the more conservative and decorative use demonstrated by the Greeks (Pinto 133). This structure is proportioned like a circle within a square. It’s a hemispherical dome that sits upon a cylindrical drum. One can also recognize the influence of the Greeks in the artist’s outer and inner use of great columns. The Romans did admire and try to imitate the Greeks. Inside, the Pantheon contains a single vast space, heavily detailed walls and ceiling, and beautiful marble flooring. In spite of this outstanding beauty, the most notable feature is the illumination of the building by the open oculus at the top of the dome. While uncovered in the past and today closed with a plate of glass, this opening in the roof is precisely the trait that supplies the Pantheon with its uniqueness and character.
The Pantheon reveals not only Roman genius for construction, in roofing this 140-foot circle so simply with one great dome, but also Roman skill in treating a tremendous interior in such a way as to emphasize both its vastness and its unity. Approached by a deep porch, once covered with a bronze vaulted ceiling supported on great bronze girders and trusses, the entrance doorway, twenty feet wide and forty high, with its original bronze doors and transom-screen, leads the visitor at once into the great enclosed space. The thick walls required to support the thrust of the dome are lightened by four great niches, one containing the doorway, the others altars to the major deities, and each separated from the central area by a screen of columns. Smaller shrines decorate the walls between, and all the wall surface up to the entablature which runs over the columns is sheathed in rich marbles laid in beautiful decorative geometric shapes. Above the entablature