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.