As we heard in the preceding TAG Talk by Gordon Higgott, the Pantheon is the most fascinating and most revered building of Roman antiquity. Written accounts, visual representations, and architectural progeny all tell us that it has been deeply admired from late antiquity to the present day, yet significant aspects of its design have been much criticized by architects, including those of the stature of Francesco di Giorgio, Michelangelo, Vasari, Inigo Jones and Carlo Fontana. Many of the Pantheon's basic historical and technical premises continue to be debated, including the origins of its plan, the phasing and date of the fabric, and even its very name and purpose.

This talk, which revisits the themes of date, design and construction in the light of the accumulated research of recent years, will resolve many of the problems - though by no means all…

Mark Wilson Jones, Chair of TAG, is an architect and architectural historian with an unusual interest in antiquity (a period often viewed as the domain of archaeology).  He trained at the University of Cambridge and then Polytechnic of Central London  before winning the Rome Prize in Architecture at the British School at Rome. After a period combining research with practice in London and Rome, he joined the department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at The Univeristy of Bath in 2000, teaching primarily history, theory and some studio.

Mark's research interests revolve around issues of design. His fascination with the Pantheon and its design began at the British School, when officially studying Renaissance material, and the building was the focus of his first publication (with Paul Davies and David Hemsoll).  The final two chapters of Mark's Principles of Roman Architecture (Yale UP 2000, the only book to have been awarded both the Banister Fletcher Prize by the RIBA and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians), were dedicated to the Pantheon, as was later, in 2015, the whole volume The Pantheon in Rome from Antiquity to the Present, co-edited with Tod Marder (Cambridge University 2015, winner of the American PROSE for best book of that year in Classics). Some of Mark’s controversial early ideas on this evergreen icon have been validated by the work of other scholars, while the argumentation has - hopefully - improved with age.

To view the recording on our You Tube channel, please click here.