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Everyone knows that the Pantheon in Rome is the best-preserved building from antiquity. Where, however, it is not at all well-preserved is in its statuary. In 1545 the last remaining trace, supposedly a bust of Cybele, was removed from its position in the wall of the chapel to the left of the entrance (Fig. 1), which had become a ‘rubbish dump’ for fragments of the pagan building and two years earlier had been allocated to the Confraternity of Saint Joseph of the Holy Land, soon to become known as the famous Congregazione dei Virtuosi. 1 The bust was thought to be ‘something for gardens and not for holy places’ 2 and was removed. 3 Nothing is known about what happened to it after that. 4 So, for moderns, the questions of which statues existed in the building and where they stood remain matters for debate. In a throwaway remark after a lecture at the Archaeological Society in Berlin in 1867, Theodor Mommsen suggested that statues of the seven planetary divinities filled the seven exedras, a view which was immediately accepted by the lecturer Friedrich Adler. 5 In 1906 the German ancient historian Heinrich Nissen looked more closely at the possible images that stood within the niches of the interior and proposed a reconstruction. 6 Yet his reconstruction has not been widely accepted, and the question has not been pursued further. Indeed, thirty years ago, Paul Godfrey and David Hemsoll challenged the traditional identification of the building as a temple and argued that the principal round exedra facing the building's entrance was used not for statuary at all, but for a tribunal for the emperor. 7 It can therefore no longer be taken for granted even that its statues were cult images.
FIG. 1.
Plan of the Pantheon. (Drawing by Mark Wilson Jones, with his permission)
[Figure omitted. See PDF]
This article reconsiders the question and proposes a new reconstruction of the building's statuary. In so doing, it also reconsiders the statuary of the original building erected by Marcus Agrippa, overturns some accepted scholarly orthodoxies about the statuary of Augustan Rome, and throws light both on the evolution of Augustan ideology in the earliest phases of the régime and on the rôle played...