The Pantheon, Fora and Basilicas
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The noblest of all circular temples of Rome and of the world was the Pantheon. It was built by Hadrian, 117-138 A.D., on the site of the earlier rectangular temple of the same name erected by Agrippa. It measures 142 feet in diameter internally; the wall is 20 feet thick and supports a hemispherical dome rising to a height of 140 feet. Light is admitted solely through a round opening 28 feet in diameter at the top of the dome, the simplest and most impressive method of illumination conceivable. The rain and snow that enter produce no appreciable effect upon the temperature of the vast hall. There is a single entrance, with noble bronze doors, admitting directly to the interior, around which seven niches, alternately rectangular and semicircular in plan and fronted by Corinthian columns, lighten, without weakening, the mass of the encircling wall. This wall was originally incrusted with rich marbles, and the great dome, adorned with deep coffering in rectangular panels, was decorated with rosettes and mouldings in gilt stucco. The dome appears to consist of a shell of brick with numerous arches and ribs covered with a heavier external shell of concrete. The interior panelling appears to the writer to have been hewn out of the mass of the brick vault regardless of the ribs and arches in its structure.
The exterior was less successful than the interior. The gabled porch of twelve superb granite columns 50 feet high, three-aisled in plan after the Etruscan mode, and covered originally by a ceiling of bronze, was a rebuilding with the materials and on the plan of the original pronaos of the Pantheon of Agrippa. The circular wall behind it is faced with fine brickwork, and displays, like the dome, many curious arrangements of discharging arches, reminiscences of traditional constructive precautions here wholly useless and fictitious because only skindeep. A revetement of marble below and plaster above once concealed this brick facing. The portico, in spite of its too steep gable (once filled with a "gigantomachia" in gilt bronze) and its somewhat awkward association with a round building, is nevertheless a noble work, its capitals in Pentelic marble ranking among the finest known examples of the Roman Corinthian. Taken as a whole, the Pantheon is one of the great masterpieces of the world's architecture.
FORA AND BASILICAS
The fora were the places for general public assemblage. The chief of those in Rome, the Forum Magnum, or Forum Romanum, was at first merely an irregular vacant space, about and in which, as the focus of the civic life, temples, halls, colonnades, and statues gradually accumulated. These chance aggregations the systematic Roman mind reduced in time to orderly and monumental form; successive emperors extended them and added new fora at enormous cost and with great splendor of architecture. Those of Julius, Augustus, Vespasian, and Nerva (or Domitian), adjoining the Roman Forum, were magnificent enclosures surrounded by high walls and single or double colonnades. Each contained a temple or basilica, besides gateways, memorial columns or arches, and countless statues. The Forum of Trajan surpassed all the rest; it covered an area of thirty-five thousand square yards, and included, besides the main area, entered through a triumphal arch, the Basilica Ulpia, the temple of Trajan, and his colossal Doric column of Victory. Both in size and beauty it ranked as the chief architectural glory of the city. The six fora together contained thirteen temples, three basilicas, eight triumphal arches, a mile of porticos, and a number of other public edifices. Besides these, a network of colonnades covered large tracts of the city, affording sheltered communication in every direction, and here and there expanding into squares or gardens surrounded by peristyles.
The public business of Rome, both judicial and commercial, was largely transacted in the basilicas, large buildings consisting usually of a wide and lofty central nave flanked by lower side-aisles, and terminating at one or both ends in an apse or semicircular recess called the tribune, in which were the seats for the magistrates. The sideaisles were separated from the nave by columns supporting a clearstory wall, pierced by windows above the roofs of the sideaisles. In some cases the latter were two stories high, with galleries; in others the central space was open to the sky, as at Pompeii, suggesting the derivation of the basilica from the open square surrounded by colonnades, or from the forum itself, with which we find it usually associated. The most important basilicas in Rome were the Sempronian, the Aemilian (about 54 B.C.), the Julian in the Forum Magnum ( 51 B.C.), and the Ulpian in the Forum of Trajan ( 113 A.D.). The last two were probably open basilicas, only the side-aisles being roofed. The Ulpian was the most magnificent of all, and in conjunction with the Forum of Trajan formed one of the most imposing of those monumental aggregations of columnar architecture which contributed so largely to the splendor of the Roman capital. These monuments frequently suffered from the burning of their wooden roofs. It was Constantine who completed the first vaulted and fireproof basilica, begun by his predecessor and rival, Maxentius, on the site of the former Temple of Peace. Its design reproduced on a grand scale the plan of the tepidarium-halls of the thermæ, the side-recesses of which were converted into a continuous side-aisle by piercing arches through the buttress-walls that separated them. Above the imposing vaults of these recesses and under the cross-vaults of the nave were windows admitting abundant light. A narthex, or porch, preceded the hall at one end; there were also a side entrance from the Via Sacra, and an apse or tribune for the magistrates opposite each of these entrances. The dimensions of the main hall (325 × 85 feet), the height of its vault (117 feet), and the splendor of its columns and incrustations excited universal admiration, and exercised a powerful influence on later architecture.
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