Jean-Pierre Adam, La construction romaine. Matériaux et techniques, Paris 1984 (trans. as Roman Building: Materials and Techniques, Bloomington 1994); CensusID 151132.

2 Christiane Denker Nesselrath, Die Säulenordnungen bei Bramante, Worms 1990, pp. 47 and 127; Christiane Denker Nesselrath, “Bramante e l’ordine corinzio,” L’emploi des ordres dans l’architecture de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume, Paris 1992, pp. 83–96; pp. 86–89.

3 For Raphael, there was an essential difference between the architecture of antiquity and that of the Renaissance in their respective use of materials (Vincenzo Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti, nelle testimonianze di contemporanei e nella letteratura del suo secolo, Vatican City 1936, p. 85; John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources – 1483–1602, New Haven 2003, vol. 1, p. 520).

4 Ian Campbell, “The New St Peter’s: Basilica or Temple?” Oxford Art Journal 4, 1981, pp. 3–8; p. 5; F. Lucchini, The Pantheon, Rome 1996, p. 114.

5 Cf. as a parallel to this the way Maarten van Heemskerck programmatically exploits the Colosseum in his self-portrait (Matthias Winner, “‘Vedute’ in Flemish Landscape Drawings of the Late 16th Century,” Netherlandish Mannerism, ed. Görel Cavalli-Björkman, Stockholm 1985, p. 91).

6 On the medieval legends of the expulsion of the demons and the origin of the oculus, cf. Tilmann Buddensieg, “Raffaels Grab,” in Munuscula discipulorum. Kunsthistorische Studien Hans Kauffmann zum 70. Geburtstag 1966, ed. Tillmann Buddensieg and Matthias Winner, Berlin 1968, pp. 56–58, Fig. 40.

7 Giovanni Eroli, Raccolta generale delle iscrizioni pagane e cristiane esistite ed esistenti nel Pantheon di Roma, Narni 1895, pp. 343–438; Buddensieg 1968.

8 Eroli 1895, p. 438.

9 Eroli 1895, pp. 439–440.

10 Eroli 1895, p. 440; Zygmunt Wazbinski, “Annibale Carracci e l’Accademia di San Luca: a proposito di un monumento eretto in Pantheon nel 1674,” in Les Carrache et les décors profanes (Actes du Colloque organisé par l’École Française de Rome 1986, Collection de l’École Française de Rome 106), Rome 1988, p. 562.

11 Marisanta Di Prampero de Carvalho, Perché Giovanni fu sepolto al Pantheon, Udine 2003.

12 Wazbinski 1988.

13 Wazbinski 1988, pp. 562–563.

14 Eroli 1895, p. 232; Roberto Vighi, The Pantheon, Rome 1964, p. 48.

15 Wazbinski 1988, p. 563; Di Prampero de Carvalho 2003, p. 17.

16 Florence, Uffizi, inv. 164 A; CensusID 44648. John Shearman, “Raphael, Rome, and the Codex Escurialensis,” Master Drawings 15, 1977, pp. 107–146, esp. pp. 109–117, Plates 1–3; Arnold Nesselrath, “Raphael’s Archeological Method,” Raffaello a Roma, Rome 1986, pp. 358–361, Figs. 5–9.

17 Antonio Muñoz, “La decorazione medioevale del Pantheon,” Nuovo bulletino di archeologia cristiana 18, 1912, pp. 25–35; pp. 32–34.

18 Richard Krautheimer, Rome – Profile of a City, 312–1308, Princeton 1980, p. 56.

19 Flavio Biondo, Roma Ristaurata et Italia Illustrata, ed. Lucio Fauno, Venice 1558, fol. 65; Ferdinando Castagnoli, Carlo Cecchelli, Gustavo Giovannoni, and Mario Zocca, Topografia e urbanistica di Roma, Bologna 1958, p. 350, Plate LXXXV.2; Tod A. Marder, “Alexander VII, Bernini and the Urban Setting of the Pantheon in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, 1991, pp. 273–292; pp. 273–276.

