The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present

by Unknown

  13.3. Jacques Gondoin, anatomy amphitheater, École de Chirurgie (School of Surgery), Paris, 1769–1774.

  Gondoin’s School of Surgery featured a central triumphal arch entrance in the middle of a columnar peristyle that supported the school’s library and that served as a ceremonial propylaeum to the central courtyard where, to the far side and on the central axis, a grand portico graced by the Corinthian order provided the facade to the anatomy amphitheater, which was the climax of this elaborate but direct architectural promenade. Semicircular in form and reminiscent of an ancient Roman theater, the anatomy amphitheater was crowned with a coffered half dome inspired by the Pantheon, including its central oculus, which in this case was “greater in diameter” than the Roman model15 so as to provide adequate natural light directly over the anatomy table itself. The Pantheon-like half dome abuts a flat wall, whole lunette conceptually completing the circle, while rendering its universal meaning specific: the half dome represents the cosmos, and the lunette portrays the great anatomists, including de la Martinière, who had penetrated its secrets.

  To appreciate more fully the cosmic symbolism of the Pantheon within the context of Enlightenment medicine, we should briefly consider the work of the famous philosophe Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, author of L’Homme-Machine (Man, the Machine, 1748). Trained as a surgeon, La Mettrie published his philosophical text to explain the wonder of life, especially in the thinking and feeling human being with his moral and creative capacities, rooted in the materiality of the body, whose “marvels” have been discerned by “doctors who were philosophers and not by philosophers who were not doctors.”16 La Mettrie praised, in particular, the insights about “the material unity of man” garnered by the seventeenth-century anatomist Giovanni Alfonso Borelli.17 The “complex machine” of the human body discussed in La Mettrie’s treatise anticipated, in many respects, the latest medical research of the twenty-first century, where scientists still display awe in the face of little-understood operations of neurons in their interface with thought and feeling. La Mettrie’s account of the actions of the body’s “machine” in its relationship to the mind or spirit reads much like today’s descriptions of “the secrets of mirror neurons,” which one journalist recently has termed “cells that read minds.”18 This wonder and these insights afforded by mid eighteenth-century surgery and anatomical studies found a fitting setting under the Pantheon-inspired half dome of Gondoin’s anatomy amphitheater.

  The enthusiasm for Newton’s scientific theories in the eighteenth century was widespread and was aptly reflected by Alexander’s Pope’s assessment: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:/ God said, Let Newton be: and all was light.” In France, Madame du Châtelet (Gabrielle-Émilie de Breteuil), wife of the Marquis du Châtelet-Laumont, lieutenant general of the king’s armies, published a French translation in 1756, with a helpful commentary, of Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, with subsequent editions in 1768 and 1775. There also were popularizing accounts intended for a broader public, such as Voltaire’s Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton (Elements of Newton’s Philosophy) and a French translation of Francesco Algarotti’s Il newtonismo per le dame (Newton for Ladies). In 1784, Étienne-Louis Boullée, one of the luminaries of the Académie Royale d’Architecture, designed a cenotaph to honor Newton (Fig. 13.4), whose actual grave was in Westminster Abbey, where many of Great Britain’s great citizens had been buried.19 It appears that the Academy’s enthusiasm for Boullée’s design prompted it to sponsor a Prix d’émulation with the same theme in January 1785, where it characterized Newton as “the greatest genius.”20

  13.4. Étienne-Louis Boullée, Cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton (project), 1784. (Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France)

  Unlike Gondoin, who had made clear reference to the Pantheon in his anatomy theater, Boullée took advantage of the full spherical form that could be inscribed within the Pantheon to transform the ancient Roman prototype into a Deist celebration of Nature. The exterior honors Newton for having determined that the Earth had been a perfect sphere before it was flattened by rotation:

  Sublime mind! Vast and profound genius! Divine being! Newton, please deign to accept the homage of my limited talent.... O, Newton! Since you, through the breadth of your intelligence and the sublimity of your genius, were able to determine the shape of the Earth, I have conceived the project to envelope you within your discovery. This is like enveloping you within yourself.... For this reason, I have used the figure of the Earth for your sepulcher.

  The interior honors Newton for having elucidated the physical principles of the universe, notably the movements of the heavenly bodies:

  My imagination surveyed the grand images of nature. I shuddered at the thought of not being able to recreate them. It is within the realm of immortality, it is in the sky that I wanted to place Newton.

