runs a frieze once decorated with a continuous row of small pilasters, instead of the awkward Renaissance false windows and panels which now occupy the area. Above this the perfect hemisphere of the dome sweeps upward, its curve emphasized by deep coffers, to a central oculus or opening thirty feet in diameter that lights the whole (Dutemple 70).
The magnificent quality of the resultant simple vertical light, which seems to bathe the whole interior so evenly and yet to emphasize so forcefully the shadowed recesses of the shrines and the niches, is something no photograph or drawing can reproduce. The whole shows how brilliantly the Roman architects conceived and realized that quality which we moderns call space. It is this quality of spaciousness, this sense of enormous areas and great heights, well lighted and nevertheless closed in from the weather and the surroundings, which is perhaps the most unique of all Roman architectural qualities. It is this which none of the previous architectures had ever approached or perhaps even dreamed of; and it is this quality which set all design on a new search for interior architectural beauty.
The Pantheon had impact upon design of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Both buildings are the examples of arched construction (structures in which arches and vaults play pre-eminent parts). In arched construction there is much greater freedom of mass design; buildings may have some parts much higher than others, and domes and barrel roofs may cap the whole (Gorman 78). Wider and higher interiors, of great variety of shape, may develop highly complex plans, in which support and buttress and wide span all combine to give impressions of tremendous and varied interior spaces, as in the Pantheon and St.