20 El Escorial, Codex Escurialensis, fol. 43 v; CensusID 67021. Cf. Hermann Egger with contributions by Christian Hülsen und Adolf Michaelis, Codex Escurialensis: Ein Skizzenbuch aus der Werkstatt Domenico Ghirlandajos, Vienna 1905–1906, vol. 1, p. 116; Thomas Ashby, Topographical Study in Rome in 1581, London 1916, p. 131.

21 Paris, Louvre inv. 11029 r; CensusID 64421. Cf. Ashby 1916, p. 131; Castagnoli et al. 1958, p. 350, Plate LXXXV.2.

22 CensusID 63876; Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti, Codice topografico della città di Roma, vol. 3, Rome 1946, p. 159; Cristina Nardella, Il fascino di Roma nel medioevo, Rome 1997, pp. 80, 126, and 162–163.

23 Rodolfo Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma e notizie intorno le collezioni romane di antichità, Rome 1902–1912, pp. 15 and 51–52. Since it is deduced from this mention that they were found close to the Pantheon, this argument holds no longer. A provenance from the ancient Roman Iseum Campense, however, does not need to be excluded.

24 The period of Leo X’s reinstallation of the antiquities in front of the Pantheon can be deduced from the term of office of the maestri delle strade Bartolomeo della Valle and Raimondo Capodiferro. Cf. Emilio Re: “Maestri di strade,” Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria 43, 1920, pp. 5–102. I wish to thank Stefan Bauer and Andreas Rehberg for this information.

25 Eroli 1895, pp. 451–452.

26 Florence, Uffizi, inv. 160 S r; CensusID 43556. The identification of the draftsman with Baldassare Peruzzi himself, as proposed by Christoph Luitpold Frommel (“Peruzzis römische Anfänge,” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 27/28, 1991–1992, pp. 137–182), is untenable for various reasons. A comparison between the handwriting on the sheet and that of genuine Peruzzi drawings is unconvincing; Frommel (1991–1992, p. 174, n. 96) totally ignores in his argument the dating of the sheet by the same hand in Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, inv. 1342 r, to the third decade of the sixteenth century (Arnold Nesselrath, “Due candelabri antichi restaurati al tempo di Raffello,” in Raffaello in Vaticano, ed. Fabrizio Mancinelli, Anna Maria De Strobel, Giovanni Morello, and Arnold Nesselrath, exh. cat., Milan 1984, pp. 98–99, fig. on 99, and Nesselrath 1993, pp. 152–153) and cuts off the crucial part of the sheet in his illustration (Fig. 21); the dating of the veduta of the Pantheon being discussed here, which must postdate the beginning of the pontificate of Leo X in 1513 since it incorporates the statues in their Leonine setting, contradicts an early dating, as proposed by Frommel, yet it is this early dating that is the presupposition for an attribution to Peruzzi. (Cf. Arnold Nesselrath, “Il Pantheon,” in La Roma di Leon Battista Alberti. Umanisti, architetti et artisti alla scoperta dell’antico nella città del Quattrocento, ed. Francesco Paolo Fiore in collaboration with Arnold Nesselrath, exh. cat., Milan 2005, p. 200, cat. II.2.5). Cf. Alfonso Bartoli, I monumenti antichi di Roma nei disegni degli Uffizi di Firenze, 6 vols., Rome 1914–1922, vol. I, Tav. 13, Fig. 27; vol. 6, p. 9; Doris Gruben and Gottfried Gruben, “Die Türe des Pantheon,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 104, 1997, pp. 3–74; p. 11, Fig. 6 (with the old attribution to Cronaca).

27 Berlin, SMPK, Kupferstichkabinett, Heemskerck-Album I, fol. 10 r (Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger, Die römischen Skizzenbücher von Marten van Heemskerck, 7 vols., Berlin 1913, repr. 1916, vol. 1, p. 7; CensusID 43444) and Heemskerck-Album II, fol. 2 r (Hülsen and Egger 1913, repr. 1916, vol. 2, p. 3; CensusID 44703). The drawings of the Dutch artist so-called Anonymus B were made after 1538; cf. Ilja M. Veldman, “Heemskercks Romeinse tekeningen en ‘Anonymus B,’” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 38, 1987, pp. 369–382.

