Roman Architecture

Professor Kleiner introduces the wide variety of Roman buildings covered in the course and links them with the theme of Roman urbanism. The lecture ranges from early Roman stone construction to such masterpieces of Roman concrete architecture as the Colosseum and Pantheon. Traveling from Rome and Pompeii across the vast Roman Empire, Professor Kleiner stops in such locales as North Africa and Jordan to explore the plans of cities and their individual edifices: temples, basilicas, theaters, amphitheaters, bath complexes, and tombs. The lecture culminates with reference to the impact of Roman architecture on post-antique architectural design and building practice.

Transcript



January 13, 2009



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Welcome to Roman Architecture. I'm Professor Kleiner, and what I'd like to do today is to give you a sense of some of the great buildings and some of the themes that we will be studying together this semester. I think it's important to note, from the outset, that Roman architecture is primarily an architecture of cities. The Romans structured a man-made, worldwide empire out of architectural forms, and those architectural forms revolutionized the ancient world and exerted a lasting influence on the architecture and the architects of post-classical times.



This semester we will be concerned primarily with urban communities--with urban communities--and we will, in the first half of this semester, we will focus on the city of Rome, and in the second--and also central Italy, including Pompeii. And I wanted to show you, at the outset, an aerial view of Rome--you see it over here, on the left-hand side of the screen--that situates us in the very core of the ancient city. You see the famous Colosseum, the very icon of Rome, at the upper right. You see the Roman Forum, as it looks today, and you see a part of the Capitoline Hill, transformed by Michelangelo into the famous Campidoglio, as well as the Via dei Fori Imperiali of Mussolini, built by Mussolini, and the Imperial Fora.



So the city of Rome again we'll be concentrating on, at the beginning of this semester, as well as the city of Pompeii. An aerial view of Pompeii, as it looks today. You can see many of the buildings of the city, including the houses and the shops, and also the entertainment district. This is the theater and the music hall of ancient Pompeii. The amphitheater is over here. And you can see, of course, looming up in the background, Mount Vesuvius, the mountain that caused all that trouble in 79 A.D.



So that's the first half of the semester. The second half of the semester we are going to be going out into the provinces, into the Roman provinces, and that is going to take us--and we're going to look at the provinces both in the eastern and the western part of the Empire--and that will take us to Roman Greece. It will take us to Asia Minor; Asia Minor, which of course is modern Turkey. It will take us to North Africa. It will take us to the Middle East, in what's now Jordan and Syria, and it will also take us to Europe, to western Europe, to cities in France and to cities in Spain.



And let me just show you an example of some of the buildings that we'll look at as we travel to the provinces. This is the Library of Celsus, in Ephesus, on the western coast of Turkey. This--the theater, a spectacularly well-preserved theater at Sabratha, you see on the upper right-hand side; and down here a restored view of the masterful Palace of Diocletian. We have the late Roman emperors in a place called Split, which is in Croatia, along the fabulously gorgeous Dalmatian Coast today.



So those are just a sampling of the kinds of buildings that we'll look at in the provinces. We're going to be seeing, we'll be concentrating on the ways in which the Romans planned and built their cities. And it's important to note, from the very outset, that Rome itself grew in a very ad hoc way. And we can tell that. Here's a Google Earth image showing that core of Rome, with the Colosseum, with the famous, modern Victor Emmanuel Monument that looks either like a wedding cake or a typewriter. It's very white, and it's called the wedding cake by a lot of the locals. You see that here. But it's a landmark in Rome. And the Capitoline Hill, with the Campidoglio over here; the Forum, the Roman Forum; the Imperial Fora on this side.



But you can see from the relatively crooked and narrow streets of the city of Rome, as they look from above today, you can see that again the city grew in a fairly ad hoc way, as I mentioned. It wasn't planned all at once, it just grew up over time, beginning in the eighth century B.C. Now this is interesting because what we know about the Romans is when they were left to their own devices, and they could build a city from scratch, they didn't let it grow in an ad hoc way. They structured it in a very methodical way. It was basically based on military strategy, military planning. The Romans, they couldn't have conquered the world without obviously having a masterful military enterprise, and everywhere they went on their various campaigns, their various military campaigns, they would build camps, and those camps were always laid out in a very geometric plan, along a grid, usually square or rectangular.



So when we begin to see the Romans building their ideal Roman city, they turn to that so-called castrum, or military camp design, and they build their cities that way. And I show you here one example. We're using Google Earth here again, another example of, or an example of a city called Timgad, T-i-m-g-a-d, which is in modern Algeria, and the ancient city still survives. And if we look at this Google Earth image of it, you can see there are no later accretions, as we have in Rome, no later civilizations built on top of it.



You can see the ideal Roman plan, which, as I said, is usually either a square or a rectangle. It has in the center the two main streets of the city. The north-south street is called the cardo, c-a-r-d-o. The east-west street is called the decumanus, d-e-c-u-m-a-n-u-s. We'll go back to all of this in the future; so you don't have to worry about it today. The cardo and the decumanus, and you can see that they cross exactly; they intersect exactly at the center of the city. And then the rest of the city is arranged in blocks, very regular blocks, this grid plan that I mentioned before. Then some of the major monuments, whether it's the theater or the forum, are arranged in different parts of the city, and then these blocks constitute essentially the housing and the shops and so on and so forth. This is a city that was planned in around 100 A.D., under the emperor Trajan. And again it gives us an inkling of what the Romans -- when the Romans thought about ideal Roman town planning -- it was this grid plan, not Rome, but this grid plan that they had very much in mind.



Cities like Rome, like Timgad, and most of the others that we'll look at in the course of this semester, were surrounded by defensive walls. As a major military machine in its own right, Rome was only too aware of the dangers of attack from others, and consequently they walled their cities. And we will look at the two major walls in Rome, as well as walls in other parts of the Roman world. I promise not to spend too much time on walls, because they're essentially piles of stone. But they're important in their own right and I will speak to them on occasion, and especially the two in Rome. You see them here.



This is the first wall in Rome, the so-called Servian Walls, which was built in the Republic, in the Roman Republic, to surround the city, the Republican city, and essentially the Seven Hills, the famous Seven Hills of Rome, to surround the Seven Hills of Rome, in the fourth century B.C. You see a section of it here. This wall--any of you who've come to Rome by train, and the Stazione Termini, see a very extensive section of the Servian Walls, as you get out--I don't know if you've noticed it, but you should see--an extensive section of the Servian Walls right outside the train station. This is a different section, a picture I took on the Aventine Hill, showing part of that wall. And that was eventually replaced by later walls.



The city grew over time. It needed a more extensive, broader wall system, and in the late third century A.D., under the emperor Aurelian, the famous Aurelian Walls were built. The Aurelian Walls, as you know -- there's no way you've missed those -- I'm sure if you've been in Rome you've seen the Aurelian Walls--they're there, they're very much there--at least if you've left the city. Maybe if you've just gone into the core of the city and haven't gone beyond that, you might not have seen them. But if you've left the city, you've seen the Aurelian Walls -- a very impressive set of walls that encircled the later city. One thing that's apparent to you as you look at these, even if you have no knowledge whatsoever of Roman architecture, is these are made of very different kinds of materials. So technical issues come to the fore right away as one analyzes this sort of thing. In the early period, essentially blocks of stone, piled one on top of the other, for the wall. Here, a more sophisticated use, later on in the Empire, of a new technology that we're going to talk about a lot this semester. That is concrete, and what concrete did to revolutionize Roman architecture; concrete, in this particular case, faced with brick.



We talked about regular town planning and the location of the cardo and the decumanus. I want to show you just an example of this. This is a city in Italy, in this case the city of Pompeii. You see it here in plan. This is a plan of Pompeii as it looked, just at the moment that Vesuvius erupted. So in August of 79 A.D. this was the way Pompeii was at that particular time. You can see it's not really a rectangle; it's kind of elongated, sort of like an oval, kind of an oval, an irregular oval. But it has the sense; I think it has the sense. It shows you that again even though the Romans were thinking to try to create their cities in a very regular way, it didn't always work out exactly that way, depending on the terrain and so on and so forth. But this is a rough--it's sort of an irregular rectangle, as you can see here.



But if you look very carefully, you sort of say to yourself like, "Where's the cardo, where's the dec? You just told us the cardo and the decumanus intersect in the center; like where are they? Why aren't they intersecting in the center?" Well, surprise, surprise, maybe not such a surprise, if you look over here at the bottom left, you will actually see the original city of Pompeii. In the fourth century B.C., the third century B.C., the second century B.C., Pompeii didn't look like this; Pompeii looked like this. And if you look very carefully at just this section, where we have the buildings in the various colors, you will see that there is indeed a cardo and a decumanus that intersect exactly at the center of this roughly square--so this was actually pretty regular originally--this roughly square city of Pompeii. At three we find the forum, because the forum is always at the intersection. The Romans try--they're very careful about this sort of thing--try to put their forum right at the intersection of the cardo and the decumanus. You see that here; and then you see a lot of other buildings splayed off to either side.



The law court or the basilica, another temple here. Here the main Temple of Jupiter, and the Senate House or Curia, and a series of other religious and comparable structures, on the right-hand side. So it began as a quite regular plan, cardo and decumanus intersecting at the center, forum right at the intersection of those two. And then over time it grew. It grew and expanded, and the streets, the same streets, the cardo expanded, although it was no longer exactly at the center of the city. This is a view from Google Earth that shows you just pretty much--I tried to angle it in such a way that it looks--that it's exactly the same angle, or close to exactly the same angle, as the plan that we just looked at before. And you can see over here the amphitheater. You can see many of the streets, including the shops and the houses, and you can see over here the forum, as it looks today from the air. And again it shows you how helpful Google--and, of course, as you know, using Google Earth yourselves for other purposes, you know that you can go way down; I mean, you can find the entire city and then you can go and explore each individual building on your own and in your own time. In fact, that's what I've done here.



Here you see a closer view of the forum in Pompeii, as it looks today, from the air, via Google Earth, here at the left. And I compare it to this plan that comes from your textbook, one of your two textbooks. This is the book by J.B. Ward-Perkins, which is, of the two, the more--well, they're both important, but then they both do different things--but one of the two important books that we'll be using this semester. Here is a plan from that book. And you can see the way in which this forum, and this forum is very important at Pompeii because it's very early in date, and consequently we will talk about it a fair amount.



We see this. The way Roman forums were usually arranged was to have one general open rectangular space, open to the sky, surrounded by columns, with a temple, the key, the most important temple, the chief temple, pushed up against one of the short back walls, and dominating the space in front of it. This is a Capitolium; we'll talk about what a Capitolium is in a future lecture, but it is a temple to Jupiter and others, as we shall see. Temple of Apollo over here, the basilica or law courts over here. And you can see, interestingly enough, they have essentially the same shape as the central forum proper, rectangular with a colonnade in the center, and then something on one side; it's not another temple but rather a tribunal, a place from which the judge would try the cases in the law courts. We see the Senate House over here, and a series of other buildings, including a marketplace and some other buildings here, on the right-hand side. So a typical Roman forum at its earliest. This dates very early on, second century B.C., and is therefore an extremely important building for us.



Just so that you get a sense of what some of these look like in actuality, this is the basilica or the law court, which is part of the Forum of Pompeii. And we see that tribunal that I mentioned before, a two-story tribunal from which the judge would try the cases. The building isn't as well preserved as we'd like, although there's quite a bit there. What is there allows us to create this kind of reconstruction drawing where we can get a very good sense of what this building actually looked like in antiquity. You see the tribunal over there. You see that there are double stories with columns on either side. You see these colossal columns along the aisle. But most importantly, unlike the forum, which was open to the sky, this is roofed, and it had a flat roof with what's called a coffered ceiling--we'll talk about that later in the term--but then a sloping roof from the outside. And basilicas were always roofed; that's what distinguishes them from a lot of other Roman buildings.



Roman temple architecture. The Temples of Jupiter and Apollo at Pompeii are not that well preserved, but some Roman temples are magnificently preserved. I mean, look at this one, it's pristine; it's like it was created yesterday as a duplicate of what a Roman temple, or a restoration of what a Roman temple might have looked like. You could put this in Memphis or somewhere like that, and think that you had a nice replica of a Roman temple. That's how well preserved it is. It's an amazing temple. It just happens to be well preserved, in part because it was re-used over time, most recently as a small archaeological museum. This is the famous Maison Carrée, or Square House, for obvious reasons, that is in the beautiful French town of Nîmes, in the south of France. You see it here in all its glory. And think as you look at this how many banks were based on this plan. I mean, you can go to almost any small city in America and see a bank that looks something like this, which just gives you some sense of again how influential Roman architecture has been over time.



It's a quite traditional temple. We'll talk about the difference between traditional temple architecture and more innovative temple architecture in the course of this semester. And as innovative as it gets, is one of the key buildings of Roman architecture, which is, of course, the famous Pantheon in Rome. I'm sure there's none of you who's been in Rome who hasn't been inside the Pantheon. It's an incredible building. This is a Google Map. It was done during--the building was put up during the reign of the very important, from the architectural standpoint and many other standpoints, the very important emperor Hadrian. And we see--this is again one of the wonderful things about Google Earth, because you're seeing here the modern city, but you're also seeing in 3D. The building still stands, and it's in incredible condition--but you're also seeing the building almost as it would've been in ancient times, surrounded by its modern environment. It's a temple. It's a very distinctive and innovative temple, because when you look at it from the front, you see it has a kind of traditional porch. It is not unlike the one on the Maison Carrée with columns that support a pediment and looks like earlier Greek or Etruscan architecture.



But what's very innovative about it is that once you go into the building, you see that this is not about--this is all about an interior space, an extraordinary interior space that is shaped by light, that is shaped by genius, essentially. And this image is actually one of those that gives you a sense of the kind of thing that I've been able to incorporate into this course, that I didn't always use before, which includes many, many, many of my own images. And this one I'm particularly proud of. It's a very atmospheric view of the dome of the Pantheon, and I think really gives you, almost more than anything else, gives you a sense almost more than anything else that I can show you today, of Rome at its best, of the power and glory of Rome and of Roman architecture. I'm very biased, but as far as I'm concerned this is the greatest building ever conceived by man. So there you are. We'll see by the end of the semester whether you agree with me or you think I'm absolutely wrong about that.



This is another extraordinary structure and one that enables me to say something that you'll hear me say more than once--and I know I'm biased--but say more than once in the course of this semester, and that is that there isn't much that the Romans didn't discover, didn't create, and not just in architecture, in all kinds of ways. And this is a good example of that. This is the so-called, the famous Markets of Trajan in Rome, part of the great Forum of the emperor Trajan in Rome. And you can see that what the Romans have done is taken a hill, one of the famous Seven Hills, the Quirinal Hill, taken that hill, cut it back, poured concrete on it and created this incredible shopping center on the side of the hill.



If this isn't the beginning of mall architecture, I don't know what is; shopping mall architecture. It's right here already. You can shop; there are over 150 shops. You can shop on a variety of levels. You can shop in the hemicycle, you can shop along the Via Biberatica. You can shop 'til you drop in this incredible mall. And as one looks at it in detail, one sees amazing things. This is a view of one of the shopping streets. You can see the typical polygonal masonry that is so characteristic of Roman street design here. Along it, some of the individual shops--think that away at the top, that was added later. But you see some of the individual shops here. And look how ingenious the Romans have been to provide not only a ramp but also a series of stairs, flat area stairs and so on. And this has all been very, very carefully orchestrated by the designers in a way that is not only utilitarian but also very attractive.



And then there's this. This is the Great Hall of the Markets of Trajan in Rome, a kind of bazaar, which also has a series of shops and also attic windows, as you can see, above. But then the particular marvel of this space is--look what they've done above. They have taken, using concrete once again--and this gives you some sense of the miracle of Roman concrete. Using concrete, they have created a new kind of vault, which we call the groin vault, which is a ribbed vault, and you can see the ribs very clearly here. And they have lifted that ribbed vault on top of piers that have been attenuated, narrowed to the point, in a very sophisticated way, much more than was true up to this moment. So they have been able to lift those groin vaults in a way that always reminds me--it's as if you went and opened a series of umbrellas over a space, lifted the space up in a truly miraculous way. And as an example again of the fact that the Romans--there's nothing the Romans didn't do or didn't invent. Here you see the well-known Marketplace in San Francisco, where you see essentially the same idea; a series of shops down below and then this magnificently lifted ceiling above.



So Roman architecture, as I said in the very beginning, really had a huge impact on later architecture. The Markets of Trajan were part of the forum complex, the Forum of Trajan, which you see part of here. The forum itself was really quite conventional. This is an interesting building because we have a fairly traditional approach to the forum itself, and then an innovative approach to the markets. This is a restored view of the basilica or law court of the Forum of Trajan. You see that it's very traditional, with columns and marble and a flat ceiling with coffers. And that's what most of the forum looks like. The markets are done in a very different style, as we saw. And this particular forum was not only a meeting and a marketplace, or a place where cases could be tried, but was also a monument in stone to the military victories of Trajan.



Trajan was the emperor who extended the borders of the Empire to their furthest reaches, and the monument is a testament to what his accomplishments were militarily. And the famous Column of Trajan, which still stands and is in magnificent condition, as you can see here, is a monument that is wrapped with a spiral frieze that purports to describe, from bottom to top, all of the exploits, all of the military exploits of Trajan's two military campaigns in Dacia. It also served as the emperor's tomb. There was a burial chamber down below for urns of Trajan and his wife Plotina. So it served not only as a commemoration of his military victory over Dacia--which by the way is modern Romania today--but also to victory over death for the emperor.



Every Roman city had its bath buildings. Most of the houses did not have running water, so baths were extremely important, obviously. So most of these had more than one, and in fact most cities, Pompeii, for example, seems to have had about three bath buildings. They're very important, both in terms of their social, their practical needs, and also as a place for social interaction, but also because there are some very interesting architectural experiments that took place in them. I'm going to show you in the course of this semester the development from the simplest bath buildings, such as the ones in Pompeii, to the most elaborate. Those of you who've visited the Baths of Caracalla in Rome -- that's an example of one of the huge and most elaborate bath buildings.



I show you here on the left-hand side of the screen, just as an example, a view of one of the rooms of the Forum Baths in Pompeii, the caldarium or warm room. All of these baths had multiple spaces within them. One of the distinctions of the earlier baths was that the men's sections and the women's sections were separate from one another. And I hate to say it, but the men had all the great rooms. They were bigger and they were more ornately decorated, as this one is -- the warm room of the men's baths at Pompeii. But you can see here, even in much smaller scale than a building like the Pantheon, and much earlier than the Pantheon, they're beginning to explore the curvatures of the wall, the semi-dome there, and the way in which you can create light effects by putting holes or what's called an oculus, a round hole, in part of the ceiling, and other rectangular holes in the ceiling to create fantastic light effects. So they're already exploring that here in Pompeii.



When we look at some of the larger bathing establishments, the Baths of Caracalla still look--well they're essentially a pile of concrete faced with brick today, as any of you who've seen it know. But the scale is truly colossal, and one is very impressed when one wanders around the Baths of Caracalla. But some of the others, for example, the Baths of Diocletian have been reused in modern times, and it's one of the reasons that so many Roman buildings survive is because of this kind of reuse over the centuries. This, the Baths of Diocletian, part of which was transformed into a church, at first, was decorated at one point in part by Michelangelo. And what we're looking at here, the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Saint Mary of the Angels, what we're looking at here is a view into what was the cold room, or the frigidarium of the Baths of Diocletian, but transformed into a church, used as nave of the church of Saint Mary of the Angels. But if you look very closely, you'll see those same cross or groin vaults that we saw in the Markets of Trajan, that are also used here to lift the ceiling in a very effective way, and then all these multi-colored columns that you see are actually the columns from the ancient building. So even in this interior of Santa Maria degli Angeli, we can get a sense of how ornate some of the decorations of some of these bath buildings were.



We're going to look at Roman theaters this semester. This is an example of one, the spectacular Roman theater at Orange in the south of France. You see it here. I'm not going to go into the parts of a theater or its relationship to earlier Greek theatrical architecture. But you can see the stair, you can see the seats, you can see the orchestra. You can see the stage building, a stage building that initially was decorated with a forest of columns, only a couple of which survive, as well as a lot of sculptural decoration, again most of which does not survive. But one of the points I want to make today is that the Greeks tended to build--the Greeks always built their theaters on hillsides. They used the natural hill to support the seats. And that's true at Orange as well. But the Romans were not content to build their theaters only on hillsides. They wanted to build their theaters where they wanted to build their theaters, and if they wanted to build a theater in downtown Rome, they wanted to build a theater in downtown Rome. So what they did was that they used concrete again to build a hill, upon which they could support those same seats. And that's again an innovation that we'll talk about.



This is the Theater of Marcellus in Rome, the earliest surviving stone theater in Rome that dates to the age of Augustus. But I show it to you again, just to show you the wonders of Google Earth. I've looked at this building a zillion times. I've wandered around it. Most of the ancient part is over on this side, and I'll show that to you in another lecture. But over time this is one of those buildings that was transformed into all sorts of things, most recently into a fabulous condominium. But as you wander around it today, you get a sense of some of the high-rise apartments that have been added to the original theater. But you can't get a full sense of it unless you go up above it. And so here's where again Google Earth is so helpful, because we can look down on the entire complex, see the gardens, see some of the apartments, see the circular driveway and so on and so forth, which gives us information that it wouldn't be possible to glean anywhere else. And here is--if you let that transformation from modern Rome to ancient Rome take place on Google Earth, this is what you're going to get for that same Theater of Marcellus. We just saw it and what it looks like today on Google Earth. Here's what it looks like when you let it transform completely into the Theater of Marcellus from ancient times.



The Colosseum, the very icon of Rome. No Roman city was without its amphitheater, its place for gladiatorial and animal combat, and Rome was no exception. The most famous surviving Roman amphitheater is the Colosseum. I show it to you here from the inside, rather than the outside initially, because I can--it allows me to illustrate the places where the animals were kept down below, but also to show you that that building has been used as a quarry. It was used by the popes and the princes of later Italy as a stone quarry. They would take essentially--well they stripped it of all its interior marble, to use that in a variety of buildings in Rome, and some of those we know their identification even today. Here's a view of one of the corridors where you can see once again those groin vaults or ribbed vaults that the Romans popularized.



Connecting all these cities with one another were the streets of the city. We'll look at streets, especially in Pompeii, where they are extremely well preserved, and these streets look very modern--you see the polygonal stones--but very modern in the use of the sidewalks. The sidewalks; there are drains as well along the sidewalks. And then you can see these very deep rut marks where the wheels of the carts used to--over time obviously they made these ruts in the pavement. And then over here a small fountain, a fountain blessed by Hermes or Mercury. You can see him there with his wings and his caduceus. A small fountain, important obviously again because most of the houses did not have running water, and there had to be a place that you could go to collect water for household use.



One of the great things about Pompeii, of course, is it gives us a sense of what life was like in ancient Roman times, daily life was like. And we'll look at millstones that are part of bakeries, as well as ovens that look--again, the Romans invented everything--look very much like a modern pizza oven. You go over to BAR, you'll see one of those. Over here, wine shops; we have lots of wine shops in these Roman cities, and they're particularly well preserved in Herculaneum and in Pompeii, with these clay amphorae that were used to hold wines, that were brought to Italy, and also sometimes oils, that were brought to Italy from different parts of the world.



Every Roman city had its McDonald's, or its Wendy's, or its Burger King, and I show one of those to you here. It's called a thermopolium, as you can see down below; thermopolium. A thermopolium was essentially--what it was made up of is a--it is a series of--a counter, with a series of recesses. And each day those who ran this thermopolium put different food in there, and so when you got hungry--again, the whole sort of fast food idea--you just walk by, like in a cafeteria, point out what you wanted. They'd serve it to you and you'd be on your way. So very much fast food--so we see lots of them in Pompeii and Herculaneum.



We'll look at Roman houses. This is one example, the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, spectacularly preserved house, where we can see a pool that was actually used for collecting water, a hole in the ceiling, but a view from the atrium of the house into the garden. The garden over here, you get a sense of it -- the greenery, the marble furniture, the fountains, and then the paintings on the walls. I mentioned at the beginning we'll spend a fair amount of time -- we'll spend a few lectures on Roman painting. And the reason that I do that is because it's absolutely gorgeous and it's fascinating. But it also allows us to get a better understanding of interior decoration among the Romans, how they decorated their walls.



But also, because as you can see from this one example, from Boscoreale, now in the Metropolitan Museum, the famous Met Cubiculum, which is decorated with Second Style Roman wall painting, that these paintings often depict buildings. They are architectural paintings, and they are very important in that regard because we see -- we often see -- experimentation in painting before we see it in architecture. And so there are going to be some things, for example, this broken triangular pediment, that we're going to see first in painting and then in built architecture. So painting -- extremely important for us.



We'll also go to the city of Ostia, the port of Rome, which is a city very different from Pompeii because it is essentially a second-century Roman city, rather than a first-century Roman city. The construction technique is concrete, faced with brick. I show you one example of that. But what's most interesting about the houses in Ostia has to do with the kind of city it was -- again, the port of Rome, a commercial city. It was very congested. People were not as wealthy as those in the resort town of Pompeii, and consequently they needed--people didn't have single-story houses, like the one in Pompeii that I just showed you before -- but rather apartment houses with multi-stories; a kind of condominium idea. And these are fascinating in their difference from those in Pompeii, and that's a difference that we will surely explore.



The very well-to-do lived in--the very well-to-do had villas. The emperors had villas all along what is now the Amalfi Coast. Capri, the island of Capri. The emperor Augustus and Tiberius had twelve villas on the Island of Capri. The most extraordinary villa, Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, which I show you here from the air. A kind of microcosm of the Empire at that particular time, with extraordinary buildings, with pools, decorated with sculpture that show the eclectic taste of the emperor who liked things Roman, liked things Greek, liked things Egyptian, and statues of--he was married, but he also had a beloved young boy whom he met in Bithynia. Antinous, the famous Antinous that he met in Bithynia and who became the love of his life. And when Antinous died he created all kinds of shrines for Antinous. This is very important architecturally because all these are interesting shrines. But in each of those shrines he created statues of Antinous, and this is one showing Antinous as an Egyptian pharaoh, which was perfect for this particular locale because it was meant to conjure up a canal in Egypt.



We're going to look at tomb architecture--I want to show you this very quickly--but we're going to look at a lot of tomb architecture, because tomb architecture is particularly interesting, because the only practical consideration for a tomb, is that it had to house the remains of the deceased, that's it. So you could be very whimsical and personal about the kind of tomb you wanted to be buried in. This is a series at Pompeii, but we're going to look at those of the emperor Augustus who was buried in a mausoleum that went back to those of the earlier Etruscans, kings, who ruled Rome before the emperors did, and he built a round tomb with an earthen mound, very similar to that of the Etruscans.



Hadrian, the famous emperor Hadrian, was also buried in a round tomb, at the well-known Castel Sant' Angelo, in Rome today, with its beautiful Bernini bridge, the angels, Bernini's angels on the bridge -- also a round tomb. In its current form, transformed into a fortress, it was used by the popes when they needed to hide out during times of trouble. Very whimsical tombs, including this pyramid of a man by the name of Cestius, and he built this tomb during a time of--when a wave of things Egyptian came into Rome, at the time that Augustus defeated Cleopatra and Antony. And then even these communal tombs, communal burial places for the less well-to-do, where their remains were placed in urns. We'll also look at tombs in other parts of the Roman world. This is a famous tomb, a rock-cut tomb in Petra, in what is now Jordan. And you can see that the tomb is essentially the rock; in fact, the burial chamber is inside the rock and the façade has been carved out of the rock.



We're going to talk about aqueducts in the course of the semester; just fleetingly show you two, the ways in which the Romans brought--for those they conquered, they provided amenities, including water, that was brought from a great distance. This is the famous Pont du Gard at Nîmes. And this is the one I showed you before on Google Earth, the fabulous aqueduct at Segovia that marches its way through the city.



I have just a couple of minutes, and I basically wanted to close just making two very quick points about the difference between traditional Roman architecture and innovative Roman architecture. I'm not going to go into that in any detail here. It's going to be the topic of one of our lectures very soon. But this transformation from temples that are based on Greek and Etruscan prototypes, like that one here, to something like the Pantheon. I also want to mention from the start that unlike other courses in architecture where you may have been studying Frank Lloyd Wright or Borromini, Francesco Borromini, or Frank Gehry, we have very few names of architects preserved from Roman times, because it was the patron who was all, not the architect, and I'll explain that in a future lecture. But we have some, and we'll talk about them when we do.



We will also see--and I just want to end up where I began, which is to say again that Roman architecture had a huge impact on architecture of post-classical times. The Roman basilica became the Christian church. The round tomb of Rome became the round church in the early Medieval and Byzantine periods. Tombs like the one in Jordan, that I showed you just before, which form what I call kind of a baroque phase of Roman architecture, were the models for seventeenth-century Baroque architecture in Rome, for example, Borromini's San Carlino. The Pantheon had--you all know what this is, UVA. The Pantheon had a huge impact. There are many 'Pantheons' everywhere, including in this country banks and the like. Thomas Jefferson looked to the Pantheon to design his rotunda at the University of Virginia, and the lawn that lay beyond.



But for us, in this classroom, at this particular time, the most important impact, as far as I'm concerned, of Roman architecture on more modern architecture has to do with the amphitheater at Pompeii, which you see here; my favorite amphitheater. The Colosseum is more famous. The amphitheater at Pompeii is earlier in date. And what's significant for us, in this classroom, at this particular time, is that the amphitheater at Pompeii--and I kid you not--is the model for our own amphitheater, and that is the Yale Bowl -- it is the model. This is the building--and you see it here from the air, the amphitheater in Pompeii--on which the Yale Bowl was based. So again, the Romans have clearly had a huge impact on architecture worldwide; on our own architecture.



And we think we live on a Gothic campus, but I'll show you, in the course of this semester, how many Roman buildings there are. In fact, we had a post--and just to get you inspired--we had a post in an earlier year in which people went around the campus to take pictures and then post them online of buildings that they thought were influenced by those of the Roman past. At any rate, that's it for today. Great to see you, meet you all. If any of you have any questions at all, I'm happy to answer them, as are the teaching fellows.



[end of transcript]

Professor Kleiner traces the evolution of Roman architecture from its beginnings in the eight-century B.C. Iron Age through the late Republican period. The lecture features traditional Roman temple architecture as a synthesis of Etruscan and Greek temple types, early defensive wall building in Rome and environs, and a range of technologies and building practices that made this architecture possible. City planning in such early Roman colonies as Cosa and Ostia is also discussed, as are examples of the first uses of the arch and of concrete construction, two elements that came to dominate Roman architectural practice. The lecture ends with an analysis of typical late Republican temples at Rome, Cori, and Tivoli.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 3-11 (historical background), 37-43 (glossary of building materials), 51-52 (glossary of architectural orders and dimensions), 59 (fortifications), 119 (Palatine during the time of Romulus), 125-126 (hut of Romulus), 237-238 (Temple of Jupiter OMC), 253-254 (Temple of Portunus), 355 (Republican walls)

Transcript



January 15, 2009



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Last time I introduced you to some of Rome's greatest buildings, and I remind you of two of them here: the Pantheon, on the left-hand side of the screen, the temple to all the gods, and then, of course, the Colosseum, on the right-hand side of the screen. These are two of the greatest masterworks of Roman architecture, and we will gain momentum and work our way up to those in the course of the semester, but it's not where we're going to begin. We're not going to begin with these masterworks; we're going to begin at the beginning. And the beginning goes way, way back, in fact all the way to the Iron Age, indeed to the eighth century B.C.



And we know on precisely what day, not only the history of Rome but the history of Roman architecture began, and that was specifically on the 21st of April in 753 B.C., because it was on the 21st of April in 753 B.C. that, according to legend, Romulus founded the city of Rome. Romulus founded the city of Rome on one of Rome's seven hills, the Palatine Hill. And I show you here a view of the Palatine Hill. This is taken from Google Earth. I urged you last time to make sure that you have Google Earth downloaded on your computer and to take advantage of using Google Earth in the course of this semester in order to really get to know the city of Rome and the location of the various buildings that we'll be talking about within the city fabric. So I show you one of these views of the Palatine Hill in Rome, from Google Earth, and you can see the relationship of that hill to the part of Rome in which it finds itself.



You're going to be able to pick all of these buildings out by yourselves in the very near future, but let me just do that for you here this morning. You can see, of course, the Colosseum, in the upper right corner. You can see the Roman Forum lying in front of it. You can see the great--that modern street that you see right behind the Forum is the Via dei Fori Imperiali, commissioned by Mussolini, Il Duce. We can also see in this view the Capitoline Hill with the oval piazza designed by Michelangelo, and down here the famous Circus Maximus, as you can see, the great stadium, the greatest stadium of Rome. It wasn't the only stadium of Rome but it was the largest, and you can see its hairpin shape right down here. The hill in question right now is the Palatine Hill, and this is the Palatine Hill, all of this area here. And as you look down on it, as you gaze down on it, you will see the remains of a colossal structure, which is actually a late first-century A.D. palace that was designed under the direction of the emperor of Rome at that particular time, a very colorful character that we'll talk about in some detail later in the term, by the name of Domitian. This is Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill. But that discussion of that palace lies in the future.



What I want to say today is miraculously the remains of Romulus' village on the Palatine Hill, founded in the eighth century B.C., actually lie beneath the remains of the Palace of Domitian in Rome, and it's to Romulus' huts on the Palatine Hill that I want to turn to today. Believe it or not, remains of those huts from the Iron Age are still there. Now they don't look like much. I'm showing you what remains of Romulus' huts right there, and you're probably having a hard time figuring out exactly what we're looking at. But what we're looking at--the architects that were working for the designers, that were working for Romulus, were very clever indeed, and they realized that the best way to create a foundation or a pavement for their huts was to use the natural rock of the Palatine Hill. And that's exactly what they did.



What you're looking at here is the tufa, t-u-f-a, the natural tufa rock of the Palatine Hill. And what they did was they created a rectangular plan. They gave it rounded corners and they cut the stone back about twenty inches down, to create that rectangular shape; they rounded the corners, and then they put holes in the tufa rock. The holes were to support wooden poles that served to support the superstructure of the hut and also to support the walls of the hut. So the pavement of the tufa rock of the Palatine is the floor of the hut, and then these holes support the wooden poles that supported, in turn, the superstructure. I now show you a restored view, on the left. And you should all have your Monument Lists and should be able to follow along with the major monuments. You won't see every image that I'm going to be showing here, but you'll see a selection there of the ones that you'll need to learn and be able to talk about for the midterm, the two midterm exams in this course.



But you'll see there this restored view of one of these Palatine huts, as well as a view of the model that one can actually see in the archaeological museum that's on the Palatine Hill today. You can see, as you look at this restored view on the left, you can see that rectangular plan that we talked about here; you can see the rounded corners, and you can see the wooden poles that were placed into those holes to support the walls and the superstructure of the building. You can see over here the same, the wooden poles. This gives you a better sense of what they looked like in actuality, the wooden poles and also the superstructure. We also know what the walls were made out of. They were made out of something--and I put some of the keywords that might be unfamiliar to you on the Monument List as well--they were made out of wattle and daub. Well what is wattle and daub? Wattle and daub is twigs and rods that are covered and plastered with clay; twigs and rods covered and plastered with clay. That served as the walls of the structure, and then the sloping roof, as you see it here, was thatched.



Now it's very hard--there are no huts that look like this in Rome still today that I can show you to give you a better sense of what these would've looked like in antiquity. But I'm sure you, like I, have seen huts like this on your travels around the world. And one example I can show you--and would that we were all down there right now. This is a view of a small village in the Maya Riviera, near Cancun, where one sees, if you take the bus or a car from Maya to Chichen Itza, which I hope some of you have had a chance to do. If you haven't, it's a great trip. And you can see all along the road huts that look very much like the huts of Romulus' village, made out of wood and then with thatched roofs, as you can see here. So this is the best I can do in terms of conjuring up for you Romulus' village.



