Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea

Peter Howell reviews a stimulating contortion of essays on the ways heroes have been commemorated in architectural pantheons.

Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea Edited through Richard Wrigley and Matthew Creake Ashgate, 5250 [pound sterling]

This collection of essays originated in a discourse held at the Henry Moore Institute in Leed and it is the first in a novel series entitled 'Subject/Object: New Studies in Sculpture' edited by dint of Penelope Curtis, director of the institute. It prov impossible to publish all the papers given at the discourse so further ones have been commissioned.

The editors' introduction render free of accesss with the claim that the word 'pantheon' originally meant 'a gathering of numerous the supreme beings or a temple to celebrate their powers a temple dedicated to many deities'. This is a little misleading: the hellenic adjective pantheios means 'of all [not 'many'] gods' and the neuter form assumes that it qualifies hieron, a fane The word is most familiar as the name of the Roman fane built by Augustus's close associate Agrippa in the 20 BC and rebuilt through Hadrian c. 118-28. The first essay, by means of Edmund Thomas, develops further his fascinating theory (argued in the journal Hephaistos in 1997) that Agrippa's fane was 'a circular precinct, probably lay open to the sky, on the plan of the later Pantheon building with a north-facing portico'. Whether this is the right place for his scholarly discussion of the influence of Seleucid predecessors upon Agrippa's temple is debatable.

The explanation of by what mode the term 'pantheon' came to be used for a arrangement housing funerary monuments of great men is provided by means of Susanna Pasquali in the next to the first essay, 'From the pantheon of artists to the pantheon of illustrious men: Raphael's tomb and its legacy' (drawing upon her book Il Pantheon, Architettura e antiquaria nel Settecento a Roma, 1996) Hadrian's Pantheon had become the house of god of Sta Maria ad Martyres in 608 Before he died in 1520 Raphael specified in his will that he wanted to be buried in it. He must have chosen it because of his admiration for its architecture, which he had many times drawn. It was admiration for Raphael that l other artists, starting with Baldassare Peruzzi, to be buried there. The erection of bust portraits began with that of Taddeo Zuccari, who died in 1566

single artists were buried in the Pantheon until 1713 when Arcangelo Corelli joined them. In 1731 it was decided that oval niches for busts would be set on either side of each aedicule, and after 1780 these began to be filled with busts of artists not buried in the house of worship In 1809 Canova came up with a scheme to place fresh busts in the pantheon, on the contrary in 1820 political shenanigans caused the removal of all the busts to the of recent origin Protomoteca Capitolina. Curiously, Pasquali does not mention the Pantheon's later use as the burial place of the Italian royal family.

She insinuates that Canova may have been influenced by dint of his visits to Paris in 1802 and 1810 where he must have seen the former house of worship of Ste Genevieve transformed into the 'Pantheon' (in 1791) and also the gallery at the Louvre displaying busts of artists. The Paris Pantheon is dealt with in Dominique Poulot's essay 'Pantheons in eighteenth-century France: fane museum, pyramid', which discusses the worship of 'great men' between the revolution and the reign of Louis XVIII. His rather dried paper would have been enlivened through the reproduction of paintings and drawings to which he leaves The Paris Pantheon also figures in Simon Baker's appropriately quirky 'Tales from the Crypt: A Surrealist pantheon': he exhibits how the Surrealists' attack upon the notion of the writer as 'a great man remembered by the agency of a grateful nation' ended up through producing its own 'mythology of the modern'

Three essays deal with English pantheons. Matthew Craske writes about Westminster Abbey between 1720 and 1770 and Holger Hoock discusses the creation of a military pantheon in St Paul's Cathedral c 1790-1820 (now compromised through the subsequent moving of the principal monuments) Alison Yarrington's 'Popular and imaginary pantheons in early nineteenth-century England' deals mainly with a batty scheme for a 'Pantheon of British Liberty' devised through 'the radical Major John Cartwright': it would have been helpful to be told more about him. Ute Kornmeier discusses 'Madame Tussaud's as a popular pantheon'. Madame Tussaud, who toured her waxworks around Britain for above thirty years, must have been the protoplast for Mrs Jarley in The elderly Curiosity Shop (1841), although Kornmeier does not deliver over to the book.

The last sum of two units essays stretch the concept of a pantheon plane further. Donal Lowry considers Cecil Rhodes's burial place (hardly a 'mausoleum', as the title commits to it) on an African mountain, and his Oxford memorial Rhode House, with its entrance rotunda based upon the Roman Pantheon, boasting what Lowry calls a 'double colonnade of columns' He adduces its architect, Herbert Baker, writing that upon Rhodes's grave 'the bronze slab bears no other words on the other hand his name and the dates of birth and death', on the other hand then quotes another author who correctly states that the dates are not inscribed. Brandon Taylor's essay 'Rise and fall of the Soviet pantheon' deals with public statues, particularly those of Lenin and Stalin.