28 Carlo Montani, “Il Pantheon e i suoi recenti restauri,” Capitolium 8, 1932, pp. 417–426; p. 426; Susanna Pasquali, Il Pantheon: architettura e antiquaria nel Settecento a Roma, Modena 1996, p. 162; Susanna Pasquali, Roma sacra – guida alle chiese della città eterna, vol. 8: Santa Maria ad Martyres (Pantheon), Rome 1996, p. 45.

29 Shearman 1977, pp. 109–117.

30 Pasquali 1996b, p. 46.

31 Muñoz 1912, pp. 32–34, Fig. 5.

32 Eroli 1895, p. 250; Vighi 1964, p. 41, fig. on p. 43; Anna Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano e gli Antoniazzeschi, Udine 1992, p. 268, no. 146, Fig. 250; Pasquali 1996b, p. 46.

33 For reasons of conservation, the fresco has been detached from the wall but reinstalled in the same niche: Cavallaro 1992, pp. 268–269, no. 147, Fig. 251.

34 Vighi 1964, p. 41.

35 Muñoz 1912, p. 32, Fig. 4.

36 Shearman 1977, pp. 111–115. In his attempt to explain the unusual two-part approach of the draftsman, John Shearman proposed that it is the work of two different artists. After cautious doubts had been expressed about this supposed differentiation of hands in the sheet (Nesselrath 1986a, p. 359), the current explanation makes the feature of the two-part elevation, first and rightly remarked by Shearman, less peculiar and tends to support even the attribution of both halves of the drawing to Raphael. It further underlines Shearman’s identification of Raphael’s drawing as the prototype on which all copies and indirect copies depend.

37 The sheet in the Uffizi, however, does not comprise in toto all of the studies that Raphael completed in the Pantheon in 1506. Cf. Nesselrath 1986a, pp. 360–361, and Arnold Nesselrath, “I libri di disegni di antichità – tentativo di una tipologia,” Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, vol. 3, ed. Salvatore Settis, Torino 1986, p. 110.

38 Christoph Luitpold Frommel, “Raffaello e la sua carriera architettonica,” in Raffaello Architetto, ed. Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Manfredo Tarfuri, and Stefano Ray in collaboration with Howard Burns and Arnold Nesselrath, exh. cat., Milan 1984, pp. 13–46; p. 17. On the question of the originality of the architectural background of the Madonna del Baldacchino, left unfinished at Raphael’s departure for Rome, cf. Marco Chiarini, Marco Ciatti, and Serena Padovani (Raffaello a Pitti: La Madonna del Baldacchino – storia e restauro, Florence 1991, pp. 17–18), who reexamined the position adopted by Peter Anselm Riedl (“Raffaels ‘Madonna del Baldacchino,’”Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 8, 1957–1959, pp. 239–246). Cf. J. Meyer zur Capellen,Raphael, vol. 1, Landshut 2001, cat. 40, for an illustration.

39 Shearman 1977, pp. 128–130, Fig. 6; Frommel 1984, p. 17.

40 Paris, Louvre, inv. 19051 v. I would like to thank the late Wolfgang Lotz for the reference to this sheet. Cf. Nesselrath 2005, p. 191, fig. on p. 192. On Hermann Vischer, see Wolfgang Lotz, “Zu Hermann Vischers d. J. Aufnahmen italienischer Bauten,” inMiscellanea Bibliothecae Hertzianae (Römische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana 16), Munich 1961, pp. 167–174; see Emmanuel Starcky, Dessins de Dürer et de la Renaissance germanique, Paris 1991, pp. 101–104, and Volker Plagemann, “Tod in Bologna – Hans Cranachs Reise 1537 – Zur Frühgeschichte der Künstlerreisen nach Italien,” Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte 41, 2002, pp. 37–155; pp. 110–113, especially Fig. 38.

41 Eroli 1895, p. 430; Sible de Blaauw, “Das Pantheon als christlicher Tempel,” Bild und Formensprache der spätantiken Kunst. Hugo Brandenburg zum 65 Geburtstag, Boreas 17, Münster, 1994, pp. 13–26; p. 22.