We also have information with regard to what these huts looked like in ancient Roman times or--not in ancient Roman, in the Iron Age, as I mentioned before. We have not only the pavement stone that's still preserved, but we also have these urns. We call them hut urns, hut urns, because they're urns in the shape of huts. And these hut urns were used for cremation, in the eighth century B.C.--these date also to the Iron Age--and the cremated remains of the individual were placed inside the door of the hut. And if you look at this hut urn, you'll see that it looks very similar to the huts of Romulus that we've already been talking about. It is either sort of square or rectangular in shape. It has rounded corners, as you can see here, and the roof of the hut urn is sloping. So we do believe we use this, along with the surviving pavement, to restore what these huts of Romulus looked like in the eighth century B.C.



Let me also note--it's interesting just to see the status of men and women in any given civilization at any given time. There are essentially two kinds of hut urns from the eighth century B.C. Excuse me, there are two kinds of urns in the eighth century B.C. One of them is hut urns and the other is helmet urns, and you can guess, as well as anyone, as to who was buried in which. The men were buried in the helmet urns and the women's remains were placed in the hut urns. So men's domain was considered the battlefield; women's domain was considered the house. But the houses are actually more important in terms of giving us a sense again of what Romulus' village looked like in the eighth century. And if you take one of those huts and you combine it with another set of huts, you can get a sense of what the village of Romulus would have looked like in the eighth century B.C. This is a model that is on view in the archaeological museum, on the Palatine Hill today, and it gives you a very good sense of the village of Romulus in the eighth century. And of course it was from this village that the great city of Rome grew, and of course there's a quite significant difference between Rome as it is now and Rome as it was in the eighth century B.C.



I'm going to skip a couple of centuries and take us from the eighth century B.C. to the sixth century B.C., and talk about what was the greatest architectural project in the sixth century B.C. Just a few words about what was going on in the sixth century B.C. Those who were ascendant in the sixth century B.C. were essentially the Etruscans. The Etruscans lived in what is known as Etruria. They were a quite advanced civilization prior to the Roman period, lived in Etruria, which is essentially Tuscany today. Etruscan, Tuscany -- Tuscany today. So the area around Florence and so on and so forth is where many of these individuals lived. They became a quite powerful civilization and they were able to use that power to gain ascendancy also in Rome itself. And there's a period in which there was a succession of Etruscan kings who were leading Rome, and these Etruscan kings eventually kicked out by the Romans. But at this time, in the sixth century, they were extremely important.



And it was under Etruscan supervision and patronage that a major temple began to be put up in Rome in the sixth century B.C.; precisely in 509. It was dedicated in the year 509 B.C., as you can see from the Monument List. The temple in question was the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus. Now that is a mouthful, and I don't want you to have to necessarily remember all of that: Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus. So we will call this temple, for all intents and purposes, the Temple of Jupiter OMC, Jupiter OMC -- Optimus Maximus Capitolinus. The Temple of Jupiter OMC was dedicated, again, in the year 509 B.C., and it was dedicated to Jupiter, but also to his female companions, Juno and Minerva. And when we think of those three, or when those three are joined together, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, they are known as the Capitoline Triad, because their main temple was on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.



And we will see the Capitoline Triad, not only honored in this temple, but in other temples. I showed you one on Tuesday in Pompeii, for example, the so-called Capitolium in Pompeii that honored Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. You'll see that when a temple honors the three of them, it has implications for the architecture of that building, for the design of that building. We'll talk about that right now, in a few minutes. But I want you to be aware of what the Capitoline Triad is. So it's all three of them, honored together; although Jupiter is always considered supreme whenever those three get together.



So we have a temple here that we have to think of in large part as an Etruscan temple, put up during the time of the Etruscan kings, dedicated in 509, but one that is beginning to have the impact of Rome and will itself have a very strong impact on Roman temple architecture. And we're going to focus quite heavily today on Roman temple architecture, and then of course return to it sporadically in the course of the semester, as we move through and look at other temples, like the Pantheon and like others that were put up in the Roman provinces. The Temple of Jupiter OMC was built on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, so one of the other major seven hills. So while the hill of the Palatine was basically the residential section of Rome at this juncture, the Capitoline Hill became its religious center where its main temple was placed. The Temple of Jupiter was located on the hill, at about the position of one of the palaces that's there now.



We mentioned last time--and any of you who've been to Rome know this well--that the Capitoline Hill was redesigned in the Renaissance by none other than Michelangelo himself. It was Michelangelo who was responsible for creating the oval piazza that is at the center of the Capitoline Hill, which was then renamed the Campidoglio of Rome, and there are these three palaces, designed also by Michelangelo, the Capitoline, the Conservatori, and the Senatorial Palaces, that serve today as two museums, or a joined museum, one on either side, and a governmental building in the back. And you can see that very well here. So this is the Capitoline Hill as it looks today, as redesigned by Michelangelo. But in Roman times it was the location, or from the sixth century B.C. on, it was the location of the Temple of Jupiter OMC, the chief temple of ancient Rome, the most important temple of ancient Rome.



What did that temple look like? And again, this is extremely important, not only for it, but for the rest of Roman temple architecture over time. Believe it or not, we have quite a bit of evidence. It's complicated by the fact that this temple burned down quite a number of times throughout its history. We know it was still standing, by the way, in the fourth century A.D., when it was described by a very famous writer. So it had a very long history. But it burned down several times and it was rebuilt several times, and each time it was rebuilt it obviously was rebuilt in a new style, whatever was au courant at that time. So it changed considerably. And nonetheless we do have quite a bit of information about it.



As far as we can tell, when it was put up in 509 B.C. it looked something like this. What you're seeing here is a restored view and a plan of the temple in 509 B.C. And it's never too soon in a course on architecture to learn how to read a plan and how to read a restored view or a so-called axonometric view. And I have put on--you probably haven't had a chance to look yet--but I've put up on the website for this course, both under Announcements and also in the Online Forum section, a couple of sheets that I think will be very helpful to you, that have terms and concepts. It has different kinds of vaulting and different kinds of masonry, and also tells you the difference between an axonometric view and a plan, and so on and so forth. I really urge you to print those out, look through them. In the beginning of this semester we do have to spend a lot of time on what things are called, but once we do that for a couple of weeks, we'll be done with it and you'll know all the basic terms and we'll be able to go on from there. But I think you'll find those handouts extremely helpful.



So as we look at what we have here, I think you can see by looking at the plan that what we are dealing with here is a rectangular structure. The rectangular structure has a deep porch, and these circles are columns -- so with freestanding columns in that porch. It has a single staircase at the front. Having a single staircase, rather than one that encircles the building, gives the building a focus; there's a focus on the façade for this structure. You can also see that the back wall is plain; the back wall is plain. And the cella, c-e-l-l-a, which is the central space of the inside of a temple, is divided into three parts. So a tripartite cella. And why was there a tripartite cella? You know the answer, because there were three gods; there was Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, the Capitoline Triad. Each one had his own little cella, with Jupiter obviously in the center, flanked by his two ladies, one on either side. So whenever you see a building with a triple cella, you're going to know that's a temple of the Capitoline Triad.



We can see from the outside of the structure, the restored view, that it had a quite tall podium. The podium was in fact thirteen feet tall -- pretty significant, thirteen-foot tall podium right here. And here you also see again the single staircase in the front, the façade orientation, the deep porch, the freestanding columns in that porch, and the triple entranceway into the three cellas of the structure. So that's the basic plan. Let me also mention the materials for the Temple of Jupiter OMC, in the sixth century B.C., because technology is important in any course on architecture. We know--and think back to what we already know about the huts--the building material used here was wood for the columns and the superstructure, just as we saw in the Palatine huts, wood for the columns and the superstructure. Mud-brick, not wattle and daub, but mud-brick for the podium and for the walls, and then the structure had quite a bit of decoration -- you don't see it here, but quite a bit of decoration, sculptural decoration, in ancient times, and this was made out of terracotta. So wood, mud-brick and terracotta were the materials used for this particular building.



Oh I meant to show you--sorry, let me just go back for a second. The reason that the other plan is on the screen, the one at the left, this is a plan of an Etruscan tomb, the Tomb of the Shields and Seats from Cerveteri, second half of the sixth century B.C., which is on your Monument List. I only bring it to your attention because it's interesting that the Etruscans also divided the main space of that tomb into three spaces, three separate spaces, up at the top, tripartite, and also gave it a single staircase, which gave it a façade orientation. I just mention that because we'll see that those, especially that focus on the façade, is an Etruscan element that is picked up by the Romans. Roman architecture is very much an architecture of facades, of the front of buildings, with a focus on the front of buildings, and I wanted to make sure that you knew that not only in temple architecture, but also in tomb architecture, under the Etruscans, that was an approach that they already took and that was adopted from them by the Romans. Another view also of the plan, just so that you can see it again straight up, with the focus on the façade, the single staircase, the deep porch, the freestanding columns in that porch, and then the tripartite division and the flat back wall.



Now I think it's important at this juncture to make a distinction between the most important Etruscan temple, namely the Temple of Jupiter OMC--and you see a model of that here--and the most important Greek, ancient Greek temple, the Parthenon in Athens. The Parthenon in Athens dates, as you probably know, to the fifth century B.C., this to the sixth century B.C. So they are not exactly contemporary but roughly contemporary to one another. And as you look at this, I think you can see for yourselves, although I will point out, the major distinctions between the two. And this is going to be very, very important for today, for today's lecture, but also in the future, because what we're going to see is that the Romans -- when the Romans began to build their own religious architecture, they looked back to what had been done by the Greeks and what had been done by the Etruscans. They picked and chose what they liked in each, and they brought that together in an entirely new creation. They mixed it up with their own culture, their own religion, brought it together, an entirely new creation, and created something distinctive that we know of as the Roman temple.



So what are the differences between the two? We've already talked about the main features of the Etruscan temple, but what are the main features of the Greek temple, of the Parthenon? I think you can see that while superficially they look alike, they have columns that support a triangular pediment and so on and so forth, the major differences are--and you can't see all of those here--but the major differences are that instead of sitting on a high podium, Greek temples sit on a much lower podium. They have a staircase that encircles the entire building; no façade orientation there, no single staircase on the front. The stairs encircle the entire building, as you can kind of see here, and there is a single cella--they never used a triple cella, as we see in the Capitoline temple. And the major difference between the two perhaps is the fact that this building is built out of stone, out of marble. The Greek building is built out of marble. The Greeks are using marble magnificently in the fifth century B.C., and even before that. So no ordinary old wood columns and mud-brick for them, they were using marble. So when we begin to see the Romans--and we'll see that today--using stone for their temple architecture, they are doing that under the very strong influence of Greece, and that's extremely important in any assessment of early Roman religious architecture.



Another view, and it's one that you have also on your Monument List, showing the Capitoline Hill in Roman times, showing you the situation of the Temple of Jupiter OMC in relationship to the other buildings that were up on top of the Capitoline Hill; mostly religious structures, but I just wanted you to see it did not stand alone. Not all of these were built in the sixth century B.C. already, but over time, an accretion of other buildings. Here you actually see the temple in a somewhat later version, because, as I mentioned, it burned down and it was rebuilt many, many times. But you also can see here--this is just useful in terms of Roman religious practice--the altar is located not inside the temple but outside; the religious service actually took place outside. The priest would officiate outside the temple, and in fact very few were allowed to go inside to see the sacred cult statues -- that was pretty much left for the priest and the priesthood.



Just again to underscore the importance of Google Earth, for anyone who was not here on Tuesday, I mentioned at that time that you cannot only go and fly over Rome as it looks today via Google Earth, but they have just recently, in the last few months, introduced an ancient Rome version. So you can go, and you click the right button, you click your mouse in such a way, you can find that the whole city will be completely recreated into the ancient city. And I just wanted you--it's much more abstract, but nonetheless it gives you a sense of what many of these buildings looked like in ancient Roman times. And this is a screenshot of the Capitoline Hill, as it appears in the Google ancient Rome version of Rome. You can't do this for the other cities at this juncture, just for the city of Rome. But it's great fun to do, and also very informative.



Now what is actually left of the temple? We've looked at the Campidoglio; we see Michelangelo's buildings are up there now. What is actually left of the Temple of Jupiter OMC? Well you're looking at it right here. It's the podium of the temple -- still survives -- that thirteen foot tall podium of the Temple of Jupiter. We think this is a quite early podium, maybe not as early as the sixth century B.C., but a very early podium from the temple upon which the structure was built. You can get a sense of the height of these things. And again a characteristic of Etruscan temple architecture, and as we shall see of most Roman temple architecture, is to have a very high podium. We can see that podium here and we can see how it is made technically. You can see it is made up of a series of rectangular blocks that are placed one next to one another and on top of one another. This is technically called ashlar masonry, a-s-h-l-a-r, ashlar masonry, to build a wall with these kinds of rectangular blocks piled one on top of another. It's tufa stone in this particular case once again, which was natural, a tufa stone natural to Rome, t-u-f-a. And this ashlar masonry; again, a building technique that was particularly popular in the fifth and fourth and third centuries B.C. in Rome.



Now what went up after the Temple of Jupiter OMC in Rome? Quite a bit. This was a very inspiring project, a very major project, and obviously it spawned a lot of other building projects in the city. Very few of those survive--I can't show you much else from this particular period--and this is for a variety of reasons. It has to do in part with those fires that I mentioned. A lot of things burned and no longer survive. It has to do with something I mentioned also on Tuesday, and that is that some of these buildings became quarries in later times, with later patrons and architects using them as a source of stone that could be used in later structures. So many of them were dismantled to be used for other buildings. And also any city that is inhabited, as Rome has been, for two-and-a-half millennia, is obviously going to lose a certain amount of its structures over time. They're going to be torn down, they're going to be rebuilt, they're going to be incorporated into other buildings. Some of those that have survived best are those that were actually incorporated into other buildings. And indeed, that's what happened here. The wall was incorporated into something else and built on top of, and that's why it still survives.



So we don't have all that much again besides this. But even if we had, whatever was standing in the fifth and fourth centuries, or early fourth century B.C., would have been destroyed in the year 386. Because in the year 386 B.C., a group of tribes, the Gallic tribes, the Gauls, came down, from the north. They destroyed everything in their path. They did a lot of damage to the Etruscan settlements around Florence and so on. They destroyed those. They came into Rome and they set the city of Rome ablaze. And when the smoke cleared, and it did eventually clear, the only building that was still standing was the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus. That's how much destruction there was. And so there's very little else that we can look at from this particular period. What the sack of the Gauls did was also convince the Romans that they had not protected their city well enough. Right? They were completely exposed, and the entire city was burned, except for that one temple. So they realized that they better get smart and they better start to wall their cities, to begin to put protective walls around the perimeter of those cities. And we see a great efflorescence of wall building therefore after the sack of 386 B.C.



And I want to turn to that wall construction right now. I want to begin with the most important wall that was put up in the fourth century B.C., right after the Gallic sack, and this was the wall around Rome itself. Rome was encircled with a stone circuit; a stone circuit that went around the entire seven hills, the famous Seven Hills of Rome, enclosing it in this stone circuit. And fortunately some parts of that wall are still preserved today. And I show you the most extensive section here. This is called the Servian Walls--you can see this on your Monument List--Servian Walls in Rome -- dates to 378 B.C., right after the sack, not long after the sack, 378 B.C. And some extensive sections of that wall are preserved. The most extensive is the section near Rome's main train station, the Stazione Termini. You can see the Stazione--a modern building--you can see the Stazione Termini in the upper right corner. And here is a view of this extensive section of the Servian Walls in Rome.



The Romans didn't want to take any chances. They decided, even though their tufa was pretty good, they decided they wanted to use the finest tufa possible, and so they brought it in from the Etruscan city of Veii, V-e-i-i. Veii was a famous and important Etruscan city, that the Romans had just made their own. So it was a perfect source for them of outstanding building materials, and they brought in an imported yellowish tufa, from the Etruscan town of Veii, to use for this very significant, very important wall that was going to protect them from this time forth. And you see that wall again here. It is very weathered; even though it still stands, it's very weathered. So the stones don't look as expertly carved as they would've been in ancient Roman times.



And what you can--it's hard to see here, and I'll show you better in a different wall shortly, but what it's hard to see is the system of what are called headers and stretchers; headers and stretchers that they used for this wall. What a header is, you take the same size rectangular block, but when you put the short side out, facing out, that's a header, and when you put the long side of the rectangle facing out, that's a stretcher. So it was an alternating headers and stretchers. Again, I'll show you that better in another wall momentarily, but use of headers and stretchers here. And we can also see that the blocks are quite regular. We are dealing with what we call ashlar masonry, once again, the same kind of construction, this placement of these fairly regular blocks, one next to one another and one on top of one another, ashlar masonry. In Latin the term is opus, o-p-u-s, quadratum, q-u-a-d-r-a-t-u-m: opus quadratum. So you can call this either ashlar masonry or opus quadratum: squared work. The same sort of thing as we saw in the podium of Jupiter OMC, being used for the Servian Walls in Rome, in 378.



I showed you last time this section of the Servian Walls. Here you can get a much better sense of the coloration of that yellowish tufa from Veii. This is also very weathered, so it's hard to see the headers and stretchers, but it's another section of wall--just in case any of you are going to Rome anytime soon--that one can see on the Aventine Hill, which is a beautiful residential hill in Rome, one of the most lovely places to wander in the entire city. You will come across another section--you never know when little pieces of antiquity will crop up. They come up in the most unusual places as one wanders the city, which is one of the reasons it's such a fascinating place to visit.



Now the Romans realized--what was going on at the same time is the Romans were beginning to extensively colonize--well they had these imperialistic ambitions. They wanted to colonize the world, but they began with the places closest to them, and they began to build extensive colonies in Italy, especially in an area very close to the city of Rome itself. And they recognized, as they began to build, what I mentioned to you last time I like to call mini-Romes, because these are little cities in the version of the capital city itself. As they began to build these mini-Romes, they recognized that these mini-Romes also needed security, also needed to be protected by walls that were comparable to the Servian Walls. So we see this great efflorescence, not only of colonization, but also of wall building in the period following the sack and the period following the construction of Rome's own Servian Walls. And I want to show you a few examples of that.



This is a map that was custom-made for this course. You can find it on the web portal, and I think you'll find it very useful, because what I've done here obviously is focus on--I don't clutter it up with a lot of places we're not looking at--I focus on the towns that we are actually going to be looking at buildings in. So I think you'll find it extremely helpful. Rome is here at the star. You can actually click on the map and that will take you to a map of Rome itself. But we see the star where Rome is, and the towns that I'm going to take you to, that have walls, are the city of Cosa, the town, the village really at that time, of Cosa; the town of Norba, that you see over here; and the town of Falerii Novi. But I wanted to show you the map, because you see how close, how proximate they are to the city of Rome itself. I'm going to show you these fairly rapidly, just to give you a sense again of the kind of wall construction that was going on in the colonies, in the Italian colonies, at this time.



This is--we'll look first at the city walls of the town of Norba. And you can see from the Monument List that dates to the second half of the fourth century B.C. And as you look at these walls, these are not done out of tufa but a local stone to Norba, more grayish in color, as you can see here. But you can tell me yourselves right off, that's not opus quadratum, that's not ashlar masonry. The blocks are not rectangular and they're not that even; in fact, they're multi-sided blocks, some of them are polygonal blocks. And we technically call this polygonal masonry. And they've taken these multi-sided blocks, piled them up, in a very interesting way, to create a very handsome wall--I like this wall a lot myself--a very handsome wall to encircle the town of Norba. So polygonal masonry in this particular instance. And we see the same use of polygonal masonry at the town of Cosa, which is north of Norba, as you'll remember from the custom map, the town of Cosa. The walls date to 273 B.C. at Cosa, and you see glimpses of them here. And I think you can see once again a grayish stone used for these walls, and you can see that the construction is once again polygonal masonry.



The pièce de résistance, the greatest masterwork of Roman wall design in this early period is the wall that you see here. This is the wall at Falerii Novi. Falerii Novi was founded as a colony in 241 B.C., and the walls were put up sometime between 241 and 200 B.C. And we see them here, and you can see that the wall also had a quite spectacular, at least for its date, quite spectacular gate. Now if we look at the walls first--actually, first of all I want to point out that they have chosen to use two different kinds of materials here, as is immediately apparent as you look at this color view. They chose to use a grey peperino stone, p-e-p-e-r-i-n-o, a grey peperino stone, from the Alban Hills, for the arch of the gateway, and to use a reddish-brown tufa for the walls themselves. A reddish-brown tufa, peperino, grey peperino stone, from the Alban Hills. So they were very careful about their selection of materials, in part to emphasize this distinction in texture and in color. If you look at the wall you can see we're dealing here clearly with ashlar masonry, with opus quadratrum, and here you can see much more clearly, than any of the other walls I've shown you because they're so well preserved, the headers and the stretchers, the alternating square and rectangular blocks, the scheme of headers and stretchers that is used for this wall.



The most important part, of course, is the arch, the stone arch. It's a masonry arch, as you can see. It's not the earliest arch in Roman architecture, but it's one of the earliest. It has been amazingly done, I think quite masterfully done. If you look at it, you will see that what the designer has achieved is to take a series of wedge-shaped blocks. These are called voussoir blocks--I put that word on the Monument List for you--voussoir blocks, these wedge-shaped blocks, and has carved them in such a way that each one fits very effectively and very well into the overall scheme. They're wedged in next to one another. In fact, as you gaze at it, you kind of think: "Gee, I wonder if any of those blocks are going to fall out from where they are?" But they don't because they're wedged in so closely, next to one another. And then they have finished the line of the arch very nicely so that it has a very attractive appearance, and because it is done in a different stone it stands out extremely well from the rest of the wall. This is really again a masterful treatment, in my opinion, of a wall at this particular time, with the wonderful addition of the arch.



And I think we begin to see--we talked last time about how important making of arches and vaults and especially the use of concrete--although here we see a stone arch, clearly a stone arch. But we're going to see that the capacity of the arch to be used for expressive purposes in architecture is capitalized on by the Romans. And I wanted you to be aware--this is not only important as a wall of this period but important in the way that it's prescient of what's to come with regard to the way in which the Romans are going to start to deploy the arch in extraordinarily creative and innovative ways in Roman architecture. It all begins here. The wall and gate of Falerii Novi stand at the beginning of this incredible development in Roman architecture.



I want to say something very, very quickly about town planning during this period, because just as I mentioned, Romans were colonizing towns in Italy and they were putting walls around them, but they were also beginning to think about how they thought about city construction in general, or the making of urban spaces and places during this particular period. So I just want to show you fleetingly two examples. The town of Cosa, of which we've already looked at the walls, dating to the third century B.C. And it's worth noting that it was again after the sack of 386 that this explosion of town building really began. As we look at the town plan of Cosa, you can see that it is encircled by the wall that we looked at just before, and you can also see it's roughly regular in shape, roughly kind of a square. As you can see here, there are gates in the walls, and then there is a scheme of streets that is comparable to what I mentioned last time was typical for an ideal Roman city plan, and that is the two main streets, the cardo and the decumanus of the city. The cardo being the north-south main street, and the decumanus being the east-west street, and them intersecting very close to the center of the city. And it's usually very close to that same center that you find the forum, or a great open space, meeting and marketplace of the city, as well as a host of other buildings: basilica, market, and so on. And then, on the highest hill of the town of Cosa, a Capitolium, a temple to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, on that highest spot, the most important religious structure of that town. That's the town of Cosa.



And then the other more important one is the town of Ostia, the port of Rome, the town of Ostia which was first founded in 350 B.C., and it was at that time a military camp or castrum was--c-a-s-t-r-u-m--a castrum was laid out there. And you can see a plan of that castrum. You see the dark dotted lines here is the original plan of Ostia, 350 B.C. All the rest that you see around it is the city as it grew into the second century A.D., when it had its efflorescence. So we see the original city here. And you can see it is perfectly regular. And I mentioned to you last time that this is very different from what happened in Rome. Rome grew in a very haphazard way over the centuries. There was never any real attempt to plan the city.



But when the Romans were left to build the kind of ideal city, the city that they thought was the ideal Roman city, they almost always built it in a very regular fashion, as a square or as a rectangle, as regular as they could make it, and it varied depending upon the terrain. If there were a lot of hills and so on, it might end up with a somewhat more irregular shape. But here you see it at its most regular, planned like a castrum or a military camp, rectangular with the two main streets, the cardo, the north-south street, the decumanus, the east-west street, crossing exactly at the center of the city. And then what's located there? The forum of the city, the great open meeting and marketplace, and then all the other major buildings deployed around that, and then, of course, the residential structures and the shops interspersed among those, in this typical Roman town plan of the fourth century B.C.



I want to spend the rest of today's lecture on the three most important buildings, in a sense, that I'm going to show you today, vis-à-vis the development of Roman religious architecture, specifically temple architecture. And I think I'm going to actually call for your help. You've learned a lot already and I think you now know enough to help me along a little bit here on sorting out some of these temples. One of them is located in Rome and the other two are located outside of Rome. I'll show you the map again in a second so that you can see where those other two are. But I'm going to begin with the one in Rome, which takes me back to Google Earth here, to show you the situation of the so-called Temple of Portunus in Rome, that dates to, we believe, sometime--it was put up sometime between 120 and 80 B.C. in Rome.



You're going to get so good at this that you're going to be able to point all these places out, without me. But we're looking back again over--this is the Palatine Hill. We're looking at a slightly different angle, Palatine Hill over here. The very edge of the Colosseum you can see in the upper left. The great Via dei Fori Imperiali of Mussolini over here. The Imperial Fora here. The wedding cake of Victor Emmanuel, the Vittoriano, that I showed you last time, over here -- the more modern building. The Capitoline Hill. You can see the oval piazza of Michelangelo right here. And the Circus Maximus over here. And for any of you who've been to Rome, the Isola Tiberina, that wonderful little island that one can cross the bridge to get to, in Rome, down here. So here's the Tiber River, looking nasty as it usually does. It's very green and not the sort of place you'd want to take a swim in, as you can well imagine. But you see the Tiber River here. And if you look very closely, you will see two temples. This is a round temple, which has a very uninventive--it's called today, very uninventively, the Round Temple by the Tiber, the Round Temple by the Tiber for obvious reasons. And then here a rectangular temple that looks like it has a red roof because it's been undergoing reconstruction and restoration recently. You see that here.



This is the Temple of Portunus. So you can see, in conjunction to another temple, it was built very close to the river, to the Tiber River. Now let's look at the plan together of the Temple of Portunus. Based on your understanding now of typical Etruscan religious architecture, typical Greek religious architecture, what would you say about this plan? Is this more like an Etruscan temple or more like a Greek temple? I can't remember if I--I think I forgot to mention, with regard to the Parthenon, that not only does the typical Greek temple of the fifth century B.C. have a staircase that encircles the entire monument, it has a colonnade, a freestanding colonnade, that encircles the entire monument, and that's called a peripteral, p-e-r-i-p-t-e-r-a-l, a peripteral colonnade. So based on what you know about the Temple of Jupiter OMC and the Parthenon in Athens, does this plan--in plan, when we look at this building--does this look more like an Etruscan plan or like a Greek plan? Okay Mr. Roma.



Student: I'd say it's more of a combination.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Good.



Student: With the peripteral colonnade and also the --



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: All right, all right. Okay. Yes. It looks like it might be a combination. Give me what the Etruscan characteristics are first.



Student: Well I think the Etruscan would be the single staircase, of course, and also the three entrances; so you've got a triad maybe.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: All right. The single staircase, absolutely, which gives it a façade orientation. Is there a triple entranceway? There are spaces between the columns. These are columns here.



Student: [Inaudible]



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: But look at the cella.



Student: Over there the cella's a single cella.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The cella's a single cella. So this is not a Capitolium. But there are spaces, you're right, between the columns. So take us a little further with the columns. You can see the columns in a deep porch, deep porch, freestanding; columns in the front are freestanding. So façade orientation, single staircase, deep porch, freestanding columns in that porch, in this case a single cella--those are all Etruscan characteristics. So it looks as if we are dealing here essentially with an Etruscan plan. But you're right--what's your name?



Student: [Inaudible]



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Neil was right, however, that this is a combination in that there are columns that go around the monument. But is it a peripteral colonnade?



Student: Probably not.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Probably not. Why not? Because what's different about these columns? You can see it in plan. They go all the way around but--



Student: They're not freestanding.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: They're not freestanding. They're attached or engaged into the wall. They're attached to the wall. What do we call that? We call that a pseudo-peripteral colonnade. So yes, it kind of looks like it goes around, but it doesn't really because it's attached into the wall and it kind of gives that sense of flatness that we got in the Etruscan temple. So you were absolutely on the mark. It's a combination of the two. And that is exactly what we see coming together at this particular time in Roman temple architecture, this wonderful way in which the Romans have looked at Etruscan precedents, they've looked at Greek precedents. They decide what they like. They mix it up, as I said before, in a way in which it best represents their own culture, their own religion, and create something that we're going to see becomes distinctively Roman.



The building is very well preserved, so we can go on to actually look at it. Here it is. It stands in almost pristine shape in Rome today, right near the Tiber River, as I mentioned. A wonderful temple in which we see some of those features that Neil has already pointed to, and that is the façade orientation, the single staircase, the deep porch, the freestanding columns in that porch. From a distance it does indeed look peripteral. It looks like there are columns all the way around. But as you look closely you will see that the columns are indeed attached to the wall, on the side, and around the other side. Now that you see the actual view, there are some other things that give this away, as a temple that has clearly also been built under very strong Greek influence. And what are those?



Student: Stone.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Stone -- yes absolutely. This is not made--this is not a wooden, mud-brick, terracotta temple. This is a temple that is made out of stone. It's not made out of marble, it's made out of travertine. It has travertine, t-r-a-v-e-r-t-i-n-e. Travertine is an Italian stone brought from or quarried at [the] town of Tivoli, T-i-v-o-l-i, which we'll talk about a lot in the course of this semester. Travertine brought--Tivoli's about an hour's high-speed drive today from Rome, obviously longer in antiquity, but it's fairly proximate to Rome. So this wonderful stone, travertine, from Tivoli, brought to serve as a facing for the podium, and for the columns, used in the columns. So it is essentially a stone structure. We'll see that the walls are made of tufa, but those walls were stuccoed over with white stucco, so that the impression that you would've gotten, if you were in ancient times when this was in more pristine condition, was that you were looking at a white marble temple, which would've certainly conjured up the idea that you were looking at a temple that was made à la Greque; that was made in the Greek style. Anything else that gives away the influence of Greek architecture? Do any of you know your orders?



Student: Ionic order columns.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Ionic order. Good; I-o-n-i-c, Ionic. The three major--and you'll find this in your Terms and Concepts. So bone up on those there. The Doric, the Ionic and the Corinthian, and we'll look at all of them today. The Ionic order, what characterizes the Ionic order are these what are called spiral volutes, v-o-l-u-t-e-s; spiral volutes. And you can see those here. This is a typical Ionic column clearly made--we don't see the Etruscans using this--clearly made under the influence, the very strong influence, of Greek architecture, Greek temple architecture. Here's a view of the Temple of Portunus, from the side, and from the rear. We once again see the way those columns encircle the structure but are engaged into the wall. You can also see the blocks of tufa stone, ashlar blocks, just as we saw them in the walls, of tufa stone used here. And you can get some sense there're some remains of some of the stucco that was stuccoed over in white, so that from a distance, at least, you would have the impression that the whole building was made out of stone. And even stone--you might even be fooled into thinking it wasn't travertine, it was marble, if you were far enough away.



I also need to mention something very important for the future of Roman architecture, and that is that concrete construction was used in the podium. You don't see it. It was only used inside the podium. The reason it was used inside the podium is concrete is very strong. It can sustain great weight and the Romans recognized very early on that they could use it in utilitarian ways to help support buildings. At this particular time the concrete was made up of rubble and liquid mortar and a kind of a dash of volcanic dust, and they brought all of that together to create a material that could sustain great weight. So they used it here for utilitarian purposes. But we're going to see already next Tuesday the Romans beginning to take advantage of concrete for very expressive purposes -- and how well they do it -- which culminates ultimately, obviously, in buildings like the Pantheon and its incredible dome.



Here's a detail of the Ionic capitals of the Temple of Portunus. You can also see this building has, as it would have if it were made in Greece, what's called an Ionic frieze; an Ionic frieze, which if you look very carefully, there's some remains of the candelabra and the garlands that hung from those candelabra in the original design of this temple. I also think it's interesting to look--here's a view again of the Temple of Portunus as it looks today. This is a nineteenth-century painting of the Temple of Portunus, as it looked at the time it was done, by that artist. And what you see is something that I have already alluded to, but which is extremely important for the preservation of buildings like this. And that is that this building, the Temple of Portunus, like so many in Rome, was reused in later times and transformed into something else, and it is probably only because it was transformed into something else that it's survived as well as it did. Because you can see that what happened is that they walled in the front. They gave it a real façade, a doorway, three windows, a medallion with the Madonna, a cross, at the top, a bell tower, and they turned it into a church.



And because it was an active church it was kept in good shape. You can see those Ionic capitals and the frieze with the garlands and so on, of the Temple of Portunus. And you can also see the Round Temple, by the way, which still does stand also, over here, right near it, near the Tiber River. So this is the reason that we are fortunate that the Temple of Portunus survives. And it does survive, in large part, because again it was transformed into a church in later times. And this is one of the fascinations of Rome, by the way; you never know--so many churches mask earlier buildings. There's one right near, not too far from these, where you can actually see three Roman temples that stood side by side were incorporated into the Church of San Nicola in Carcere. And you can actually see the remains of all three of those temples used in that church. And it's one of the fascinations, obviously, of wandering around the city of Rome.



The other two temples that I want to show you today--we're looking back at the map of this particular area--are located at Cori, and you can see the proximity of Cori, not just to Rome, but also to Ostia, right here. The city of Cori and the city of Tivoli. And now you see Tivoli from where travertine comes; the location of Tivoli in relationship again to Rome. It's not very far, which is why the building material was so easily transportable from Tivoli to Rome. Let's look first at Cori. Cori is one of those incredibly--those of you who have traveled around Italy, outside of Rome, around Italy, know that one of the glories of traveling in Italy is to go into some of these medieval hill towns. You go into these places and you--whether by car or by bus or cab--you make your way up to the very peak of that hill town. It's very picturesque, and then ultimately you get to the top and you stand up there and you get this incredible panorama over the city and over the landscape.



That's the kind of place Cori is. It's a medieval hill town. But leave it to the Romans--and they had a knack for doing this wherever they went--they found the best location in Cori for their temple. And this temple is located almost at the very peak of the hill of Cori, and you have to drive all the way up to see the temple, the so-called Temple of Hercules at Cori. We don't really know if this was put up to Hercules, but it's been called the Temple of Hercules for a long time. So we continue to call it that. And you see it here in plan, in restored view, with its little complex in front, and then the temple as it looks today.



So looking at this one, then we can see again that we are dealing with an Etruscan plan, with freestanding columns in the porch. You can't see it here, but you can up there. It does have a single staircase. It's a kind of pyramidal staircase. It has a side as well as a front -- or sides as well as fronts. But you can see it does not go all the way around, as a Greek staircase would have. It's focused on the front. So we once again have this idea of single staircase on the front; façade orientation of the temple; deep porch; freestanding columns in that porch; single cella, in this case. Now, Neil, what happens when you go around in this one?



Student: Is that for this one?



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Yes.



