Geometric Proportions in Measured Plans of the Pantheon of Rome

Abstract

The Pantheon in Rome has been depicted in countless paintings and measured drawings. This paper considers how the building and its subsequent representations express meaning through elementary geometric symbols, patterns, and proportions. The author observes notable discrepancies between a sampling of measured plans from Sebastiano Serlio’s woodcut engravings in the Renaissance to current laser campaigns. She analyzes the different drawings for underlying geometric patterns. A pattern of rotated squares, in root-two proportion, appears consistently in the horizontal plan of each measured set and complements Mark Wilson Jones’s proposed scheme of a conjoined sphere and cube. This comparative method of analysis offers students and scholars of descriptive geometry a useful tool for interpretation.