42 Pasquali, 1996a, p. 139.

43 Eroli 1895, pp. 239 and 430; De Blaauw 1994b, p. 22.

44 Tod A. Marder, “Bernini and Alexander VII: Criticism and Praise of the Pantheon in the Seventeenth Century” Art Bulletin 71, no. 4, 1989, pp. 628–645; p. 629, Fig. 3; Angela Cipriani, “Lavori per l’isolamento e il restauro del Pantheon,” in Bernini in Vaticano, exh. cat., Rome 1981, pp. 192–197; Pasquali 1996a, p. 69, Fig. 34.

45 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi P VII 9, fols. 108 r and 110 r. Marder 1989, p. 629; De Blaauw 1994b, pp. 20–22, Figs. 3–4. The flap showing the altar in elevation on folio 110 r is located at the lower left of the sheet but is not visible in the photograph available to us.

46 Milan, Civico Gabinetto dei Disegni, Collezione sardini Martinelli, inv. 5, fol. 99 r.

47 Milan, Civico Gabinetto dei Disegni, Collezione sardini Martinelli, inv. 5, fol. 76 r (fol. 77 shows a longitudinal section).

48 Eroli 1895, pp. 239 and 430.

49 De Blaauw 1994b, pp. 22–23. Eroli 1895, p. 266, mistakenly dates it to the period of Innocent VIII.

50 Lanciani 1902–1912, vol. 1, pp. 88.

51 Pasquali 1996a, pp. 32, 33, 36, and 41, Figs. 16–17.

52 Tod Marder, “Specchi’s High Altar for the Pantheon and the Statues by Cametti and Moderati,” Burlington Magazine 122, 1980, pp. 30–40.

53 Eroli 1895, p. 266.

54 Ulrich-Walter Gans, Korinthisierende Kapitelle der römischen Kaiserzeit, Vienna 1992, pp. 50–53, Fig. 36. In seeking nonstylistic dating criteria, the reported provenance of a capital very similar to the Pantheon capitals from the Baths of Caracalla, as transmitted by the Codex Destailleur B, fol. 103, in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, is perhaps of interest.

55 El Escorial, Codex Escurialensis, fol. 44 r; CensusID 50729. Egger 1905–1906, vol. 1, pp. 117–118; Nesselrath 2005, p. 191. On the chronological order and attribution of the codex, cf. Arnold Nesselrath, “Il Codice Escurialense,” Domenico Ghirlandajo 1449–1494, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Florence 16–18 October 1994, Florence 1996, pp. 175–198.

56 London, Royal Institute of British Architects, inv. VIII/6. See Shearman 1977, p. 124; Nesselrath 1996, p. 185, Fig. 24.

57 Florence, Uffizi, inv. 4337 A v. Cf. Nesselrath 1996, p. 185.

58 Such a dating is consistent with the observations on the Codex Escurialensis, its relation to Filippino Lippi, and the proposed dating for the models; cf.Nesselrath 1996, pp. 192–196.

59 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architetti, vol. 4, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence 1906, p. 382; Golzio 1936, pp. 116–118; Shearman 2003, vol. 1, pp. 569–571; Buddensieg 1968, pp. 45–46; Norbert Nobis, Lorenzetto als Bildhauer, Bonn 1979, pp. 115–117.

60 Lanciani 1902–1912, vol. 2, pp. 237–238.

61 Corrado Maltese, ed., Francesco di Giorgio Martini: Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, Milan 1967, 2 vols.; vol. 1, pp. 280–281, tav. 147; CensusID 60550.

62 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 4424, fol. 27 v; CensusID 60257. Cf. C. Hülsen, Il libro di Giuliano da Sangallo: codice Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 4424, Leipzig 1910 (repr. Vatican City 1984), p. 36.

63 Arnold Nesselrath, review of Codices e Vaticanis selecti phototypice expressi, vol. 39, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City 1984, reprint of Hülsen 1910, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 52, 1989, pp. 285–287.

