The demon and the angel of the Pantheon

"The air inside the Pantheon was cool and damp, heavy with history. The sprawling ceiling hovered overhead as though weightless — the 43-metre unsupported span larger even than the cupola of St Peter's. As always Langdon felt a chill as he entered the cavernous room. It was a remarkable fusion of engineering and art. Above them, the famous circular hole in the roof glowed with a narrow shaft of evening sun. The oculus, Langdon thought. The demon's hole.
They had arrived."
From Angels & Demons by Dan Brown.

The great Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) looked at everything with an artist's eye, and he was not easily impressed. But when he first saw the Pantheon in 1496, he said it was of "angelic and not human design." At that point, the building was already more than 1,350 years old.

The Pantheon, in all the beauty Michelangelo admired, still stands today — some 500 years after he first saw it. The angels who helped design it and the demons that Dan Brown created for it are all part of a never-ending story. How successfully (or not) director Ron Howard has been in transferring the drama of the book to the film Angels & Demons will be revealed on the big screen tonight, and here tomorrow.