Student: Well there's no columns around on this one.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: There are no columns. There are no columns. It's not a peripteral colonnade. It's not a pseudo-peripteral because it doesn't have--but what is this? They look sort of like flat columns. They're what are called pilasters, p-i-l-a-s-t-e-r-s, pilasters, which are essentially flat columns. So it does have some articulation--you can see them up there--there is articulation, but it's been flattened out still further. So once again an Etruscan plan with some nod to Greece, in the sense that there's a recognition -- we've got to have something that goes around here. But, they don't want to take it out, they don't want to use an actual column, and they flatten it out, as you can see so well here. Now again, anyone who knows your orders, what Greek order is used here in this building? Yes?



Student: Doric.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The Doric, the Doric order. The simplest and most severe order is used here, the Greek Doric order, and the system of Greek triglyphs and metopes; triglyphs and metopes. I'll show you a detail in a moment and I'll explain what those are. So the Greek Doric order, triglyphs and metopes, for this temple. And one thing we couldn't see in that plan is the high podium. So that's another Etruscan feature. So once again we see this very interesting and very eclectic bringing together of Etruscan elements and Greek elements in what we can call early Roman temple architecture.



Here's another detail of the Temple at Cori. You can get a--I took this on a very grey day so you don't get the sense of the glory of what it can look like up there. But you get some sense of its situation, right at the edge, with a spectacular--on a beautiful day--a spectacular panorama of the mountains, the other mountains in this area, and of the hill town itself. And here we can see the Doric order better; very simple, with the so-called triglyphs and metopes; t-r-i-g-l-y-p-h and m-e-t-o-p-e-s, triglyphs and metopes. Triglyphs are triple striated bands. And you can see them up there, the triple striated bands, and in between them square panels. So this alteration of triple striated bands, the triglyphs, and the square panels, the metopes, which is typical of the Doric order, the Greek Doric order. You see it in the Parthenon, for example, and it has been taken over here by the Romans.



You also see something very interesting about Roman building practice here, because if you look at the columns, you'll see that the upper part of the columns are what is called fluted, fluted -- they have striations in them. But they're not fluted at the bottom. You can see it stops right here, the fluting stops here and the bottom is plain. What's the reason for that? Well we know that even in Greek Hellenistic times, that approach was taken, and we believe it was done for two reasons. One: practical purposes. Why are there no flutes at the bottom? Because people are more likely to lean up against the columns, at the bottom, than they are obviously at the top, and when people lean up against columns, the flutes start to break off. So they decided not to flute the bottom. But it may have been also for decorative reasons, because we'll see, when we get to Pompeii, in the very near future, that there are many columns at Pompeii that have fluting at the top, painted white, and then the bottom, the plain bottom, painted red, for reasons of taste and decoration. And it's very possible--we do know that ancient--I don't want to destroy any illusions here--but ancient buildings were very often painted, and ancient sculpture was always painted. So these might've been a lot more garish looking in ancient times than they are today, which might also have taken away from this sense of having a marble building. So that's something that we probably should keep in mind as we evaluate these structures.



The last one I want to show you today is the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli -- also beautifully situated. It's a temple that dates to 80 B.C. Also probably not a Temple of Vesta, but it's a round temple, and temples of Vesta were often round. So it's tended to be called by scholars a Temple of Vesta -- in 80 B.C. Again, beautifully situated out over a particularly verdant area of Tivoli, where you can look down and around this beautiful area. There's a waterfall very nearby. It's just magnificent, and you can see it's not surprising that some enterprising family decided to build the Sibilla Restaurant right here, and there's a patio on which one can go and eat under umbrellas, and so on and so forth, here.



Here's the temple, the ancient temple of 80 B.C. And once again we look at a plan over here. And I also show you a view of the so-called Temple of Venus from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, just to make the point that this is as Greek as we've gotten thus far, in the sense that the Greeks really loved round temples. They built them a lot. There was a very famous Temple of Venus, in their case Aphrodite, on the island of Knidos, and that Temple of Venus on the island of Knidos is the one that was duplicated by Hadrian for his villa; and we'll talk about this later in the semester. But I show the one at Hadrian's villa because it gives you a very good sense of what this structure was like in ancient Greek times as well, because we think it's a replica. A round structure; freestanding columns encircling the entire building, low podium, a staircase around that podium that encircled the entire building, and then a Temple of Venus in the center.



When we look at the plan of this structure we will see it's pretty close. It's round. It has columns that are freestanding, that encircle the entire structure. But it has a higher podium, as we're going to see, and even though it's circular, they've given it a staircase on one side, which gives it--even a round temple, which you think of as something you just keep circling, has a kind of façade orientation, in this instance. So they are applying some of these Etruscan characteristics to an almost pure Greek type. Here's a view, it's very well preserved, a view of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, as it looks today. And what order is this?



Student: Corinthian.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The Corinthian order; the Corinthian, the last of the three great Greek orders. The Corinthian order, which is very ornate

Professor Kleiner discusses the revolution in Roman architecture resulting from the widespread adoption of concrete in the late second and first centuries B.C. She contrasts what she calls innovative Roman architecture with the more traditional buildings already surveyed and documents a shift from the use of concrete for practical purposes to an exploration of its expressive possibilities. The lecture concludes with a discussion of the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, an impressive terraced complex that uses concrete to transform a mountain into a work of architecture, with ramps and stairs leading from one level to the next and porticoes revealing panoramic views of nature and of man-made architectural forms.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 45-47 (building techniques), 47 (exterior finishings), 239-240 (Tabularium), 243-245 (Theater of Marcellus), 368-369 (Porticus Aemilia)

Transcript



January 20, 2009



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Good morning. It's Inauguration Day--Happy Inauguration Day to everyone--and I thought that actually the inauguration of Barack Obama today and the particular lecture in this class are very well suited to one another. Because although you see that the title of today's lecture is "Technology and Revolution in Roman Art," I could also call it something like "The Change the Romans Believed In." Because the change the Romans believed in, the change the Romans believed in was a shift from what we call traditional Roman architecture to innovative Roman architecture. And that's what we're going to be talking about today, what we call innovative, and what we'll call in the course of this semester, innovative Roman architecture.



We've already talked about what we've called traditional Roman architecture, and I just want to look again with you, to begin today with the Temple of Portunus, that we looked at last time, the Temple of Portunus in Rome, near the Tiber River, a temple that was put up in the late second, early first century B.C. And we talked about the fact that this was a traditional Roman building of this day. A traditional Roman building though that was quite derivative, that looked back at Greek architecture, Greek religious architecture, and Etruscan religious architecture, and drew from both of those, drew elements from both of those, and combined them together into what we termed a new Roman creation, at least in the traditional vein. We talked about the fact that the Etruscan elements of this particular monument were its tall podium, were its deep porch, were the freestanding columns in that porch, were the single staircase and the emphasis on the façade, that having that single staircase achieved.



We also talked about the fact that while there were columns all around the structure, which is actually a Greek way of doing things, that those columns were attached or engaged into the wall, which still gave it a certain sense of flatness, including on the back, that was also characteristic of Etruscan architecture. We also talked about the Greek elements that were incorporated here, and those included the fact that the building was made out of stone, and also the fact that one of the traditional Greek orders, in this case the Ionic order, was used for the structure. So this bringing together of Greek and Etruscan elements in this thoroughly Roman building, but a building that again we would call a traditional Roman building. And what do I mean by traditional? All the traditional Roman buildings share in common the following features. They have columns and they have walls, and those columns and walls serve a structural purpose and that is to hold up the flat or the sloping ceiling, the sloping roof, and that is in fact exactly what you see here.



But at this very same time, in the second century B.C. and into the first century B.C., we begin to see a new kind of experimentation that is going on concurrently with this, an experimentation that grows up in some of the same towns that we see traditional buildings like this. And what made this experimentation different than anything that had come before is the fact that the Romans use, for these buildings, a completely new material, and that material is concrete. We talked about the fact that already in the Temple of Portunus concrete was used, but concrete was used only in the podium. You can't see it. It is inside the podium and serves to strengthen--concrete has a great deal of strength and can sustain great weights--and so it was placed in the podium for utilitarian purposes so that it could help to support the temple that was located on top. But again, none of its expressive possibilities were explored by the designer of the Temple of Portunus or any of the other temples we looked at last time.



But what begins to happen also, in the course of the second and first centuries B.C., is architects beginning to realize that this new concrete technology has an opportunity to transform Roman architecture, and they begin to experiment with that transformation. In order to understand the concrete buildings that we're going to be looking at this morning, which are absolutely fascinating--and I hope you'll be as enthralled by them as I am, and they again stand at the very beginning of this development of innovative architecture in Rome--it's important to know a bit about concrete, Roman concrete that is, and I want to make a few points about it. Roman concrete -- the Latin term for it is opus caementicum, as I've indicated here. Roman concrete is different from what we think of today as concrete. It's a composite of various natural elements that becomes a liquid mass when mixed with water and eventually hardens into a very, very strong substance, much stronger than any of its ingredients are on their own. Roman concrete was a mixture of stone rubble and liquid mortar, and composed of lime, sand and something called pozzolana -- pozzolana being a volcanic substance, which was very plentiful in Italy, especially around the area of Pompeii, Herculaneum, the area of Campania.



Concrete was used in Rome from the early second century B.C. on, but it was not until the end of the second century, and the beginning of the first century, that the expressive possibilities of concrete began to be fully realized. Concrete--I think this is also important to mention, when you think about concrete construction in relationship to stone construction, that we've already discussed -- concrete is not cut or quarried the way stone is. Concrete is caste in molds. Concrete can be caste in any shape, at least any shape that a carpenter can build with wood. And like modern builders, the Romans erected wooden frames for their walls and ceilings and they poured concrete into those wooden frames. What's most important for us, in the context of this lecture and in this course in general, is that the introduction of Roman concrete into Roman architecture freed the Roman architect from the confines of a rectilinear architecture that they had inherited from the Greeks, the kind of rectilinear architecture that made up a temple like the Temple of Portunus. This is a very momentous change and one that will have a lasting impact on the buildings of the Romans.



Let me try to give you a sense of what I mean by this. One could argue that the greatest concrete structure built by the Romans was the Pantheon. And I remind you of the Pantheon on the right, in fact the dome of the Pantheon, which would not have been possible without concrete construction. But it's interesting to compare the Pantheon to an attempt that Etruscan architects made to create something similar but out of stone. I show you on the left-hand side of the screen an Etruscan tomb that dates to 600 B.C. So, very early in time, 600 B.C., an Etruscan tomb at a place called--it's not on your Monument List--but at a place called Quinto Fiorentino, Q-u-i-n-t-o, new word, F-i-o-r-e-n-t-i-n-o. Quinto Fiorentino, an Etruscan territory. And what the architects have done here is to try to create a round tomb, and they've used stone, as you can see, and they have laid those stones. They've cut and quarried the stones as usual. They've tried to cut them in the shapes that they need in order to make this work. And they've piled them, one on top of the other, row after row after row, until they've gotten -- it started out okay at the bottom, but as they get further and further on to the top and it gets rounder and rounder, and converges at the apex, they start to have trouble, as you can see. And although it's a heroic, a valiant attempt on their part, it isn't terribly successful, at least to my mind, aesthetically. And, in fact, they were worried about it falling down, so they even had to place a stone pier here, to support the dome, to make sure that it didn't drop. And actually that was pretty successful, because here it is, still today, looking pretty good in that regard.



But with the introduction of concrete into architecture, under the Romans, building a dome like the Pantheon was simplicity itself. All you needed to be able to do was to build one of these wooden models, wooden structures, that you then poured concrete into, and voilà, you have the dome of the Pantheon. So simplicity itself, transformational, vis-à-vis Roman architecture. The only problem with concrete -- there were two problems with concrete that the architects of this period had to contend with. One of them was that concrete has to be protected from moisture--that's number one--and number two, that concrete is less attractive than stone. The Roman architects of the second and first centuries B.C. solved these two problems in the same way. What they decided to do was when the concrete was still wet, they attached stone to it. This could either be large ashlar blocks, stone blocks, or it could be small pieces of stone, that uncertain work or opus incertum that we talked about last time, pressed into the concrete when it was wet, and when it all dried, that stone both made the building look more attractive and also protected the building from moisture. We looked last time at that opus incertum facing. I remind you of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, which you see here, and you will recall that the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli had concrete, both in its podium, for utilitarian purposes and to support the great weight of the temple, but also that the architects explored making the cella wall, the curved cella wall, also out of concrete. And then when that concrete was wet they put in these small cut, irregularly shaped stones, called uncertain work or opus incertum, to protect that.



So we saw that already in the Temple of Vesta, even though it was a traditional temple, based on Greek and Etruscan models. And we'll see it again today, in several buildings, and I'll show you just one example, the last structure that we'll talk about today, the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, an extraordinary structure built on a hillside, that also used opus incertum as the facing. And you can see it used here for the wall and also for the coffered ceiling above. And so a stone facing, opus incertum, that was particularly favored in the second century B.C. and into the first century B.C. Over time the choice of facing changed. Although ashlar blocks, tufa, travertine, and opus incertum were popular in the second and first centuries, as time goes on things change.



We'll see, under the Roman emperor Nerva [correction: Nero] there was a revolution, another kind of revolution of sorts, in Roman architecture, and we'll talk about the reasons for that and so on later in the semester. But with that revolution came an interest in a new facing material, namely brick -- brick that was originally stuccoed over. And, in fact, the opus incertum work and the tufa stone that we've talked about already today tended to be stuccoed over as well. But by the second century we begin to see an appreciation for brick in its own right, the attractiveness of brick, and the Romans begin to use exposed brick as the facing for their buildings. And I show you one example. It's a detail of a warehouse in the Roman port city of Ostia, that we'll look at later in the term, with this exposed brick facing; very attractive, different colorations and so on and so forth. Just to alert you to the fact that again the kind of facing that we're talking about today will not be the only facing that is used by the Romans over time.



I want to show you today a series of these concrete constructions, concrete experiments we might call them, that begin to turn up, not only in Rome itself, but also in some of the cities close to Rome, that we saw Rome began to colonize in the Republic and into the age of Augustus -- cities that either are the same or very close to the ones that we looked at last time, and I'll show you a map momentarily. I just want to begin with one in Rome itself. This is the so-called Porticus Aemilia in Rome. The Porticus Aemilia was a warehouse, a very large warehouse on the banks of the Tiber River. The Porticus Aemilia was built, as you can see from the dates on your Monument List, very early on, 193 B.C., and then restored in 174 B.C. Only a small fragment of the Porticus Aemilia survives today, but we have a lot of evidence, a lot of clues, that we can piece together through scholarly detective work, to determine what this building looked like in antiquity, and we can get a quite accurate sense. We have, for example, the words of the great Roman historian Livy, Livy, who was writing in the age of Augustus. He tells us that the Porticus Aemilia--he describes it, he mentions the Porticus Aemilia--and he tells us it was located on the east bank of the Tiber River, and that it was southwest of one of Rome's Seven Hills, the Aventine Hill. Southwest of the Aventine Hill, which is enormously helpful because it gives archaeologists and so on a clue as to where they might look for remains of this particular structure.



So we have that. We also have a fragment of the building, we believe, because it's located just in the right place, and I show it to you here. It's not much. It's essentially a hunk of concrete that includes an arched doorway and some arched windows, but it's very important in terms of allowing us to reconstruct what this structure looked like in antiquity. But most significant of all, we have a fragment from what is known as the Marble Map of Rome. The Marble Map of Rome, called the Forma Urbis--and I've put that word on the Monument List, that title on the Monument List for you, the Forma Urbis--the Forma Urbis was a great marble map that was made of Rome in the early third century A.D., under the emperorship of Septimius Severus, and put up on a wall in Rome, and we'll talk about its location later on in the semester. But it purported to represent all the buildings that were standing in Rome in the early third century A.D. It is fragmentary today, but there are a fair number of fragments, and fortunately a couple of those fragments, or several of those fragments, are fragments that represent the Porticus Aemilia.



So we can tell from that, from Livy's description, from this fragmentary remain, we can piece together what it looked like. And you can see it here, a very, very long rectangular structure that went all along the bank of the river. Storage, you need a lot of storage, especially as the Romans began to conquer the world, they were trading more extensively with other parts of the world, and consequently they needed places along the Tiber River to store the goods that were both going out and coming in. So they build this gigantic warehouse along the banks of the Tiber. Now there's a fair amount of disagreement about some of the smaller details of this warehouse and what it looked like in antiquity. So we have to do the best that we can to bring that evidence together to determine what it looked like. But as I said, in some details you'll see there's variation. So several of the things I'm going to show you vary slightly, but the only one that you'll be ultimately responsible for is the one that's on your Monument List. But I just want you to be aware of the fact that there are different interpretations of exactly what it looked like.



What we are sure of, and what's most important for us today, is that it was made of concrete and that it had barrel vaults. What was a barrel vault? A barrel vault was a vault that was again made out of concrete, placed on a wall, and then the vault was shaped like the side of a barrel, as you can see here, which is why it's called a barrel vault -- shaped like the side of a barrel, resting on walls down below. A fairly simple shape that could not have been made, or would be very difficult to make out of stone, but was easily able to be made out of concrete. And we see a series of those barrel vaults, placed one next to another, for the warehouse, for the Porticus Aemilia in Rome. It was placed--and actually I neglected to mention, Livy also tells us that the Porticus Aemilia had four tiers -- it was tiered in four levels -- and we see those four tiers here, rising up ever so slightly along the slope of the Tiber River.



This is a cross-section of what the inside of the Basilica Aemilia might have looked like. You see those great barrel vaults here. You see that the architect has been adventurous in the sense that he has not placed the barrel vaults on solid walls, as we saw in that diagram, but has opened those walls up, created piers and arches above those piers to create these arcades, which is quite ingenious and very smart, because what it does is enable there to be both axial movement, through the building, but also lateral movement. You can walk not only along each barrel vault, but you can walk in between the piers which, as I said, creates a sense of much more openness, and lateral as well as axial movement. The other thing that you see here are the back walls, where we can see just what we saw in that fragment of the building, the arched doorways, as well as the arched windows in the back walls, which of course allow light into the structure. Lots of activity needed to happen here, as things were moved in and out, and those who worked here needed to be able to see everything that they were doing.



The view that you have on your Monument List is this one. It's a restored view of what the Porticus Aemilia might've looked like in antiquity, and it's very helpful. It's a cutaway view, which gives you most of the major features, all in one place. You can see that it is indeed tiered. There are four tiers for this structure, that they move up slightly as they move up the slope of the hill. You can see the use of the barrel vaults. You can see the piers down below. You can see the flat roof that these seemed to have. But as they rose up slightly along the slope of the hill, you can see that the designer has placed small, curved, slit windows on each tier to allow again additional light into the structure. And you can also see, from this diagram, that it was made of concrete and faced with opus incertum work -- these small, irregular stones that we saw in the Temple of Vesta also used as the facing material here. Here's one more restored view, which shows you roughly the same: the four tiers, the barrel vaults, the windows on the various tiers, and then most importantly these doorways and windows in the back, as well as the general space that was available inside this extraordinary building.



I mentioned that while we'll look at a couple of buildings, several buildings in Rome, I also want to go out to some of the colonies that were founded by the Romans, in the vicinity of Rome, in the second and first centuries B.C., where they began to build, as we saw. They began to plan towns. They began to put walls around those towns. They began to put temples in those towns and they also began to put other structures, including warehouses and sanctuaries and the like. The ones that we're going to look at today--here again, Rome is at the star--and we're going to look at buildings in Terracina, over here, in Tivoli, and also in Palestrina. And you can see the proximity of those to others we talked about last time, Norba and Cosa and Falerii Novi, and so on and so forth. It's not surprising, again, to see the Romans turning to their environs as they make these earliest towns and as they start to fill these towns, to make them into the kind of mini-Romes that they so desired.



So we're going to look at a series of these, of different dates and of considerable interest, in terms of what they herald for the future of Roman architecture. The first that we're going to look at is a market hall, a market hall at a place called Ferentino, and it dates to--I may have neglected to show you Ferentino on that map but it's in with all the others there, Ferentino--around 100 B.C., it dates to. And you can see that it's essentially one giant barrel vault, one giant barrel vault, which was used as the market hall. You can see also that that giant barrel vault, which is made of concrete, has opening off it, on the sides, a series of arched areas, also barrel vaulted on the inside. These were used as the market stalls inside this marketplace. You can also see I believe very well that the facing that is used for this concrete is opus incertum work for the walls and for the vaults. And then what they've done to emphasize the location and the shape of the arches, they have used stone around those -- also to give further solidity to this part of the building they have used stone. And you can see it's a combination of nicely cut ashlar blocks, down here, but also the voussoir blocks that we saw in the Falerii Novi gate, used over the arches. So this combination of both stone, of opus quadratum stone, and also of opus incertum, used as the facing for this particular structure.



What's significant about this building is that it looks forward to things that we're going to see later on develop in Roman architecture. Primarily I showed you in the introductory lecture a glimpse of the Markets of Trajan in Rome, and I remind you here of the great market hall of the Markets of Trajan, which is even more sophisticated in its use of concrete, because it has ribbed vaults, as you can see. But this experimentation that we're going to see in the early second century A.D. in Rome would not have been possible without the experimentation in concrete that took place in this very early stage in the second century and in the first century B.C.



Even much more interesting in fact is the building that I'd like to turn to now, and this is the so-called Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina. It dates, we believe, to 100 to 70 B.C., and it is, like so many Roman buildings, spectacularly sited. I had mentioned this on several occasions. We looked at the Mediaeval hill town of Cori, for example, where the Temple of Hercules was located at the very apex of the hill. The Romans had an incredible knack for choosing extraordinary locations on which to site their buildings, locations that made those buildings -- that accentuated those buildings from a distance -- but also gave those who went to the buildings amazing views out from those buildings. This is one of those examples, the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina.



The best view of this sanctuary is from the sea. If you happen to be fortunate enough to be floating on a boat somewhere near Terracina--and it's a beautiful place to float--you will see, from a distance, the great podium of the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur. But you can also see it from the town, which is where we're situated here. We're standing in the town, a couple of decent pizzerias right in front of us, and we're looking up at the hill on which the sanctuary finds itself. Now as you look up to that hill, all you can actually see is all that's actually up there now, which is the podium of the sanctuary. The temple is no longer there, although there's some evidence up there, some remains that gives us a decent sense of what that temple looked like in antiquity. But the podium is extremely well preserved, and you see it again magnificently sited at the top of that hill.



This is a restored view of what the podium would've looked like--what the podium does look like, as we see it here--and as it would have supported the temple on top, and also a back columnar element over here, that was roofed, as you can see. If we look at this restored view, we see several things that are worth noting. One, that the temple itself is very much a traditional building and one that is very much in the tradition indeed of the buildings, the temples, that we've already discussed: this combination of Etruscan plan and of Greek elevation that we saw in so many of these. You can see, for example--and again there's enough evidence for us to be pretty sure that this is what it looked like -- high podium, single staircase, emphasis on the façade, deep porch, freestanding columns in that porch, but columns that seem to have encircled the monument. So this combination of--and stone construction we think--so a combination once again of Etruscan and Greek elements for the temple.



You'll probably notice that the temple is slightly skewed, the angle of the temple of skewed, it's not straight on with the podium, which is very unusual for the Romans. We'll see that the Romans were very interested in everything being exactly as it should be: axial, symmetrical, both sides matching. It's very unusual for them to skew something like this. Why did they do it? It probably had something to do either with something that was already on the site, some other building, that forced them to do this, or having something to do with the particular god who was honored here and the location -- the way they wanted that to be in relationship to various elements of the rites--or east-west, or whatever. There was something that caused them to put this in the position that they did. And you can also see that it isn't--it has this back colonnade behind it, covered colonnade behind it, but it isn't attached to it in any way, which is also unusual, as we'll see. The podium you see down here, made up of a series of arcades. You can see once again both axial and lateral access, because just as in the Porticus Aemilia, they have created smaller arcades in the side piers, to allow this kind of axiality in the structure, or movement through the structure in more than one way.



The podium is extremely well preserved, as you can see, and extremely impressive. It's an extraordinary place to go. It's a lot of fun to go there to see this. It's off the beaten track, to a certain extent, but it is on the road between Rome and Naples, so that if one is going from Rome down to Pompeii, this is the sort of thing one can stop and take a look at, and there're some other interesting things along the way as well. We see here the great podium, as it looks today. It's made out of concrete. You can see both the large arcades and then these lateral ones that I mentioned before, on the interior face of the piers. You can also see that they have used opus incertum facing here. These are regular stones, all bunched together to create an attractive appearance, although this was probably stuccoed in antiquity. And then they have used stone blocks to emphasize the juncture of each of these walls, but also to help give the building increased stability. So this combination of stone--well it's all stone--but this combination of blocks of stone and the smaller opus incertum stones for the facing of the podium.



And here's a wonderful view, I think, that shows you a panorama through a number of these lateral arches, and gives you some sense of how carefully orchestrated this was by the architect who was responsible for this. It's never too early for me to emphasize that the Romans were very concerned with creating vistas and panoramas, from one part of a building to another, from one part of a complex to another, and they never lost an opportunity to do that. So that as you stand and look through a series of these lateral arches, you can see how carefully arranged that was, to pay attention not only to the way in which the arches--you can see them in a series, as you can see here, looking almost as if they're diminishing in size, although they aren't really--but also this idea of creating exciting visual experiences. As you walk through something, not just to walk through it, but to see something that really amazes you and that fascinates you, and that creation of vista and panorama -- both panorama out onto the countryside, from the hilltop, but also a panorama or vista through a building -- is something quintessentially Roman, and we'll see it turning up again and again and again as a major objective of Roman architecture.



A view once again of the restored view of the sanctuary. The sanctuary had below it an underground passageway called a cryptoporticus--and I put that word on the Monument List for you--a cryptoporticus that was used essentially for storage, for storage purposes for this sanctuary. And, believe it or not, we actually have the cryptoporticus still preserved, and we can look at it. And it's interesting because here too we see the architects using concrete construction, creating a barrel vaulted corridor, in this case with windows on the end and then a few doorways and some slit windows, all of them arched, as you can see here, to allow light into the structure. It was used, as I said, for storage purposes, storage having to do with the cult, and so on and so forth.



It's very important--and we're going to look at a couple of other sanctuaries as well--to keep in mind that these sanctuaries were meant--they were different than an individual temple in a forum inside an urban complex. They were meant to draw pilgrims from far and wide, which is one of the reasons that they were placed in such prominent positions, on tops of mountains, so that you wouldn't--if you were going by in your cart, or whatever, and saw this, from a distance, or coming by sea, in a boat, seeing it from a distance, you would be drawn--it would be like a mecca that you would be drawn to. So these sanctuaries were meant to attract large numbers of people to them. So they needed to provide not just the temple itself but other things, and they were like malls. They often included shopping areas, souvenir shops, shopping stores for local specialties and that kind of thing, in order to encourage people to visit.



I'd like to turn to another, also very interesting sanctuary, that was put up at around this time. This is the Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli, and it was erected, we believe, sometime between 75 and 50 B.C., in Tivoli. It is an incredible place. It is not so different from the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur in its general intentions: this whole idea of creating this mecca for religious activity and also just a place that people would enjoy coming to and gathering together for social interaction. We see a restored view of what it looked like in antiquity. It is similar to and different from the Jupiter Anxur Sanctuary.



Just like the Jupiter Anxur Sanctuary, it rests on a very tall, on a tall and large podium. As you can see, the temple doesn't stand in isolation but is raised up on this large podium. You can see that it has a temple in the center, this one completely pushed up against the back wall and completely straight. So axial: created in axial relationship to the podium. The temple, we believe, was also one of these traditional types of temples with the tall podium, with a staircase on one side, with columns going around at least three sides, deep porch, freestanding columns in that porch, raised up on its own podium, and then the larger podium down below. One of the features that we see here, that we did not see in the Jupiter Anxur Sanctuary, is the use of the circular staircase here, which adds drama to the design. It's also on axis with the staircase of the temple itself, but it also serves as a kind of--it's shaped like a theater, a theater cavea--we call it a cavea, the seating: c-a-v-e-a, the cavea of a theater. It's shaped just like that, as you can see here, and we believe its purpose was not so much as a monumental entranceway or a monumental staircase, although it served that purpose, to a certain extent, but also as a place where people could gather and could sit and probably watch performances -- religious performances perhaps, or perhaps other kinds of performances -- in front of this, in front of the Temple of Hercules. And there may have been some kind of a stage building. There was a wall here, so there may have been also some kind of stage building in front of that semi-circular seated area.



This is another restored view, showing you the same. You can perhaps see that theatrical area better here, again serving as a dramatic staircase but at the same time as a place where performances could take place at this structure. But all the other features are apparent. And I want you to pay special attention to the fact that we have the temple pushed up against the back wall, not one of the short back walls but--well none of them are short here--but against a long back wall, as you can see, but pushed up against it, dominating the space in front of it. We're going to see, when we turn to Pompeii on Thursday, that this same idea of pushing a temple against a back wall is characteristic of forum design, the design of meeting and marketplaces, as it is for sanctuary design.



The Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli is preserved in part--and I can show you one very interesting detail, which is what you see now on the screen. We are looking at part--let me go back for a second just to point this out. If you look along the sides and the back, you will see that there are columns above and then columns with arcades: arcades and columns in the first story, and then columns on their own, in the upper story. So what I'm going to show you now is a section of the lower story of the Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli. And we can see that what we have here is a very important combination--and it's the first time we've seen this today--of arches with columns interspersed, columns placed, engaged or attached into the wall, in between these arcades, as you can see here. The construction is concrete. The facing is a combination of stone--look at the blocks, the ashlar blocks, and the voussoirs above the arches, and opus incertum work for the walls, as you can see here. But the scheme of columns in between arcades: extremely important. This is setting in place the kind of scheme that we're going to see used for buildings like the Colosseum in Rome -- so extremely important. There's one detail here, there's one detail about the columns though I wonder if anyone notices, that make them different than any other columns that we've seen thus far this term. Does anyone see what that is?



Student: [Inaudible]



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: They definitely don't--yes, good point. That wasn't the one I had in mind, but you're absolutely right, and it leads to another point I'm going to make in the not too distant future. They don't support anything. They are used here--the building is supported by the concrete construction. The columns don't have any support role whatsoever. They're there entirely for decorative purposes. So, excellent point. And still one more. Look at the facing of the column. What does that tell you? What is it, what kind of facing?



Student: Opus incertum.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Opus incertum; which means what?



Student: Concrete.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The columns are made of concrete too. The columns are not made out of stone, but the columns in this instance--it's unusual--but the columns, in this instance, made out of concrete and also faced with opus incertum work. A view again of the complex, just to make the point that as at the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina there is an underground passageway, a cryptoporticus. But in this case--and you can see, it's on the left, underneath the left side of the sanctuary--but in this instance, interestingly enough, this isn't just a storage area, it's actually a street. The ancient name for Tivoli was Tibur, t-i-b-u-r. There was a street called the Via Tiburtina, that made its way from Rome to Tivoli, and this underground passageway was actually the street. The street ran underneath the sanctuary. That street, or that part of the street that ran under the sanctuary, can still be seen today, and you can see--it looks almost like an underground subway or something like that--you can see barrel vaulted area, with a series of niches over here, probably for shops, so that along the way you could stop and shop beneath the sanctuary. So a street, in this case, that is part of the Via Tiburtina, leading from Rome to Tivoli.



I'd like to turn now to a couple of buildings in Rome, back to Rome, to look at first a building called the Tabularium, that dates to around 78 B.C., that was a very important building in Rome, because it was used to house the state archives, at that particular juncture. It was put up by a man--we even know who put it up--a man by the name of Quintus Lutatius Catullus, and I've put his name on the Monument List for you, and it was located on the north side of the forum, of the Roman Forum, and the south slope of the Capitoline Hill. And here I show you one of these excellent Google Earth fly-over views of this part of ancient Rome, or what this part of ancient Rome looks like today. And we see the landmarks that we've already pointed out: the Colosseum at the very top; the Roman Forum lying in front of the Colosseum; Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali; the Imperial Fora over here; the Palatine Hill up here; the Circus Maximus here; the wedding cake, so-called, of Victor Emmanuel, the modern building, nineteenth-century building over here; and then the Capitoline Hill, redesigned by Michelangelo, with the oval piazza.



The Tabularium is located right here. It is again facing the forum, the Roman Forum, but it is the back wall of one of Michelangelo's palaces, the so-called Senatorial Palace designed by Michelangelo. What Michelangelo did is what was done so often by later architects, incorporated--didn't tear down the earlier Roman Tabularium--but incorporated its wall as the back wall of his Senatorial Palace, and that's exactly what it remains today. Here we see a view of the Tabularium. We're standing on the Forum side, looking at what remains of the Tabularium, and we can see some of the features that we've already been discussing today. First of all, let me point out that it is made out of concrete. It's made out of concrete. The building is concrete. But here in Rome they decided not to use--opus incertum work was not the rage in Rome. Instead they were much more interested in cut stone. And you can see that they have used cut stone in this structure, cut tufa stone--I think you can recognize the stone as tufa -- remember tufa is indigenous to the city of Rome. Rome has a lot of fairly decent tufa.



They've used tufa here, and they have used tufa work also for the arcades above and for the columns. The capitals are done in travertine, added in travertine, considered the most important part, so they used the more expensive material there. But you can see here, as at the Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli, that we have this combination of arcades and columns -- and once again, as was already pointed out, columns that have no structural purpose whatsoever, columns that are there for pure decoration. And this scheme of arcades with columns is going to become extremely important in the future. One can go inside the Tabularium today and see what remains of the state archives. There are some very interesting corridors and vaulting that one can see. And, by the way, it's a nice place to go because there's also a panoramic window on which one can get some spectacular views, down over the Roman Forum, and some great pictures as well, photographs as well.



We're looking here at one of the corridors of the Tabularium. You can see that the arches are made out of stone, supported by columns, but in between them--there are a series of bays, as you can see here--and in between them we have domical ceilings that are made out of concrete. So concrete used here, combined--concrete for the domes--combined with stone, that the Romans were very--handsome stone that was in Rome itself favored, used for the arches and used to decorate the walls as well. And what's interesting is that we find in these corridors a series of ramps and a series of steps. And there's actually one staircase that has sixty-six steps--I've counted them--sixty-six steps, as well as ramps. And what we see happening here--and these are again covered by barrel vaults--what we see happening here is the Romans paying a lot of attention to varying the experience that you have when you walk through buildings. Sometimes you're going to be walking on a straight path, sometimes you're going to be walking on a ramp, sometimes you're going to be walking on stairs, to vary that experience. And you're going to see panoramas and so on along the way, to make it an experience to go into a building and to wander around that building. But we're also going to see--and I'll show you this particularly in the last structure we talk about today--we're also going to see the Romans not hesitating to be the controlling force, that they very much were, and to establish certain pre-determined paths that you have to take. So you're having a varied experience, but you're kind of having it in the way that the Romans want you to have it, and that's an interesting phenomenon that I hope we'll think about together as we converse in the online forum.



I want to show you one last building in Rome today, before I show you the real pièce de résistance of concrete architecture of this early period. I'd like to show you one more building in Rome. It's a later building, and in some respects it belongs in a later lecture. It's the Theater of Marcellus in Rome, a theater that was put up by Rome's first emperor, Augustus, after the death of his nephew and son-in-law Marcellus. He seems to have put it up, that is, Augustus seems to have put it up. He was in great grief at the loss of this young man because he had hoped that Marcellus would succeed him. Marcellus was married to Augustus' daughter, Julia. He'd hoped that Marcellus would succeed him, but Marcellus, unfortunately, died very young. Augustus was in incredible grief, and he put up this theater in Rome, this stone theater in Rome, in honor of Marcellus.