64 London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, fol. 52 r; CensusID 60104. Thomas Ashby, “Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Roman Buildings,” Papers of the British School at Rome 2, 1904, pp. 1–88; p. 37, no. 63. On the Codex Coner, cf. Arnold Nesselrath, “Codex Coner – 85 years on,” Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum 2, 1992, pp. 145–167.

65 Michael Bury, “A Newly-Discovered Architectural Treatise of the Early Cinquecento: the Codex of Antonio da Faenza,” Annali di architettura 8, 1996, pp. 21–42; p. 32, Fig. 13. Timo Strauch is preparing a study on Antonio da Faenza and his treatises.

66 Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, inv. 1713c v; CensusID 44650. Cf. Tilmann Buddensieg, “Bernardo della Volpaia und Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo – Der Autor des Codex Coner und seine Stellung im Sangallo-Kreis,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 15, 1975, pp. 89–108; pp. 93–94 and 103, Fig. 4.

67 Shearman 2003, vol. 1, pp. 748–749. On the Madonna del Sasso, cf. Nobis 1979, pp. 115–130.

68 CensusID 190999; M.-H. Pluchart, Ville de Lille – Musée Wicar, Notice des Dessins, Cartons, Pastels, Miniatures et Grisailles exposés, Lille 1889, p. 185, no. 875; Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Catalogue des Dessins Italiens – Collections du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, Lille 1997, p. 314, no. 789 v (Frédérique Lemerle), fig. on p. 315. On Raffaello da Montelupo’s book of drawings in Lille, cf. Arnold Nesselrath, “Il libro di Michelangelo a Lille,” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura N.S. 24, 1994, pp. 35–52. The drawings of Amico Aspertini in his London book of drawings, CensusID 61459 and 60954 (Phyllis Pray Bober, Drawings after the Antique by Amico Aspertini, London 1957, p. 89) are copied from the Codex Coner, fol. 52 r (Ashby 1904, p. 37, no. 63; CensusID 60104).

69 Cf., for example, the reerected Library of Celsus in Ephesus or the solutions in triumphal arches also from the Trajanic period, such as the one in Timgad.

70 The drawing is only known to me from a photo in the Witt Library in London that was cut out of a sale catalogue and that bears the name of O. Baer, Frankfurt. Curtis O. Baer emigrated from Frankfurt to the United States in 1940. The drawing is not mentioned in Eric Zafran, Master Drawings from Titian to Picasso – The Curtis O. Baer Collection, Atlanta 1985. I am indebted to the late Rupert Hodge for obtaining a reproduction of the photo for me many years ago.

71 Turin, Archivio di Stato, Cod.a.III.15.J.13, fols. 47 r–55 v. Lanciani 1902–1912, vol. 2, p. 23.

72 Kjeld de Fine Licht, The Rotunda in Rome: A Study of Hadrian’s Pantheon, Copenhagen 1968, pp. 111–114 and 221, Figs. 121–122; Andrea Wandschneider, “Das Pantheon – Raumerfahrung und Sakralbestimmung,” Antike Welt 20, no. 3, 1989, pp. 9–24; pp. 14–15, Figs. 6–7.

73 Muñoz 1912, pp. 25–27; Arnold Nesselrath, “Von Volpaia bis Volpi. Die farbige Marmorinkrustation der Vorhalle des Pantheon,” Pegasus 4, 2003, pp. 19–36; pp. 20–22.

74 Eroli 1895, p. 265; P. Tomei, “Le vicende del rivestimento della cupola del Pantheon,” Bollettino d’arte 32, 1938, pp. 31–39.

75 Biondo 1558, fol. 56; Eroli 1895, p. 265; Tomei 1938, pp. 31–32.

76 A series of these lead tiles are riveted onto the exterior perimeter of the drum around the Pantheon dome. Two are now in the Vatican Museums, inv. 56231 and 56232. Cf. Eroli 1895, pp. 265–266; Tomei 1938, p. 32, Fig. 2; Nesselrath 2005, p. 199, cat. II.2.2.

