The ancient Greeks and Romans, he explains, used it to point not as we do now to a dizzying vastness, but rather to a harmony underpinning everything above and below us, an order that was in itself divine and moreover within the reach of our understanding. Descending through a ceiling studded with gilded stars, the shining shaft would confer on him the blessing of the “cosmos”-that term, for Pihas, being crucial. This central temple could affirm the ruler’s authority because it invited down, by way of the oculus, direct, unmediated sunlight into a ritual enclosure in which he might be seated. The eight-columned façade of the former and its lofty rotunda, dome, and topmost opening to the skies were erected after Hadrian became emperor in 117 CE, although such a building was first conceived when the imperial system entrenched itself more than a century before. Pihas’s itinerary begins just outside his institute’s doors in central Rome, with a juxtaposition of the Pantheon and the nearby Church of the Gesù. (Copyediting, it appears, is now beyond this firm’s budget.) Here erudite, there trenchant, Pihas puts on a provocative performance, rising above the abject service that Routledge has delivered him. We tangle with the theology of William of Ockham, the soliloquies of Hamlet, and Pascal’s thoughts about infinity. ![]() Mary’s College of California and the academic director of the Rome Institute of Liberal Arts-provides a sort of philosophized vade mecum with his Nature and Imagination in Ancient and Early Modern Roman Art, he takes his sightseers on some daunting detours. He points to some of its outstanding monuments and paintings, traces the thinking behind their production, contrasts them, and proposes that over time a sequence is revealed. He walks his readers around the city of Rome. Pihas grounds this panoramic thesis in a pivotal location. The gambits all issue from this source we call “imagination.” “Nature”-the great physical out there-at most can merely stonewall our bids to engage. We no longer do so now, though, for modernity is a cultural condition in which we humans monopolize the conversation. But does the world offer statements to which we should listen? If we paid attention to all that surrounds us, could we learn where to place our trust and how to direct our actions? There was a time, argues Gabriel Pihas, when we believed that we could. If not, then we would hardly have science, and a large share of poetry would also be in vain. Years later, I still wonder how best to have replied. “Does the world ever speak?” My grandson-an impossibly inquisitive four-year-old-once stopped me in my tracks with that. ![]() ‘Interior View of the Pantheon’ etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, from the series ‘Views of Rome,’ 1768
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