The theater was put up, as I mentioned, either in 13 or in 11 B.C. So I can talk about this--we have several lectures on Augustus--and I can talk about this in that lecture, but I decided to put it here because it really is the culmination, in a sense, of some of the experiments we've been talking about today, and I wanted you to see it in this context for that reason. We are looking at the Theater of Marcellus as it looks today. Parts of it are extremely well preserved, as you can see, at least these first two tiers here. The main reason that the building has survived, and you can--well I'll talk about the details in a moment--the main reason that the building has survived--and I believe I mentioned this in the introductory lecture--is that it was re-used over time. It was re-used as a fortress in the Middle Ages, it was used as a palace in the Renaissance, and it was used most recently, and is still being used, as a very luxurious condominium today.



This is where Google Earth really comes in handy. If you go onto Google Earth--because it's very difficult to get a sense of the way in which the ancient part of this structure relates to the rest of the structure today, without going up above it. And by going up above it, and looking at it, both from above and--and Google Earth now allows you to do 3D at the same time, so you can do 3D and up above at the same time--you can see the relationship of this building to its modern locale. And, by the way, it's just in the shadow, it's very close to the Capitoline Hill; it's a hop, skip and a jump from the Capitoline Hill, this area of Rome. It's actually the so-called Jewish Ghetto area of Rome--it served as a ghetto in times past and is still referred to that way today--and it has some of the best restaurants in Rome. If you have never had carciofi alla Judea, Jewish artichokes, wow, they are incredible, and there are several, lots of restaurants in this area that has [have] them. They're a real Roman treat. It's considered a very characteristic part of the cuisine of ancient Rome, and it's definitely something to experience. But we see the Theater of Marcellus right here, and you can see, both the façade, which is the ancient part of it, but also the rest of the building and the way in which it is used today as a condominium with apartments opening off these lovely courtyards with trees and plants and flowers and all sorts of things there. And there's another famous temple, the Temple of Apollo that is located right outside; there are at least three columns preserved of that temple, but also its podium right in front of the Theater of Marcellus.



This is again Google Earth. You can look not only at what the building looks like today, but you can re-create; now, in these last couple of months, they've enabled us to re-create ancient Rome as well, and one can do that for all of the buildings that we'll be looking at this semester, and this one is their re-creation--it's fairly simple--but their re-creation of the Theater of Marcellus. And it allows us to look at some of the features of that building. Again, sorry that I have to talk so much about terminology at the beginning but, as I mentioned, once we get through this, the first couple of weeks, we won't have to do much of that anymore. But the basic components of a Roman theater were the seating, which is called the cavea, c-a-v-e-a, which is this semicircular seating that we see here. The cavea is usually divided into a series of wedge-shaped sections--which you cannot see here, but I'll show you in another view in a moment--wedge-shaped sections that are called, each are called the cuneus, c-u-n-e-u-s, cuneus. And then there is a stage building--we're seeing the back of that here--but a stage building facing the seating, called a scaenae frons, s-c-a-e-n-a-e f-r-o-n-s, a scaenae frons.



What's important to us here, in the context of this lecture, is that while the Greeks built their theaters--and Greek theaters were the main prototype for Roman theaters--while the Greeks built their theaters on hillsides, the Romans were not content, as a civilization that was interested primarily in urban centers, the Romans were not content to build their theaters on hills. They didn't want to be constrained by having to build their theaters where hills happened to be, and so now, with concrete construction, what they were able to do instead was to build a hill out of concrete anywhere they wanted to build a hill out of concrete, right in the center of downtown Rome, and then hollow that concrete out in order to create the entrances and exits from that structure. And that's exactly what they did for the Theater of Marcellus.



If we look at this detail of the outside of the Theater of Marcellus, we will see that this building, made out of concrete, is, like the others we've talked about today, faced with some kind of stone. In this case the stone is travertine. The decision of Augustus was to get this more expensive stone, bring it from Tivoli, and use it for this structure. Blocks of stone, ashlar blocks of stone, as you can see here, and interspersing, among the arcades, columns; columns that, as were pointed out before, have no structural purpose whatsoever; columns that serve only as decoration, and the fact that they were decoration is apparent in the fact that they have varied the orders here. We see the Doric order used for the first story and the Ionic order used for the second story, and we think there may have been a third story; today what you see up there is part of the later construction. But if there was a third story, whether that had columns or pilasters, which you'll remember are flat columns, if it had those, those were probably of the Corinthian order. Because that is exactly the scheme that we see on the later Colosseum: Doric, Ionic and alternately Corinthian. But we're sure at least of the Doric and of the Ionic.



So these columns have no structural purpose whatsoever; purely decorative. In a sense they're kind of the icing on the cake. They don't hold up the building but they decorate it in a very nice way, and it shows you that the Romans are beginning to use what the Greeks used as structural components of their buildings, namely columns, to hold up walls, to hold up roofs, they are using them for purely decorative purposes, playing around with their original purpose and using them in a different way, and we see that happening in spades here. If you go into the building you will see the corridors of the Theater of Marcellus. You will see what first looks like a barrel vault, done out of concrete construction, resting on stone, on travertine piers. But you see that that barrel vault curves. A curving barrel vault is technically called an annular vault, a-n-n-u-l-a-r. You see an annular vault here, or a diagram of an annular vault here. It's essentially again a barrel vault that curves. We sometimes refer to it as a ring vault, because of its shape. So you see those annular vaults used in the Theater of Marcellus. These are the same vaults that will be used ultimately in the Colosseum.



A quick view of a typical Roman theater, the Theater of Marcellus in Rome, and a typical Greek theater. This is the famous Theater at Epidaurus, of the mid-fourth century B.C. in Greece. And I show you -- just wanted to point out the main differences. They look superficially alike in that both of them have an orchestra, they have an area of seats, they have a stage building, but there are some important differences. One is--and you can't see that over here -- but the Greek theater had a round orchestra; the Roman theater always has a semicircular orchestra. Both of them have seats, the cavea. Here you can see these wedge-shaped sections of seats called the cuneus, that both Greek theaters and also Roman theaters had. Both of them have stage buildings, although the stage building is more prominent in the Roman context. But the most important distinction is the one I've already drawn, and that is, as you can see at Epidaurus, the Greeks build their theaters on hilltops; you can see the trees and part of the hill very clearly here. The Romans build theirs on hills made out of concrete -- not always, there are some exceptions to that. We do have some Roman theaters built on hills, when the hill happened to be in a good location and particularly beautifully sited, but for the most part Romans build them on their own concrete construction.



I've mentioned the Monument of Victor Emmanuel, the Vittoriano, and I just wanted to say a couple more words about it because--and you'll see how it fits into the context here in a moment--because it's a nineteenth-century building. And it's a building that was put up to honor the first king of the kingdom of Italy. His name was Victor Emmanuel I. It was put up in 1885, and you see it here, again, a major landmark in the city. This is a Google Earth image once again. But the reason I show it to you in this context today is that it is in a sense terraced on the slope of the Capitoline Hill. You see Michelangelo's oval piazza up there. It's terraced on the slope, a series of levels. Staircases leading to terraces, leading to other terraces, leading to the top of the building, decorated with statuary. It's a real experience to climb up it. It's an amazing place to go. It has the Tomb of the Italian Unknown Soldier here, with guards and an eternal flame and all of those things. And I must add, for any of you who have not been in Rome in the last year, and who are hoping to go sometime soon, or whenever in the future, they have just added, on top of the Victor--it was always a great place to climb up and see great views of Rome--but they have just added an elevator, a modern elevator that they've created, that you can now take up, taking you even higher than you were ever able to go before. The views of Rome from there are among the most spectacular that one can see in the city. So I happened--unfortunately when I was there this past June it was raining, and it doesn't rain in Rome that often at that time of year, but it was, so many of the pictures that I took are sort of a grey background and so on and so forth. But nonetheless some of the most spectacular views you can see of the city. So don't miss out on that opportunity.



But I show it to you in this context because of all of this terracing up a hill. The idea for this kind of thing goes way back to the second century B.C., and comes from buildings like this one. This is, without any question, the masterpiece of Roman concrete architecture, concrete construction, sanctuary design, in the second and first centuries B.C. We're not absolutely sure of its date. For a long time--this is, by the way, the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, at a town called Palestrina. The date is very controversial. There are many who long associated it with the Roman general Sulla, and said that it dated to 80 B.C. There are others who have contended that it's much earlier than that; it dates to the second century B.C, and if it dates to the second century B.C, it's even more amazing, because that means it comes at the beginning rather than at the end of this second and first century B.C. development. I tend now--I've gone back and forth. I taught it as a Sullan building for quite awhile. Now I've been teaching it the last few years as a second-century building. It probably doesn't matter all that much; it dates to one or the other and it's an example of what was going on at that particular time. But I'm giving you a date this year as second century B.C., which I think, at this juncture, is probably--my personal opinion is that's probably where it belongs.



You're looking at it here. It is an incredible--it is part of an incredible hill town. Just like Cori, the city of Palestrina is a beautiful hill town. You can see it here with all the wonderful red roofs of the town that tie the design of the town together. The culminating monument of that town is still the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia. Once again the Romans have found a spectacular locale for this sanctuary cum theater cum shopping mall, mecca for Romans of its day, on this hillside. Once again they have in fact taken over the entire hillside. They have terraced the hillside, as we can see, and they've essentially poured concrete on that hillside to create a system of ramps and stairways and with a temple at the very apex.



It is pretty well preserved today. You can see there's an awful lot of it still there. If you're coming by car, you can either park down here or up there, and you can make your way up the ramps, up the staircase to the various levels, and then up to the theatrical entranceway into the uppermost part. The Temple of Fortuna herself, which was at the apex and was located probably in what may have been a kind of mountain alcove, at that particular time, was transformed in the seventeenth century, by the famous Barberini family--famous Italian family; popes came from that family and so on--transformed into--they were very smart too--transformed into a nice little palace that they could go and stay in when they felt like it. A small palace but one that takes the exact shape of that uppermost part of the sanctuary. I'll show that to you in a moment. Here's a view from Google Earth. You can see Google Earth doesn't always work. When you go out to some of the smaller places, it's hard to zero in on it well enough to get a decent focus. But you can see it actually here. You can go to Palestrina and see it on Google Earth. These are the various tiers, with the palace at the uppermost part.



Here's a restored view--it's on your Monument List--that gives you a sense of what the building looked like in antiquity. You can see the entranceway was down here, a small arched entranceway. But you really needed to go up the ramps. You could go up on either side. So we see this composite, just like we saw at the Tabularium, this combination of ramps and staircases to make your way up; varied experiences, but at the same time a pre-determined path. Because while you had some choice when you first arrived, you could go up the ramp on either left and right--and you can see it was a covered ramp in antiquity--but when you got here you had one choice, you had to go up the stairway, to this level, and then there were some shops here you could explore. But then if you wanted to go up to the next level, you had to go back to the central stairway, up to this level, back to the central stairway, and then to the stairway in the shape of a theater at the uppermost part. So again, experience is stressed, your experience of the building was stressed, but at the same time your path was determined by the Roman designer.



This is another view of the same, where we can see the entranceway, the ramps, the staircase leading you from one to the other; the uppermost staircase. Here you can well see the theatrical -- the way in which the theater, the semi-circular theater is used both as an attractive entrance stairway to the structure, but at the same time as a place where performances could actually take place. Then what's called a hemicycle. You see several hemicycles here; h-e-m-i-c-y-c-l-e, these curved areas. The columns follow that curve. You see that hemicycle at the very top, and then at the apex of the structure the shrine of Fortuna herself, a small round shrine. In fact it's almost an anticlimax to see how small the shrine at the uppermost part of the structure is.



How did the Romans achieve this? They created, as you can see here, a series--or they converted the hillside into a series of man-made terraces. They built those terraces up, in some instances, by barrel vaults. You can see the series of concrete barrel vaults here, as they have built some elements up along the way. And the ultimate result was what you see here -- the same sort of thing we saw before, the ramps, the staircase, the hemicycles with columns supporting a curved wall, a series of shops, the spectacular theater-like staircase, the curved hemicycle at the uppermost part, and then peaking up at the top the Temple of Fortuna herself.



It's hard to conjure up in a classroom in New Haven the actual experience that one has when one goes to Palestrina and climbs through this structure, and it's not as well preserved today as it once was, obviously, in antiquity. But in the few minutes that remain I want to try to recapture, or try to take you through that experience. We're obviously--and to show you how arduous it actually was. It's a climb up there, and in fact this is one of those examples, and there are many in Italy, that one likes to call Stairmasters made by nature, essentially -- places that you can go and you can put, exert a lot of effort into making your way to the top of this sanctuary. The best natural Stairmaster in Italy is of course--any of you who have been along the Amalfi Coast, know there's nowhere on the Amalfi Coast that you don't have to climb up and down, at multiple times of day. And that's exactly what's happening here. And you can see how steep this path up the ramp was, and we're going up the ramp again. It was covered in antiquity. It's open to the sky today.



As we go along the ramp we see the remnants of some of the capitals. These are travertine capitals, as you can see here, fallen down. But if you look at some of these capitals in detail, you see something quite extraordinary, and that is the capital isn't straight. The uppermost part of the capital slopes. Now why is that? The reason that is, is because if you're going to put columns along the inner wall of the ramp, which is what they did, the column--the capitals--have to conform to the incline of the ramp, and so they have slanted those capitals. The whole idea though of changing--the Greeks would never do something like that; it would be sacrilege to change the shape of a capital. But this Roman architect has done that with abandon here. He needed to do it, because he needed to fit it into the scheme, although he could've not had columns there, but he wanted to have columns there. So he slanted them. This whole, this sort of sacrilegious approach to traditional Greek and Etruscan architecture, the willingness to change things, to experiment--I told you this was a change you believe in--the willingness to change these things, to experiment with them in ways that had never been done before, to go against the tenets of traditional ancient architecture, namely that of the Greeks and Etruscans, is something quintessentially Roman and something that we see happening here, and again heralds a very innovative future.



Here we see again the ramp, we see the capitals, the slant of the capitals, and we see that the work here was done, was concrete faced with opus incertum, both for the walls and also for the ceilings. As one makes one's way up the ramps, we see these alcoves, all of this done--the various shops, the alcoves--all of it done with concrete faced with opus incertum. We see the remains of the hemicycles. You can see the columns made of tufa with travertine capitals supporting this curved attic of the hemicycles. We see the vaulting with its concrete construction. This is an annular vault once again, where we can see the facing in the coffers is opus incertum work. Another view of that, both the wall and the annular vault, decorated with opus incertum work; a detail of that opus incertum work to show you how very attractive it was. It&a

Professor Kleiner explores the civic, commercial, and religious buildings of Pompeii, an overview made possible only because of an historical happenstance--the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which buried the city at the height of its development. While the lecture features the resort town's public architecture--its forum, basilica, temples, amphitheater, theater, and bath complexes--Professor Kleiner also describes such fixtures of daily life as a bakery and a fast food restaurant. The lecture culminates with a brief overview of tomb architecture in Pompeii and a moving account of what happened to the inhabitants of the city of Pompeii when disaster struck.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 53-58 (glossary of building types)

Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 157-166

Transcript



January 22, 2009



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Last time we talked about a number of monuments that were connected to one another geographically and also chronologically, and were also made out of the same material: concrete faced with opus incertum. I remind you of three of those today: of the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina; of the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor at Tivoli, in the center; and then on the right the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina. We're going to do something entirely different today. We're going to look at a single city, one city, in all its aspects: its public and private architecture, its civic, commercial, and religious buildings. We can't do this sort of thing very often, because too few Roman cities are either well preserved enough or well-excavated enough to allow such an overview. But this is no ordinary city. This is a very special city. The city we will be concentrating on today is Pompeii.



Pompeii was located in an area of Italy called Campania. It was located near Naples; it was located near the Mediterranean Sea. It was a small resort town in the late first century B.C. and into the first century A.D. And you can see it on this map here, and it's right here. You can see that this area of Campania is obviously south of Rome. It is along, again, the Mediterranean Sea. And you can see Pompeii here also, with its sister city of Herculaneum, and some of the other well-known cities from this area: Boscoreale, Oplontis, for example, and Naples itself, ancient Neapolis. You can see this cluster of these cities that make up Campania. This was an area--the town itself again was a small resort town. It was a town that obviously had its own population of people who made their money largely from commerce, because they were located so close to the sea. But it was also a spot that was highly favored by the glitterati of Rome, who used to come down to this area of Rome, not only to go to Pompeii itself, but to establish villas, to build villas in the vicinity of Pompeii. And we have imperial villas at places like Oplontis and at a place called Boscotrecase that is located here as well, and along what is now the Amalfi Coast and on the island of Capri. So this was a town again that was noticed and was visited, even by the most elite in the city of Rome, in the capital city of Rome itself.



But what's very important for us, from the outset, is to recognize that although Pompeii, as we know it today, was essentially a Roman city, it had a history that was much longer than that, that went back much further than that. And I'd like to go over some of the major highlights of the history of Pompeii, because they will situate us and will help us to understand the city's architecture. The history of Pompeii, as I noted, is much longer than the history of Roman Pompeii. It goes back as far as Rome itself. It goes back to the eighth century B.C.--the same Iron Age period--when Romulus was founding the city of Rome. Pompeii goes back that far as well. It was first overseen by an Italic tribe called the Oscans, but the Oscans were soon taken over by an even more powerful tribe called the Samnites. And the Samnites are in fact extremely important for the city of Pompeii and for the architecture that we'll review today.



The Samnite period in Pompeii lasted from the fourth through the third and even into the second centuries B.C., up to 80 B.C., because it was in 89 that Pompeii fell to Rome. We've talked about Rome colonizing this particular part of Italy -- not only the area right around it, but the area south of it -- and Pompeii fell to Rome in an important military campaign in 89 B.C. And in 80 B.C. Sulla made Pompeii a Roman colony. What happened thereafter was the Samnites, who had built homes for themselves and public buildings that we'll study here, the Samnites were essentially thrown out of their homes. Their property was confiscated, and that property was given instead to the Roman veterans. We've talked about the fact that that was the way the Romans operated. They paid back their veterans for loyal service by giving them land, and they usually gave them land of those that they had conquered. So that happens here as well; Samnite property confiscated, and the Roman veterans settle in their homes and begin to redo them, settle into using their public buildings but begin to remake them in the Roman image. The next century and a half saw the construction of Pompeii's most famous buildings, but we should not forget, and we'll concentrate in part on that today, that some of these buildings had their genesis under the Samnites. During this period there was a very high civilization in Pompeii. There was trade with Greek cities and especially with the Greek city of Neapolis, Neapolis being the ancient name for Naples.



The next very important year in the history of Pompeii was the year A.D. 62, when the city was literally-- the city of Pompeii was literally shaken to its foundations by a very significant earthquake--a very significant earthquake indeed. And to give you some sense of that earthquake, I show you a frieze that encircles a shrine that was located in the house, or that was commissioned for the house, as decoration and as a place to place the household gods that the owner and his family worshipped. The shrine had a frieze around it. The man himself, by the way, was named Lucius Caecilius Iucundus. And we're very lucky--you don't have to remember his name, but Lucius Caecilius Iucundus--and Iucundus, fortunately we have a portrait preserved of Iucundus. So we can get a good sense of what he looked like, literally warts and all, because you can see that he had a huge wart on the lower left side of his face. And he was willing to have himself memorialized, and here we are sitting and looking at him today in this classroom in New Haven, as he was really was, with this large wart on the lower left side of his face. But a wonderful portrait of Iucundus, the owner of this particular house, who was obviously so struck, and probably so effected in his own life by the earthquake, that he decided to have a relief commissioned that would depict the event of 62 A.D.



And you see exactly -- you see what is happening here. You can see, in fact, the great Temple of Jupiter, the Capitolium of Pompeii, which we'll talk about today, literally collapsing. And you can see that in front of that temple were two tall bases with equestrian statues honoring important people of the city. Those look also like they are shaking in their boots, so to speak, and about to fall over. If you look down here, you see the city wall. And note, your ashlar masonry, your opus quadratum, and the use of headers and stretchers in this wall, the wall of the city of Pompeii. But you can see the gate is not doing too well; it also seems to be tottering and about to fall down. So this is a graphic depiction of what happened then, and you can--it gives you some sense of the significance of this for the people of Pompeii.



Now at the end of this, like in so many natural disasters--obviously these people loved living where they did; it's a beautiful part of the world--and they essentially stood up and dusted themselves off and began to remake their city, to restore their city to what it was. And we have, from this point on, from 62 on, almost immediately seventeen years of frenzied building activity in which the Pompeians tried to bring their city back from the dead, so to speak, to bring it back to what it had once been. But you know the punch line here, you know the end of the story. You know that all of this work, all of this seventeen years of hard work was all for naught, because on that fateful day of August 24th in 79 A.D. the long dormant volcano of Vesuvius--which you see looming up behind the Temple of Jupiter in Pompeii today--the long dormant volcano of Vesuvius erupted, covering the city of Pompeii and all of its sister cities in a mass, or in a blanket of ash and lava.



Covering it forever? Well not quite forever; almost forever. Because as you also know, the city was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, and when it was rediscovered what happened there first was a period of treasure hunting. Well-to-do individuals, primarily from Europe, made a beeline for Pompeii, once it was rediscovered, and began to build their own personal collections of art from what lay around. They took jewelry; they took metal items, precious metal items. They even did the unspeakable by cutting portrait paintings and other paintings out of the walls and taking them back to decorate their own palaces and villas in other parts of the world. That went on for a while, but fortunately not too long. The archaeologists gained the upper hand and we begin to see not long after that a period of scientific excavation. And I show you two images here, which show that scientific excavation, which show some of the houses of Pompeii being revealed by archaeologists. And, of course, it was all--the good work that they have done, and work continues apace at Pompeii excavations still go on in parts of the city, that have allowed most of the city, as far as we can tell, to be revealed to us today.



Now this tragedy that befell Pompeii, in August of 79, was indeed a tragedy for them, for the people who lived there obviously. It was also a tragedy for the reigning emperor, a man by the name of Titus, T-i-t-u-s, who's honored in the famous Arch of Titus in Rome. We'll talk about him and his architecture in Rome later in the semester. But it was a disaster for him, and he had to contend with a plague and a fire in Rome also at the same time. It was very difficult for him, and poor man, even though he was quite young, died of natural causes after only three years in office. And I think it was in part this catastrophe that had happened, in the Bay of Naples area, that led in part to his--the stress of it led in part to his demise. So this was a great tragedy for him, a great tragedy for the people of Pompeii, a great tragedy for Rome. But it was a stroke of good luck for archaeologists, and in a sense for us as well, because of course what happened to Pompeii is something very different than what happened to Rome. What happened to Pompeii is that it was--its life was snuffed out all at once, it came to an end all at once. Compare this to Rome, which has been inhabited over millennia. In Rome buildings have been redone, rethought, remade over time.



That never happened in Pompeii because Pompeii again died essentially in August of 79, and everything that was there was preserved, just as it was, and that's how it was discovered when it was excavated in the mid-eighteenth century, as it had been -- exactly how it had been, on that day in August in 79. This is extremely important. It's one of our only really fixed chronological dates, and it provides us with an incredible laboratory of material. Because, again, everything--nothing is changed from the time that it was left there, except for what the treasure hunters removed. But for the most part nothing has changed, and we can study it as it was. The other thing that you must remember from the outset, that although what was revealed by excavators in the eighteenth century, nineteenth century and beyond even today, was not just the--it was the Pompeii of August 79. But the buildings that stood there were not just the buildings that had been renovated between the earthquake of 62 and the eruption of Vesuvius of 79, but some of the very earliest buildings, including the Samnite structures, still stood. And so when we look back we will be able to trace, in a sense, the city of Pompeii and its architecture, from the time of the Samnites up until the time of the emperor Titus.



I want to begin with a plan of the city of Pompeii, and you see it here. And the plan that I show you is a plan of the city as it was in A.D. 79. We see all of the buildings at that juncture. We see that the shape of the city is essentially an irregular rectangle, and we also can see very well that the city is surrounded by a wall, a protective wall, as were--so it was walled like all the other cities that we've talked about thus far this term. You can see some of the major buildings very clearly: the amphitheater that we'll talk about today, the theater and the music hall over here. You can see the streets of the city, the cardo or north-south street, and the decumanus, or east-west street of the city, as well as the fairly regular blocks where the houses and the shops were located. What is important to note, however, is that the Samnite city was obviously much smaller than the city of 79. And to recapture a sense of the Samnite city, we have to look at the bottom left side of this plan, where we see the original Samnite city, which seems to have been roughly a fairly regular square. And in that Samnite city, the Romans--and they followed Roman surveying methodology here--they looked to what was exactly the center of the city and they placed the cardo, the north-south street, and the decumanus, the east-west street, at that exact mid-point of the city. And then they located, as they liked to do, the forum of the city, the great meeting and marketplace, right at the intersection of the cardo and of the decumanus. And that is exactly where we see the forum that was begun in the Samnite period, right at the intersection of those two original streets. Then over time, obviously, as they expanded the city, the cardo grew and the decumanus grew. And it didn't end up exactly at the center of the larger city, but it was at the center of the original city.



Let's begin, in fact, with the Forum, because the Forum was begun itself during the time of the Samnites. You'll see from your Monument List that I've given you a date of the second half of the second century B.C. for the Forum at Pompeii, and again that indicates to us, because of the chronology of the city, of the history of the city, that it was begun in Samnite times. You see here on the screen an excellent plan of the Forum, as it was and as it grew over time, as buildings were added over time. This plan is from one of your textbooks, from Ward-Perkins, and I think it deserves careful study. Let's describe it together today. We see that the central part of the Forum, which was again essentially the main meeting and marketplace of the forum, is a very elongated rectangle, with a temple, a Capitolium, a Temple to Jupiter, located on one of the short ends. And you should be immediately--your mind's eye should go immediately to the sanctuary designs that we saw last time. Think, for example, of the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor at Tivoli, where we saw that the temple was pushed up against one of the back walls--in that case the long wall--and dominated the space in front of it. We see the same kind of scheme here, where we see this rectangular space with the temple pushed up--in this case on one of the short walls--pushed up against the back wall and then dominating the space in front of it.



The Forum itself is surrounded by columns, a colonnade, as you can see here, and it is open to the sky, open to the sky. Then deployed around it all the other important buildings that needed to be in a forum: the curia or Senate House, over here; the basilica or law court over here; another temple, in this case the Temple of Apollo; and then a series of buildings that were added later, on the right side. A wonderful building of a woman, that we're not going to be talking about this semester, called Eumachia--and it gives you some sense that women could wield power. It wasn't easy. They couldn't vote and they couldn't hold public office, but they could sometimes wield power, and this particular woman did, in Pompeii -- a very large building that was for her and for her trade guild. A lararium or a place, a shrine; a market or macellum up there. Some of these added later. But the ones that are particularly critical to our understanding of the Samnite city are the Capitolium and the Basilica, which both date to the second century B.C.



Here's a view of--oh I'm sorry, I did want to say something about the Google Earth image on the left. This is a Google Earth image, which I tried to take in such a way that one can see it, almost exactly the same vantage point as the plan. And you can see everything here that I've already pointed out: the open rectangular space, the colonnade, the temple pushed up against the back wall -- the Temple of Jupiter, the Basilica over here, the Temple of Apollo, Eumachia's building here, the Senate House over here, and so on. And this again underscores the value of Google Earth, as one can look down on these buildings and compare what one sees to the master plan.



This is a view of the colonnade. It's a two-story colonnade at the Forum of Pompeii, and you can see the same thing that we saw happening in the Theater of Marcellus in Rome, that the columns that they have used -- they have looked at the Greek orders, the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian -- and they have selected here to use the Doric for the first story and the Ionic for the second story. This colonnade does not date to the Samnite period. We believe that it was put up later, but it's made out of white limestone, and it probably again does belong to a renovation of the Forum of a somewhat later date. Look also near the columns and you will see a series of bases: a large base over here, a smaller base over here. You see a lot of these still in the Forum today. And what these bases were for, of course, were to support statues, statues, and then there would've been inscription on the base identifying who that was. Sometimes they were statues of the reigning dynast in Rome--in the age of Augustus, it might be Augustus, or his wife Livia--but they also honored the most important people of the city of Pompeii: magistrates, great benefactors. Eumachia we know had a portrait inside her own building honoring her, standing next to the empress Livia. So that's--you have to imagine that while the Forum is quite empty today, that in antiquity there would have been all of these bases with equestrian statues and full-length statues, vying with one another for attention -- the individuals honored there sort of jostling with one another to underscore their fame, at least within their own city.



This is a view of the Temple of Jupiter, or the Capitolium, in the Forum of Pompeii; an extremely important building, and one that you can see from the Monument List, also what began to be put up quite early, in 150 B.C. But its triple cella, honoring the Capitoline Triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, was, it won't surprise you to hear, put up only after the Romans made Pompeii a colony, and that happened in 80 B.C. So you'll see that I've given you a date of 150 for the temple, but 80 B.C. for the renovation of the cella to incorporate these three spaces for statues of the Capitoline Triad. Let's look at the plan first. You see it down here at the bottom -- you see it down here at the bottom, and you can see that the plan of the temple corresponds to plans that we've seen for other temples that we've studied thus far this term--the Temple of Portunus, for example--where we see this combination of an Etruscan plan and a Greek elevation. You can see here the façade emphasis; single staircase; deep porch; freestanding columns in that porch; the flat back wall as was characteristic of Etruscan temple design; the plain side walls over here. We can see all of that in this plan. And we also know that the building was made out of stone, tufa, in this case tufa, not from Rome but tufa from this part of Italy, from the Campanian region. Tufa there for both the columns and also the capital. So a stone building. So this same combination of Etruscan plan and Greek elevation that we saw in Rome. This view of the temple also shows you that it had a tall podium, as was characteristic of these other early temples. Here you can see the remains of the stone columns and of the building itself. It's not as well preserved as we wish it were, but enough is there to give us a very good sense of what the Capitolium looked like in ancient Roman times.



I mentioned that the other early structure added to the forum complex was the Basilica of Pompeii, and I'd like to turn to that now. The Basilica of Pompeii dates to around 120 B.C. You see its plan here again, in the bottom left, and you'll remember it splayed off from the Forum to the left bottom side, as you face the Temple of Jupiter. You can see that the plan of the Basilica is very interesting because it actually is quite similar to the plan of the Forum itself. It is a rectangular space, not as large and not as elongated, but nonetheless a rectangular space. Its entranceway is over here, from the Forum. You can see that there are columns inside, a colonnade, just as we saw in the Forum itself. And the building is organized, as is the Forum itself, axially, so that there is a focus: something at the end that serves as the focus, and then the axiality comes from that. We see the focus over here at the end. It's not another temple; it is a tribunal, a tribunal on which the judge would sit to try the law cases that came here. The main difference between the Basilica and the Forum itself is that the Basilica was roofed in antiquity. The roof is no longer there, as you saw in the Google Earth view, but it was roofed in antiquity, whereas again the Forum was open to the sky.



The view that you see of the Basilica as it looks today is also very illuminating. We are looking toward the tribunal. You can see the tribunal is actually extremely well preserved. We get a very good sense of what it looked like in antiquity. It itself has a tall podium. We can imagine the magistrate holding court up here, on the top of that tall podium, between the Corinthian columns, in this case. We're not absolutely sure, but we believe the second story, which has smaller columns--they diminish in size on the second story--also were Corinthian columns, because you can see at least one of them. One of them is restored, at the top right, but that one is a Corinthian capital. So we believe Corinthian order on the lower story, Corinthian order on the second story as well, beginning to show this Roman penchant for the Corinthian order, which we've already discussed. And you can also see here some of the lower parts of the columns that would have been encircling the center of the structure and dividing the central space from two aisles, one on either side. It looks like they're made out of brick, but they're actually made out of a tile that looks like brick; brick wasn't being used quite this early but a tile resembling brick was used in Pompeii, and we can see that served as the core of the columns. They would've been stuccoed over though and looked more like white marble, indicating to us again this desire of the Romans to make things look at least--or the Samnites at this point and ultimately the Romans when they renovated this structure--to make it look as Greek as possible. Yes?



Student: Why are the columns chopped up?



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Why are the columns chopped up? You mean almost all in the same place? These things were often pieced, and so sometimes that can happen. And it's actually one of the--you raise a very interesting issue, because one of the things that archaeologists are beginning to speculate, only recently about--and you see this in some of the most recent literature--is here we say, and I said it today, that this city was preserved exactly as it was in 79. And yet when you look at what it looks like, it's actually in a pretty ruinous state. So that could mean two things. One, that they didn't make all that much progress in that seventeen years, that they worked very hard but that the damage had been so significant that they were not able to bring these things back as much as they had hoped to. But it also may be just the destruction. While the ash and lava covered the city and protected it, it obviously wrought some damage as well, so that some of these things obviously came down and over time the material got washed away or taken away or whatever. But it is curious that they sort of broke in exactly the same place, but it's because of the construction technique and the way in which they were pieced together.



Student: They would've been [inaudible].



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Yes exactly. Let me show you another view of the right-side wall of the Basilica. You see these columns here, again, very regular. There's a young woman standing right here; so that gives you a sense of scale. She's about only up to this point of the column. So you can see how large in scale these were in ancient Roman times. But if you look at the two that are closest to the tribunal, you will see that they have Ionic capitals. So that gives us enough to go on, to speculate that the first story of columns--and there were two stories on the walls, two stories of columns. The lower ones were Ionic--and you can see that they are attached or engaged into the walls; those were Ionic. And then we believe that there was a second story that--we know there was a second story, but that the second story of columns would have been Corinthian capitals, up there.



This is a restored view of what the Basilica would have looked like in 120, after it was built; 120 B.C., after it was built. And you can see here the tribunal; we're looking toward the tribunal. It's two storied, Corinthian order on both stories, tall podium. We see here in black the columns of the central space that divide the center from the two side aisles. And here you can see very well the way in which they created two stories; a bottom story and an upper story. You could walk on that upper story, and using the Ionic capitals in the first story, and smaller Corinthian columns in the second story. And it's important for me to note, in terms of the development, the later development of basilican architecture, that this basilica in Pompeii, of this early date, did not have what's called a clerestory -- c-l-e-r-e s-t-o-r-y, a clerestory. What is a clerestory? A clerestory is a series of windows, open to the outside, that allow views out and light in. This building does not have a clerestory. So it probably, in its heyday, in the Samnite period, was probably on the dark side. But we will see that clerestory, the clerestory, is incorporated into later Roman basilican architecture.



One of the greatest buildings, without any question, at Pompeii, and one that everyone flocks to see--and if you have never been to Pompeii, let me just note that it is a little bit further out than some of the other structures, but it is a to-not-be-missed monument. And, in fact, I know at least one of you has already spoken to me about an upcoming trip to Rome and Pompeii, and consequently I just say that you absolutely need--you can spend days at Pompeii--but you must have a full day, a full day, for Pompeii. Because in order to get to the--not just to see the Forum and what's in the center and a few of the houses; it doesn't take that long, it's a nice walk, it's not a huge distance. But people forget to do it, because it's on the outskirts. But you really must get--the two endpoints are the Amphitheater and the Villa of the Mysteries, both of them absolutely incredible to see and too often missed by tourists, but two of the greatest sites at the city of Pompeii.



This is the Amphitheater as it looks today from the air. The Amphitheater is one of several buildings that were begun immediately upon the Romans making Pompeii a Roman colony in 80 B.C. You can only imagine those veterans, those army veterans of war, who had just been settled in their new homes, clamoring from day one for the Amphitheater, a place where they could go for gladiatorial and animal combat. This is what they wanted to see, and consequently no local magistrate or emperor worth their salt would allow the city to continue without--there was no emperor in 80 B.C.--but would allow the city to go on without an amphitheater. So that was one of the first orders of business. This Amphitheater at Pompeii, which dates we believe to 80 to 70 B.C., is one--is an incredibly important building for the history of Roman architecture, because it is our first preserved stone amphitheater, and all the amphitheaters that come later, including the great Colosseum in Rome, are based on buildings like this one. This was a great experiment in amphitheater design, already in 80 to 70 B.C.