77 Eroli 1895, p. 265.

78 Gerald Heres, “Beiträge zur antiken Bronzekunst. Niet vom Gebälk des Pantheonsvorhalle,” Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Forschungen und Berichte, 22, 1982, p.197, tav. 30; Der Ruhm des Pantheon, ed. Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer, Ellen Schraudolph, and Hildegard Wiewelhove, exh. cat., Berlin 1992, pp. 18–19.

79 Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura (I sette libri dell’architettura), Venice 1584, vol. 3, fol. 52 v.

80 Heres 1982, p. 196, fig. 2; Ian Campbell, Ancient Roman Topography and Architecture, London 2004, vol. 1, pp. 312–429; Ian Campbell, “Some Drawings from the ‘Paper Museum’ of Cassiano Dal Pozzo and the Berlin Codex Destailleur ‘D’,” Pegasus 6, 2004, pp. 23–45.

81 New York, Metropolitan Museum, fols. 84 v–85 r; CensusID 241205. Cf. Émilie D’Orgeix, “The Goldschmidt and Scholz Scrapbooks in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Study of Renaissance Architectural Drawings,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 36, 2001, pp. 169–206; pp. 177–179; and now, Carolyn Y. Yerkes, “Drawings of the Pantheon in the Metropolitan Museum’s Goldschmidt Scrapbook,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 48, 2013, pp. 87–120.

82 D’Orgeix 2001, p. 178, Fig. 16; Campbell 2004a, vol. 1, pp. 412–416, cat. 140; Campbell 2004b, pp. 41–42, Figs. 11–12.

83 Heres 1982; Anne-Christin Batzilla, “Bronzeniet vom Pantheon,” in Barock im Vatikan 1572–1676 (exh. cat. Bonn and Berlin), Leipzig 2005, p. 142, no. 54. Louise Rice, “Bernini and the Pantheon Bronze,” in Sankt Peter in Rom 1506–2006. Beiträge der internationalen Tagung vom 22–25 Februar 2006 in Bonn, Beiträge der internationalen Tagung vom 22–25 Februar 2006 in Bonn, ed. Georg Satzinger and Sebastian Schütze, Munich 2008a, pp. 337–352; Rice, “Urbano VIII e il dilemma del portico del Pantheon,”Bollettino d’arte 143, 2008, pp. 93–110; Rice, “Pope Urban VIII and the Pantheon Portico,” in Gerd Grasshoff, Michael Heinzelmann, and Marcus Wäfler, eds., The Pantheon in Rome: Contributions to the Conference, Bern, November 9–12, 2006, Bern 2009, pp. 155–156.

84 John Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrims, trans. and ed. Daniela Giosuè, Rome 1995, pp. 70–72 and 195–196; CensusID 191221. The same expedient, of course, was canvassed by Florentines at the time the cupolone of S. Maria del Fiore was being projected in 1420: it would, they suggested, be a good thing to fill the area below the dome with earth and small coins, so that people would carry away the earth without expense once the dome had been raised (cf. Vasari, vita of Brunelleschi; Vasari repr. 1906, vol. 2, p. 345). I am indebted for the indication of this anecdote to Peter Spring.

85 Capgrave 1995, p. 72; Nesselrath 2005, p. 191.

86 Capgrave 1995, p. 197; Martin Wallraff, “Pantheon und Allerheiligen,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 47, 2004, pp. 128–143.

87 For further descriptions, their historical analysis depending on the cultural level of the author, at times more anecdotal, at times more analytical, e.g., that of the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai, or that of the mayor of Nuremberg Nikolaus Muffel, or that of the papal historian Flavio Biondo or the humanist Pomponio Leto, cf. Nesselrath 2005, pp. 191–192.

