Who Is Buried in the Pantheon

The Pantheon holds tombs, and it holds monuments to people who are buried somewhere else, and for two centuries it held busts of people with no connection to it at all. Most accounts run the three together, which is how Michelangelo ends up on lists of who is buried here.

This page separates them. Where a claim is contested we have said so.

The artists are there because of an institution rather than a whim. In 1545 the confraternity of St Joseph of the Holy Land, known as the Virtuosi, obtained the right to grant burial in the Pantheon to its own members. Raphael's interment in 1520 predates that, which makes him the precedent rather than a beneficiary.

The standard telling has a grateful pope granting the tomb as an honour. What the sources record is a transaction: Raphael purchased the burial place and paid to restore an ancient aedicule at his own expense, and left instructions in his will for a marble statue of the Virgin to stand above it.

That statue exists. It is the Madonna del Sasso by Lorenzo Lotti, called Lorenzetto, contracted on 10 February 1521 and made between about 1520 and 1524, finished by assistants including Raffaello da Montelupo. Vasari records the testamentary instruction.

The famous epitaph, which turns on the conceit that Nature feared to be outdone while he lived and to die with him, is attributed to Pietro Bembo by the ministry. The Italian biographical dictionary leaves the question open between Bembo and Tebaldeo, and we would rather say that than pick one.

And he was not the first person buried in the building. It had been a Christian basilica with relics for nine hundred years. He was the first modern artist, which is a much more interesting claim and the one worth making.

Two kings and a queen of Italy are buried in the right-hand and left-hand exedrae, and this is the reason the bell towers came down in 1883: a newly secular state wanted a Roman monument for its royal tombs, not a baroque basilica.

They are still guarded. The Istituto Nazionale per la Guardia d'Onore alle Reali Tombe del Pantheon was founded on 18 January 1878, nine days after Vittorio Emanuele II died, and it still exists: a recognised body under the supervision of the Ministry of Defence, self-funded, with around 2,500 members.

The service is voluntary and unpaid. Members stand two-hour watches in dark civilian dress, with a cape and cap that are optional, and keep a register that visitors may sign. There is no published rota, so we cannot tell you when you will find them there, and anyone who gives you exact hours is guessing.

A frequent confusion worth clearing up: Vittorio Emanuele III and Queen Elena are not here. Their remains returned to Italy in December 2017 and lie at the sanctuary of Vicoforte, near Cuneo. Umberto II and Maria José are at Hautecombe Abbey in France.

Between about 1780 and 1809 the Pantheon filled up with commemorative busts of great Italians who were buried elsewhere: Michelangelo, Dante, Tasso, Palladio, Titian, Correggio, Veronese, and non-Italians including Poussin, Mengs and Winckelmann.

In 1820 Pius VII had them moved out to the Protomoteca on the Capitoline, which opened that year to receive them. This is the origin of the persistent belief that Michelangelo is buried in the Pantheon. He is in Santa Croce in Florence, and always was.

Note what was moved: the busts, not the graves. Corelli's bust went to the Capitoline; Corelli did not. He is still here, which is worth knowing because several accounts have him relocated.

One genuine oddity. Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Pius VII's secretary of state, has a monument here with a bust by Thorvaldsen, and the Pantheon holds his heart. The rest of him is at San Marcello al Corso. He belongs on neither list cleanly, which is why he is usually left off both.

The obvious question about this list is why a painter would want to lie in a converted pagan temple rather than in a church of his own city, and the answer is institutional rather than romantic.

In 1545 the confraternity of St Joseph of the Holy Land, known as the Virtuosi al Pantheon, obtained the right to grant burial here to its own members. That turned a privilege into a membership benefit: joining the confraternity was how a working artist in Rome acquired a claim on the most conspicuous building in the city. Nearly everyone on the list above, from Perin del Vaga to Annibale Carracci, is there through that route.

Raphael predates the arrangement by twenty-five years and is the reason it exists. His burial in 1520, in a tomb he had bought and an ancient shrine he had paid to restore, established that a modern artist could be commemorated among the antiquities rather than merely beside them. Everything afterwards is the institutionalisation of that precedent.

It also explains the pattern of the busts. Between the 1780s and 1809 the building filled with marble heads of great Italians buried elsewhere, because by then the Pantheon had become the place where reputations were displayed rather than where bodies happened to be. When Pius VII cleared them out in 1820 he was undoing an argument about national memory, and sixty years later the Italian state made the same argument again by putting two kings here.

Three separate institutions decided in turn that this room was where Italy kept the people it wanted remembered: a confraternity of painters, a pope, and a monarchy. Only the first of them asked the dead.