How did they go about building this amphitheater? What they seem to have done is to excavate the central area, the earth of the central area, to create a space for the oval arena, which you see here. And I've put the terms on the Monument List for you: the arena, which you see here. So they've excavated that central space, placed the arena there. Then they have piled up earth. It's essentially an earthen bowl, is what they've created here, an earthen bowl, with the excavated space for the arena, and then piled up the earth on the outside to support the seats, to support the seats, to serve as a support for the seats. There was no natural hill here, so they had to do this on their own. So they build up the earth, they place the seats--they line that earthen bowl with seats, stone seats--and they create the cavea of the amphitheater, because we use the same term for the seats of an amphitheater as for the seats of a theater. The cavea, or c-a-v-e-a, the cavea, or the seats of the amphitheater. And you can also see here indicated the wedge-shaped sections of the seats. Just as in the theater, they are called the same thing, the cuneus, c-u-n-e-u-s, or in the plural cunei, c-u-n-e-i. So these wedge-shaped individual sections, a cuneus--all of them together, cunei--the cunei or wedge-shaped sections of the seats apparent here.



The exits and entrances--and there are a couple of major ones on either side--those have a colorful and unforgettable name. I guarantee you, you will remember this name for the rest of your lives. Those exits and entrances are called vomitoria, which means they literally spit forth spectators; vomitoria, these entrances and exits to the amphitheater. Let me also note that the outer ring--and the outer ring is extremely important because it buttresses the earthen bowl--that outer ring is made of concrete, concrete that we'll see is faced with opus incertum work. And the entire structure is encircled by an annular vault -- one of these ring vaults that encircles the entire structure, that is made out of concrete. So another early example of the masterful use of concrete faced with opus incertum work, in this case in the Amphitheater in Pompeii.



I show you a Google Earth image of this, which gives you a very good sense of the oval shape of the original structure. I think it's important to compare the exterior of the Amphitheater of Pompeii, which is extremely well preserved, as you can see here, with the experiment at the much earlier Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, where we also saw this use of concrete faced with opus incertum work. If we look at the façade of th e Amphitheater at Pompeii, we'll see first of all how exceedingly well preserved it was. We also see this unique staircase here, with stairs--and I'll show you a side view in a moment where you can see those stairs--stairs leading up, on both sides, to the apex. And then a series of arches, in diminishing size, larger in the center and diminishing in size as they go down the ramp, to correspond to the shape of the ramp, and then additional arcades over here. These are what are called blind arcades, because you'll see that they have a wall in the back. You can't walk in these arcades and get into the Amphitheater. There are only two barrel-vaulted corridors--and you saw them in the general view--one on either long side of the oval, that you can actually walk in and out of the Amphitheater from them. But you can go up the staircase and enter the Amphitheater as well from the cavea; go up to the top and then just go at the upper most part of the steps and walk down to your seats that way. So the blind arcades we can see here. We can see that once again, just as we saw in some of the other buildings we looked at last time, the way in which they've used opus incertum for most of the wall, the facing for the concrete for most of the wall, but they have used stone--both blocks of stone and these voussoir blocks, wedge-shaped blocks--to articulate the arcades, to make them more prominent, and also to give the building additional stability.



What's interesting here, and one of the reasons I also bring back the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, is the fact that the Romans again are giving you some options in terms of how you get into this building. You can get in through the barrel-vaulted corridors, or you can climb up this distinctive staircase. And, by the way, we have no other--this truly is a unique staircase--we have no other one like it in the history of Roman architecture. So you have those options. But again, they are still pre-determining the way in which you go. They give you a few options, but within that scheme it is clearly a pre-determined path, up the staircase over here, and then through only those two barrel-vaulted corridors. And we talked about that at the Fortuna Primigenia Sanctuary -- up the ramps and then up the staircase in the center -- a very similar way of thinking about getting people from one place to another, in an orderly way.



The staircase is so distinctive that--and here I show you a side view of it, where you can actually see the steps leading up. And if you go visit there, you should try both options; go down the corridor, but also it's a lot of fun to go up the steps and into the cavea. But it's so distinctive, and never to be repeated, that when we look--there's a painting that survives from a Pompeian house. We'll look at it in more detail later in the semester, but I wanted to just show it to you now, because it is so apparent that it is a representation of the Amphitheater at Pompeii, which is not surprising, since this is a house in Pompeii. But you see that distinctive staircase here, with the steps, the way in which you can enter into the cavea. You get a sense of the cavea and the kind of goings on that happened in this Pompeii Amphitheater. But you can also see--this is a very important detail that is, and this is the only place where we actually have a representation of it--you can see that at the upper most part of the cavea, there is an awning, called a velarium--and I've put that word on the Monument List for you--an awning that was supported by poles, that were located on brackets at the uppermost part of the amphitheater. And that awning, the purpose of that awning--the Pompeiians seemed to have a thing for protecting, the Romans in general, for protecting people in inclement weather. So they put these awnings up; when it rained they put these awnings up to protect those who were there to see a gladiatorial combat, to protect them from that rain.



One last view of the Amphitheater of Pompeii. We are looking at its bowl-shaped arena, as you can see here, and the seats that do survive, to get a sense of the interior. Here you can see very well the two-barrel vaulted entrances and exits, one on either side, and that's the only way--again those blind arcades, you can't get in that way, and you can see that very well here. Those are the only entrance or exits into the theater, besides the staircase. And in the introductory lecture I made the point, and I'll just bring it back home again, that the Yale Bowl here in New Haven is based on the Amphitheater in Pompeii, there's no question about that. In fact, if one goes back in the literature on the Bowl, and its original construction, it is even mentioned in original articles that the architects were looking back--and I'm not making this up--the architects were actually looking back at the Pompeii Amphitheater as a model. And you can see the relationship. When you look at the Bowl from the air, you can see it's kind of a bowl shape, almost exactly like the shape of the Pompeii Amphitheater. This aerial view, by the way, was taken at the time of the hundredth game between Yale and Harvard, and you can see the stands were packed. The major difference between these two amphitheaters is the fact that the one in Pompeii was made to hold 20,000 people. The one in Yale can hold up to as many as 78,000 people. So we have a larger amphitheater, so to speak, here than they did, and do, in the city of Pompeii.



I want to move from the Amphitheater to the other great entertainment district of Pompeii, and that was the Theater and the Music Hall, the Theater and the Music Hall. And I want to show those to you fairly quickly. We see them here in plan, the Theater in red and the Music Hall here in a kind of, I don't know, chartreuse. As you can see, it dates to 80 to 70 B.C. -- so another example of a building that was added when the Romans gained ascendance of this part of the world. And a couple of terms again. We can see, if we look at the Theater, we can see the fact that the Theater is semi-circular in shape, or the cavea is semi-circular in shape. We can see the wedge-shaped cunei up there. We can also see that the orchestra is semi-circular in shape, not round, and that there's a scena, s-c-e-n-a, or a scaenae frons, as I called it last time, a stage building at the front. There is also a space over here, which we call the porticus--and again I put that on the Monument List for you--the porticus. What was the porticus? The porticus was an open rectangular space with covered colonnades on either side. The purpose of the porticus was to have a place where people could go during intermission to stretch their legs, during the intermission of the comedy or tragedy that they were there to see. And there were little shops along the way, little spaces along the way. Some of them served as shops for playbills and other souvenirs from the evening's experience, but also that served as spaces where props and scenery and costumes and all sorts of things that were needed in the theatrical performances could be kept. So that's the porticus.



Then over here we see the Music Hall. It's a smaller version of the Theater, but it's designed in exactly the same way, with a semi-circular orchestra, the semi-circular cavea, the division into cunei, as you can see here, a small and much less elaborate scena in the front. The major difference between the two--and we see this not just in Pompeii but throughout Roman architecture--is not just the scale, that the theater's always much bigger than the music hall, but that the theater was open to the sky, and the music hall had a roof and that roof. The reason for the roof in the smaller music hall, and the reason for the smaller size, was to make the acoustics as good as they could possibly be, and that was easier to do in a roofed building and in a building of smaller scale.



A Google Earth view of the Theater and Music Hall, as they look today--and you can see they're quite well preserved; you can see the exact shapes that you looked at in plan over there. Here's our porticus, for example. You can get a sense of how pleasant that might be able to be during intermission time. What this view also gives you a sense of, however, is the way in which these two buildings are embedded in the rest of the city; they do make up an entertainment district, but at the same time they are very close to the city streets that have along them houses and shops and so on and so forth. So very closely embedded into the life, into the commercial life and the residential life, of the city, even though this was intended again as a great entertainment area for those who lived there.



And I made this point before, but I'll make it quickly again, that while Roman theaters, like the Theater at Pompeii, are based on Greek prototypes, there are some differences. The two theaters--this is the Greek Theater at Epidaurus in the mid-fourth century B.C. They both have the stone seats; they both have--which is called the cavea--they both have these wedge-shaped sections of seats; they both have a stage building, although the Greek one is much simpler. But the major differences between the two is that the Greek theater has a circular orchestra, whereas the Roman theater has a--and this is the Theater of Pompeii--has a semicircular orchestra. And the other major difference, the most significant one, is the Greeks built their theaters on hillsides, as you can see at Epidaurus. The Romans built their theaters--and this is the case in Pompeii-- on a hill made out of concrete.



I want to turn to an extremely important building, and one that I am going to come back to on a number of occasions during this semester. So put an asterisk next to this one as a particularly important building and one that it's almost certain I'll find some way of incorporating into the first midterm, because I think it's so significant, and it will turn up again and again and again in the course of the term, especially when we talk about later bath architecture. It is the Stabian Baths of Pompeii. It dates to the second half of the second century B.C., and it was remodeled in the first half of the first century B.C. The Stabian Baths are one of several bath buildings at Pompeii. I mentioned in the introductory lecture that these houses in Pompeii did not have running water and so access to bathing and to water for daily use was obviously critical, and the baths served that purpose, the place where one could go and bathe. But they were also--they also became great social centers, great places where you really wanted to go and hang out with your friends, while you were sitting in the sauna. And so they take on a very--they are a very important piece of life in cities like Pompeii.



The Stabian Baths, as their date indicates, are very early. They're begun already under the Samnites, and they have some extremely interesting features. And once again I'm going to have to go over some of the bath terminology. You can see here that if you walk along the street, you just see a series of cubicles, which served as shops, so fairly unprepossessing. But there is an entranceway through those shops into a very large open space, surrounded by columns on three sides, that is called the palaestra of the baths. The palaestra was the exercise courts, where you jogged and ran around and so on, and after you exerted yourself and got all sweaty, you could jump into the pool, that was located over here. This was not a place to do laps, it was pretty much a soaking pool or a pool where you could cool off. But the technical term for that is either a piscina, which is what's on the Monument List for you, or a natatio, n-a-t-a-t-i-o, a little pool where you could splash yourself after exerting yourself by exercising in the palaestra.



The bath block itself, the bathing rooms themselves, are located on the other side of the plan, on the right side, as you see it here, the northern side actually, of the plan. And we see two sets of spaces: this set of four down here, this one, this one, this one and this one; and then a set of a comparable number of rooms up there. These early Roman baths, there was a separation between the men's section of the baths and the women's section of the baths. And I'm sorry, ladies, but we'll have to accept the fact that at least in ancient Pompeii the women's section was quite nondescript. It was much smaller than the men's--at least they had one, thank goodness--but it was smaller than the men's, and the rooms had no architectural distinction whatsoever. All of the designer's effort went into creating a wonderful set of rooms for the men. We see the men's rooms again over here, these four, and the women's at the top. Consequently the only ones that have any merit architecturally, in my showing you today, are the ones for the men's baths, down here.



The four rooms, the four key rooms to both the men's and women's sections, were the apodyterium--and again these words are on the Monument List for you--the apodyterium, which was the dressing room. It's a fairly--again, it's large, but a fairly nondescript, rectangular room here. You can see it right down here. And the way it was designed was that you went in, and there were no lockers, no private lockers, but there were benches where you could, when you got undressed, you could just take your clothes and put them in a little pile on that bench. You had to just take on faith that no one was going to steal any of your belongings, and if you were very well-to-do, some of the very well-to-do Romans, men and women, brought slaves with them, their slave, their private slave, to watch their stuff while they were in the sauna with their friends. From the apodyterium you go into the so-called tepidarium of the baths, also usually a plain rectangular room, even in the men's section, which served as the warm room, where you started to warm yourself up. You went from the tepidarium into the caldarium of the bath, which was the hot room, where you really--it was the sauna essentially of the bath. And consequently there was a basin over here with cold water, so if you got too hot, you could go and splash yourself with that cold water.



So apodyterium, tepidarium, caldarium. By then you're really heated up and you can make your way back into this room over here, which is called the frigidarium, or the cold room. The frigidarium was the place that you could really cool off. And I think you can see by looking at these, the two most important rooms architecturally--you can see this even in plan--are the caldarium, which has an apse or curved element at the end, and this room in particular, the frigidarium, because it is a round structure with radiating alcoves--and we're going to see that it's domed. This is a particularly--again star, star, star, star -- one of the most important rooms that I've shown you, probably the most important room I've shown you thus far this semester, in that it is going to have a very long future architecturally. What you see here basically ends up as the Pantheon, some day: this round space, round structure, with radiating alcoves and, as we'll see, a dome, and not only a dome, but a hole in the ceiling, an oculus, that allows light into the structure.



How were these baths heated, how were the hot rooms heated? Through a system called a hypocaust; again I've put the word on the Monument List for you, a hypocaust, h-y-p-o-c-a-u-s-t. What was a hypocaust system? A hypocaust system was a system by which they put terracotta tubes in the floor and behind the walls. They blew hot air into those, and they also raised up the pavement of the floor, on a series of stacked tiles--and you can see that extremely well; here's a very well-preserved hypocaust from the Stabian Baths--placed these tiles on stacks, stacks of tiles, leaving space in between them, and put braziers between those, metal braziers, metal bowls, that held hot coals and so on. And from those hot coals--they obviously had slaves who had to keep those coals hot--but coals that were placed in these pans, that helped also to heat the pavement that was located above. This very important room, the frigidarium of the Stabian Baths, you see it here as it looks today: a small, round space. It would have had a pool in the center, a round pool, radiating alcoves, a dome, a dome that is open to the sky, with an oculus that allows light into it. You can see the remains of paint, stucco and then paint, blue and red, paint, probably some kind of marine scene included here. But this, I can't underscore enough the importance of this particular room and the future that this design has for Roman architecture.



I'd like to show you another bath at Pompeii, the so-called Forum Baths. The Forum Baths are interesting because they're later. They date to, as you can see from your Monument List, to 80 B.C. So this is what the Romans did when they came in and took over Pompeii and were making it into one of those mini-Romes, those cities in the model of Rome. And you can see it's very, very similar to what was going on in the Stabian Baths, in the earlier Samnite baths, with the same palaestra; we see a palaestra up at 2; the exercise court. We don't seem to have a natatio in this particular plan. We see the men's section over here, at 3, 4, 5 and 6, and the women's section over here, 7, 8, 9, 10. Again, the women's section off to the side, of no architectural distinction whatsoever. The men's over here, and you could enter the men's either through the palaestra or from an opening over here at 1. We see the same set of rooms that we saw at the Stabian Baths. We see the apodyterium or undressing and dressing room over here at 3. The tepidarium at 5, the caldarium at 6, and the caldarium at 6 is of the same shape as the caldarium in the Stabian Baths, a rectangular room with an apse at the end and a basin for cold water splashes. And then you go back again to the frigidarium, and you can see the frigidarium in the baths, Forum Baths at Pompeii -- the same shape as that in the Stabian Baths at Pompeii, a small round room with radiating alcoves.



I can show you views both of the tepidarium of the Forum Baths, extremely well preserved, as you can see here. You can also see they've used a great barrel vault for this room. It isn't as large as it looks here, but it's a sizable room. And this is a very good place to show you by the way, to give you a sense of how these things were decorated, how so many rooms -- Roman buildings today, are stripped of their original decoration. But that decoration was often quite beautiful and ostentatious, and we can see here, we can get here a sense of that. You can see the wall has been stuccoed over, and then also in stucco these great flowering acanthus plants and creatures flying above -- animals, human feature, gods and goddesses flying above. They used paint as well, red and blue and white and other colors, to accentuate the design. This gives you some sense of the flavor of these. And then this wonderful detail below of these Atlas figures who are shown holding up the vault of this particular room. It gives you some sense of why Romans flocked to these places -- not only because it was the only place they could bathe themselves, but also because it was just a wonderful space to be in and to enjoy again the company of friends. This is a view of what room, in the Forum Baths?



Student: The caldarium.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The caldarium--excellent--the caldarium over here, with its rectangular shape and then its apse and its basin for cold water splashes. And then look at the ceiling, how wonderful. In that apse you see a semi-dome, a round hole or an oculus in that semi-dome, to allow light into it. So here we see them exploring oculi in semi-domes, as well as in domes. And then the square and rectangular spaces: holes in the ceiling, openings in the ceiling that have been placed there also to allow light into the system so that you could use the room, but also to create the kind of wonderful light effects that it does, when you have rays of sunshine coming in on you while you are in your sauna.



This is a couple of views of the frigidarium of the Forum Baths. You can see a dome up above, the oculus in that dome. You can see some of the stucco decorations still preserved. You can see the alcoves here, the radiating alcoves, and some of the stuccoed decoration here: sea creatures against a red background. And this is a restored view of what the frigidarium would have looked like, with the pool in the center; a nice place to relax. The radiating apses over here, and then the dome with the oculus and with the light streaming in. Again, I can't underscore enough the importance of both of these frigidaria for the future of Roman architecture.



The other importance of the Forum Baths is the Forum Baths is today where you can eat, and if you're there for the full day, as I recommend you be, you're going to want to eat at some point, and there is a cafeteria, which doesn't look like much but actually the food is not bad. The Italians have a very hard time making bad pasta. So you can always get some good pasta at the snack bar and you will want to make your way--there's a few views of it--make your way to the Forum Baths, if you're there for any length of time.



Very quickly I just want to remind you--we talked about this in the introductory lecture--that one of the main reasons that Pompeii is so interesting to us today is because it tells us so much about the daily life, not only of the Pompeians, but of the Romans in general, because we have all these wonderful shops still preserved at Pompeii. This was a bakery. We see the millstones that were actually used for the grinding of the grain still preserved. We see the oven over here, looking wonderfully like a modern pizza oven, as you can see. And we also, believe it or not, have from Pompeii a petrified bread--it's preserved--that gives you a sense of what Pompeian bread looked like. And it looks strikingly like our pizzas, with the segments of the bread. So if you want to have a sense of where pizza came from--I told you the Romans, again there's nothing the Romans didn't invent; bread, pizza, whatever. But you see that petrified bread, giving you a very good sense of what was produced in this particular bakery.



I also mentioned in the introductory lecture the fast-food stands of Pompeii; the thermopolium in the singular, or the thermopolia in the plural, these fast-food stands where you could get a bite real quickly. The way they were designed was to have a great counter in them, with recesses. Fresh hot and cold food was put out obviously every day, and if you were hungry you just went up to the counter, you took a peek at what was there, you pointed out what you wanted, and you could eat on the run. The Romans were never to have their state religion and their family religion far from them, and you can also see a nod to the gods over here. There's a shrine with some of the representations of the household gods, even in this fast-food emporium.



We have wine shops from Pompeii as well. I show you actually a scene of one of the storage rooms at Pompeii that you can see actually as you walk along--it's a wonderful ruffling, turning to the next page--these wine, these amphoras, these great clay amphoras that held wine. They're located in one of these storage areas that one can see as one walks along the Forum, on the left side, in Pompeii today. But you can imagine these on shelves in a wine shop of ancient Pompeii, offering wines gathered from all over the world, for discerning oenophiles--is that the word?--oenophiles.



Connecting all of these shops to one another were of course the streets of the city. The streets of the city are extremely well preserved. I show you here a couple of views of the crossing of the cardo and the decumanus in Pompeii, and you can see exactly what the streets looked like. You can see the multi-sided paving stones of the streets. You can see the sidewalks looking uncannily modern. You can see--you can't see exactly here -- but there are drains along the way, to allow rain water to filter off the streets. And all of this again an extremely modern look. And the streets of Pompeii give us the best sense, of any streets of any preserved ancient city, of what the streets looked like in any given Roman town. These streets had along them--again because of needs for water--had along them fountains. Here's a very modest fountain where we see a representation of the goddess Ceres, c-e-r-e-s, Ceres, with her cornucopia and the fountain spout coming out of her mouth. And you can see this is the sort of thing, when the Romans just needed a little bit of water for household use, they would go out to the local fountain. So as you walk along the streets of Pompeii, you see a lot of these small fountains.



You also see graffiti; what would a city be without some graffiti on its buildings? Any of you who've been in Rome recently know there is too much graffiti. There's like a graffiti craze. The Romans have always had a lot of graffiti, but it's gotten so bad; it's almost unimaginable now. But the graffiti tradition was alive and well in Pompeii, and you see it here, covered with glass. But you see it here. You see it here and there in the city as you wander by, and it gives you a sense that people did write right on their buildings, these--what they wrote on these buildings tended to be political, for the most part. And you'd see graffiti that would say things like "Vote for Barbatus, the bearded one; he'll be the best guy for the office, and he's pretty handsome too." That's the kind of graffiti that you'll see as you walk along--if your Latin is good--that you'll see as you walk along the streets of Pompeii.



You'll also see these big blocks of stone. And there are people who look at these and they think, "Oh how interesting, that's debris from Vesuvius." It's not debris from Vesuvius, clearly. These are there deliberately. These are stepping stones. The Romans were so ingenious, and so again concerned about how to protect people in inclement weather, that they created, they put these stepping stones all around the city, usually at the cross-sections of two streets. So if there was torrential rain, and if the water had piled up and if the drains couldn't quite handle it, you could get across the street without stepping in the water. And would that we had this, in the slushiness that was New Haven, in the last week. I can't tell you how many times I think, "Why doesn't Yale have stepping stones? We really could use them." But here they are, and you see very clearly the ruts that come from the carts that were made between the stepping stones, by those carts constantly riding through them. And it shows you that they had to orchestrate the wheels of the carts in such a way that they would span the stepping stones. But it's a very ingenious thing. They're fun to look at, fun to walk on, really fun to take pictures of. I have tons of them. I didn't--I decided not to bring a personal picture this time of me or anyone else in my family on stepping stones, or other Yalies, I've got lots of those too.



I didn't bring those today, but I did bring something I'm really proud of, because in all the years I've taught this city, I've always wanted to actually show what it looked like when it had rained. And since I've been to Pompeii so, so many times over the years, but it doesn't tend to rain when I go there; June, July, August, it just doesn't rain. So I've never been able to do that. I was there this past June and lo and behold--I was very upset because who wants to wander around the city of Pompeii in the rain? But I had one day to go there and I was there and I said, "Wow, it's raining, here's my chance." So I finally was able to get some views of what happens--and this was right--we had a torrential rain for about a half an hour, and then the sun came out. And this is what you see as you wander the streets. You see that the water has accumulated, but again, lo and behold, you can easily make your way across that street, across those stepping stones nonetheless.



Just a very few words on what happens to the streets of the city of Pompeii, or any Roman city for that matter, when you leave the gates and you go out on the intercity roads. Many of those intercity roads become cemeteries. The Romans used these roads as their cemeteries. The Romans had a religious belief that there was a separation between the city of the living and the city of the dead. So all of the tombs are outside the walls of the city. So you see at Pompeii two extremely well-preserved tomb streets, the Street of the Tombs and the Via Nucera-- which is the one you see here, n-u-c-e-r-a--with tombs of all sorts of shapes and sizes. I'm not going to go into these in any detail in this course. There is a paper topic for any of you who get interested in tomb architecture on the tombs of Pompeii. We will look at some tombs in Rome, in great detail, but I'm just going to give you a glimpse of them here. They come in all sizes and shapes. They're very, very interesting. They honor the people who are buried there, including--there's a bench tomb, for example, where you can sit and think on the life and times of the individual who was buried there. So an absolutely fascinating, fascinating street, with a lot of different tomb types that show the variety of tomb architecture under the Romans.



I'd like to end today by making at least a passing reference to a matter which is of huge concern to archaeologists, and huge concern to all of us, as human beings, and that is what happened to the people of Pompeii, in those very last moments of life? And archaeologists have been able to reconstruct exactly what happened to--or not exactly, but as close as possible in the time from which Pompeii was excavated to now -- to reconstruct again what happened to these human beings at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius. They've been able to again to reconstruct a very moving picture of their last moments of life. What we know is that the ash and lava from Vesuvius--and you see a restored view here of what that would've looked like, and you can see Vesuvius and you can see the Forum over here, with the Temple of Jupiter and the Temple of Apollo, and the throngs of people inside the Forum, at this particular juncture, as they look up and see what is happening

Professor Kleiner discusses domestic architecture at Pompeii from its beginnings in the fourth and third centuries B.C. to the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. She describes the plan of the ideal domus italica and features two residences that conform to that layout. She then presents the so-called Hellenized domus that incorporates elements of Greek domestic architecture, especially the peristyle court with columns. The primary example is the famous House of the Faun with its tetrastyle atrium, double peristyles, and floor mosaic of the battle between Alexander the Great and Darius of Persia at Issus, a Roman copy of an original Greek painting. She concludes by highlighting the suburban Villa of the Mysteries and notes the distinction between plans of Roman houses and those of Roman villas.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, p. 56 (house types)

Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 185-195

Transcript



January 27, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning. As you can see, the title of today's lecture is "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Houses and Villas at Pompeii." We spoke last time about the public architecture of Pompeii, about the forum, about the temples, about the basilica, about the baths, and also about shops, and tombs as well. But today we're going to turn to the residential architecture of Pompeii; residential architecture that is extremely important, not only for what it tells us about Pompeii, but what it also tells us about domestic architecture in the first centuries B.C. and the first century A.D., because there is no place where the houses are better preserved than at Pompeii. So it tells us again, not just about the city itself, but also about residential architecture in Rome, where we have very few examples, and elsewhere in the Roman world.



I want to begin with the image that you see now on the screen, which is a building--and we're talking about the one at the left, front left--a building that is on one of Pompeii's main thoroughfares, the Via dell'Abbondanza, the Via dell'Abbondanza, the Street of Abundance. And the building in question is relatively well preserved, and what is significant about it for us right now is the fact that it is two-storied, as you can see here. What we'll see in the course of today's presentation is that most of the buildings, most of the houses, in early Pompeii, are single-story dwellings, but here we see one that is two-storied. And this two-storied dwelling actually dates fairly late in the history of residential architecture in Pompeii. It dates sometime between the earthquake of 62 and the eruption of Vesuvius of 79; so between 62 and 79 A.D.



And we see that it has two stories, in this instance. A story down below that may have been--that says has entranceways, might even have been opened up as a shop, and then a second story that is very interesting indeed. And it has what we call cenaculae, c-e-n-a-c-u-l-a-e, cenaculae, which are second-story dining rooms that have open panoramic windows, these windows, as you can see, through columns. So an interesting nod to Hellenization once again, this idea of incorporating Greek elements into Roman architecture -- elements that again are under- that come into Roman architecture through the influence of earlier Greek architecture, and views out through those columns. So two important points: one, that these have two stories, and that adding a second story to a Roman building, or a Pompeian building in this instance, doesn't occur until between the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius; and secondarily, this idea of the picture window. And we've talked about the importance for the Romans of vista and panorama, and they're doing it here. They're opening up that second floor so that you can sit in one of these dining rooms and then have a very nice view out through the columns of the street and the street life below.



Now this building, on the Via dell'Abbondanza, lies at the end of the development of Pompeian domestic architecture. And so what I'm going to do is take us back to the beginning and trace Pompeian domestic architecture from the Samnite period up through the eruption of Vesuvius. With regard to the earliest houses at Pompeii, these were done during again the Samnite period, the fourth and third centuries B.C. Keep in mind that the Samnites were an Italic tribe, that is, indigenous to Italy from way back when--I had mentioned to you that Pompeii was founded already in the eighth century B.C. And these Italic tribes built houses, obviously, in which they lived already in the fourth and third -- substantial houses -- in which they lived already in the fourth and third centuries B.C.



I want to begin our conversation about domestic architecture in Pompeii, and by extension in Rome itself, with the so-called domus italica. What was the domus italica? The domus italica was an ideal Roman house plan, and we know quite a bit about it because of the writings of Vitruvius. Vitruvius -- not to be confused with Vesuvius -- Vitruvius was an architectural theoretician who was writing in the age of Augustus, Augustus being Rome's first emperor. And Vitruvius left a great deal of writings about all kinds of architecture, including domestic architecture, and he talks in detail about the domus italica or what he considered the ideal Roman house, and he describes all of its parts. And through his writings we can explore together what the ideal Roman house was, and what you're going to find very interesting, I believe, is the fact that the actual houses at Pompeii conform, or the earliest houses, conform very closely to this ideal plan.



Let's run through it together, both in plan and in restored view. Again I'm going to need to go over a lot of terminology here, but I guarantee you I'm going to repeat it enough today that it will be indelibly marked on your minds and you won't even have to--I don't think you'll even have to study this, when the time comes, because you're going to know these parts of the houses so well after we go through them today. Here you see the plan of the typical domus italica. You can see at number 1 is the entrance into the house. The entrance to the house was called the fauces, f-a-u-c-e-s; the fauces or the throat of the house. Sometimes the fauces had before it a vestibule, called a vestibulum--and all of these words are on the Monument List for you--a vestibulum, which was a place right before the beginning of the fauces, underneath the eaves of the house, where you could actually stand, get in from the rain in case it was raining outside, while you waited for the door to be opened. But in these very early domus italica houses, we don't tend to see the vestibulum. So think it away for the moment, just the fauces or throat of the house.



Then on either side of the fauces there are two rooms, which are called cells or cellae: cella in the singular and cellae, c-e-l-l-a-e in the plural. These can be treated in a number of different ways. They can either be closed off from the street and used as interior rooms for the house, extra bedrooms or living spaces, or they can be, as you see them in this ideal plan, opened up to the street. When they are opened up to the street they take on the role of shops or tabernae, t-a-b-e-r-n-a-e, shops or tabernae. And those shops could be either used by those who owned the house, to make additional money, or they could be leased out to others for their shops. You see the fauces leads into the most important room of a Roman house, the so-called atrium, the famous atrium of the Roman house, a-t-r-i-u-m. The atrium was the audience hall of the house. And it's important to mention from the outset that Roman houses had a very different role in Roman society than houses do for us today. We tend to think of our houses today in large parts as retreats, as places we can get away from it all -- get away from work, get away from schoolwork and so on, and escape. Although we do enjoy obviously having friends and family visit us there, we tend to think of it as a place of retreat.



This was not true in Roman times, when the house was also a place to do some very serious business. The man of the house, the head of the household, the paterfamilias, often greeted clients in the atrium of the house, and when he was away on business, or away at war, his wife, the materfamilias, would stand in for him and she would conduct business in the atrium. So considered a very public part of the house, a place where you wanted it to look its best because you were going to be greeting important visitors there, to do business. So the atrium is located here. You can see this rectangular pool in the center of the atrium. That is the impluvium--and you have that on the Monument List--the impluvium of the house, which is a pool in which they collected rain water for daily use. How did they collect that rain water? Because there was an opening in the ceiling, also rectangular in shape. That's called a compluvium, and the compluvium had surrounding it a slanted roof to encourage the water obviously to slide in through the compluvium and land in the impluvium down below.



Around the atrium and also around the impluvium, at 4 here, are the bedrooms of the house, the cubiculum, in the singular, and cubicula, in the plural: the cubicula or bedrooms of the house. And you can see that each one of them opens up off the atrium. They are very small in size, smaller than any other rooms in the house, and they were literally just a place to sleep. They were very small, mostly very dark. Some of them had slit windows. I'll show you one of those later. Many of them didn't have any windows, they were literally just sleeping spaces. Over here, at 5, we see the wings or the alae, a-l-a-e--the wings or the alae, ala in the singular--alae of the house. The wings of the house were a very important place from the point of view of family tradition and religious practice and so on. It was the place where the Romans kept the shrines of their ancestors. They had wooden shrines--they were usually made out of wood--with doors, and they kept inside those the busts and portraits of their ancestors, and they would take those out, they would open those shrines up and take those out on special occasions, usually anniversaries marking the anniversary of the death of the deceased. And they had an interesting practice in which the member of the family who most closely resembled the deceased in size and general appearance would put on that mask and participate in a kind of parade in honor of the dead. So they kept those in those shrines, in the wings or the alae of the house.



Here at 6 on axis--and we know how much the Romans liked axiality as well as symmetry--we see the room over here, at 6, is on axis with the fauces and the atrium. This room is called the tablinum, t-a-b-l-i-n-u-m, the tablinum, which started as the master bedroom of the house, the most important bedroom, much larger than the cubicula, but over time it became a place where the family archives were kept. And beyond that--and we'll see it happening pretty early actually today--it becomes almost a kind of passageway between the atrium and the area that lay beyond here. At 7 we see also a fairly large room, the dining room or triclinium, and you can see in this case, in the ideal Roman house, it opens off the atrium; so easy to get to from the atrium. And then at the back, number 8, for one of these ideal Roman houses, the hortus, h-o-r-t-u-s, or the garden of the house, which was obviously open to the sky.



If you look at the restored view, you can see how these earliest houses really had a very enclosed feeling. They were quite stark and geometrically ordered, with very few openings. You can see, in this case, this one opening as an entranceway into the fauces, as well as into two shops, as you can see here. And then, of course, the compluvium, a hole in the ceiling, and then the hortus is open to the sky. But, other than that, there are no windows whatsoever. It's a very enclosed structure. And we're going to see that although that's the case in the beginning that changes over time; we'll see a very important and interesting evolution.



Now another point that I want to make from the start is just as in temple architecture, and we've traced the development of early Roman temple architecture, where we saw the Romans ultimately using--combining an Etruscan plan with a Greek elevation. We're going to see something actually quite similar happening in the development of Pompeian and Roman domestic architecture. We're going to see that Etruscan, earlier Etruscan monuments, had an impact. And I show you a plan of an Etruscan tomb over here--we've looked at this before--an Etruscan tomb over here, just to show you that the general arrangement of that tomb, with an entranceway here, with two rooms over here, kind of like the tabernae that we looked at, or the cells that we looked at just before. A big space over here, not unlike the atrium. The idea of axiality: entering into it, then this large space, then another space which mirrors the tablinum or is like the tablinum of the Roman house, and then other rooms on either side. So this whole idea of this progression of one space, an axial progression of one space to another space to another space that's on the same axial focus; very important, and I think those who were building these fairly early on, the Samnites and so on, were clearly looking at Etruscan examples.



And it shows us, very early on also, that in the minds of the Romans there was a very close association between the houses of the living and the houses of the dead. Because if you look at the inside of this Etruscan tomb--and I mention it; I'm not holding you responsible for it, but I mention it to you underneath the domus italica on the Monument List. This is the Tomb of the Shields and Seats in Cerveteri of the sixth century B.C. And if you look at it, you can see that inside the tomb--it's all carved from the rock, from the tufa rock--you can see that it looks very much like what you'd expect a house to look like, with beds. And notice the detail. They've even provided--it's all done in stone, the tufa stone -- but you see they've even provided stone pillows here, not very comfortable, but it gives you the sense of what a house would've been like. And we know that beds in houses looked very much these. Over here a throne, with a nice footstool, as you can see. And then if you look very carefully, also indicated in stone, the rafters, the beams done in stone. And then the moldings around the door and around the shields, which is the reason this is called the shields and the seats obviously is because it has seats and it has shields on the wall. So I just wanted to make the point, because it'll turn up a number of times in the course of the semester, the close association in the minds of the Romans between houses of the living and houses of the dead, and also that important point that the early Samnite builders are looking at Etruscan prototypes.