88 Krautheimer 1980, pp. 65–68.

89 Eroli 1895, pp. 266–267 and 451–452; Ashby 1916, p. 131.

90 Antonio Salamanca places the ancient porphyry sarcophagus in almost exaggerated form over the gable end of the porch (cf. Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, “Les gravures de monuments antiques d’Antonio Salamanca, à l’origine du ‘Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae,’” Annali di architettura 1, 1989, pp. 47–62; p. 54, Fig. 10) and thus takes its emblematic character into account. Antonio Lafreri presents his view of the Pantheon with the ancient sculptures in front (Ashby 1916, p. 131, pl. 42, Fig. 76; Christian Hülsen, “Das Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae des Antonio Lafreri,” Collectanea Varie Doctrinae, Leon Olschki Bibliopolae Florentino Sexagenario, Munich 1921, pp. 121–170; p. 143; Heilmeyer, Schraudolph, and Wiewelhove 1992, pp. 31–32, cat. 2; Gruben and Gruben 1997, pp. 11–12, Fig. 6); they take the place of an explanatory caption and liken the reality of the piazza to the ancient building.

91 Shearman 1977, pp. 130–140.

92 London, RIBA, inv. XIII/1 r and v. Cf. Eckhart Knab, Erwin Mitsch, and Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael – Die Zeichnungen, Stuttgart 1983, p. 601, nos. 462–463; Arnold Nesselrath, “Raffaello: Profilo e alzato ortogonale, combinati tra loro, della trabeazione principale dell’interno del Pantheon,” in Frommel, Tafuri, and Ray 1984, p. 420; Nesselrath 1993, pp. 16, 19, 30, 32–33, 37, 124–125, 131, 132, Figs. 128–129.

93 Nesselrath 1993, pp. 16, 19, 32–33, 37, 123–132, Figs. 25–27; CensusID 67335 and CensusID 67341.

94 Denker Nesselrath 1990, p. 93; CensusID 154486 and CensusID 51095.

95 Denker Nesselrath 1990, pp. 79–86; Denker Nesselrath 1992, pp. 86–89.

96 Florence, Uffizi, inv. 6770 A r und v. Denker Nesselrath 1990, pp. 79 and 81–86, Figs. 165–166; Denker Nesselrath 1992, p. 86, Figs. 14–15.

97 Florence, Uffizi, inv. 1191 A r. Denker Nesselrath 1990, pp. 96–97, Fig. 198; Denker Nesselrath 1992, pp. 88–89, Fig. 20; Arnold Nesselrath in The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and His Circle, ed. Christoph L. Frommel and Nicholas Adams, 2 vols., New York 1994, 2000; vol. 1, p. 216.

98 Gruben and Gruben 1997, pp. 31 and 54–55.

99 Riccardo Pacciani, “Firenze nella seconda metà del secolo,” in Storia dell’architettura italiana, Il Quattrocento, 2 vols., ed. Francesco Paolo Fiore, Milan 1998; vol. 2, pp. 330–373.

100 Vasari repr. 1906, vol. 4, p. 511: ...dove le costole che si partono dal tondo del mezzo di sopra, cioè dove ha il lume quel tempio, fanno dall’una all’altra i quadri degli sfondati dei rosoni che a poco a poco diminuiscono; ed il medesimo fa la costola, perchè non casca in su la dirittura delle colonne.

101 Vasari repr. 1906, vol. 4, pp. 511–512; CensusID 43497: Nondimeno molti artefici, e particolarmente Michelagnolo Buonarroti, sono stati d’openione, che la Ritonda fusse fatta da tre architetti, e che il primo la conducesse al fine della cornice che è sopra le colonne; l’altro dalla cornice in su, dove sono quelle finestre d’opera più gentile; perchè in vero questa seconda parte è di maniera varia e diversa dalla parte di sotto, essendo state seguitate le volte senza ubbidire ai diritti con lo spartimento: il terzo si crede che facesse quel portico, che fu cosa rarissima. Per le quali cagioni i maestri che oggi fanno quest’arte, non cascherebbono in così fatto errore, per iscusarsi, come faceva Andrea. Cf. Tilmann Buddensieg, “Criticism and Praise of the Pantheon in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at Kings College, Cambridge, April 1969, ed. R. R. Bolgar, Cambridge 1971, pp. 259–267; p. 265; Arnold Nesselrath, “Raffaello e lo studio dell’antico nel Rinascimento,” in Frommel, Tafuri, and Ray 1984, p. 407; Nesselrath 1993, p. 123.

