RAPHAEL’S PANTHEON

Raphael, the great Renaissance artist, made a famous drawing of the Pantheon. The drawing is most notable for it’s inaccuracy.

“…when Raphael drew the interior of the Pantheon, he didn’t produce “the reality one sees,” but rather made some slight variations in the placement of the columns which “opened” the walls, giving back “the reality as it should be seen.” 1.  p. 86.

Belardi goes on to state that this is one of the most imitated architectural drawings. Apparently, artists copied Raphael’s drawing, because of the way it broke the rules.

“Raphael’s drawing adheres to no known graphic or projective system, and yet it shares qualities with not only orthography and perspective, but also cartography. It mediates between conflicting systems of architectural knowledge and seeks a resolution between the geometry of representation and the geometry of architecture.” 2.

We have looked at Raphael’s contribution to our cultural understanding of perspective;  see ONE POINT VS TWO POINT PERSPECTIVE.  And we have looked at the Pantheon transparently;  see VISUAL FACTS.

I really like Luce’s statement that Raphael was trying to work between the binaries of representation and geometry.  So, already in the High Renaissance, the questioning of representation and it’s relationship to knowledge had already started.  And this was during the period in which everyone was working to codify the one point perspective projection system.

I also like that Raphael’s drawing is also in between the binary of orthographic and perspective projections.  Raphael was trying to show how this thing worked.  He was not going to be limited to established projection systems.  He made up his own.

So I guess all we’re doing in these pages is picking up a thought that was first broached in around 1500.  Raphael, for one, was dissatisfied with the limitations of Cartesian representation as well as ordinary projection systems then, and we’re continuing that exploration 500 years later.

1.Belardi, Paolo.  Why Architects Still Draw.  MIT Press. 2014.

2.Kristina Luce, “Raphael and the Pantheon’s Interior: A Pivotal Moment in Architectural Representation”, pp. 49-62 in Nexus VII: Architecture and Mathematics, ed. Kim Williams, Turin: Kim Williams Books, 2008.  Web.  https://www.nexusjournal.com/the-nexus-conferences/nexus-2008/187-n2008-luce.html