A Papal Pantheon? Canova’s ‘Illustrious Italians’ in Rome

Abstract

For a twenty-first-century tourist visiting Rome, the Pantheon shows few similarities to Stendhal’s description of a temple filled with the ‘busts of great artists’. Although the tomb of Raphael still attracts hordes of tourists, few other artists are presently commemorated in this well-known building associated with the cult of genius. In lieu of a quiet residence in the Pantheon, the busts and herms were in 1820 (sic!) transferred to the Capitoline Museums.2 Few contemporaries paid attention to this transfer. Gaetano Moroni, an eccentric autodidact who started off as a barber at a Roman convent before becoming the private secretary of his erstwhile client Pope Gregory XVI, was one of the few to record that ‘marble busts of the principal artists were added to the small oval niches’ in the Pantheon before these were transferred to the Protomoteca Capitolina*.3 What both Stendhal and Moroni neglectedto mention is that rather than ‘great artists’, it was illustrious Italians whose busts and herms were then removed. For a devoted member of the carbonari (‘charcoal-burners’), a network of secret societies that fostered early nineteenth-century Italian nationalism, Stendhal’s notes reveal surprisingly little about the patriotic overtones of the series. Nor does he, or even Moroni, refer to the historical context that had prompted the construction of the pantheon.