I want to show you now the way in which actual Pompeian houses conform very closely--the early ones at least, of the fourth and third centuries B.C.--conform very closely to this domus italica ideal plan. I want to begin with the so-called House of the Surgeon in Pompeii, which dates to the third century B.C. And it's called the House of the Surgeon because of all the surgical instruments that were found in the house, and I show you the array of them now on the screen. This should be of considerable interest, to especially--and I know there are a number of you in here -- students whose major is biology. And I want to mention also that you might be surprised to hear--but maybe not, Yale has such amazing collections--that the Medical School has a collection of surgical instruments that goes way back, and it goes way back to ancient Rome. You can actually see ancient Roman surgical instruments in that collection that we have here at Yale, not perhaps as many as this, but an interesting selection, and those of you who are in that field might at one point want to take advantage of that and get to see them firsthand. So this house got its name from this cache of surgical instruments that were found inside. That probably gives us some sense of the profession of at least one of the people who was living here.



I show you the plan of the House of the Surgeon, and you'll see a version on your Monument List that actually has the rooms designated there, which I don't have here. So that will be helpful to you as you--I wanted you to have that version so that you, when you're studying, you have that before you. And in any exam, by the way, even if I show something slightly different in class, I will show you only what is on your Monument List in the exam. So those are the ones that you should study and remember. But you'll see the plan is exactly the same. It just doesn't have the labels here. So we can see that it conforms, the House of the Surgeon, third century B.C., to the ideal domus italica plan.



You enter here; you enter into the fauces or throat of the house. There are two cells, one on either side. It's very clear in plan that this cell is closed to the outside and opens only off the atrium, so used by the family for their own purposes. This one is open to the street, clearly used as a shop, either by this family, or they've leased it out to somebody else. The atrium is on axis with the fauces. We can see that the atrium has a pool, a rectangular pool, or impluvium; and there would've been a compluvium up above. On either side the cubicula or bedrooms of the house, opening off the atrium. Over here the wings or alae of the house, for the ancestral shrines. Over here, again, a dining room, a triclinium, that opens off the atrium. Up here we think probably a portico, one column or two, but that might belong to a later renovation, and I'll explain why in a moment. And then in the back a somewhat irregularly shaped hortus or garden. But I think you can see from this example how closely these actual houses track the domus italica described by Vitruvius.



Another example of one of these early Roman houses that conforms to the domus italica type is the so-called House of Sallust in Pompeii that dates to the third century B.C. This is another house that has the domus italica as its core. But, just like most of the houses in Pompeii--you'll remember how when the Romans took over Pompeii in 80, or made Pompeii a Roman colony, they tossed the Samnites out of their homes, they took them over, and of course once they took them over, they renovated them. So there's quite a bit of renovation that takes place to some of these early Samnite houses. In this case the House of Sallust seems to be an example of that.



But we still see the original core of the domus italica. The entrance over here into the fauces of the house; I'll say something about that in a moment. The atrium on axis with that, with the impluvium. The cubicula over here. The alae or wings here. The tablinum of the house over here. In this case you can see that the triclinium opens up off toward the hortus instead. This family wanted to provide views of the hortus rather than the atrium, from the dining hall. Now what's particularly interesting, and may belong to the renovation, are the shops that are opening up off the street. Because you can tell in plan exactly how this shop was used. Anyone volunteer to say, based on the plan? What kind of a shop was this?



Student: Fast-food restaurant.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: A fast-food store. Yes it's a fast-food shop, a thermopolium, because we can see the counter and we can see the recesses in plan. So this family either had, or let its space out, for one of these thermopolia, for one of these fast-food stands in the front of their house. So two examples, the House of the Surgeon and the House of Sallust, that conform closely, third century B.C., to the original domus italica plan.



In the second century B.C. we see something happen in house design, quite extraordinary, and that is linked to the same kind of development we saw in temple architecture, and that is yes, they've been looking at the Etruscan type of plan, they've been conforming to that to a certain extent. All of a sudden in the second century they get the bug to make their houses look more Greek, and they begin to incorporate elements that they take from earlier Greek architecture, and the result is quite extraordinary. I'm showing you here an example of an ideal plan of what we call the Hellenized domus, the domus that has been Hellenized, that has been given Greek--it has been enhanced with Greek elements. And let's run through the plan again, of the so-called Hellenized domus type.



You can see that the core is the same as the domus italica. You enter over here. Here we can see in plan the incorporation of the vestibulum, this vestibule that is located right in front of, or at the beginning of the fauces, the purpose of which--you can see it right here--the purpose of which, you kind of entered into the house. The roof of the house protects you in case the weather is not good, but you still have to stand in that vestibule until you're allowed into the fauces and the rest of the house. So we see here the vestibulum, the fauces, the two cells, cellae, one on either side, in this case they are not opened up as shops. The atrium here, with its impluvium, to catch rain water. At 4, we have the usual cubicula, or bedrooms. At 5, we have the usual alae or wings. And then 6, the tablinum on axis with 7, the triclinium opening off the atrium. So once again the core of the original domus italica, very much intact in the Hellenized domus.



But look what's happened up here. What's happened up here is at number 8, under the influence of Greek architecture, under the influence of what's happening in temple architecture, they incorporate columns into the interior of the house, and they place their garden here. It's a garden court, with columns, which technically is called a peristyle, p-e-r-i-s-t-y-l-e. And it is comparable to what we see in temple architecture when we saw the architects giving some of the temples--the peripteral colonnade; do you remember the colonnade that goes all the way around and is freestanding, under the influence of Greek architecture? It's the same sort of thing here, except it's on the inside of the building. So this peristyle court cum garden, located right here. And then on either side, additional bedrooms or cubicula; these were probably very desirable, to have a bedroom that opened, had a nice view out over your garden. And then back here two additional triclinia, two additional dining rooms, to take advantage of the beautiful views that one could get, if one could see it -- probably not terribly much through these narrow doorways, but at least opening up onto the peristyle court. One second. We see up here the restored view, showing the same, the entranceway. And look here, you can even see columns added in the front to announce, from the very start, that this is a house that is owned by a very cultured individual, who knows his Greek, and knows his Greek culture, and knows to incorporate these Greek elements into his house. Then we see the compluvium. We see the peristyle from above; you can see, open to the sky with columns, but still very stark, very plain on the outside. No windows to speak of, very much an enclosed space.



Student: I was just wondering--I always like looking around--where the food preparation would take place?



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Some of these houses did have kitchens, and I'll show you an example in a moment. Probably more of them did than we're sure of. It's just a question of what remains, in terms of being able to determine that. But we certainly have examples of that. So they did seem to have kitchens.



So now I want to show you some examples of houses that conform to the Hellenized domus type, this being the first one. It's one of the most famous houses in Pompeii, and if you're going there anytime soon and are making a list of must-sees, this is one of those must-sees, in Pompeii, the House of the Vettii. We think it belongs, although we're not absolutely sure, to the Vettius brothers, to the Vettius brothers in Pompeii. And it dates, as the Monument List indicates, to the second century B.C. and later. Looking at this plan you can see the way in which it conforms to the Hellenized domus type. Once again it has the core, it has the domus italica core. The entranceway over here, with the fauces; the cells on either side, in this case used as rooms internal to the house, they do not open off the street as shops; the atrium here, with the impluvium; a smaller number of cubicula on either side; alae over here. Look what has happened to the tablinum. The tablinum is gone essentially. All it consists of is a couple of pilasters that are located right here--and I'll show them to you in a moment because it's well-preserved pilasters here.



So the tablinum has essentially disappeared. It's become a kind of passageway from the core of the house into the garden. And it is a peristyle garden, surrounded by columns, as you can see. And you can see how important that peristyle garden has become. This family has decided to decrease their other space in order to have this stupendously large garden here. And they have also put a very large dining hall, triclinium up here, that opens off the peristyle, and it has a much bigger opening so that they could clearly dine and get views of this garden, this peristyle garden, of which they were obviously incredibly proud. So some major changes there. Now this particular house--oh I did want to say though, despite those changes, the house is still very enclosed and very plain and stark from the outside. This is a restored view of what we believe the outside looked like. So geometrically ordered, cubic, as you can see. Just one entranceway, possibly a few small windows, possibly not. And then you can see the compluvium and the peristyle court. But otherwise very much enclosed, like the earlier domus italica; not much change with regard to how the exterior of the building is treated.



This again is one of the reasons everyone flocks to this house is it's very well preserved. There's been some restoration work, of course, but really this is one of those must-sees, because it really gives you as good a sense as anything of what these houses looked like in antiquity. We have obviously entered into--we've come through the fauces. We are standing in the atrium. We can see the pool or impluvium here. We can see the compluvium, very well preserved, up above. I think it's probably the best preserved compluvium that we have, or close to it. And you can see that there were little antefixes added in terracotta and stuff, as decoration, up at the top. As we're standing here we look back through what was once the tablinum, and now is basically a point of transition, a passageway from the atrium to the most important part of the house, from the point of view of these patrons, the garden. So you're looking through. You see these great piers on either side, that are all that's left of the tablinum. You look through that and you see the garden. The garden has its columns surrounding it. The walls are painted, of that garden, all a very lively and wonderful interior.



And what also becomes very clear in looking at this particular view is something that we've already discussed, and that is the importance in the minds of the Romans of vista or panorama, of great views that you can see from one part of a building to another. Remember the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina and all of those wonderful lateral and axial entrances and exits, where there were all kinds of interesting light effects. We see the same sort of thing here. The idea is to pass from a particularly well-lighted area outside into a darker area, the fauces. Then a little bit more light added to the system through the compluvium, and then a whole host of light, that you can see in the distance, through the open--because of the open peristyle. So dark, light, dark, light -- this progression of space, this progression of light through the structure a very typical Roman thing to do. The other thing, of course, is this emphasis on axiality, this movement through a structure in a very axial way.



The garden here, as it looks today. It would've been, of course, even more beautiful in antiquity, when it would've been in better shape. But nonetheless, this gives you--it's a bit overgrown now and so on--but it gives you some sense of what it would've looked like, with the greenery in the garden, surrounded by the columns, with garden furniture, little fountains, little marble fountains and the like, and with the walls--the paintings are not in very good shape today, but imagine them more vibrant. And I'm going to show you examples of that on Thursday and next week, of some of the paintings that are in better condition and how vibrant this would've been with those paintings. Look also at the columns because you can see--we'll see that some of these columns are made out of stone, some of them are made out of those tiles, that look like bricks, that I've shown you before. But in all cases they were stuccoed over white. Why were they stuccoed over white? To make them look like Greek marble. So once again, this Hellenization of Roman domestic architecture, this attempt to make these things look as Greek as possible.



You asked about the kitchen. Well this is our best preserved kitchen, from Pompeii. It's really quite amazing. There's a stove, and the pots and pans that were clearly still sitting on the stove at the time this particular family had to flee from Vesuvius. And I neglected to show you, but you can look at the Monument List for this plan, where the rooms are marked. You will see the kitchen marked on that plan. And you will also see what's called the Women's Quarters, marked on that plan, which was probably where some of the slaves who were owned by this particular family, the Vettius brothers, lived, in that area.



Another example of a house that conforms, a Pompeian house that conforms to the Hellenized domus type is the one that you now see on the screen. It's a plan of the House of the Silver Wedding, in Pompeii. We believe it was remodeled in the first century B.C., although it's controversial. It might have been remodeled a bit later in the first century A.D. It's an interesting structure. It got its name, the House of the Silver Wedding, because there was a lot of fanfare in the late nineteenth century--I think it was precisely 1893--when the king and queen of Italy came to visit this particular house, and it became their favorite. And so the Silver Wedding is actually a reference to them and to their marriage, and so on and so forth.



It's a wonderful house, and I think you can see how it conforms. Again, it has a core that is very much the domus italica core, but it is another example of one of these houses that has been remodeled because of the owner's interest in Hellenizing that house. We enter here through the fauces. There are cells on either side, opening off the fauces. It's an unusual arrangement. Then over here the atrium with the impluvium; the cubicula on either side; the alae or wings of the house; a dining room over here; two peristyle courts, one in the back, a smaller one, and then a huge peristyle court over here on the left-hand side. So for this family one was not enough, they wanted double the garden space, and they've allotted a lot of space in this house to those gardens. Then, most interesting of all I think about this house, and the reason I chose it to show to you, is that we are starting to see the Hellenization of the atrium as well. Because look what's happened to the atrium. They have placed four columns around the impluvium, in the atrium. So it wasn't enough to have these two large peristyles, they wanted columns everywhere, and they placed these four around the impluvium. An atrium that has four columns in it is technically called--and I put it on the Monument List for you--a tetrastyle atrium; this is a tetrastyle atrium.



Even that wasn't enough. Look at that room in the upper left. That room in the upper left is a banqueting hall, an additional dining space, but a special dining space, that you can see opens up very nicely off the smaller peristyle of the house. The opening is fairly wide, so it probably would've had some wonderful views of the peristyle garden. And look, there are four columns in there as well. And this particular banqueting hall, its technical name--it's got a kind of a funny name that I don't think you'll forget called an oecus, o-e-c-u-s; and it's even more amusing in the plural, because the plural is o-e-c-i, oeci. So this is an oecus, among oeci, an oecus up there. And you can see that it's an oecus that has four columns in it; so we call it a tetrastyle oecus.



All right, so now that we've had an opportunity to look at the plan of the House of the Silver Wedding, I want to give you a sense of what the building looks like today. It's not as well preserved as the House of the Vettii, but we can get a very good sense of what it was like in antiquity. And the oecus, which in some respects is the most important room in the house, from our standpoint, is very well preserved. We're looking here at a view. We're standing again in the beginning of the atrium, looking through the atrium. We see the impluvium of the house -- a lot of moss and some--it's overgrown today. But nonetheless you can see it there, as well as the compluvium above. What's most important to us is you can see that this is indeed a tetrastyle atrium, with four columns that are surrounding the impluvium, those columns supporting the ceiling, and of course the compluvium above. Also interesting is the way in which the columns are treated. You can see that they have been fluted and then stuccoed over. Do you remember the temple at Cori, that we looked at, where we talked about the fact that--the Temple of Hercules at Cori -- we talked about the fact that the columns were fluted part of the way, and then down below those flutes were covered over with stucco and the stucco was painted. We see the same thing here. And if you look very, very closely, you can even see the remains of the red paint, the red paint that decorated the lower part of these columns. So some interesting correspondences there in terms of building practice. You can also see here, as we saw in the House of the Vettii, this wonderful vista from the atrium of the house, through what remains of the tablinum, into the garden of the house, the peristyle garden of the house, which from the patron's point of view was one of the most important, if not the most important part, of the house.



This is the oecus of the House of the Silver Wedding, and you can see it is extremely well preserved, and you can also see how very interesting it is, in all kinds of ways. It is a tetrastyle oecus--again, a banqueting hall--tetrastyle oecus, with four columns. Those columns are stuccoed and painted over. The paint is very well preserved. It's a reddish, purplish color, probably meant to conjure up porphyry, p-o-r-p-h-y-r-y, porphyry, which comes only from Egypt. It's only quarried in Egypt, very expensive to bring it that great distance, all the way to Pompeii. And, of course, this isn't porphyry, it's just a painted column. But the whole idea of this, from the patrons' point of view, was to look like he and she were very well-heeled, that they could afford to bring--they're trying to make the illusion that they could afford to bring this expensive stone, from very far away, to use in their house here. Look also at the fact that there's a barrel vault. This is actually a wooden vault, rather than a concrete vault here in this room. But very nicely done, and the walls are extensively painted. They are weathered today, but they give you a very good sense of what would have been the original appearance of this room. And, as I mentioned, we'll talk in detail about Roman wall painting, especially because, as you can see, it does depict architecture. We'll begin that conversation on Thursday and continue into next week.



I want to turn now to what is surely the most important surviving house at the city of Pompeii, and this is the famous House of the Faun. If you're in Pompeii and you only have time to see two houses, you go to the House of the Vettii and the House of the Faun. The House of the Faun, as you can see from your Monument List, dates to the second century B.C., for the most part, and we see a view, part of Pompeii over here, with a series of houses marked in yellow. And the reason that I show this to you is because the House of the Faun is particularly large. You can see from this plan that it takes up in fact the entire block, an entire block of the city of Pompeii, and it is much larger than some of the others. For example, look at the House of the Vettii over here. It's twice, if not larger, than that: twice the size of the House of the Vettii, if not even more than that. So it's a very large house. Clearly no expense was spared, either in accumulating the property, and also in enhancing the décor of the house.



If we look at a plan of the House of the Faun, we will see, without question, that it corresponds and it follows the Hellenized domus type. We enter over here. We see it has a vestibulum; a fauces; two cellae, one on either side; an atrium with an impluvium; the cubicula here on either side; the wings or the alae. It does have a tablinum, you see it over here, and then it has two peristyle courts, with columns encircling them, a smaller one and then a very large one in the back. Note also, while this is on the screen, that there is a very interesting room that is located over here. It's a rectangular room. It has a couple of columns on bases and pilasters, one on either side. It opens right off the peristyle court, and on the floor of that space, which we call the Alexander exedra, e-x-e-d-r-a, after Alexander the Great, because on the floor of that was the most famous mosaic that we have surviving from antiquity, that represents Alexander the Great, and I'll show you that momentarily.



First let me show you what the house looks like from the outside. It's well preserved. It doesn't have its ceiling the way the House of the Vettii does, but otherwise it's pretty well preserved. We're looking down the street on which it finds itself. You see the polygonal masonry blocks. You see the sidewalks here as well, and how modern they look. You see the stepping stones. And over here the façade of the House of the Faun. You can see the entranceway, and you can see that the entranceway has on either side a pilaster, a pilaster with a Corinthian capital above. And that's very important, because it's announcing to us, as did that ideal Hellenized domus that I showed you before, it's announcing to us that this is a patron, this is an owner of this particular house who has leanings toward things Greek and wants us to know that, even before we have entered into the house.



You go into the house and stand in the vestibule. You will see that there is still quite a bit of decoration preserved. The walls are painted with blocks, what look like blocks of stone: an illusion. This is an example of First Style wall painting; we're going to talk about that on Thursday. And then up here a shrine is still preserved, a shrine that probably held statues or statuettes of some of the household gods, the revered gods for this family. This is an excellent view because it shows us again how entering this house you would stand in the vestibule; you'd go from there into the fauces, then into the atrium, then into the peristyle that lay beyond -- the first smaller one and then the larger one after that. But it shows us again the point that I've made so many times already, just in this first part of the semester, and that is this Roman interest in vista or panorama. They've set up a view from the moment in which you enter the house, a sequence of experiences from light to dark to light to dark, but also a sequence of visual experiences that make entering this house and walking through this house an extraordinary experience, one that they have helped enhance. And you can also see again the capitals here.



Here's a view of the atrium as it looks today. We are standing in front of the impluvium. In that impluvium is a statuette in bronze of the Dancing Faun, from which this house gets its name. The one that you see there now is a copy and the original is in the Archaeological Museum in Naples. This view also shows you the way in which you had the series of visual experiences, from the fauces to the atrium, and ultimately toward the peristyle with its wonderful forest of columns done à la Grecque, in the Greek style. Here's another interesting view. We're still in the atrium. You can see the Dancing Faun right here. We're looking at the side wall; if we're facing the Faun, this is the wall to the left. This is very helpful because it shows us exactly what the cubicula that opened off the atrium would've looked like. You can see that they were very dark. Some of them had these tiny slit windows, or perhaps slightly larger slit windows. But for the most part they were very dark -- again meant only as a place to sleep at night and to be used for no other purpose than that. You can also see from this view that this is a rubble wall that has been stuccoed over, and that reliefs, painted different colors, have been placed on that wall. This is an example of so-called First Style Roman wall painting, and we'll go into what that was, define what that was, and discuss it in more detail on Thursday.



This is a wonderful restored view of what the House of the Faun would've looked like when all of its First Style Roman wall painting was intact, showing what it would've looked like to stand in the atrium and look back through what survived of the tablinum, with these very large pilasters again, announcing the Greek leanings of this particular patron. And then the view toward the peristyle, where you would also see the columns that looked like they were very much in the Greek style. So here's clearly a person who not only is building his home to correspond to the latest in domestic architecture, namely the Hellenized domus type, but who just wants to make that point over and over and over again: that he's cultivated, that he knows things Greek, and that he has the funds to be able to incorporate those into his house. And indeed First Style wall painting, as we'll find out when we discuss it, is also a style that is based on Greek prototypes. So another example of the Greek elements in this building.



What room do you think this is? Oh I didn't show you this on the plan; I neglected to. But you can look at your Monument List. When you look at the plan, you'll see that this house had more than one atrium; it had two atria. And this is one of them. It's a tetrastyle atrium, because you can see there are four columns, one around each corner of the impluvium. So a house with two peristyles; a house with two atriums, and even one of the atriums has four columns, as you can see here. And this one is also very useful for the fact--one of you asked me a question, when we were looking at the Basilica of Pompeii, about why the columns looked the way they did--I think it was you--and I mentioned that they were pieced, and here you can see that very well, these drums placed one on top of another. So that you can see over time how easy it would be for some of those to fall off or become dismantled, and for us to be left with the sort of thing that we're left with when we look at what remains in the Basilica of Pompeii. Here's a view obviously of one of the peristyles. Here you also see something interesting in terms of building technique. The columns in Pompeii tend to be either of local stone, a local tufa, or made of these tiles that look like bricks, but then in either case stuccoed over, white, fluted, to make them look, once again, like they are marble columns: the illusion that they are marble columns, even though they are not, to underscore their Greekness.



This is a view of that exedra, that Alexander exedra that I mentioned to you before, that opens off the first peristyle, with two columns on bases here. Note the red at the bottom, white at the top. Two pilasters painted red, as you can see. And you can see the tourists standing there, gazing down. They're gazing down at a copy. And this copy, by the way, for a very long time, for as long as I remember going there, except for this last time I was there, there was nothing there, and I think most people had no realization that this amazing mosaic originally was on the floor. But they have a put a copy--the mosaic is now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, long ago moved there. But they finally put a copy down on the floor, so that--of the mosaic that was there--so that people who visit the House of the Faun realize, oh, this is where the Alexander Mosaic was located, which is particularly important, because this is a view of the mosaic, this extraordinary mosaic of Alexander the Great, that's now in the Naples Archaeological Museum. And, of course, you can see that they display it there as if it were a panel picture, hanging on the wall. But that is not how it was displayed, or meant to be displayed, in the House of the Faun. It was a floor pavement in the House of the Faun. But look how nicely, at least in the museum, they have recreated the ambience by putting the columns and the pilasters--they tried to recreate the sense of the exedra, just as it is in the house. It's just that they put the mosaic in the wrong place; it should be on the floor.



Nonetheless, you can see it's an extraordinary work of art. I'm not going to go into it in great detail, but I did want to expose you to it because it is so important and so magnificent, and I also want to make absolutely sure that you don't miss, when you go to the Pompeii area, you do not miss going to the Archaeological Museum in Naples. It's an amazing museum, one of the greatest of all the museums in Italy, and it has of course--almost all the great stuff that comes from Pompeii is at that museum today. So it's another one of those asterisked, must-sees. You look at it here. It represents the battle between Alexander and the Persian King Darius, d-a-r-i-u-s, at the famous Battle of Issus, i-s-s-u-s, and at that battle Alexander was victorious, and you see it here. And one of the reasons that it's so important for our understanding of the House of the Faun is that we believe that this mosaic was a copy of an earlier lost Greek painting, a Greek painting of this same scene, of Alexander and Darius, done in around 300 B.C. by a Greek painter, that was copied for this house in mosaic, sometime in the second century B.C.



So it's another example of this patron, of this owner of the house, who is so besotted with Greek art that he wants to have as much of it around him as he possibly can, and he clearly has the assets that enable him to commission a mosaicist to make this amazing painting [correction: mosaic]. Now there are a lot of people who talk about this mosaic, and they say, "Well, you know, it's such a pale reflection of what the painting would've been, and it's a typical derivative, Roman art. They had to look at Greek art and derive from it. They couldn't come up with anything on their own." But I would maintain that's absolutely untrue, and I would also maintain that to do this kind of work in mosaic, rather than paint, is much more difficult. This is a true tour de force, to be able to create this kind of active battle scene, with collapsing horses and with spears in the sky foreshortened, and foreshortened weapons down here. This is an amazing thing to do in mosaic, when you think of all of these individual tesserae, these small stones, multicolored stones, that had to be brought together, placed in mortar, to create this amazing tableau. To me it seems like it is a much, much greater feat to have to achieve that, and to achieve it so well in mosaic than in paint.



Just quickly a couple of details. Here's the one of Alexander himself on his horse. It's an incredible characterization of the great Hellenistic general and king, and you see him on his favorite horse, Bucephalus here; and I think it's a wonderful characterization by this particular, very talented mosaicist and his workshop, to capture the relationship of man and horse. If you look at not only the eyes, but also at the hair, the hair of Alexander tousled, flowing in the wind, the mane of the horse, so closely allied with one another. The artist has really very effectively captured that again, even just using these very small pieces of stone, which you can see very well here. Look at the way the shadows are cast, even by that stone. It's incredible. Here's the other detail that I'm going to show you of Darius, in his chariot. As you can see, he's looking toward Alexander, he's mesmerized by the great Hellenistic king, but he's at the same time afraid. And he's beating a retreat, because you can see that his driver has turned the chariot around. He's whipping the horse and he's heading in the other direction, away from Alexander, as is this figure here. We see his horse from the rear, a real tour de force, depicting a horse. But he too is looking at Alexander, quite afraid, and his horse is also turning to go off into the distance. So capturing this very dramatic moment.



And to me the most wonderful detail is this one, that you see down here, which is a view of one of the fallen Persians; the shield is falling over on him, but the shield is polished to such a shine that he can see the reflection of his own face. I have a detail to show you of this. He can see the reflection--you see it here--of his own face in that shield. And this view is particularly good. I took this one very close up, so that you could see the individual stones. You don't--from a distance they blend, but when you go up close you can really see, oh yeah, that's a mosaic. And it's really an extraordinary work of art. A very quick question because--



Student: How big are the stones?



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: They're very small, they're very small, and the reason for that is in large part so that they will blend ultimately, and from a distance it will have the feel of a painting. Certainly when it's on the wall, probably less so when you stood and looked at it, in its original location, because you'd be looking down on it and you'd be closer to it than here. But it's an amazing work. And again remember that although the original painting, done by the Greek painter, was probably, did hang on a wall, this one was meant as a floor mosaic in this house -- but again a testament to the Greek leanings of this particular patron.



Now I also wanted to show you--that's not the only mosaic in Pompeii. It's the greatest, by far, and it's without question--and I think everyone who studies this stuff would agree with me, that it's the finest surviving mosaic in the history of ancient Greek and Roman art. But there are plenty of other mosaics preserved, including at Pompeii, and I want to show you just one. It's mentioned underneath the Alexander mosaic, on your Monument List, because it's so beloved; it's even more beloved by most tourists to the site than the Alexander mosaic, which after all you can't see on the site, you have to see it in Naples, at least the original. But this is the so-called Cave Canem Mosaic, and it belongs to the House of the Tragic Poet, a house that was put up between 62 and 79 A.D. And you see what's meant to be a very ferocious dog with his teeth bared. This one is done much more simply, in only three colors; mainly black and white--tesserae or small stones; t-e-s-s-e-r-a-e, that's what these small stones are called, the tesserae--black and white, basically black on white. But you can see that there's one touch of red, the collar of the dog. And the dog is chained, as you can see, just like that poor plaster cast of the dog that we saw last time, he's chained. But he's meant to look very ferocious. He's baring his teeth. And the whole point, Cave Canem, beware of dog, is for you to be warned of the fact that if you dare step any further than that vestibulum, and try to get into this house or try to steal anything or whatever, this dog will attack. So it's the same kind of--it's like a security alarm system actually for antiquity. And I bet you can tell me where in the house this mosaic was located.



Student: The fauces.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: In the vestibulum or the fauces of the house. Yes, probably the vestibulum actually, indeed the vestibulum of the house, so that even before you got in as far as the fauces you were warned that you'd better beware of the dog. And this thing, you will see this--any of you who've been to Pompeii know this and can attest that I'm right--every single souvenir stand, anywhere within any numbers of yards of Pompeii, is selling the Cave Canem on everything you can possibly imagine: the mugs, the T-shirts, the hotplates, the whatever, the tote bags. You can get the Cave Canem in every shape, size and possibility. And I have one of those myself, only one, only a hotplate, but that's it. I did it like everybody else at one point, years ago.



I want to show you briefly a couple of other houses, just to make a few small points, well, important points, an important point or two about each of them. The first one is the House of Menander, in Pompeii, which dates to the second century B.C. and later. You see it in plan here. The House of Menander, like everything else we've seen in the latter part of this lecture, is a Hellenized domus. You can tell that because of the peristyle here. In other respects it's very similar to everything we've seen: the usual fauces, atrium, cubiculum, tablinum system, the large peristyle up here, and some dining spaces opening off that peristyle. What makes this particular house interesting, and the reason that I show it to you, is it's a good illustration of what happens when over time you remodel, and also over time, when other property becomes available nearby. And we can tell from this plan that what happened here is that the core of the house was added to, as property on either side, additional property, became available, and this owner purchased that property and added it. And the plan becomes much more irregular obviously, because of that. An addition over here, an addition over here; some of that sense of axiality and symmetry is lost when you start to add to either side horizontally. But there are lots of houses like this, and it's one of the things one needs to keep in mind as one visits the city and as one looks at each of these incredible structures.



Just very quickly, with regard to the house, just so you have a sense of what it looks like today. It's named the House of Menander because of this painting of the poet who sits on a chair over there, on one of the walls of the house. Part of the peristyle is actually quite well preserved, as is the atrium. We're standing in the atrium, as you can obviously see, with the impluvium, looking back toward the garden. This is interesting because you can see again the cubicula opening off either side, but also because of the incorporation, just as in the House of the Faun, of columns elsewhere than just in the peristyle. These in that transition place between the atrium and the garden, the so-called tablinum space, these very large columns, stuccoed over, fluted, and you can see in this case, not painted red at the bottom but a kind of bright yellow to match the colors of the wall. So again this incorporation of Greek elements into houses like this one. This is also a good view. It's a very well-preserved house. We're back in the atrium again. You can see the way in which the cubicula, the small cubicula open off that. You can see some of the paintings. And here's the entranceway, through the fauces, and you can see in this particular case a small shrine that's located in the corner -- the purpose of that, for the household to display the household gods.



This is another interesting house that I just want to treat fleetingly. It's the so-called House of Pansa in Pompeii, and it dates to the second century B.C. And it's a very large house, as you can see, like all the other Hellenized domuses, because we see that it has a peristyle with columns here. Like all the others it has everything that we've seen: the vestibulum; the fauces; the atrium; the cubicula; the wings or alae; the tablinum, a dining room; and a bevy of shops down here. In fact more shops than we have seen be the case in most of the houses we've looked at, at least five, if not six shops down here, which gives us something of a clue to something that might be going on in this house. If we go back to the peristyle and we take a look at that, we see that there's a pool in between the columns. And you might speculate, "Oh how nice; a nice pleasant pool. You could sit around, you could dip your hands or your feet into that pool; a nice pleasurable spot to enjoy." Well actually it wasn't that at all. We think now that it was probably a pool that held fish, and fish--not fish, just attractive fish that one could admire, but actually fish that were sold in one of the shops in front.



One of the reasons we believe that is a scholar by the name of Wilhelmina Jashemski, whose specialty is gardens of Pompeii, has spent her whole scholarly career--and it was well worth it because she's come up with some extraordinary things--on studying the root marks of the gardens in Pompeii, and she's been able to demonstrate, through studying those and working with experts on that sort of thing, just what was grown in these gardens. And you find that some of them were pleasure gardens with beautiful flowers, and some of them were produce gardens. And this one was a produce garden, so that there would've been vegetables and fruits and so on, that were gardened here and then they were sold in the shops that were located at the front. So here we see a wonderful example of the way in which these houses could even be used by some owners as a means of income for them and for their families, and that was surely the case with the House of Pansa. It also has a very well-preserved peristyle. We can see the columns here around that pool that was used to hold the fish that were sold in one of the shops. The columns are extremely well preserved, including some of the capitals, Ionic capitals, as you can see here, and the fluting, and then the plain, stuccoed over at the bottom, with the paint--you can see in this case, remains of the red paint that would've decorated the bottom part of those columns.



Another very interesting house, and one that's important for us because it marks a later development in Roman house architecture in Pompeii, is the House of Marcus Loreius Tiburtinus. Remember Tibur was the ancient word for Tivoli, and so it's likely that Tiburtinus in fact came from Tivoli, moved to Pompeii, and built this large house sometime between the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius, so 62 to 79 A.D. Like the House of the Faun, it took up an entire city block. But you can see that the owner has made a different decision than the owner of the House of the Faun, because the house itself takes up very little space, and most of the space is taken up by the garden. We're less sure here whether this was a pleasurable garden--there are some indications that it might have been--or whether it too was used as a produce garden. We don't have all those shops on the front, so that seems less likely here. But you can see it's another example of the way in which these houses are becoming not only more personalized, but also with much more emphasis on the garden and on the dining rooms that are surrounding that garden; we see one of those dining rooms here.



What's particularly interesting about this house, and one that helps us round the circle to where I began at the beginning of the lecture when I talked about the fact that it was between 62 and 79 that the Pompeians began to build second stories on their houses. They began to expand vertically, and we saw the cenaculae of the Via dell'Abbondanza building. We see the same thing happening here, that a second story has been added around the living quarters. Now here it was obviously really needed, because they weren't giving much space to the living quarters, so they had to build up vertically for those. And if you look very carefully at the restored view, you will see that the windows of that second story open off and look out over onto the compluvium of the atrium. You see that there, the compluvium of the atrium, and then around it you can see the second story, with the windows looking out over the compluvium of the house. Then the rest, needless to say, garden.



It's actually pretty well preserved. It's fun to wander around. You see these wonderful trellises and all kinds of interesting architectural forms that are part of this incredible garden, in the House of Tiburtinus. And you even see there this magnificent grotto, which leads me to believe that we're beginning to see something interesting here, which is the incorporation of the sorts of things that you would tend to see in villas, not right in the center of a city, but villas that were located either outside the city or along the coast. And the reason I say that here is because we can see this grotto-like effect, where we have what looks like a pebbled effect on the back wall: painted, two columns, Corinthian columns, with a pediment above, and then these two wonderful mythological paintings. This one you probably recognize as the Myth o

Professor Kleiner discusses domestic architecture at Herculaneum and the First and Second Styles of Roman wall painting. The lecture begins with an introduction to the history of the city of Herculaneum and what befell some of its inhabitants when they tried to escape obliteration by Vesuvius. She features three houses in Herculaneum, two of which--the Houses of the Mosaic Atrium and the Stags--are among the best examples of a residential style popular in Campania between A.D. 62 and 79. Professor Kleiner then turns to the First or Masonry Style of Roman wall painting, which seeks to replicate the built architecture of Hellenistic kings and other elite patrons by using stucco and paint to imitate a real wall faced with marble. She follows with Second Style Roman wall painting, which uses only paint to open up the wall illusionistically onto vistas and prospects of sacred shrines, city scenes, and landscapes. The lecture concludes with a discussion of the Garden Room from the Villa of Livia at Primaporta, which epitomizes the Second Style by transforming the flat wall into a panoramic window.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 49 (interior decoration), 130 (House of Augustus), 135 (House of the Griffins)

Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 185-195

Transcript



January 29, 2009



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Good morning. As you can see from the title of today's lecture, "Habitats at Herculaneum and Early Roman Interior Decoration," we're going to be concentrating once again, at least in the first half of the lecture, on domestic architecture in Campania. We're going to look at several houses in Herculaneum, and then we're going to move from there to begin our discussion of early Roman interior decoration, namely the First and Second Styles of Roman wall painting. And what you'll see makes them particularly relevant to what we've been discussing thus far this term is the fact that in both the First and Second Styles, architecture is depicted in these paintings, and we're going to see some very interesting relationships between that and the built monuments that we've talked about thus far this semester.



