In 1986 I was curating an exhibition on the political and architectural vicissitudes of Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Panthéon in Paris (the church of Ste-Geneviève, called the Panthéon since the French Revolution), to mark, in Paris and Montreal, both the bicentennial of the French Revolution and the opening of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. While I was in the midst of preparing the exhibition, Le Panthéon: Symbole des Révolutions, Kurt Forster called my attention to an important group of documents at the Getty Center from the workshop of Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, who, after Soufflot’s death in 1780, assisted in the completion of the church’s dome and was architect of the Panthéon during the Revolutionary decade of the 1790s and under the Napoleonic Empire. As a belated thanks for Kurt’s invitation to Santa Monica to study Rondelet’s drawings related to the decades-long debate over the structural problems of the dome and crossing piers of Soufflot’s famous building, and for the gracious loan of several of the most important drawings to the exhibition, I offer this postscript to our study of the Revolutionary Panthéon. A few years before the Canadian Centre for Architecture lured Kurt from Zurich to Montreal, the CCA’s collections seem to have forecast his arrival. In 1995 the CCA acquired a set of previously unknown drawings by Charles De Wailly that presented a radical proposal to solve the Panthéon’s structural and symbolic challenges. These three extraordinary drawings could be understood as one of the forerunners on the Continent of the Panorama, that popular entertainment which Kurt Forster so influentially introduced into discussions of changing attitudes toward both the urban and the public in a critical study of the nineteenth century. As a scholar who has transformed thinking—mine and so many others—about so many subjects in architectural and urban history both with his insight and his commitment to new forms of scholarly and museographic institutions, this essay is dedicated, en amitié, to a grand homme de l’histoire de l’art, Kurt Forster.


Publication of a radical proposal to decapitate the towering dome of the Panthéon (fig. 1) earned revolutionary laurels for one of the ancien régime’s most lionized architects, Charles De Wailly (1730–1798), a year before his death. The radical erasure of the central feature of Soufflot’s famous church design (1755–89) was intended to eliminate the challenging structural and symbolic problems involved in the Revolution’s project to convert Ste-Geneviève into the Panthéon. The most ambitious...