FROM THE HUT TO THE PANTHEON

[1887]

I

IN one of the low-lying regions of the city of Rome, so low, in fact, that it is flooded whenever the Tiber rises a few feet above its ordinary level, there stands a huge cylindrical edifice which nearly fills up one side of an open paved space the Piazza della Rotonda. The exterior of this great building looks worn and battered; and time, or the hand of the spoiler, or both together, have stripped off an outer casing and left bare the somewhat unsightly ends of the bricks which rise tier upon tier, and are here and there arranged in blind arches as if to give greater strength to the fabric.

Standing well back of the opposite side of the Piazza one can just see the top of a domed roof, most of which is hidden within the upper circle of the outer wall. But there is nothing to attract the eye except a stately columned portico; and even this is placed at a disadvantage, because the ground slopes downward to the great doors which are overshadowed by it.

This is the famous Pantheon. Notwithstanding the

ravages of "winter and foul weather," and the still worse mischief worked by foreign and native barbarians, especially the latter, it is the most perfect relic of imperial Rome in existence. Though the statues which once adorned it within and without have long since vanished; and though, centuries ago, the bronze panels and beams of the portico went into a papal melting-pot, to reappear, partly as cannon in the walls of the castle of St. Angelo, and partly as the columns of the hideous canopy over the shrine of St. Peter in the great church on the Vatican Hill; yet the substantial features of the building remain very much what they were, when, nineteen centuries ago, it rose under the eyes of Augustus. But the baths of Caracalla, the Coliseum, and the basilica of Constantine, which were built long afterwards, some of them centuries later than the Pantheon, are now nothing but mighty ruins.

It is fortunate that the heirloom which has thus been transmitted to modern Rome is one of the most valuable of all the possessions of the ancient city. The unattractive exterior disguises a perfect jewel of interior architecture; and when I was in Rome in the winter of 188485, I never passed through the Piazza della Rotonda without entering the venerable fane to renew my delight in it. There is but one adequate description of the general effect of the interior of the Pantheon that I know of:

"They went in, accordingly, and stood in the free space of that great circle, around which are ranged the arched recesses and stately altars, formerly dedicated to heathen gods, but Christianized through twelve centuries gone by. The world has nothing else like the Pantheon.

"The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions, showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here; the gray dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven were looking down into the interior of this place of worship, left unimpeded for prayers to ascend the more freely; all these things make an impression of solemnity which St. Peter's, itself, fails to produce."

I hope that the American youth whom I address do not fail to acquaint themselves with the works of the great writers of their own age and country-and, if so, they will know that I have borrowed from "The Marble Faun." Perhaps they are less familiar with the romance of "Monte Beni" than with the "House of Seven Gables," or "The Scarlet Letter"; and, to those who are unacquainted with Rome, it may well be that the Italian story is less attractive than the others. But to those who know that place of ruins and retrospections, there is something in the pure and sad sobriety of tone, the suggestive half-lights and mysterious shadows of Hawthorne's picture of the city which boasts itself eternal, which is wonderfully fascinating and true to nature.

I have omitted a paragraph about "dusty, artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gewgaws hanging at the saintly shrines," partly because it seems to jar a little, and partly because the evil is less rampant now than it was in Hawthorne's time. As the resting place of Victor Emanuel, the Pantheon is out of favor with the Papalini; and I think that, at present, it is the only Roman

church, with the exception of St. Paolo-fuori le Mura, the interior of which is not ruined by the bad taste of devout decorators.

The architect of the Pantheon must have been a master of his craft; and it is sad that his name and fame have long since vanished into oblivion. When M. Agrippa, the friend and minister of Augustus, at whose cost the edifice was built, gave him his commission, he seems to have resolved to construct something which should be eminently and characteristically Roman; perfectly simple, exquisitely beautiful, and yet of great majesty; withal so enduring that it should stand unscathed for two thousand years in the most storm-worn city of the world, while every monument of similar antiquity was brought low. And if the unknown architect did thus aspire to leave a witness of his unsurpassable skill for the admiration and the envy of future ages, he has undoubtedly succeeded.

The durability of the Pantheon speaks for itself: The late eminent French architect, Viollet-le-Duc, declares that, of all the great domes now in existence, that of the Pantheon alone remains without flaw. I have given better authority than my own for its beauty and its grandeur; but as to its simplicity and its eminently Roman character, I have somewhat to say.

Beauty, as a general rule, implies simplicity; I do not mean the simplicity of monotony, but the simplicity of unity. That which is highly and nobly beautiful always conveys an impression of balance, harmony, or rhythm; the parts, however various they may be, are related in a way which produces an intellectual satisfaction. Mind agi

tates the mass of sensible impressions; the inner order shines through them and appeals to the reason.

For a long time, I was perplexed to know what it was about the proportions of the interior of the Pantheon which gave me such a different feeling from that made by any other domed space I had ever entered. But on studying an architectural section of the building, I believe I found the key to my problem, for its form results from the combination of two extremely simple geometrical figures, a sphere and a cylinder.

Take a sphere and a cylinder, the latter being of the same diameter as the sphere, and of the same height as its diameter. Then cut the sphere into two hemispheres and the cylinders into two cylinders of equal heightthat is to say, of height equal to the radius of the sphere. Next stick one hemisphere by its flat side on to the flat top of one of the half cylinders; take a cast of the whole in papier-mâché, or some such material, and cut a circular hole in the summit of the hemisphere. The result will be a tolerably exact model of the interior of the Pantheon, which measures about 140 feet from the summit of the dome to the center of the circular floor, while this is about 140 feet in diameter. Nothing can be much simpler than such a combination of sphere and cylinder; and I conceive that this extreme simplicity lies at the foundation of the beauty of the result, while grandeur is conferred by the vast size of the whole. And both these æsthetic qualities are not a little heightened by the magical illumination yielded by the great, round, solitary toplight, in which the bright blue sky is framed like a heavenly window by day; while, by night, the "unhasting but