The Pantheon seems, however, to have been blessed with several lives, a story of markedly different chapters, pantheons, one might say, plurality built in. Compared, the Pyramids remain stubbornly unchanged the Parthenon comes down to us much diminished. Then, over time, there are the vagaries of history. Mixed in with the Pozzuolian cement, at the bottom are basalt blocks for strength, in the middle section knuckle-size bits of rock at the top are lodged empty clay jars and pumice-stone, light enough to float in water. Viewed from the exterior, the roof’s comparative flatness, like a convex pancake, is determined by the materials thinning out as the inner dome curves upwards, lest it collapse beneath its weight. Michelangelo comments that the building seems the design of angels not men. Michelangeloīyron, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage heaps adjectives: “Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime.” None is quite grand enough to fit. “It is, as it were, the visible image of the universe.” Who knows whether with his simile in Adonais for life on earth, “like a dome of many-coloured glass”, he wasn’t thinking of this, its land-bound equivalent. Symbolic but also relieving weight, the caissons take five steps backward to the wall, each originally embedded with a bronze star. Horizontally, 28 per row, they match the moon’s annual cycles. Five levels of concentric caissons extend upward like the five then known planets. “The likeness of a terrestrial globe and the stellar sphere,” is the way Hadrian puts it in Marguerite Youcenar’s novel Memoires d'Hadrien. Its 41 x 41 metres conjure a sense of space unprecedented in previous architecture, Egyptian, Greek or Etruscan. Its interior corresponding to a sphere, ‘la Rotunna’, as it’s called fondly in Romanesco, from floor to the oculus matches with still astounding precision the diameter. Not to mention its purpose, not for gory entertainment but, as Byron puts it, “a sanctuary and home/ of art and piety.” Due to its sheer mass, but also to its form and symmetry. ‘When the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall, and when Rome falls, the world will perish.’ The proverb has not reckoned that, after such a hypothetical event, the perfectly proportioned Pantheon would in all likelihood still be there.
It would take over 1,300 years before Brunelleschi’s dome (1436) would equal it, while even today it keeps its record in the non-reinforced dome category. Architects still puzzle over the dome’s construction. Yet for sheer mass on the ground and the use (at least for its time) of cutting-edge technology and know-how the Pantheon must take the prize. France, Dubai and Indonesia might cite their various towers, as, with some accidental help from nature, can Pisa. For height the United States could vaunt any number of structures to surpass it. So the Pantheon, whose interior he once, as it now seems, sketched prophetically and where he is buried might contest the title as world’s greatest building. In the quincentenary year of his death, Raphael can stake a claim as greatest artist ever. Tracing some of the Pantheon's reincarnations down through the centuries.
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