ABSTRACT

In the famous plan of a reconstructed section of ancient Rome that serves as

the main illustration of Il Campo Marzio, 1762, and in a corollary bird’s-eye

view, Piranesi offered an image of a Pantheon contextualized in relation to

many Imperial monuments (Figures 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3). The Pantheon was one

of the best preserved and arguably the most visited and commented upon

architectural works in the city in the mid-eighteenth century, as it is today. It

was often represented; architects from at least the late fifteenth century

forward captured various aspects of the building: its façade and interior decor-

ation, and its measurements.1 However, none before Piranesi had positioned

it in a plausible urban reconstruction of ancient Rome.2 The result is that it

appears as just a bauble in the vast network of structures and infrastructure

in the Ichnographia. In other words, Piranesi denigrated its significance by

overwhelming it with other monuments, such as the Thermae Agrippae, not

just bigger but more impressive in design and in structural complexity. I will

here explore the possibility that the artist’s version of the Pantheon was a

polemical response to a long tradition of idolizing and isolating the structure to

the point that it came to epitomize rather than hint at the artistic achievements

of ancient Rome. In its place, he offered an opportunity to supplant the

numerous misprisions of the Pantheon, and in the process, he proposed his

own: the Pantheon as a mere shadow of the magnificence of the ancient

Roman capital.