  Designing the interior of the cenotaph as a spherical cavity punctuated in the upper half by holes that would enable the sunlight to shine through like twinkling stars of the nighttime sky, Boullée used these “stars” as his sepulchral lamp:

  The interior of this sepulcher is conceived in the same spirit. By using, O Newton, your divine system to form the sepulchral lamp that illuminates the tomb, I have made myself, so it seems to me, sublime.21

  Had this project been constructed, it would have been an early example of a planetarium. Boullée’s Cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton was the second of his major buildings to encapsulate the immensity of Nature that he discussed in his essay on architecture; the other was his Metropolitan Church project (ca. 1781–1782), where he expressed his boundless admiration for the Pantheon in the form of homage to Michelangelo:

  Michelangelo, painter, sculptor, and talented architect, addressing the task of designing Saint Peter’s basilica and wanting to surpass all of the beautiful monuments of Rome, especially the Rotunda, about which he always spoke with the highest praise, astonished the entire world. He proposed to construct a dome as vast as that of the Pantheon such that it would be the crown of the building, whose vaults would support this immense mass: an idea so grand, so daring, so astonishing that, if it had not been executed and if today somebody had made such a proposal, one would have certainly contested its feasibility!22

  Inspired by Michelangelo’s daring design for Saint Peter’s dome and wanting his church “to give the impression of the universe” in all of its immensity,23 Boullée proposed the elevation of a comparable dome in such a manner that it would seem to float miraculously on high. Then, several years later, when designing the Cenotaph to Newton, the architect left behind the domed Greek-cross model of Michelangelo’s Saint Peter’s, which he had used as the basis for his church project, to adapt the spherical cavity implied by the entire interior of the Pantheon into a Deist celebration of Newton’s discoveries.

  During the French Revolution, the Institut de France, founded in 1795 as the successor body to the royal academies,24 selected a cenotaph to Newton as the theme for a Prix d’émulation in 1800. The winning prize by C. Gay imagined a spherical cavity fully lit with stars and set within a stepped pyramid, each level symbolic of an earlier astronomical chronology. On top of the pyramid, a colossal bronze statue of Newton sits majestically on a throne, as the great scientist pensively determines the “system of the universe.” Newton is crowned with an aureole of seven rays, one for each of the “primitive colors” that he had “discovered” by diffracting light through a prism.

  The interior of Gay’s design presents a cosmological symbolism worthy of the original Pantheon on which it manifestly was modeled. Within the vast, spherical room painted azure blue and decorated with stars in their true positions, there was to be a central promenade with 24 winged figures representing the hours. Each statue holds a flower, which blooms at its designated hour to constitute a “botanical clock.” Newton’s complete works were to be engraved there on marble plaques. Hence, the building was to be a cenotaph to Newton, a museum of astronomy, an archive of Newton�
�s thought, and a Deist temple to Nature.25

  Deism in Funerary Architecture

  The place of worship par excellence for the new Deist religion was not the church but rather the cemetery. From the 1740s onward, France in particular, and to a certain extent other European lands, underwent a reform movement in burial practices that considered the thousand-year-old custom of burying within parish churches and in adjacent or neighboring cemeteries both unhealthy for the living and disrespectful to both the living and the dead. As reformers proposed new cemeteries for locations outside of the city walls, architects began to offer an image of the new cemetery as a site of Deist worship, where humankind returns to the elements of the cosmos and where the dead return to the bosom of Nature.

  Most of these designs were inspired in some manner by the Pantheon, either literally, as had been Gondoin’s anatomy amphitheater, or more abstractly, in the manner of Boullée’s Cenotaph to Newton. Among the most literal designs, which used a coffered, domed interior reminiscent of the Pantheon, were Pierre-Adrien Pâris’s stage set for the Tomb of Agamemnon (Fig. 13.5); Jean-Louis Moreau’s Grand Prix of 1785, with the cemetery’s central chapel giving the appearance of a hemisphere surrounded by a ceremonial ring of columns on the exterior and featuring a coffered Pantheon-like dome with a double ceremonial ring of columns to the interior; and Giuseppe Borsato’s Aula sepolcrale (funerary chapel, 1799). Perhaps the preeminent abstract project was Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s cemetery proposal for the industrial town of Chaux, the royal saltworks that he had designed in the Franche-Comté region of France. Similar to Boullée’s Cenotaph to Newton, Ledoux’s cemetery project presented a spherical interior cavity that represented the cosmos, in this case with the sphere half buried in the ground. The engraving entitled “Elevation of the Cemetery of the Town of Chaux” does not show a building but, rather, a view of the planets. Similar in spirit to Ledoux’s cemetery project was an anonymous entry to the Grand Prix of 1799 for a public cemetery whereby the student imagined a domed central chapel replete with fully spherical interior space.26

  13.5. Pierre-Adrien Pâris, tomb of Agamemnon in a crypt, set design, ca. 1783. (Photo: © Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon)

  One popular variant on this funerary theme was the cemetery with a central chapel in the form of a pyramid, which was a traditional shape for a mausoleum, yet hollow in the center with a Pantheon-like domed space to the interior. Boullée himself designed several such chapels, as did Pierre Fontaine in his second prize design for the Grand Prix of 1785. This format was repeated in several of the entries for the Grand Prix of 1799, as in Jean-Nicolas Jomard’s central pyramid with its star-studded dome, Louis-Sylvestre Gasse’s First Prize design, and Guignet’s Second Prize, the latter also with an interior dome covered with stars.