Just to remind you of the location of Herculaneum, which is usually called the sister city of Pompeii, because of that locale. We see it on the map here. Pompeii is down in this location. Herculaneum is to the northeast of Pompeii, closer to Naples than Pompeii is, as you can see. And note also the city of Boscoreale, Boscoreale, which is located between, almost equidistant -- a little bit closer to Pompeii than Herculaneum -- but in between the two. And I point it out to you now because we're going to look at an important room, with paintings, from the city of Boscoreale today as well. Here you see a view, a Google Earth flyover, of Herculaneum, as it looks today. It's very helpful because you can see a couple of things here that I want you to keep in mind, as we look at this city. One, that although most of the city of Pompeii has been excavated, only about a quarter or twenty-five percent of the city of Herculaneum has been excavated. So we have much less at Herculaneum than we do for Pompeii, and what we're missing, for the most part, is the public architecture. We don't have a great amphitheater from Herculaneum. We don't have a theater and a music hall complex. We think we might have part of the basilica, but we're not absolutely sure. We don't have the great large forum space that we have in Pompeii.



So we're missing a lot of that public architecture at Herculaneum, which gives us less of a sense of what the city was originally like, at least in its public face, although there's no doubt that that material still lies beneath the ground. So we have only a quarter of the city, mostly the residential part of the city, or part of the residential part of the city. But there are several houses there that are extremely--give us, provide information, especially about what was going on between the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius, 62 to 79, that are extremely valuable in terms of giving us a sense again of the evolution of Roman domestic architecture. The other issue that this particular view raises is the reason why Herculaneum is less well excavated than Pompeii, and the reason for that has to do--and you can see it well here--has to do with the fact that the modern city grew up on top of the ancient city. And they were able at one point to clear part of it, for excavation, but they have not been able to clear the rest. It's a political nightmare to have to deal--you have to relocate all the people who live in this area and have lived in this area for a very long time. That's politically a very difficult thing to do. It also is extremely costly. So thus far only twenty-five percent of Herculaneum revealed. Let's all hope that at some point someday Italy can sort this out and find a way to excavate the rest of this extraordinary city.



You can see from this view that I took as--this is one of the views that you get as you enter the site, the current location today. But I think you can see very well here again what I'm talking about: the relationship between the ancient city, lower ground level, that has been unearthed through excavation. You can see a peristyle court of one of the houses here, for example. But you can see the way in which the modern city rings the site, and again what a challenge it would be to remove that modern city and to reveal the rest of Herculaneum. Here's another view where you can also see some of the remains of the ancient city, of these residences and so on, and their relationship to the rest of the town.



With regard to the history of Herculaneum, it is very similar to the history of Pompeii. One difference is that the city of Herculaneum was supposedly founded by Hercules, hence its name Herculaneum. But in other respects the history again is quite comparable. We know, for example, that the city of Herculaneum was overseen for awhile by that same Italic tribe called the Oscans, who were then conquered by the Samnites, and the Samnites took over Herculaneum. And it was during the Samnite period in Herculaneum that we begin to see the same kind of architectural development that we saw also in Pompeii. We also know that those in Herculaneum, the citizens of Herculaneum, the leaders of Herculaneum, got involved in the Social Wars, as did those in Pompeii, and that the city of Herculaneum was conquered by Rome in 89 B.C., in 89 B.C. So Herculaneum becomes a Roman colony in 89 B.C. Thereafter we know--and of course at that point, just as in Pompeii, the Romans begin to build buildings in the Roman manner. From that point on we know again comparable development. We know that at Herculaneum they also witnessed that very serious earthquake, an earthquake that also destroyed significant parts of the city of Herculaneum, and they too went through that frenzied seventeen-year period of rebuilding. But again, just as at Pompeii, it was for naught, because the city of Herculaneum was also covered by the ash and lava of Vesuvius.



However, there's one major difference that has to do with the way that ash and lava fell. We talked about the fact that at Pompeii there was actually quite a bit of notice, that the ash and lava came down on the city fairly gradually, and that there was time for people to escape, and that most of them did, except for those foolhardy souls who decided to wait it out, which we discussed a couple of lectures ago. But in Herculaneum, it happened much more rapidly, and in fact it became very clear, very quickly, that a huge blanket of lava was headed toward the city. And needless to say, that encouraged people to leave pronto, and we thought, at least for a very long time, that that's in fact what had happened, that everybody had escaped the onslaught of Vesuvius. What happened after that blanket of lava engulfed the city is it hermetically sealed the city, hermetically sealed the city, in such a way that materials that have been lost at Pompeii were preserved at Herculaneum. And the best example of that is wood. We have almost no wood. Wood is not a material that withstands the test of time terribly well, and we have almost no wood from Pompeii. But from the city of Herculaneum, we have a considerable amount of wood, and this just has to do with the fact again that the city was so hermetically sealed by that blanket of lava.



And I can show you a few examples of what survives in wood. For example, this bed, or part of a bed, that's still preserved, as you can see here, with the wooden legs. A wooden partition in one of the houses, to divide one section, kind of like a modern pogo wall, to divide one section of the structure from another. You can see also the wooden frames around the doors and around the windows are also preserved, as are these wooden beams that you can see over the doorways and over the windows--mostly over the doorways--those wooden beams also made out of wood. And this is the most famous example, and one that everybody sees as you wander the streets of Herculaneum, the Casa a Graticcio, which we see here -- and you can see that even the balcony, which is made out of wood, is extremely well preserved. So this provides evidence that we don't have from Pompeii that's extremely valuable in terms of understanding Roman building practice.



I mentioned already though that we didn't think anyone--we thought that all those who lived in Herculaneum had escaped from Vesuvius, but it turns out that was not in fact the case. As recently as the 1980s, some archaeologists were doing some excavating down at the sea wall of the city of Herculaneum, and lo and behold, they came upon a cache of skeletons. And I show you some of those skeletons here. And those skeletons are in the same kinds of positions as the bodies that we saw at Pompeii, in that clearly a number of them have huddled together for protection, futile protection as it turned out. And here another one who's raising himself or herself in an attempt to survive somehow this awful event that has occurred. We find these skeletons--and they found these skeletons near the sea wall, and what they've concluded from this, two things: one, again the difference in the lava that fell on Herculaneum. You can see that it not only preserved wood, it also preserved bone, which is why the skeletons are still visible here, whereas at Pompeii everything decomposed, at Pompeii. So the situation again quite different. But they've also been able to determine that what clearly happened here is again because there was so much notice, people fled. And where did they flee? They fled toward the water, because they were right on the sea, they had a lot of boats, and the hope was that they could ferry everybody out from the city. And for the most part they were successful, but there was a certain group that unfortunately got left behind, and it was their remains that were discovered in the 1980s.



It's amazing what these bodies can tell us about some of the people who lived there, and I'll just give you a little sense of a couple of the storylines. Here is the skeleton of a woman, and you can see that this woman has--if you look very closely at her left hand, two of her fingers--you can see she has rings on two of her fingers, and those are larger views of those very rings. Two rings with green and red stones. The red stone, you can see, has a little bird depicted on it. These were her rings. Consequently the archaeologists call her "the ring lady"; or it should be "the rings lady." But here she is with her two rings. And you can see that she also had, next to her side, these two absolutely gorgeous golden snake bracelets, sort of à la Cleopatra, Cleopatraesque, that she obviously loved and took with her when she attempted to escape from the city.



And an even more poignant story is this one. What we're looking at here is the head of a woman; a young woman, the excavators have determined. And if you look at the top of her head, you will see that a tuft of hair is actually preserved. It looks dark in this image but it's actually blond. So they've been able to determine this was a young, blond woman, who lived in Herculaneum. And you can see the small size of the skeleton below. This is not hers; it's obviously her fetus, the baby. She was seven months pregnant they've been able to determine, and so they have found the bones of the baby as well. And you can see them here and the excavators--the excavation reports -- they talk about the fact that the bones of the baby, of the infant, of the unborn child, are so fragile that it was like picking up eggshells, when they were trying to piece this skeleton together. So it's incredible the kind of information that archaeologists have been able to glean from those trying to escape Herculaneum on that fateful day in August of 79. One other sad story is just that they did actually find the remains of one child--this is sort of like the story of the dog at Pompeii--one child whose remains were left in this little crib in one house. And again the bones are preserved, because of this circumstance of the particular configuration of the lava; the bones of that small child are also preserved in this crib in one of the houses in Herculaneum.



To turn to the city itself, I show you now a plan of Herculaneum, or at least the excavated part of Herculaneum, that gives you some sense of what is there. And I've already mentioned that we simply won't see any big amphitheater in plan, or any major forum complex, and so on and so forth. We simply don't have that evidence in the excavated part. But what you do see is comparable to the residential area of Pompeii. You can see a series of major thoroughfares crossing with one another. We can't be sure, since we don't have the whole city, which is the main cardo and which is the main decumanus of the city, but they are certainly laid out at a quite regular pattern, with shops and houses interspersed with one another, as you can see extremely well here. Again, we don't, as far as we know, we really don't--well we're quite sure we don't have any of the major public buildings. But there are a couple of structures here and there that do tell us something. Here's an arch, for example, that may have been on one of the more important thoroughfares of the city, and we certainly have shops and the like along the way.



And I can actually show you a few views of shops and the city streets and so on, that give you a good sense that Herculaneum was very similar looking to Pompeii. If you look at the street here--it's a street from the city of Herculaneum--you can see the same multi-sided stones for the pavement. You can see the same sidewalks. You can see the same drains in Herculaneum. You can see the same rut marks. What you don't see--and I started a post on this yesterday--what you don't see are stepping stones. There are no persevered stepping stones in Herculaneum. There are lots of preserved stepping stones in Pompeii. And I was mulling this over yesterday in a way, even beyond what I have tended to in the past about these stepping stones, thinking about could I think of any other examples in any other Roman city I've ever been, including Rome itself, where there's actually quite a bit of preserved pavement here and there -- out on the Via Appia, in the Roman Forum, and so on and so forth? And I can't think of a single other site, off the top of my head, where we find stepping stones. So I just put that out as a thought question for all of us, to see whether I'm missing something, or whether it's conceivable that Pompeii may have been exceptional in this regard, rather than the norm. Here we see amphoras, these clay amphoras in which wine or oil were kept, so a wine or an oil shop there. And then, of course, our favorite, the fast-food stand, the thermopolium; Herculaneum had plenty of thermopolia, very similar to those in Pompeii. So you can imagine, for the most part, a quite similar looking city.



I mentioned though that the evidence that we do have is mostly for residential architecture, and there are three houses in particular that I want to focus on, because they give us information that goes beyond the information that I've been able to give you from the houses that we looked at in Pompeii. The first one I want to look at is the so-called Samnite House at Herculaneum. It dates to the second century B.C., and you see it in plan here. It's a very simple house. So second century B.C. That tells you what? It tells you that it's early, but it's already in that Hellenized-domus period, which began in the second century B.C. So we look to see which plan it conforms to. Does it conform to the domus italica, or the Hellenized domus? Well at first it looks like it conforms to the domus italica, because you can see it's quite simple. It has the basic core. You come in here, into the fauces. There are cells on either side, the cellae. These cellae are indeed cellae. They open up only to the house and not to the outside. They have not been transformed into shops. We see the atrium here. We see the impluvium of the atrium, and there was, of course, a compluvium up above. We see a very small number of cubicula, just a couple over here. And we don't seem to see the usual wings, unless this one over here--although there seems to be some sort of staircase on that side--served in part as the wing. And so and one of those rooms, probably the left one, served as the dining room. There's no hortus, there's no peristyle.



So again at first it looks like a pretty simple example of the--an even simplified version of a typical domus italica. But when we walk into the atrium, which is very well preserved today, we see something quite different. The focus in this particular house was the atrium. You can tell it's an atrium. You can see the compluvium up above. We're looking here at the entranceway, through the fauces. These are the doors into the two cells, one on either side. This is a door into one of the only two cubicula in this structure. You can see also that the patron and designer of this particular house wanted to--you can see that this is a Hellenized domus, in the sense that they have incorporated pilasters here, on either side of the wall, next to the entranceway. But most interesting of all is what has happened in what seems to be a second story for the atrium. They have expanded, they have moved, they have developed the atrium even more vertically than has been the case before, by adding this blind gallery, up at the top, which on three sides is again closed--you can see the enclosed wall--but on the fourth side, which I don't have an image to show you, the fourth side, it's open. So there's an open loggia, there's open space between the columns.



So blind gallery on three sides, open loggia on the other side; the open loggia, of course, bringing additional light into the atrium. So a very elaborate treatment of the atrium, which shows us not only the esteem in which this particular patron held the atrium, but also this interesting incorporation of columns in a different way than we've seen before, making them the high point of this room by placing them in the second story. They are Ionic columns. Notice also this sort of latticework fence that encircles it. We'll see that kind of latticework fence also in Roman painting. You can see, in fact, the remains of some paint on the walls. So the walls behind this were painted. So a very opulent atrium that shows again this interest in building vertically and adding some interest at the uppermost part, to create this sense of two stories. This is a development--this is in fact even early for that, in the second century B.C.



The two most important houses, however, at Herculaneum are the House of the Mosaic Atrium and the House of the Stags. And I want to look at both of those houses with you today. I'm going to start with the House of the Mosaic Atrium. You can see from this plan, which comes from the Ward-Perkins textbook, you can see from this plan that they are literally side-by-side; they essentially share a wall, as you can see here. They are very important in terms of the development, not only of residential architecture in Campania in the late first century A.D., but also as a premonition of what's to come in much later residential architecture. Again, I'm going to look at both of them, and we'll start first with the Mosaic Atrium.



If you look at the top of the plan, the northern most part of the plan--and this house, by the way, does--as you can see from the Monument List--does date to A.D. 62 to 79, so at the very end of domestic architecture development in Pompeii. If we look at the uppermost part, the north, you will see that if you enter the house at the arrow, and you look ahead, you would think--you look at the vista ahead and see the atrium and the tablinum--you would think you were in a typical domus italica type house. It's got those three main elements. It's got the fauces; it's got the atrium with an impluvium and a compluvium, as we'll see; and it's got a tablinum, all on axis with one another. But as you're standing in the atrium looking toward the tablinum, you're kind of looking at this tablinum and saying to yourself, "This is not the tablinum I know, this is not the tablinum I'm used to, this is not the tablinum in most of the houses that I know." It's designed in a very different way. And what is it that you see in plan that indicates to us that it's designed in a different way? Does anyone see what it is?



Student: Columns.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: It has--are they columns? Look closely.



Student: Flat.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Are they round?



Student: No.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: No, they're square. So they're either piers, or they're columns on bases that are square. But you're right, there are architectural members in here. It turns out they're piers but--so there are piers in here. Okay. What else? What about the actual plan itself? How are those piers--what's the relationship of those piers to the room design? Someone over there?



Student: Freestanding.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Freestanding. Yes. What else? Does it remind you of a plan we've seen in another context? You're looking at a central space, divided by two aisles, by architectural members, in this case by piers. A basilica. It's a basilican plan: central nave, two side aisles. What's a basilican plan doing in a house? Is this a basilica or a law court? No. It's actually a winter banqueting room, but a winter banqueting room in the shape of a basilica. And I make a lot of that, because we'll see this happening with increasing frequency in Roman architecture, and that is a certain building type that was developed for one kind of building--in this case a basilican plan developed for law courts--begins to be used for another kind of room, in this case a winter banqueting hall. And I like to call this the sort of inter-changeability of form -- that you can develop a certain plan for a certain kind of structure, but then be creative enough to realize that you could use that same plan in another environment, in a different but interesting way. And that's exactly what happens here. Now needless to say the scale is actually fairly large. But this does not look like a huge basilica. It's brought down to domestic size scale, as you can see here. So that's a very interesting development. It's very well preserved, and I'll show it to you in a moment.



So once you get into the atrium, then you have to take an abrupt right in order to see the peristyle court. And the peristyle court is very, very large. We've talked about the fact that there was an increasing interest in the peristyle as a key component of a Roman house, and we see that very clearly here; in fact, the peristyle is really beginning to take pride of place away from the atrium. Because the atrium is almost beginning to go the way of the tablinum, in the sense that it's becoming a kind of passageway; it's not an end in itself, it's becoming--or the atrium and tablinum aren't ends in themselves, they are a passageway into this huge peristyle. If you look at the plan of the peristyle, you can see that there are columns, but those columns are engaged into the wall. And that's well preserved. I'll show it to you in a moment. And then also extremely interesting is now on axis with the atrium and the huge peristyle, is TR; TR is the triclinium or the dining room. And look at the size of that triclinium, and look at the fact that the triclinium opens both off the peristyle and also has an opening on this way, on this end, toward the front--toward the other side, excuse me--of the house. And this is the side, the southern side that faces the sea.



And Herculaneum was very close--I'll show you a restored view that makes this clear in a moment--Herculaneum was very close to the sea. And these two houses were probably among the two most expensive houses in Herculaneum, because they had the best views of the sea. They were very high up, above the sea wall, and they looked right out at the sea. So the way they've designed this: very large triclinium, to benefit from being able to see both the peristyle and views out over the sea, even while you were dining. There seems to have been a colonnade over here--so views through columns, out to the sea--and then these two rooms at D. These are, as you can see here, the diaetae; d-i-a-e-t-a, singular; d-i-a-e-t-a-e, plural. These are rooms that are set aside for sort of summer pleasure, summer pleasures, near the panoramic window that you can look out to the sea. So a place to relax and enjoy the sunshine on the southern end; views of the sea; a special room set aside just for that kind of panoramic viewing and the like. So this move again toward vista, toward panorama, that we've been talking about before. So some very important changes here that signal where Roman residential architecture will go in the future. I'm going to wait on the plan of the Stags until we finish with the Mosaic Atrium.



The Mosaic Atrium, you can see a view into the atrium today. You can see why the house is called the House of the Mosaic Atrium, because of the very well-preserved black and white, striking black and white mosaic that we find there. And you can see how well preserved the impluvium is, with the mosaic decoration around that. You can also see, however, if you look carefully at this image--you've probably noticed it already--that the floor undulates. Why does the floor undulate? The floor undulates because of that heavy blanket of lava that entered into Herculaneum, that made its presence known and that distorted the shape of the floor of the atrium, but fortunately preserved it, at the same time, which is great. We're looking from the atrium into the tablinum, and we see that basilican form that we described already before: a central nave, a back wall, side aisles on either--you can't see this side, but the same on this side as on this side--side aisles and circulation of space among them.



And you can also see, if you look very carefully--and I have another view in a moment--that there are windows here as well, windows that allow light into the system. When we talked about the Basilica of Pompeii, I mentioned to you that the Basilica at Pompeii did not have a clerestory--c-l-e-r-e s-t-o-r-y--did not have a clerestory, but that we would begin to see the development of the clerestory later. We see it here; this use of a clerestory with the placement of windows in that second story to allow light into the structure. It has been developed here. It's a very important architectural development, and we're going to see again the ramifications of that into the future.



Here's another view of this banqueting hall. And, by the way, the technical name for this--and I have it on the Monument List for you--is the Egyptian oecus or the oecus Aegypticus; the oecus Aegyptiacus, or if it's easier for you, the Egyptian oecus: this particular form of banqueting hall, in the shape of a basilica. This view is helpful, not only because you can see the piers better, but also because you can see the windows better: the clerestory system that allows light into the space. And you can also see this ubiquitous use of white and red for the piers in this case, just as they are usually used for columns. The uppermost part of the pier is white, and then they've painted the bottom red. So very similarly to the kind of decor we saw also in Pompeii.



This is, of course, the peristyle court. You can see it here, and you can see the way in which these columns have been engaged into the wall of the garden court. You can also see this interesting use of combination of stone and tile, for the construction. Also interesting, as you look at the rooms that line the side of the peristyle, you can see how opened up they have become. We don't see that severe wall that we saw in the very earliest domus italica, with no windows, as you'll recall. There are lots of windows here, and they are large windows, and they are allowing light into the structure, not just on the front, where the views are, but on the other sides of the building. This is again a very important change and one that is going to have again important ramifications for the future. Note also that the famous Pompeian red is used to decorate the walls. So that's the House of the Mosaic Atrium.



Now let's turn to the House of the Stags; the House of the Stags so called because of a sculpture that was found there, that I'll show you a bit later. If we look at the House of the Stags, we see some interesting things happening as well, that seem to parallel the development we've already described. This house too, built between 62 and 79. The entrance in this case is on the uppermost right, right here, and you can see that you enter in along a fauces, along the throat of the house, into what is designated as the atrium. But that atrium is not like any other atrium we've seen thus far this semester. What's missing?



Student: Impluvium.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The impluvium; the impluvium is missing. If there's no impluvium, there's no compluvium, which means that the room is not open to the sky. And we call an atrium that has no opening--and I've put this on the Monument List for you--an atrium testudinatum; an atrium testudinatum is an atrium that has no opening to the sky. And that's the case here. That also tends to underplay the space, because it's no longer as interesting as it was when it had that wonderful basin and the skylight and so on and so forth. And if you look at the plan, you'll see it's very interesting. It has lots of openings on various sides. So this is a really good example of what I was hinting at before, and that is the atrium beginning to go the way of the tablinum; the atrium beginning to become a passageway from one part of the house to another. It really is merely a passageway from the outside, from the fauces, into the other rooms of the house.



What has received the greatest emphasis, by the patron and by the designer, is not the atrium, but is the triclinium or dining hall, and you can see that there are two of them, and they are placed in relationship to one another, axial relationship to one another. So they're almost talking to one another; there's a kind of dialogue, an architectural dialogue, between that smaller triclinium and this larger triclinium, across an open courtyard. So here we see again the triclinium beginning to emerge as the single most important room in the house, which obviously signals what's going on in these houses -- that people are beginning to use them even more than they did before, not only as places of business but as places to enjoy fabulous dinner parties, while you can look out over the sea. And, in fact, if you look at this triclinium, the larger one, you can see again it opens both off the garden court, and also opens toward the south, where you would have seen the views of the sea; all of this very deliberate. We see the diaetae here as well, these summer living spaces with views out over the water. And here we see an interesting detail, which is a kind of kiosk or gazebo that's located in the front, and that actually still survives, and I'll show that to you in a moment. So again quite momentous changes in residential architecture in Herculaneum and in Campania in general in the late first century A.D.



This is a restored view -- very helpful because we can use it to illustrate a number of things. We can use it to illustrate how close to the sea Herculaneum was. We can use it to look at the sea wall that I talked about before. We can use it to look at the harbor, the small boat dock that was down here, with boats waiting. This was the place that people ran to in order to escape the onslaught of the Vesuvius. And this is exactly -- this sea wall is exactly where those bodies were found, so they made it this far but not far enough. And we can pick out both the House of the Mosaic Atrium, right here, and the House of the Stags, over here: both of them very large, as you can see. You can see in the case--here's the northern end--you can see is this case, for the House of the Mosaic Atrium, the compluvium of the atrium that we described, the mosaic atrium. You can see the open court here. You can see the side that faces the sea and how opened up it is, how many windows there were, how open, the diaetae on either side, where you could get nice views. Here, the House of the Stags, same sort of thing. You see no opening whatsoever in the northern end, no opening in the ceiling, no compluvium. You see the two trinclinia facing one another across the open court, and you see that little gazebo entranceway, a gazebo that again looks out toward the sea, that distinctive detail.



Here are a couple more views, just to show you quickly. If you go and visit Herculaneum, you can still see those sea walls there, made out of concrete as you can see. They're well worth taking a look at. And this is a view taken--this is one of the ways you can enter into the city--taken across. You can see Vesuvius in the background, and you can see this is the House of the Mosaic Atrium, that we've been looking at. This is the House of the Stags. And you can tell the difference because of the little gazebo, little kiosk in front. And here you can see again so well the way this is positioned high up on the wall, with spectacular views of the sea, and this opening up of the wall to allow maximum vista, maximum panorama, through those spaces in the house.



Note the kiosk here, and then note this other entrance; I'm going to show you both of those in detail. This is a little gazebo. As you can see, it rests on piers. It was obviously a very pleasant place to sit, with marble furniture, and to have a glass of wine out here, looking out over the sea. And you can see once again that the piers have been stuccoed over: white on top, red on the bottom, just as we have seen is so characteristic also of Pompeii. And right behind, that other entranceway, that I can also show you, where you can see--if you look very closely, you can see not only the red paint on the pilasters, but also the very elaborate decoration in blue and white of the pediment above. This gives you some sense also of the kind of decorative sculpture there would've been in buildings like this: the marble tables, these wonderful statues--there are two of them--of stags being attacked by hounds, and these stags are what have given this house its name, the House of the Stags.



I want to turn from Roman residential architecture in Herculaneum and the developments there, to early Roman wall decoration, painted decoration, and as I said at the beginning, specifically to the First and Second Styles of Roman wall painting, which are particularly interesting in the context of a course on architecture because, as we'll see, they are so architecturally oriented. I want to begin with a wall from the House of Sallust, and we'll go back to Pompeii. We'll be looking at examples both in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and also Rome. I want to look at the House of Sallust in Pompeii. And you can see from your Monument List that the tablinum was decorated with what we call First Style Roman wall painting. That's obviously a modern, scholarly designation. They didn't call it that in ancient Rome or Pompeii or Herculaneum. First Style Roman wall painting. This tablinum in this house was decorated in around 100 B.C., which is when we date most of the examples of First Style Roman wall painting. It is very well preserved, and it gives us a very good sense of what the Romans, or what, in this case, the Pompeians were trying to achieve.



This style, the First Style of Roman wall painting is also--you'll see it referred to in your books and in your textbooks and in scholarship in general, as either the Masonry Style, or the Incrustation Style. And the reason for this--both of those are good descriptions--because you can see that what is at work here is that the designers are trying to create a wall, they're trying to create the illusion that what we're looking at is not a stucco and paint wall, which is actually what it's made out of, but a real marble wall. We can see that the wall is divided into a series of zones, architectural zones, which are exactly the zones that were used in Roman building technique. We don't quite see it here. I'll show it to you in another example. There's usually, way at the bottom, a very narrow band, which is called a plinth, p-l-i-n-t-h. The plinth has above it what's called a socle, s-o-c-l-e, which is a higher, a slightly higher element. Then what are called the orthostats, o-r-t-h-o-s-t-a-t-s; the orthostats are these blocks here. And then the isodomic, i-s-o-d-o-m-i-c, the isodomic courses; you see those here. And then usually either a stringcourse, or more likely, or in addition to, a cornice, what's called a cornice, a projecting cornice--c-o-r-n-i-c-e--at the top. So plinth, socle, orthostats, isodomic blocks, and then the stringcourse and the cornice, which again corresponds to actual Roman building technique.



But more important than that terminology is again what they are trying to achieve here. It is clear when you look--well first of all keep in mind that this is not flat; it's a relief, it's a relief wall, and the wall has been built up in relief through stucco. They've taken the rubble wall, they've added stucco, and they've made that stucco look like a series of blocks that are divided by these stringcourses. Then what they've done is painted those blocks, and they've painted those blocks not all one color, not all Pompeian red, but all different kinds of colors: green and red and pink and beige, and sometimes multicolored, as we'll see. What is the implication here? The implication here is that we are looking--that they're trying to create the illusion, through stucco and paint, of a marble wall, of a marble wall that would've been very expensive to build, because you would've had to bring all of these multicolored marbles, which you could not find in Italy, from places very far away: from North Africa or from Asia Minor or from Greece or from Egypt. You'd have to bring it from very, very, very far away, and that would cost a tremendous amount of money.



So what they are saying here is, "I'm the owner of this house. I am wealthy enough to be able to afford bringing marble from all over the world and using it to decorate my tablinum." Now was anyone fooled that this was a real marble wall and not a painted wall? Well probably not. But the idea was to give one the sense that this was a very expensive wall. And we'll see one of the most--well I'll hold that until later, that thought until later. Here's another example in the same house. This is the House of Sallust. We are looking--we have just--here's the tablinum wall that we just looked at. We are now in the atrium of the house, or what survives of the atrium of the house. We are looking at two of the cubicula that open off the atrium. And if you look at the walls, you can see again the same effect, that the rubble wall has been covered with stucco; that the stucco has been divided--the stucco has been built up in relief; that it has been divided into a series of architectural zones. And then the individual blocks, in the orthostat level and in the isodomic level, have been painted different colors, again to give this illusion that what we are looking at is a marble wall, not a painted wall. So an attempt to make something, to fictionalize and make something seem more than it actually is.



Here's another view, a restored view, that gives you a sense perhaps of what this might have looked like when the colors were more vivid. We do believe that those cubicula had doors, probably wooden doors that no longer survive. And you can see not only the architectural courses here, but the effect that this would've had. Here's one of these multicolored blocks, again, marble that would've had to be brought from North Africa or somewhere like that, where they had these kinds of multicolored marbles. But this gives you some sense of what the appearance would have been. And perhaps from a distance your eye really would have been fooled into thinking that this was a real marble wall.



You'll remember the restored view I showed you of the House of the Faun, where we stood again in the atrium, looking back at the statuette of the Faun, and I mentioned that the walls were decorated with First Style Roman wall painting. And so we see that again here. And we see the kind of effect it would've had if the entire space was covered with this kind of wall painting. You can also see the relationship between those paintings and the vista that one saw as one stood and looked back through the columns, on to the additional columns of the peristyle court.



Another example of a First Style wall, this one from Herculaneum, is the so-called Samnite House, which we saw earlier today, with that fabulous atrium. The Samnite House. And this is the fauces of the Samnite House; also dates to 100 B.C. And you can see the same scheme as we already saw. One additional feature that you can see better here is the plinth, this very narrow band that we see at the bottom, the plinth. The socle here. The orthostats here. The isodomic courses here. The stringcourse, and then the cornice. So exactly the same scheme that we saw in the other house at Pompeii we see here in the Samnite House at Herculaneum, this one even better preserved. And that's actually a very washed out view, but I can show you a better one, where you can get a better sense of the coloration of this particular wall: the plinth, the socle, the orthostats, the isodomics and then a frieze; as you can see, in between the stringcourse and the cornice, there is a red frieze. And look at--this is better preserved so that you can get a better sense again of what this might have looked like in ancient Roman times--this wonderful contrast between the reddish, porphyry-like stone that probably would've come from Egypt; the multi-grained stone that might've come from North Africa; the kind of impact that this would've had.



But again, most important for us, is what they're trying to do is create an illusion. They're trying to create, make something look like something it really isn't. They are using again stucco and paint to make a wall, to make a very plain wall, to make a rubble and stucco and painted wall into a very grandiose wall, that looked like walls that were probably the kinds of walls--in fact we're sure they were the kinds of walls--that decorated the palaces of great Hellenistic kings in the Hellenistic East. We know that the great kings of Pergamon, and some of the other kingdoms, had palaces that had real marble walls. And we think it's very likely that that is the sort of thing that they are trying to recreate here.



And then a very, a particularly important point, I think, is the fact that even though I would love to lay claim to this particular style for the Romans, the Romans did not invent the First Style of Roman wall painting. They copied it from the Greeks. We know that the Greeks used this First Style of Roman wall paint -- it wasn't called the First Style of Roman wall painting, obviously, for them. But they used something comparable to the First Style, which we believe was derived from these Hellenistic palaces, ultimately. And you can see here a view of a wall, or a drawing of a wall, that was in--and it's on your Monument List -- from the House of the Trident on the Island of Delos: late second, early first century B.C. The Island of Delos was strategically located between Italy and Greece and Asia Minor and so on. It was one of these crossroads of trade, and it was a place where Romans settled in the first centuries B.C. especially. And we see houses there--probably some Greek owners, some Roman owners--that have this same kind of style. It's painted. We see the same zones--I won't describe them again--but the same architectural zones that we see in the First Style paintings in Pompeii and in Herculaneum. And we believe that those are based on Hellenistic precedents. But they show us again that this was used in the Greek East. It was probably picked up by some of the traders, brought back to Italy, and used there.



The fact that it's a Greek import is extremely important, because then we can group it with all the other Greek imports that we've been talking about: the columns, the peristyles, the Alexander mosaic; all of the things that the Romans, the Hellenizing elements that we have seen the Romans be particularly fond of in this early period and have used themselves in their architecture and in their architectural decor. So we see that here, again, the taking over of a Greek style of organizing and decorating a wall for these Roman buildings.



This is a house we'll look at later in the semester at Ostia, the port city of Ostia, the so-called House of Cupid and Psyche, and we see the two lovers here, on a pedestal in the center. I show it to you here only--it's a much later structure--but I show it to you only because you'll see, when we get to that, that the Romans do--and we'll see it much earlier than that in fact--the Romans do begin to revet some of their structures with marble--this begins already in the age of Augustus, so we'll see it very soon--and eventually it becomes part of house design as well. So while this isn't as grandiose as a Hellenistic palace would've been, it does give you some idea of what a house would look like, or a palace would look like, that had marble on the floor and marble on the walls. And it's this kind of thing that they are trying to create the illusion of--this is very subtle with pastels and so on--but it's this kind of thing that they are trying to create the illusion of, with the Roman First Style.



We see First Style Roman wall painting also in Rome, and in fact I can show you an even more spectacular example in Rome. It's from the House of the Griffins, and I show you a view into a great barrel vaulted room. We're walking along the corridor of a great barrel vaulted room in the House of the Griffins in Rome, on the Palatine Hill, in fact, under the later imperial palace of the emperor Domitian. It dates to 80 B.C.; this particular room, which we call Room 3, dates to 80 B.C. It's from this room that the house gets its name. You can get a glimpse of--and I'll show you a better view in a moment--of the griffins. There are heraldic griffins in a lunette, painted red in the background. They're made out of--they're built up in stucco -- and then the lunette itself is painted red. It's from those griffins that the house got its name.



We are looking down the side of that house, and we see again that is built up in stucco, so it's still a kind of stucco relief. But if you look at the paintings on the walls, and on the back wall, the side wall or the back wall--and I'll show you a better view here--you will see that although we are dealing with something that looks like a First Style wall--it's very flat, it's divided into architectural zones: the socle, the orthostats, the isodomic courses here--that is all done entirely in paint, as you can see. It's not built up as a relief. The only relief here that we see is the relief that is used for the heraldic griffins, up in the uppermost part. When this was in better condition, a painting was made of it, and I show that painting to you here. And I hope this will give you a better sense than anything else I've shown you today of how glorious these things must have been in antiquity, and how again if you stood back from them, you might have been somewhat fooled. We see the wall here. We can see all the components that we've already described: the plinth, the socle, the orthostats, the isodomic courses, and then the lunette with the heraldic griffins. And again, the whole idea of this being to give you the impression that you are looking at a real marble wall, even though you are looking at a painted wall.



Much more important for the development of Roman painting is another house that I'm going to show you here, which is Room 2, in the House of the Griffins. And this dates a little bit later; it was done between 80 and 60 B.C. And we look at this; we will see that there are beginning to be some important changes here. As you look at this--you see we're looking at a barrel-vaulted room, once again -- all three walls well decorated and very well preserved. So we can see exactly what's going on here. As we look quickly, we see remnants of the First Style wall. We see that we have the same architectural zones--the plinths, the orthostats, the isodomic courses--and we have the same idea of marble. You can see that these variegated marble blocks and these red panels are meant to look again like marble, although this is done entirely in paint; there is no stucco used in this room whatsoever. Stucco is not used anywhere here. It's completely flat and it is painted as an illusionistic view.



