Page 162 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Paris

160  P ARIS AREA B Y AREA

q Panthéon

When Louis XV recovered from desperate illness in 1744, he was
so grateful to be alive that he conceived a magnificent church to
honour Sainte Geneviève. The design was entrusted to the
French architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who planned the
church in Neo-Classical style. Work began in 1757 and was
completed in 1790, ten years after Soufflot’s death, under the
control of Guillaume Rondelet. But with the Revolution underway,
the church was soon turned into a pantheon – a location for the
tombs of France’s great and good. Napoleon returned it to the
Church in 1806, but it was secularized and then desecularized
once more before finally being made a civic building in 1885. The Façade
Inspired by Rome’s Pantheon,
the temple portico has
Pediment Relief 22 Corinthian columns.
David d’Angers’
pediment bas-relief
depicts the mother
country (France)
granting laurels to her
great men.

The Panthéon Interior
The interior has four
aisles arranged in the
shape of a Greek
cross, from the
centre of which
the great
dome rises.

KEY
1 The arches of the dome were Entrance
designed by Rondelet and show
a renewed interest in the lightness
of Gothic architecture. They link four
pillars supporting the dome, which
weighs 10,000 tonnes and is 83 m
(272 ft) high.
2 The dome galleries afford a
magnificent panoramic view of . Frescoes of
France’s capital. Sainte Geneviève
3 The dome lantern allows only a Murals along the south
little light to filter into the church’s wall of the nave depict the
centre. Intense light was thought life of Sainte Geneviève.
inappropriate for the place where They are by Pierre Puvis de
France’s heroes rested. Chavannes, the 19th-century
fresco painter.

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