The Pantheon Dome: How Rome Cast a Concrete Sky That Has Not Fallen in 1,900 Years
The Pantheon dome is still, after nineteen hundred years, the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth. How the Romans cast it -- and why it has not fallen.
The Pantheon dome is still, after nineteen hundred years, the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth. How the Romans cast it -- and why it has not fallen.
Who built the Pantheon? Agrippa's name is on it, Hadrian actually built it, and Apollodorus of Damascus probably designed the dome. Here is how all three fit.
Raphael's most famous work earned him a burial slot in the Pantheon in 1520 -- a reading of the paintings that made him, and the epitaph that closes them.
The full pantheon history -- Agrippa's lost temple, the fire, Hadrian's rebuild, the conversion to Santa Maria ad Martyres, and the pope who stripped the bronze.
A walking guide to every surviving Caravaggio painting in the city of Rome -- seven churches and museums, and the fastest route between them.
Why Michelangelo signed the Pietà: he overheard pilgrims crediting a rival for his masterpiece, and never signed another work for life.
The Raphael self portrait School of Athens tucks the painter beside Ptolemy at age twenty seven, staring straight out and claiming a seat among the ancients.
School of Athens figures identified one by one: Leonardo as Plato, Michelangelo as Heraclitus, Euclid as Bramante, and the painter hiding in the corner.
The Sistine Chapel restoration controversy of 1980 to 1994 turned the ceiling from brown to neon, and one professor spent his life calling it a crime.
The Creation of Adam hidden meaning that a doctor noticed in 1990, and why once you see the brain in God's cloak, you cannot unsee it.