And They Were Always in the Temple: The Pilgrims’ Experience at S. Maria Rotonda (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Pantheon in the Middle Ages
the Great's legitimization of Christianity in 313. At Constantine's behest and with his sponsorship, the city received a cathedral, the Lateran Church, and the great basilica of St. Peter was rising over the body of the apostle outside the walls of the Eternal City, to be followed by an almost equally impressive basilica dedicated to St. Paul. Meanwhile, in 330, Constantine shifted the empire's capital to Constantinople. 4 It is uncertain how these signifi cant urban, political, and religious events aff ected the Pantheon and the role it played in daily life in Rome. Its survival and reputation were such that, little more than a decade after Constantius's visit to Rome, either in 368 or 370, the Rotunda was explicitly mentioned as the place in which an imperial law was announced to the public. 5 Thereafter, we hear nothing about the Pantheon until the early seventh century, when Pope Boniface IV requested the emperor's permission to transform the building into a church.
The Pantheon is one of the most important architectural monuments of all time. Thought to have been built by Emperor Hadrian in approximately 125 AD on the site of an earlier, Agrippan-era monument, it brilliantly displays the spatial pyrotechnics emblematic of Roman architecture and engineering. The Pantheon gives an up-to-date account of recent research on the best preserved building in the corpus of ancient Roman architecture from the time of its construction to the twenty-first century. Each chapter addresses a specific fundamental issue or period pertaining to the building; together, the essays in this volume shed light on all aspects of the Pantheon's creation, and establish the importance of the history of the building to an understanding of its ancient fabric and heritage, its present state, and its special role in the survival and evolution of ancient architecture in modern Rome.
Review: The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Tod A. Marder and Mark Wilson Jones
American Journal of Archaeology, 2017
This long-awaited volume is the only published collection on the Pantheon covering the building's history from Agrippa to the present. Considerations of the AJA's readership lead me to focus on the first six of 12 essays, those covering the building in antiquity. The second six, by Thunø (the medieval Pantheon), Nesselrath (Renaissance), Marder (17th century), Pasquali (1700-1820), Williams (19th century), and Etlin (the modern age) are outstanding in their own right but have been adequately treated by other reviewers. Perhaps by design, the chapters on antiquity present a united front on certain scholarly developments. This
The Basilica and the Rotunda: Type, Analogy and Ritual in Medieval Europe
Burning Farm (ed. Pier Vittorio Aureli), TPOD Lab, EPFL , 2023
This paper explores the replication of Jerusalem’s sacred architecture in Medieval Europe. It studies the concept of analogy in order to define the spatial translation of Jerusalem into “analogous” shrines built for pilgrims unable to visit the city itself. These analogous shrines follow a typological structure that originated in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a basilica (an axial structure built for hierarchical congregations) and a rotunda (a centrifugal space dedicated to private contemplation) were juxtaposed to facilitate the idiosyncratic rituals of the Jerusalem liturgy. Following Carlos Marti Aris’ definition of type as a “principle of organisation by which a series of elements, governed by a specific relationship, acquire a certain structure,” this paper argues that the coupling of a basilica and rotunda forms an archetype that can be identified in Christian architecture of the Middle Ages. While these structures differ from each other in their materiality, style, and scale – reflecting the political and cultural motivations of their patrons – they are united by their adherence to a particular type that is situated “at the level of the form’s deep structure.” Using typological knowledge, this paper traces the evolution of sacred architecture by contrasting the historical variations that change over time with the essential similarities that remain the same through the ages and can, in fact, connect seemingly dissimilar buildings. By studying Jerusalem’s analogies, this paper attempts to locate the essential, structural similarity between them, and thus anchor their fixed coordinates in the typological origin of Christian architecture and ritual.
Exploring the Sacred Geography of the Pantheon of Rome
The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of sacred space as a human construct through examining arguments and theories proposed by academics in relation to having several exploration visits to the site located in Rome. The research visits take place in the pantheon of Rome, one of the most important surviving work of Roman architecture.1 However, the research will focus mainly on the role of the sun in the pantheon as one of the main features that aid into making the space sacred. The issue of discussion in this matter, is whether the role of the sun in the pantheon is considered sacred due to the space being initially sacred or is the space considered sacred due to the role of the sun? The key theorists I will be presenting are Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade and, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, they all have different ideas of what makes a space sacred, and that could help with in investigation of the pantheon.
The role of the sun in the Pantheon’s design and meaning
Despite being one of the most recognizable buildings from ancient Rome, the Pantheon is poorly understood. While its architecture has been well studied, its function remains uncertain. This paper argues that both the design and the meaning of the Pantheon are in fact dependent upon an understanding of the role of the sun in the building, and of the apotheosized emperor in Roman thought. Supporting evidence is drawn not only from the instruments of time in the form of the roofed spherical sundial, but also from other Imperial monuments, notably Nero's Domus Aurea and Augustus's complex of structures on the Campus Martius -his Ara Pacis, the 'Horologium Augusti,' and his Mausoleum. Hadrian's Mausoleum and potentially part of his Villa at Tivoli are drawn into this argument as correlatives. Ultimately, it is proposed that sun and time were linked architecturally into cosmological signposts for those Romans who could read such things.