102 Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer, “Apollodorus von Damaskus – der Architekt des Pantheon,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 90, 1975, pp. 316–347; p. 319; Paul Godfrey and David Hemsoll, “The Pantheon: Temple or Rotunda?” in Pagan Gods and Shrines of the Roman Empire, ed. Henig et. al., Oxford 1986, pp. 195–209; Paul Davies, David Hemsoll, and Mark Wilson Jones, “The Pantheon: Triumph of Rome or Triumph of Compromise?,”Art History 10, 1987, pp. 133–153; Marder 1989, pp. 635–640; Gruben and Gruben 1997.

103 Heilmeyer 1975, pp. 330–333.

104 Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, ms Classe I 217, fol. busta 4, no. 8 r; CensusID 62544. Cf. Howard Burns, “A Peruzzi Drawing in Ferrara,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 12, 1965–1966, pp. 245–270.

105 Burns 1965–1966, p. 250, Fig. 3.

106 Nesselrath 2003.

107 Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Codex Saluzzianus 148, fol. 80 r; CensusID 60550. Maltese 1967, vol. 1, pp. 280–281, tav. 147; Buddensieg 1971, pp. 263–265, Fig. 3c; Marder 1989, p. 635, Fig. 11; Nesselrath 2005, p. 192, fig. on p. 190.

108 Florence, Uffizi, inv. 1060 A r; CensusID 46413. Cf. Nesselrath in Frommel-Adams 2000, pp. 200–201.

109 Buddensieg 1971, pp. 265–266, Figs 3, a and b; CensusID 43452. Marder 1989, p. 637, Fig. 20.

110 Florence, Uffizi, inv. 306 A r, 841 A r, 874 A r and v, 1241 A r, and 3990 A r; CensusID 43452. Cf. Nesselrath in Frommel-Adams 2000, pp. 134, 158–159, 171–172, 221 and 268–269, illustrations 347, 369, 380, 425, 476.

111 London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, fol. 32 v; CensusID 46698. Ashby 1904, p. 29, no. 36. I wish to thank Sebastian Storz for fruitful discussions on this sheet.

112 A. Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura, Venice 1570, p. 73; CensusID 43487.

113 Richard S. Field, The Illustrated Bartsch 56 (Netherlandish Artists: Philipp Galle), New York 1987, p. 52, no. 5601.014:5. Horst Bredekamp, “Maarten van Heemskercks Bildersturmzyklen als Angriff auf Rom,” in Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 46, ed. Robert W. Scribner and Martin Warnke, Wolfenbüttel 1990, pp. 203–216; see 203 and 211–213, Fig. 1.

114 Carlos Eire, War against the Idols, Cambridge 1986, p. 211. I wish to thank Horst Bredekamp for this reference.

115 Don Quixote, Part II, Chapter VIII, with grateful acknowledgment to the translator John Rutherford: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, trans. John Rutherford, London 2000, p. 535; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote De La Mancha, Edicíon Commemorativa IV Centenario, Madrid 2004, p. 484: Quiso ver el emperador aquel famoso templo de la Rotunda, que en la antigüedad se llamó el templo de todos los dioses, y ahora, con mejor vocación, se llama de todos los santos, y es el edificio que más entero ha quedado de los que alzó la gentilidad en Roma, y es el que más conserva la fama de la grandiosidad y magnificencia de sus fundadores: él es de hechura de una media naranja, grandísimo en estremo, y está muy claro, sin entrarle otra luz que la que le concede una ventana, o, por mejor decir, claraboya redonda que está en su cima, desde la cual mirando el emperador el edificio, estaba con él y a su lado un caballero romano, declarándole los primores y sutilezas de aquella gran máquina y memorable arquitectura; y habiéndose quitado de la claraboyaa, dijo al Emperador. “Mil veces, Sacra Majestad, me vino deseo de abrazarme con vuestra Majestad, y arrojarme de aquella claraboya abajo, por dejar de mí fama eterna en el mundo.”

116 Marder 1989, pp. 637–638; F. Lucchini 1996, p. 10 (without source reference).