The Pantheon (Latin Pantheon[1], from Greek Πάνθεον Pantheon, meaning "Temple of all the Gods") is a building in Rome which was originally built as a temple to the seven deities of the seven planets in the state religion of Ancient Rome, but which has been a Christian church since the 7th century. It is the best-preserved of all Roman buildings. It has been in continuous use throughout its history. Although the identity of the Pantheon's primary architect remains uncertain, it is largely assigned to Apollodorus of Damascus.
Ancient
The original Pantheon was built in 27 BCE-25 BCE under the Roman Empire, during the third consulship of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, and his name is inscribed on the portico of the building. The inscription reads M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIUM·FECIT, "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, during his third consulate, built this". It was originally built with the adjoining baths of Agrippa and water gardens.

Agrippa's Pantheon was destroyed along with other buildings in a fire in 80, and the current building dates from about 125, during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian[2], as date-stamps on the bricks reveal. It was totally reconstructed, with the text of the original inscription added to the new facade, a common practice in Hadrian's rebuilding projects all over Rome. Hadrian was a cosmopolitan emperor who traveled widely in the east and was a great admirer of Greek culture. He seems to have intended the Pantheon, a temple to all the gods, to be a kind of ecumenical or syncretist gesture to the subjects of the Roman Empire who did not worship the old gods of Rome, or who (as was increasingly the case) worshipped them under other names. How the building was actually used is not known.

The building is circular with a portico of three ranks of huge granite Corinthian columns (eight in the first rank and two groups of four behind) under a pediment opening into the rotunda, under a coffered, concrete dome, with a central opening (oculus), the Great Eye, open to the sky. A rectangular structure links the portico with the rotunda. Though often still drawn as a free-standing building, there was a library building at its rear into which it abutted; of this building there are only archaeological remains.

In the walls at the back of the portico were niches, probably for statues of Caesar, Augustus and Agrippa, or for the Capitoline Triad, or another set of gods. The large bronze doors to the cella, once plated with gold, still remain, but the gold has long since vanished. The pediment was decorated with a sculpture in bronze showing the Battle of the Titans - holes may still be seen where the clamps which held the sculpture in place were fixed.

As the best-preserved example of monumental Roman architecture, the Pantheon was enormously influential on European and American architects from the Renaissance, starting with Brunelleschi's 42 meter dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, completed in 1436 – the first sizeable dome to be constructed in Europe after Antiquity. The dome of the Pantheon can be detected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: numerous city halls, universities and public libraries echo its portico-and-dome structure. Examples of notable buildings influenced by the Pantheon include British Museum Reading Room, Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda at the University of Virginia, the Rotunda of Mosta, Low Library at Columbia University, New York, The Marble Hall of the Sanssouci palace in Potsdam, Germany, and the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia

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