The boast attributed to Michael Angelo--that he would raise the Pantheon upon the top of the Temple of Peace--has more meaning than at first appears. The Temple of Peace (so called), now known to have been the Basilica of Maxentius, consists of a vast nave with aisles. The nave is divided into three square bays of between 80 and 90 feet in width, and these bays are groined. Had the pendentive dome been then known, each bay might have been covered by such a dome as that which spans the central bay of St. Sophia, and in such a case the _dome_ of the Pantheon might, in [Illustration: Fig. 453.--Half Elevation and Half Section looking East, St. Paul’s, London. (_From Fergusson._)] loose language, have been said to be placed upon four piers and four arches of the Temple of Peace. But Michael Angelo aimed at much more than this. It was not the _dome_ only, but the _whole structure_ of the Pantheon, which (in a figure of speech) he thus intended to raise upon a square substructure open on all sides to view from other parts of the interior. Thus he raised upon his pendentives what he compared to the _circular wall_ of the Pantheon, and _on that_ he raised its _dome_. This was not, however, the whole of his task, for over the eye of the dome (as of the Pantheon) he erected again another structure--a domed rotunda--into which the eye reaches from below, and through whose windows the light penetrates into the dome. And, _more than all this_, instead of allowing his dome, as in the Pantheon, to be half buried within the walls of the building, he made it rise boldly from their upper surface, and gave it such a proportion as to render it an august and beautiful object from every reasonably distant point from which it is visible. The task was _indeed_ one of which the greatest genius might fairly boast! Nearly every subsequent dome of any magnitude seems to have been founded, more or less, upon St. Peter’s; and, so far as I can judge, our own St. Paul’s is the noblest of them all.