Pantheon: The History of a Concept on the Move

Abstract

With his lamentation on man’s inability to appreciate the talents of friends, Petrarch placed himself in a long line of thinkers admitting to the biased nature of fame. Contrary to the ancients, who had abundantly fêted the heroes of their own glorious age, medieval Christianity had made the here-and-now secondary to Creation and Apocalypse.2 The anticipation of a Day of Judgement made the glorification of contemporary heroes, the Christian warrior-king excepted, suspect. During the Renaissance, the humanist focus on progress invited a new orientation towards time that aimed at bridging past, present, and future. This narrative necessarily made contemporaries sceptical about today’s impact on and relevance for tomorrow. This explains Petrarch’s admonition to Tommaso that, should he desire fame, he had better die first. In the following pages, I will return to Petrarch’s role in recuperating the ancient trope of the exempla virtutis and integrating it into modern European culture. More generally, I will discuss the genealogy of the concept of pantheon and the impact of the eighteenth century on the emergence of public pantheons in Revolutionary Europe.