Pantheon Shaft of Light

The Eye in the Sky

As the Parthenon in Athens is the most famous Greek building, the Pantheon in Rome is the most famous Roman. As rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian from an earlier temple, with a sublimely simple geometrical design, its appearance from the outside is a dome, the upper part of which, if continued round to the ground by the mind’s eye, is a perfect hemisphere, and its lower part is the beginning of a cube whose upper half has been cut away to allow the sphere of the dome to emerge from it. It is supremely classical in that it strips its elements down to the simplest possible geometrical components, the cube and the sphere. The dome has an ‘oculus’ or ‘little eye’ at the top, a small space open to the sky through which the sun’s shafts descend on different parts of the ornate interior at different seasons and different times of day. That mysterious shaft of light can be whatever you make of it, since Hadrian left no clues. Some say it symbolizes the sky of the whole world funneled down on the ordered space of the Roman Empire, which was at its largest around the time Hadrian was emperor. A backdrop of it in a ballet would be the ultimate stage setting.

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