The Pantheon: The Light Vittorio Storaro Came to Rome to Capture

Chapter 01 of Storaro's Rome: the story behind each image of La Civiltà Romana, told from the book by Vittorio Storaro.

Every day, thousands of people leave the noise of Piazza della Rotonda, walk between sixteen granite columns, and do the same thing at the same moment. They stop. They look up.

Above them is a concrete dome more than 43 metres wide, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and at its centre a single opening to the sky: the oculus, about nine metres across. No glass. No lamp. Only daylight, sliding across the coffered ceiling and the marble floor hour by hour, as it has since the Emperor Hadrian rebuilt the temple almost nineteen centuries ago.

Vittorio Storaro, who won his three Oscars for Apocalypse Now (1980), Reds (1982) and The Last Emperor (1988), stood under that circle too. But he was not looking at the architecture.

"I did not come to capture a building. I came to capture that light."

Vittorio Storaro

A city that divided the world in two

In his book La Civiltà Romana, the Pantheon is the final image of the chapter Storaro calls The Beyond, whose theme is The Light. The story he tells there begins long before the dome was raised.

Out of fear of the unknown, he writes, the Romans divided existence in two. Life was light, movement, the spoken word. Death was darkness and silence. The souls of the dead wandered through the night, and the Moon was their home: a world with no light of its own, glowing only with the reflected light of the Sun.

Then a new idea reached Rome from the East, carried by religions that promised the soul would live on. Death was no longer a descent into darkness. It was an ascent toward light. The day a person died was given a new name, the dies natalis: the day of their birth into the heavens.

Storaro found that idea here. A temple to all the gods with an open circle in its roof is a building made to let the sky in, a place where the light of the Sun reaches down into the human world every single day.

Light is not decoration

For most of us, light is simply what lets us see. For Storaro, who has spent more than sixty years writing with light (the literal meaning of the word photography), light is the subject itself. In the same chapter he describes it as energy, matter moving at tremendous speed, the first thing every living being looks for. That is why he calls a formula one of the most beautiful poems ever written: Einstein's E = mc², matter becoming energy, becoming light.

Stand in the Pantheon on a clear day and you can see what he means. The disc of sunlight that falls through the oculus is never in the same place twice. It slides down the curve of the dome in the morning, crosses the floor around noon and climbs the far wall in the afternoon. Every moment in the building is lit differently from the one before it. Every moment is unrepeatable.

Two exposures, one frame

Storaro made his photograph of the Pantheon during the five-year journey through the Roman world that became La Civiltà Romana, long before digital editing existed. Created with a film camera. A double exposure made directly on the same negative, in a single frame. No Photoshop. First the sunlight, then Diana.

He captured the sunlight filtering through the oculus, then exposed the image of the goddess Diana onto the very same frame of the same negative. Diana is the goddess of the hunt, of the forests and of the Moon: the lunar goddess, belonging to the world the old Romans believed had no light of its own. In Storaro's frame her face finally meets the light of the Sun.

The whole chapter is held in one picture. The darkness of the old belief and the light of the new one, joined on a single frame of film.

"Here, the marble of a goddess and the light of the sun become a single moment. A moment that can never be repeated."

Vittorio Storaro

When you visit the Pantheon

• Where: Piazza della Rotonda, in the historic centre of Rome, a short walk from Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain.
• The best light: on a clear day, from late morning to early afternoon, when the beam through the oculus is at its sharpest.
• When it rains: the rain falls straight through the oculus. The floor is gently curved, with small drains that carry the water away.
• At Pentecost: Rome's firefighters release a shower of red rose petals through the oculus, one of the city's most beautiful traditions.
• Look for: the inscription of Agrippa above the portico, and the tomb of the painter Raphael inside.
• Then do what Storaro did: find a place under the dome, wait, and look up. As he puts it, you are looking at the same light he saw.

The artwork

The Pantheon by Vittorio Storaro, from La Civiltà Romana, is available as a photo print on fine art paper, an acrylic print and a canvas print: a piece of the Pantheon's light to take home.

Questions about the Pantheon and this image

Why does the Pantheon have a hole in its roof?
The opening, called the oculus, is about nine metres wide and is the only natural light in the building. It lets the sun, and the sky, into a temple built for all the gods.

Who made the Pantheon artwork in La Civiltà Romana?
Vittorio Storaro, three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer, during his five-year photographic journey through the Roman world.

Was the image edited in Photoshop?
No. It was created with a film camera: a double exposure made directly on the same negative, in a single frame.

Who is the goddess in the photograph?
Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt, of the forests and of the Moon.

Storaro's Rome follows the images of La Civiltà Romana one by one, each with its place in Rome, its story from Storaro's book and his narration. See all the stories or listen to every story told so far.