  The prize-winning designs from the revolutionary period were published and hence widely transmitted to posterity, with extensive results in a variety of building types not limited to the cemetery. Four of these schemes reappear in a sketch from a course on architectural form, circa 1910, by the French Beaux-Arts architect Paul Philippe Cret, who was teaching in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania (Fig. 13.6). Three of the four revolutionary projects depicted here are symbolic building programs with no actual function, and all three have Pantheon-like domes. (The fourth project was for a school.) One was a Temple Décadaire (1802) by J.-N.-L. Durand and Jean-Thomas Thibault, a temple project with a star-filled dome typical of the French Revolution, which attempted to substitute domed temples dedicated either to Nature or to the Supreme Being to replace the Catholic church. The other two projects were the public cemetery Grand Prix of 1799 by Gasse and Gay’s Cenotaph to Newton of 1800. Although Cret himself did not design buildings that used the Pantheon as a model, he did invest his extensive civic architecture with metaphorical and symbolic central atrium spaces that appropriately characterized the building type, a lesson that he taught his student Louis Kahn, who also worked for Cret’s architectural office after graduation.

  13.6. Paul Philippe Cret, sketch from course on architectural form, University of Pennsylvania, ca. 1910. (Photo: Paul P. Cret collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania)

  More directly than Cret, Kahn applied the legacy of the Pantheon – “that wonderful building which satisfies the institutions of man”27 – to much of his architecture, where the inwardly turned, centralized spaces evince both the lessons of Cret’s teachings and of Kahn’s own study of the Pantheon, first made possible when he won a fellowship in 1950 from the American Academy in Rome. These buildings include the Bath House (Trenton, 1955–1956), Erdman Hall Dormitories (Bryn Mawr College, 1960–1965), Philips Exeter Academy Library (1967–1972), National Assembly of Bangladesh (Dacca, 1962–1974), and Center for British Art and Studies (Yale University, New Haven, 1969–1974). Perhaps the National Assembly and the Exeter Library (Fig. 13.7) show the influence of the Pantheon most directly. The Philips Exeter Academy Library is built around a central space serving as the book delivery room. Each of the four defining walls of this square room is elevated off the floor and punctuated by a giant circle, which reveals rows of bookshelves beyond. One has the impression of a Pantheon of books. For the Assembly Chamber at Dacca, Kahn considered the Pantheon as a model to be followed abstractly, now rendered as a segmented melon vault placed over the octagonal chamber.28

  13.7. Louis I. Kahn, Philips Exeter Academy Library, 1967–1972. (Photo: Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission)

  Yet all of these buildings reflected Kahn’s conviction that the Pantheon taught an architect the importance of creating a symbolic space that captured the essential nature of an institution, a theme to which Kahn repeatedly returned in his lectures and writings:

  Every city is made up of institutions. If you were to consider the making of a city you would have to consider the organization of the institutions. But you have got to review those institutions and really know what those institutions are. The institution of learning must have in its mind – must have in its sense – the realm of spaces which are good for learning, and not a program which says that you must have so many of this, or so many of that, but a realm of spaces which you feel is sympathetic to learning. So, therefore, you may go into a space which may be a Pantheon-like space. You would name it absolutely nothing – it would just be a good place to arrive in which you would say “school” – from which may come other spaces.29

  Thus for Kahn, as for Cret, institutional buildings required a symbolic central space of appropriate character that set the tone for that particular institution and to which all of the building’s other rooms and places were thematically related.30

  For Kahn, the “Pantheon is really a world within a world” and in that sense the archetype of all architecture and the deep experience it can offer:

  The [Pantheon’s] dome, the first real dome made, was conceived with a window to the sky.... And there is a demand [for] form saying nothing specific, no direction; that’s what form says to you, feeling and philosophy.... The round building is something which is irrefutable as an expression of a world within a world.31

  In the end, the connection between Kahn, Cret, Boullée, and the Pantheon becomes even more intertwined, because for the exhibition “Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu,” held in five American museums in 1967–1968, Kahn wrote a poem expressing his admiration for Boullée’s projects, which includes the lines: “Boullée is/ ... / Thus Architecture is.”32 This line was an echo of Boullée’s often repeated claim that in using the light and shadow of nature in his buildings, such as the Metropolitan Church project, the Cenotaph to Newton, and his funerary architecture, he was, in effect, emulating Divinity in the act of creating the world: “your art will make you the master of these means, such that you too will be entitled to say fiat lux,” let there be light.33

  The Rise of Democratic Government

  One cannot overestimat
e the historical significance of the democratic revolutions that took place in the United States and then in France toward the end of the eighteenth century. Although there had been precedents of restrictive, representative government in the ancient Greek city-states, the ancient Roman Republic, the medieval Venetian Republic, and the British parliamentary system, the American and French Revolutions were literally epoch-making events in a world that since millennia had been dominated by monarchical rule, grounded in the principle of Divine Right, a notion challenged by Enlightenment authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued, for example, in Le Contrat social (The Social Contract, 1762) that the basis for society and hence for government was a compact among its citizens. This principle was clearly articulated in the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies in Congress, July 4, 1776, whereby they became the 13 United States of America:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

  Of course, the United States, like France with its new constitution established during its revolution, would have to pass through two succeeding centuries as each country learned to apply more thoroughly these principles to all of its citizens and to all of its inhabitants. Yet the very articulation of these notions as the basis both for society and its government was unprecedented.