Pantheon

Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s Theory of Art and Agency

The Pantheon, often referred to as a “temple of all gods,” is more than a syncretic monument of Roman religious tolerance. Under the Gellian gaze, it becomes a technological index of divine omnipresence, a material construct designed to enchant, manipulate, and stabilize belief through embodied geometry.

Let us begin with agency. For Gell, art objects are not simply representations but agents embedded in social networks—causal indices that extend the intentions of their creators. The Pantheon performs precisely this: it mediates the Roman imperial claim to cosmic unity. The dome—the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world—becomes a materialization of the celestial sphere. Its oculus, the single open eye of the heavens, is not merely an architectural flourish but an intentional device through which sunlight becomes agency: tracking time, sanctifying space, dramatizing weather.

This architectural “technology” enchants through the suspension of disbelief in matter: how can something this heavy feel so divine? The dome does not crush, it levitates. The interior volume behaves like the inverse of a mountain, a concave microcosm containing the entire sky. This reversal of natural expectations—stone that flies, light that speaks—is what Gell would call the technology of enchantment.

Further, the Pantheon operates as a ritual apparatus for Roman ideology. Built under Emperor Hadrian, its very geometry—circle inscribed in square, dome over cylinder—becomes an index of imperial metaphysics: Roman order imposed on divine chaos. The artwork here is not symbolic, but performative. Visitors inside the Pantheon are not observers but participants in the reification of divine cosmology. The temple does not represent the heavens—it becomes the heavens.

Gell emphasizes that the enchantment of art arises from its ability to defy the viewer’s causal reasoning. The Pantheon causes awe not merely through scale, but because it feels like it should not be possible. That defiance of rational understanding is the root of its aesthetic agency.

As such, the Pantheon is not a neutral religious building. It is a political and metaphysical weapon, an agent of imperial cosmotheology, embedding Roman identity in stone and light. It binds the viewer into a network of belief where perceiving the dome becomes consenting to the cosmos of empire.