Chapter 3 Who Built the Pantheon? Agrippa, Apollodorus, Hadrian And
Despite so much that is known about Roman buildings, Chapter 3 there is relatively little to say about the individuals involved in the ferment of their creation. We can reconstruct Who Built the Pantheon? confidently the original appearance of many a monument, but not much about their designers. This is not for want of Agrippa, Apollodorus, information; it is just not quite of the right kind. All around the Mediterranean survive ample ruins, including some Hadrian and Trajan strikingly well-preserved buildings, of which the Pantheon is the prime example. This physical evidence is illuminated by literary sources, inscriptions and brickstamps, and on Mark Wilson Jones occasion by maps and drawings inscribed in stone. Notwithstanding some long-running disputes, we can often be sure of the identity and date of individual monuments in major cities. We also possess quite a populous roster of architects’ names, thanks to numbers of their tombstones, along with the occasional textual mention of a few of the men at the top of their profession. Some buildings bear discreet architects’ inscriptions, yet these are nothing like as numerous and prominent as those of their patrons; it is they who take the credit. In short, it is normally impossible to join up specific surviving buildings with specific architects about whom we know any more than the name. In this the Roman period fares worse than the Greek, when architects were frequently tied to particular projects by specifications, contracts and accounts recorded on stone, while the names of famous protagonists can be found in the treatises of Roman writers, most notably Vitruvius and Pliny.1 By such means we know of no fewer than three individuals who had responsibility for the design of the Parthenon in one role or other, Ictinus, Kallikrates and Karpion, while a fourth, Phidias, the creator of Athena Parthenos, may also have had some architectural input.
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