But as we look at this, we see although we get a sense that that First Style wall is kind of still present, we also see some again very important changes. We see the way in which they've treated the socle here, to create these kinds of illusionistic cubes that look almost as if they're projecting out into our space. Look also at what they've done by adding columns, columns that stand on bases, this colonnade that seems to encircle the room, the way a peristyle encircles a garden court, this introduction of columnar architecture. Again clearly under the influence of Greek architecture and clearly commensurate with what they're doing in temple architecture, what they're doing in sanctuary architecture, and also in house architecture. So we see those columns. And it looks as if those columns are resting on bases that are represented as if they're receding into the background. The artist has paid a lot of attention to trying to render them perspectivally. So although all of this is done in paint, we get the impression that what we're looking at is a colonnade that is in front of the wall--it projects into the spectator's space--and that what lies behind it is a kind of First Style wall.



This is the very beginnings of what we call Second Style Roman wall painting: this introduction of columns; this introduction of elements that project into the viewer's space; this sense that you are looking at two levels of space, the level of space that is the wall, and then the level of space that projects in front of it. And look at the columns at the top of the columns. You will see they hold lintels, but those lintels also are shown as if they're receding into depth, and you can sort of barely see--and you'll see this better as you study this in the online images. You'll be able to see the actual coffered ceiling that is represented on the top, underneath those lintels, which again indicate that this is being represented in depth. And here you can see exactly what they're trying to do. They're trying to use paint and only paint to recreate the sort of thing that we saw in built architecture in the oecus in the House of the Silver Wedding: these columns that project in front of a painted wall.



This is the pièce de résistance of what we call Second Style Roman wall painting. This is the preeminent example of mature Second Style Roman wall painting. It is a scene in the Villa of the Mysteries. It's in one of the cubicula; cubiculum 16, at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. It dates to 60 to 50 B.C. It's a further development of what we saw in Room 2 of the House of the Griffins. We see the First Style wall is still present. We see the plinth; we see the socle; we see the orthostats; we see the isodomic blocks, although they are done entirely in paint. Again, no stucco here whatsoever. We see the columns have also been added, as is typical of Second Style. But here the columns are even more interesting, because we can see that the columns not only project from the wall themselves, but they support an entablature--e-n-t-a-b-l-a-t-u-r-e--an entablature which projects out toward the spectator, and they tried to make that look as if it recedes into depth. We see another set of columns here that support a straight lintel. But then look, the lintel arches up in the center. This is called an arculated lintel, an arculated lintel. We have not seen an arculated lintel in built architecture. This is very early, 60 to 50 B.C. We are seeing it here. Why are we seeing it here and why are we not seeing it in built architecture is a very interesting issue and one we could debate in the online forum.



We see that that First Style wall has been--oh, and we also see columns that support one of these lintels, with a coffered ceiling; the brown coffered ceiling up at the uppermost part. The First Style wall--this is a very complex painting and a very interesting painting intellectually. The First Style wall has been--it's there, but it's been dropped down. It's been dropped down, and now we can see something that lies behind that First Style wall. We see a view of this round structure, called a tholos--t-h-o-l-o-s; a round tholos. It's like the tholos that was at the top of the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, at Palestrina. It's a shrine of some sort, and that shrine is surrounded by blue sky. So that's something that's presumably outside. So the First Style wall has been dropped down, and now we have this vista or panorama of something that lies outside the wall.



So we, in a sense, have three zones of space. We have the columns that project into the spectator's space. We have the First Style, or what's left of the First Style wall. And then we see a view through the wall, to something that lies beyond: a vista, a panorama, a window. It's like opening up the wall as a window, to what lies beyond. It's fictive again, in the same way that First Style wall painting was fictive. It creates an illusion of something that is there, that isn't really there. And it coincides certainly with the kind of development we've been tracing also in built architecture: this opening up of the house; opening up of the windows; opening up bay windows, to views that lie beyond.



There're also these mysterious things that are called, that people usually refer to as "the black curtains" in Second Style Roman wall painting. You can see this black element that looks almost as if it were a curtain that's been dropped down to reveal the scene that lies beyond. Because of this, and because of the columns, the projecting columns, many scholars have suggested that there's some relationship between this and theatrical architecture--theatrical architecture that was probably stage sets and the like, that were probably initially made out of wood, that don't survive any longer--and that these may imitate some of those stage sets, and that this may be an actual curtain used in theatrical performances. But there are other ways to think about those black curtains, so to speak, and I think we don't have time to do that here now, but we should definitely engage on that in the online forum. Oh and I do want to say one last thing--we're going to look at one more example of Second Style Roman wall painting--one thing, one distinction that I want to make between the First and the Second Style is while the First Style of Roman wall painting was a Greek import, there is nothing like the Second Style, as we've just described it, anywhere in Greek art. The Second Style of Roman wall painting is without any question a Roman innovation, and an extraordinary Roman innovation at that, and one that is very closely allied with developments in architecture, as we've described them.



This is another example, the Villa of Publius Fannius Sinistor: Second Style painting. Dates to 50 to 40 B.C. It was in that town of Boscoreale that I showed you on the map before, between Herculaneum and Pompeii, and it was removed from there at one point and made its way to New York. It is now in the Metropolitan, and has been for a long time, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it is usually referred to as The Met Cubiculum. And if you haven't seen it, you should go down and see it. It is most extraordinary. They've tried to recreate--the paintings are all ancient--but they've tried to recreate the ambience by putting a black and white mosaic on the floor and giving us a nice, comfortable, sort of, bed, and a footstool over here, that are just the kind of thing that you would've seen in that room, although they don't actually belong. And they've added a window and so on and so forth. But the paintings are all genuine ancient paintings. And what's amazing is we have the entire spread of the room. And actually there are mirror images, the scenes are mirror images of one another, across the two long walls.



I want to show you just a couple of details. This is a detail from that room that shows a tholos seen through columns. Once again we see here--this is an example of Second Style, but it's a little bit more developed here, because you can see that the First Style wall has really been dropped down now, and, in fact, it doesn't even look like a First Style wall anymore, it just looks like a red parapet with a green frieze and a little cornice at the top. But it doesn't really look like a First Style wall. In fact, it looks like a wall with a gate that doesn't look like there's any knob or anything like that; so we kind of wonder, can we get into this? Do we have to jump over it? How do we get from here into what lies beyond? We're not absolutely sure. But we see a tholos once again, one of these sort of sacred shrines. And here you can see it is surrounded by a peristyle, by columns: a peristyle just like one might find in a house, or in a villa.



So what are we looking at here? We see columns that support a pediment. The pediment if you look--a triangular pediment. What's interesting about it is it's broken at the bottom. The Greeks would never break their pediments. The Romans have broken this pediment to allow space for the tholos to rise up between it. And it's a very interesting thing to do, and it shows while on one hand they respect ancient Greek architecture, they're also willing to depart from it and break the rules, so to speak. And we're going to see that's emphasized by the Romans later on. So the tholos here. So we have these different elements. We have the columns projecting toward us. We have the wall of the gateway. We also have this view through the window, a picture window, into what lies beyond. And we seem to have these black curtains again; in fact, we have three of these black curtains. So we ask ourselves again, what are those exactly?



Another view, just showing you this in relationship to the House of the Faun, and this whole idea of vista and panorama, from one part to another. We see the same thing happening in painting as we see happening in that. And then one last detail of the Publius Fannius Met Cubiculum over here. A very interesting detail, and I urge you to explore this on your own, because it's so fascinating in detail, this doorway. And then most interesting of all this panoply of structures that seem to be piled, one on top of another, in a series of stories. This again is very early. It's 50 to 40 B.C. We don't see anything like that in built architecture then. We only see second stories beginning to be added in Pompeian structures, Herculaneum structures, between the earthquake and Vesuvius, between 62 and 79. But here, already, in the mid-century B.C., we see this depicted in paint. Is this fanciful? Is it based on something that was built in wood that no longer survives? These are questions, perhaps unanswerable questions, but ones well worth pondering.



I want to show you, in the few minutes that remain, just two more houses, quickly. One of them--both of them--are important though, because they belong to the emperor and empress, to Augustus and to Livia. Augustus purchased some property on the Palatine Hill. He wanted to live--as Rome's first emperor of Rome--he wanted to live where Romulus had lived before him, of course. And he buys some property up here, builds [correction: restores] a house. He puts a temple to his patron god, right next door, Apollo, and then Livia has her own house right across the street: his wife Livia. She lives with him in his house, but she's also got her own house right across the street. And both of these houses were decorated with paintings.



I want to show you first the ones in the House of Augustus, the most famous room in t

Professor Kleiner discusses the development of Third Style Roman wall painting in late first century B.C. villas belonging to the imperial family and other elite patrons. Third Style painting, as Professor Kleiner demonstrates, is characterized by departure from the perspectival vistas and panoramas of the Second Style toward an attenuation of architectural elements and a respect for the inherent flatness of the wall. The Third Style remains popular until the middle of the first century A.D., when it is replaced by the Fourth Style of Roman painting; both styles coexist in the Domus Aurea, the luxurious pleasure palace of the emperor Nero in downtown Rome. Professor Kleiner characterizes the Fourth Style of Roman wall painting as a compendium of previous styles, with imitation marble veneer, framed mythological panels, and the introduction of fragments of architecture situated in an illogical space.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 49 (interior decoration), 268, 290-292 (Domus Aurea)

Transcript



February 3, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everyone. As you can see from today's lecture title, we're going to be talking about painting palaces and villas in the first century A.D. But I could also call this lecture a lecture on Third and Fourth Style Roman wall painting, because we're going to continue our conversation today about the four architectural styles of Roman wall painting. In order to do that, I just want to remind you of what we talked about last time. We covered the First and Second Styles of Roman wall painting, and you'll remember that what they had in common is that they both tried to create an illusion of what they weren't, in a sense. Think back to the First Style of Roman wall painting, when the painters tried to transform a rubble wall into a marble wall, to create the illusion that it was indeed a marble wall, rather than a rubble wall.



And in the case of the Second Style--and I show you two examples again of that here, the detail from the Villa of Publius Fannius Sinistor, on the left-hand side of the screen, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the House of Augustus, the Room of the Masks in the House of Augustus, on the Palatine Hill in Rome, both examples of Second Style Roman wall painting. And we saw in this instance that the illusion was to create the sense that you were looking through a window, to transform, once again, the rubble wall into a window, a window that showed what might lie outside the villa, in the peristyle court, for example. Remember this one, with the shrine or tholos that is surrounded by blue sky and looks like it is located perhaps in a domestic peristyle, and then over here this window that opens onto a sacro-idyllic landscape. We are being beckoned into that sacro-idyllic landscape to explore the sacred items within it and even beyond. So opening up these walls illusionistically, to create an illusion in both, but in the case of the Second Style, to open the wall up illusionistically as a panoramic window. We also explored the fact that in the Second Style the Roman designers, the Roman painters, seemed to have experimented with one-point linear perspective, this perspective in which all points recede to a single point in the distance, and that we see that use of one-point perspective in the Second Style wall paintings in the Room of the Masks.



We also talked about the relationship between Second Style Roman wall painting and theatrical architecture -- that they may have been looking at actual theaters, possibly in wood, possibly in other more permanent materials that no longer survive, or they may have been creating this, in part, out of whole cloth. So this connection to the theater, and the one last point that I want to remind you of is the fact that we also discussed that, although there's an enormous respect for earlier Greek architecture, not only in these painting but in the temples and in the cities and in the sanctuaries that we've already explored, and we see the Roman painters using those elements of Greek architecture--columns and pediments and the like--in the Second Style, we also see that they are beginning to break the rules. They have a respect for Greek architecture, but they're also willing to bend the rules, an example being, of course, their use of the triangular pediment here, but they have broken that triangular pediment apart to reveal the tholos here. This is a very important development, and we saw it already also in the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, where you'll remember the column capitals in the ramp and how they slanted those column capitals in a way that Greek architects never would have done. We see that same sort of breaking of the rules here. It's extremely important because it shows again that although they revered the past, they were willing to look forward to the future. And we're going to see, especially in the late first century A.D., into the second century A.D., further exploration of that kind of thing, and it's going to have a huge impact on Roman architecture.



In order to explore the Third and Fourth Styles, I need to go to a couple of other cities than the ones we've looked at thus far. I have the map here once again that shows Campania. We are going to be looking at the city of -- or a villa -- in the town of Oplontis, which you see here. We'll also be looking at an important villa at Boscotrecase. And you can see the proximity of those two to the sites we've already discussed--Pompeii, Herculaneum, Boscoreale, and also Naples, up here. I want to look first at a villa, or the paintings at a villa, at Oplontis. This villa--and you see a plan of it here--appears to have belonged to a woman by the name of Poppaea--P-o-p-p-a-e-a. Who was Poppaea? Poppaea was first the mistress and then the wife of Rome's notorious emperor Nero. Initially it looked as if the two were soul mates because she seemed to have as much of a mean streak as he did, in that she encouraged him, quite avidly, to murder his mother, to murder his first wife, and even to murder the philosopher Seneca. But despite the fact that they seemed to have been soul mates, Nero turned against her, and in fact when she announced to him that she was pregnant, he kicked her in the stomach, which caused her death. But after her death he took advantage of her death and divinized her, made her a diva for his own political purposes. So a very interesting saga here, between Nero and his wife Poppaea.



The reason that we think Poppaea owned this villa, or lived in this villa at some point--and the villa dates, we believe, to 20 to 10 B.C.--the reason we believe that she lived there is that there was an amphora, one of these terracotta pots, that was found in the excavation with the name of a freedman, a freedman of Poppaea, which suggests that she may well have lived there. The other interesting observation that archaeologists made when they excavated this particular house is that it looked like it had been empty at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, when it had been indeed covered over with ash and lava. And they also found a lot of tools lying around the house, which led to their belief that the house was probably in the process of being renovated. It may have suffered damage in the earthquake and was in the process of being renovated, before reuse, at the time Vesuvius struck.



If we look at this very good plan of what is preserved of this villa today, we can pick out a number of features that we've already become accustomed to in our study of Roman domestic architecture: houses and villas. We can see peristyle courts with columns, for example. We notice here the very large atrium, with the impluvium designated here in plan. There was a kitchen, an extensive kitchen, over here as well. We also see the use of columns, these colonnades that are part of peristyles, in some cases, but also are colonnades that look out from the villa toward what surrounds it -- the landscape and the sea and so on, that surround it. And it's another example of what we began to see in the second phase of the plan of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, and that is an opening up of the facade, an incorporation of a larger number of windows to make the facade lighter and more airy, as well as a series of colonnades with spectacular views toward what lay outside the villa. The most important room for us today is Room Number 8, over here, and that room is part of an interior bath, an elaborate interior bath, that was part of this villa. And Room Number 8, which is basically a rectangular room, as you can see here, was the caldarium or the warm room of that bath, and it has some very interesting paintings that will show us the transition between what we know of as Second Style Roman wall painting and what we term Third Style Roman wall painting.



This is a view of the villa as it looks today. You can see, like Herculaneum, it is very closely surrounded by modern apartment houses and so on. Here you see it. It's only again part of what the original villa was. But even from this view, you can get a sense of how open it was compared to those very enclosed, severe domus italica houses that we began with. You see here this opening up, views through columns and doorways, but also these peristyle courts and colonnaded courts and so on, that again give this a very open appearance, which is part of again this important development toward that kind of openness. The villa has in it both Second and Third Style Roman wall paintings, which again makes it extremely interesting, because it is clear that there was some transitioning here, from one style to the other.



And I should mention, by the way, that with regard to the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Styles, they weren't necessarily an evolution, a development, from one point to another; by that I mean I don't think the painters or the patrons necessarily had in mind, "We're going to start at Point A and get to Point D eventually." I think that what we're dealing with here, as we talk about this chronological evolution, is a transition of styles that had something to do in part probably with fashion, with fashion for a particular way of decorating things, and, of course, with influences that were coming in from other parts of the world. And, in fact, as far as the transition from the Second to the Third Style, the cycle of styles seems to suggest that at the time that the Second Style was at its most popular was just when those who owned these houses wanted to move on to something new, understandably. Once everybody had it, it was time to think about something else. And so the cycle, just as these walls that we've been describing--the Room of the Masks, the Fannius Sinistor, and this one in Oplontis that we see on the left-hand side of the screen--just as they gained their greatest popularity, there was a decision to move on to still another cycle of taste. And again, that's exactly what we're going to see at Oplontis.



I show you here on the left--actually it's not on your Monument List but in order to get us to the Third Style, I want to say something about a Second Style painting at Oplontis, and we see a detail of that on the left-hand side of the screen. I compare it to the Second Style, or a part of the Second Style wall of P. Fannius Sinistor at Boscoreale. And I think you can see the resemblance between the two. The objectives are the same. The artist is trying to open up the wall, to create a picture window through which you can see a vista -- a vista that includes a round shrine, just as we saw here. So the same at Oplontis, a round shrine, in this case with the windows [correction: columns] spread to see a cult statue inside, and that shrine, that circular shrine or tholos, surrounded by a peristyle, the kind of peristyle that one might have seen inside one of these Roman houses surrounding a garden. Just as at Boscoreale, we see the gateway that seems to separate us from what lies beyond, and we see again the structure surrounded by blue sky. We also see these very substantial columns that are characteristic of the Second Style, projecting out into the spectator's space, supporting entablatures that also project out into the spectator's space, and supporting also a lintel that has a ceiling, with coffers that recede into depth. So what we see in Second Style at Oplontis is very similar to what we saw at Second Style, at Boscoreale and also at Pompeii, at Cubiculum 16 of the Villa of the Mysteries.



But if we look at Caldarium 8, Room 8, the caldarium of the bath, we see something that may look superficially similar, but is actually very, very different, and I think you can pick out those differences very quickly, just as I can. What we're looking at here is a view of three walls -- the most important back wall here, and then the walls to the right and to the left. And if you look carefully, you will see that the coloration is similar: the famous Pompeian red, a nice maroon, some black, some gold used here. And again, a quick glance, you see that there's a landscape of some sort, with a blue sky right in the center. So you're--being used to Second Style painting, you might say to yourself, "Oh well, that's another window into something that lies beyond." But if we look at it very carefully we will see that that is not the case at all. We're going to see here that what has happened is that the artists have rejected the perspectival panoramas of the Second Style, in favor of going back to an appreciation of the flatness of a wall. What is a wall but flat? A wall is flat. A flat wall is to be decorated. So sort of believing in that integrity of that wall is the cornerstone of the thinking for what we call Third Style Roman wall painting. And you can see the way the artist has treated the wall: a series of zones; a painted maroon zone or a socle down here; a middle tier, painted Pompeian red; an upper tier painted this gold; all of which looks like a series of stripes across the wall.



Let me show you another view, which is a little bit brighter, so that I think you can see this better; the maroon zone, the red zone, and the gold zone. And if you look also at the painting in the center, you will see that there are some architectural elements, but they are not the substantial architectural elements of the Second Style. They are very attenuated. If you look at these--and I'll show you a detail in a moment, they are, in fact, columns, we'll see, with capitals at the top. But from a distance they don't look like columns. They look like white stripes against a flat wall. They support lintels, as you can see here. These lintels don't project--they're just straight lintels, they're not broken in any way--and they too are very delicate, and from a distance look like a stripe against the wall, not like a lintel. We can also see--and I think that having a detail will help you here. Yes, let me first show you a comparison between this wall in Caldarium 8 and the Second Style wall that we looked at just before. And I think you can see very clearly the differences here: the substantial columns in this case, the opening up of the wall as a window to something that lies beyond.



This is very different. Yes, there's a blue sky. Yes, there's a tree. But that scene is contained within a frame. I think I can also illustrate that better here by showing you a detail of that central panel. That central panel, by the way, represents not something that one would be likely to see outside the window of one's house, but rather a mythological scene, which represents the legendary hero Hercules--you see him over here--Hercules, and in fact Hercules has just finished the last of his Twelve Labors, and he has brought back the Apples of the Hesperides, which you see sitting on a rock over here, and so he is celebrating the last of these Twelve Labors. For some reason he seems to be kind of a tree hugger here; he seems to be hugging the tree, a tree that has a yellow ribbon tied around it. We use today yellow--we tie yellow ribbons around things, for a variety of reasons, as we know. We don't know exactly why the Romans did that, but we see that frequently in Roman wall painting. But here he is standing at the base of the tree, his labors completed, and that tree again is surrounded by blue sky.



But I think you can see that it is not a window into something that lies beyond, because the scene is contained within this frame, and what the artist has done is outlined the frame with a very black, dark black outline. Now whether this has anything to do with those old curtains that we talked about in the Second Style might be interesting to speculate. But it looks to us like it's basically just a frame that is making it clear that this is flat, that what we are dealing with here is a flat wall, onto which a panel picture has been attached. It is hung -- it seems to be hung on that flat wall; it is not meant as a window or a panorama into something else. Besides the black frame, you see there's also a molded frame, very nicely painted here, and in this detail you can see that again what looked like stripes, white stripes on a flat wall from a distance, are indeed columns. You can see that they support capitals and a lintel up above, but from a distance again they don't look that way. And they are columns and capitals very different from what we've seen before, because again they are very, very, very attenuated, very delicate. They don't have any of the substance of the columns of the Second Style.



Look up above the panel picture of Hercules and you'll see--and I have a better detail of this in a moment--a series of figures that are located in the yellow zone, and I can show them better to you perhaps here, where you're looking also at a view of the socle. This side of the wall--you may have noticed this in the general view--is actually a niche; it's actually a niche, a rectangular, fairly shallow, rectangular niche there. So the painting continues into that niche, which gives it a little sense of depth, a little more sense of depth than it would have otherwise. And above the niche is a soffit, which you can see is also painted, and I show you a detail of that soffit up above. If you look at what's right above the painting of Hercules, you will see--and I'll show you these in detail in a moment--a citharist; that is, a man who plays a cithara, who is seated there and is playing his instrument. On either side of him we see panel pictures, and then on top of those panel pictures peacocks, peacocks that are represented frontally and look out toward us. And if you look at both--and we'll look at them in detail again momentarily--if you look at the citharist, and if you look at the peacocks, you see that they are standing on ground lines, but ground lines that don't look like they have any depth; in fact, they're standing somewhere where you couldn't really stand, which is one of the interesting features of Third Style, again this desire to move and to respect the flatness of the wall. If we look at the soffit, we see that that too is painted in red and gold; that it is divided into a series of panels; that in those panels we see floating, mythological figures, a woman on a bull--I'll show you a detail of her in a moment--just floating in the center. She doesn't seem to be in any space at all, she's just floating there. And then on either side a niche with a shell at the top, with standing figures, and then strangely enough pictures of still-life paintings, right below those.



Here are all of those details. Here we see the citharist, sitting again where there doesn't seem to be--there is a maroon, a brown line here, but it doesn't look like it occupies any space. So there's this interesting tension between the flatness of the wall and the fact that there's a figure that seems to be sitting somewhere where there's no place to sit. The same with the peacocks. You can see them, this one standing on this white, flat line. His toes do seem to be projecting a bit over those. So there's this interesting tension between what's flat and what might have a hint of space. And then below that, one of these sacro-idyllic landscapes, again framed in black, making it clear that we are to read this as a panel picture hanging on a flat wall, a kind of picture gallery, in a way that's very different from Second Style. Up here, a mysterious figure with a sacrificial dish, standing in a niche, with a shell decoration at the top. And then a still-life painting with fruit down below. And then up here, something that we're going to see becomes ubiquitous in Third Style Roman wall painting: a figure that floats in the center of a colored panel, either red or black or white, in this case a mostly nude female figure who is riding, as you can see, on the back of a bull. At least the front of the animal is a bull, and you can see the back of the animal has a fishtail. So it's a kind of bull-like sea creature, as you can see here.



So this room, this very important room, Caldarium 8 in the Villa at Oplontis, seems to be a good example of this transition from Second Style, which was also in the house, to some new cycle of fashion in Roman painting. An example of the mature Third Style can be seen in two rooms, the Red Room and the Black Room, so called for obvious reasons--this is the Red Room--that belong to the Villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotrecase, that dates to around 11 B.C., we believe. This house we think also had Imperial connections; that is, we think that this house was put up in honor of the first emperor of Rome, Augustus' only child, his daughter Julia. The marriage of Julia to Tiberius--T-i-b-e-r-i-u-s, the man who was to become the second emperor of Rome--the marriage of Julia to Tiberius may have been the occasion for the decoration of this house. It bears the name of one of Julia's sons by a different man, by Marcus Agrippa, her son, her last son; his name was Agrippa Postumus, because he was born after--she was impregnated, obviously, by Agrippa before he died -- but the child was actually born after the death of Agrippa. Hence his name Agrippa Postumus. There's some speculation that he may have lived in this villa at some point.



But what's important to us is the likelihood seems to be that, just as with the Villa at Oplontis, this villa seems to have been owned by someone in the imperial family. Which is very important because it suggests to us not only that the finest artists of the day must have been working on these, as they did in Rome for the House of Augustus, or in Primaporta for the Villa of Livia, but also leads me, at least, to speculate that it's possible that these interesting transitions from Second to Third Style, and Third Style to Fourth Style, may have come at the behest of the artists who were these very high-level artists who were working in the imperial employ. It makes a certain amount of sense to speculate that that might have been the case. So here we have the Red Room of the Villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotrecase, and we can see some of the same features that we saw in Caldarium 8 of the Villa at Oplontis. We see once again that those substantial columns or that opening in the wall is gone, forever banished; in fact, the Romans never return to their quest after one-point perspective, for example. Respect for the integrity of the wall, the flatness of the wall, the wall as a surface to be decorated. We see that they have decorated it with a system of tiers: a black socle at the bottom, then a red central zone, and a red upper zone.



And, by the way, we can still get some sense that they have looked at earlier Second Style wall paintings, because if you look at the structure, the overall structure of this wall, for example, there still seems to be a central panel flanked by wings, this whole idea of regia and hospitalia that we talked about, that goes back to theater design. There's certainly a hint of that still here in the general arrangement or formatting of the wall. But it is completely flat: black zone, red zone. And then, although we will see in detail that we have a column here, with a capital at the top, from a distance again it looks like a white stripe on a flat wall, and that's deliberate on the part of the artists. Again here, there's a panel in the center, but it is not a panel that serves as a window to what lies beyond. It is a panel that is meant to be just that, a panel. It's meant to imitate perhaps a marble painted panel that would've actually hung on a wall in a house or villa like this, but depicting that here in paint. So it is meant to be--we are meant to see it as -- a panel picture that hangs on a flat wall in the Red Room at Boscotrecase. We can see also some vegetal decoration--very, very delicate, doesn't occupy space at all--decorates the flat wall above. So very similar to what we saw again in Caldarium 8.



Here's a detail of the Red Room where we can see the sacro-idyllic landscape better. You can see that it follows in the line of other sacro-idyllic landscapes that we've seen. It has a shrine, in this case a column that supports an urn, at the top, with a tree; behind that some sort of wall with windows over here; and in this case a group of shepherds with their flocks and other figures possibly involved in some kind of ritual, located in and around the shrine. You can also see here extremely well in detail the way in which they have outlined this panel with a black frame, to make it very clear that this is contained within a frame. Beyond that, you can now see that this is a column, a very attenuated, very delicate column -- more a colonnette we might call it, with a capital at the top. But it is meant here not to occupy any real space, not to project into the viewer's space, but to serve as a second frame for the panel picture that is placed on the flat wall.



I think it's instructive to compare this to what we saw in the Room of the Masks, House of Augustus, Palatine Hill, mature Second Style. So mature Second Style, commissioned by an imperial patron; mature Third Style, commissioned by, we think, an imperial patron. Both sacro-idyllic landscapes, with white backgrounds, but you can see the main difference here, not only the substantial architecture, but the fact that the white background continues behind the architecture. Right? It continues behind the architecture here, here, here, which gives us the sense again that this is something that's a misty landscape of some sort, that one could, at least with one's eye, but also perhaps oneself, could actually enter into and wander around; that's the sense you get here. But here you are stopped from doing that. There's nothing more here than a panel picture that hangs on a wall.



Now you might say to me that if we're going back to respecting the wall and to having a painting that is fairly flat, that what--are we going back to the First Style of Roman wall painting? And I remind you of one of the First Style Roman wall paintings that we looked at together. But it really is very different from the First Style as well, because in the First Style, you'll remember, the wall was not actually flat. The wall was built up as a relief, in a series of architectural zones, and then the individual blocks were painted different colors, to give an illusion, once again, that this was not a plain wall but rather a very exotic and expensive marble wall, with marbles brought from all over the world to decorate it. So an illusion of something that it wasn't. Here in the Third Style we are again not dealing with any illusions really at all, but just a respect for the flatness of the wall, decorating that flat wall with a kind of wallpaper, through paint, and then putting on that flat wallpapered wall pictures, hanging pictures, just as we hang pictures on flat walls today.



The Villa at Boscotrecase also has a Black Room, so called because the main color there, the main background color there is, as you can see, black. It too is interesting--interesting in a somewhat different way -- but is a quintessential example of mature Third Style Roman architectural painting. We see, once again, that the room has been divided into a center, a central area with wings, one on either side. We also see that it has been divided into painted zones: red at the bottom, black in the center, black also at the top. We can see that there are architectural members, although again they look, from a distance, like white stripes on a black wall. But if we get up close to them--and I'll show you even some closer views in a moment--we will see that we are dealing with very, very, very, very attenuated colonnettes, with capitals at the top. And notice--and this has been true throughout--they decorate these columns also, all up and down, all along the way, with floral motifs and so on and so forth; which also underscores their function as a decorative motif, rather than an actual column. The column supports, the colonnettes support what looks like a very simple pediment. It's just slightly peaked, as you can see up there. But there is one--this painting is interesting because if you look carefully at the frieze, at the uppermost part of the columns, or colonnettes, you will see that there is some hint of space there. Look at the way it undulates there: it recedes over here, recedes over there, and then it also meanders in the center. So there's a slight hint, in this particular case, of some space, some recession into depth, which only adds to the intrigue and mystery of these incredible paintings.



These are very, very interesting in detail. I can show you here, for example, the swans. We see some swans--and remember these swans. This again seems to be an imperial house, because we will see swans are very important for the emperor Augustus, and he decorates the Ara Pacis in Rome, a great work of architecture and sculpture, with swans, that may make reference to a new golden age that he has ushered in. We see those here. But look at them, look at the way they rest on these little candelabra-like torches, and then those in turn on a spiraling acanthus tendril, that doesn't look like it could support anything at all. How very strange, to have a swan supported by a tendril like this. This sort of thing couldn't actually work, and it's one of again the intrigues of the details of paintings such as these.



This is another interesting detail, because it shows again a kind of candelabrum supporting a panel picture, that we are meant to read as a panel picture on the wall. And if you look carefully, you can see the Egyptianizing motifs in that panel picture. There was an extreme Egyptomania that spread through Rome and Italy after Augustus was victorious over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the famous Battle of Actium. Augustus initially used these Egyptianizing motifs to make political remarks about his victory over Cleopatra and Antony. But over time it became more a fashion, and we begin to see Egyptianizing motifs, not only in the homes of members of the imperial family, but even used ever more widely than that.



Another detail shows again that central area with the--now you can see that they are indeed colonnettes, with capitals at the top. You can also see there are a couple of medallions, that turn out to be medallions that have heads in them, over here. But here you can see how fanciful it gets; even though this is clearly a colonnette with a capital. What capital supports then, in usual building practice, supports on top of it a medallion with a head, and then another curlicue on top of that, and that supports the pediments, and that has on the edge this very decorative motif, dripping off the side? There's no--this is fantastic in that regard; fantastic, and they're clearly having fun with these details and with using these wonderful details -- this dropped element over here, for example. The images are interesting; the heads are interesting. Many scholars have believed that they're representations of gods, like Apollo, but a couple of scholars have put forward the idea, and I find it a very attractive one, that we may actually have--there are two of them--we may actually have a portrait of Julia, whose marriage may have been commemorated here, and of her step-mother Livia, the empress of Rome, during the age of Augustus.



Most interesting of all is the small sacro-idyllic landscape that floats in the center of the panel. Again in Third Style Roman wall painting we either tend to have painted panels in the center with frames, as we've seen thus far, or floating elements in the center. They could be a floating woman on the back of a bull/sea creature, or they can be a sacro-idyllic landscape, as we see here. And here's another detail where we can blow up that sacro-idyllic landscape and see again that it is just the sort of sacred and idyllic landscape we've seen before, with a shrine; the top of a column; a building over here; trees, a tree in the center, other trees; and then various sacrificial goings on in front of that. But from a distance again it just looks like some sort of object floating in the center of a very large, black, flat wall: one decorative motif among many.



We looked last time at the magnificent paintings in the Villa of Livia at Primaporta, and we talked about the fact that that was the quintessential Second Style wall, because more than any other we saw it was truly the wall as panorama, as a vista into something that might lie beyond, and we described in great detail the features of this particular painting. It's interesting that you wouldn't think that a gardenscape would be a good subject for Third Style Roman wall painting, a kind of painting that again respects the flatness of a wall, and yet we do have examples of what we would term Third Style Roman wall painting, showing the depiction of a gardenscape. And I turn to that now. The painting that you look at is on the wall of the House of the Orchard, the Casa del Frutteto, in Pompeii, in the so-called Orchard Cubiculum, and it dates to A.D. 25 to A.D. 50; so considerably later. And it's interesting, by the way, to note the chronology here. Third Style Roman wall painting has a quite long life, because if we talk about it being used already in 20 to 10 B.C. at Oplontis, and we're now looking at a house that could be as late as 50, might've been decorated as late as 50 A.D., that takes us sixty or seventy years for this one style. So although I said these are cycles of fashion, fashion wasn't changing all that quickly at this particular juncture.



But here we see a gardenscape in what we would call a Third Style wall. Now why do we call this a Third Style wall? It's divided into zones. We have a black socle down here. We have a zone here, which seems to show a fence, a more substantial fence than we saw in the gardenscape of Livia. It does seem to support some marble vessels or vases here. So you might--to look at the bottom you think, "Well. maybe there is some suggestion of some space." In fact, if you look very carefully at the gateway of the fence, you can see that there is some attempt to represent it as if it recedes into depth, at least the doorway. So there's some attempt at that here. But if you look at this zone, I think you'll agree with me that the artists have once again, the painters have once again, respected the flatness of the wall. Yes, there are columns here, but they are not substantial columns. They are attenuated columns, maybe not as attenuated as Boscotrecase, but attenuated nonetheless. They do have capitals at the top. But as you walk into this room and look at them from a distance, they look like gold stripes on a flat back wall. And, in fact, the fact that the wall was painted black is very significant, and not blue, as we saw in the gardenscape of Livia at Primaporta.



And look also--what's particularly interesting is the way in which the artist has positioned the trees within the frames of the columns. If you look very closely you will see that there isn't a single leaf that either overlaps the columns, or that disappears behind the columns. They are completely contained within those columns. They are represented very abstractly, very flat. And so, because they are contained within those, we get the impression, not that we're looking at a gardenscape that is somehow viewed through a window behind the columns, but it's almost as if we're looking at a Japanese screen or something like that. It's a flat surface that has been decorated with depictions of trees, not a view to look at trees that lie behind these columns. It's very--it's really fascinatingly done, I think.



And if we look at a detail of the wall in the Casa del Frutteto over here, and of a tree, and a detail of a tree from Livia's Villa at Primaporta, I think we again see the differences between the two: blue background, which gives us a sense of reality here; mountains in the background, as you'll remember; a black background here, gives a very different effect. Here we talked about how the artist was a particularly good observer of nature: had really gone out and looked at real trees; had looked at the way in which leaves rustled in the breeze; had looked at the way in which again light falls differently on leaves--it can bathe them in light or it can bathe them in shadow. We looked at the very realistic way in which the artist depicted the birds who are in flight and then alight on a leaf or a branch of the tree.



Look at the difference here. The leaves are beautifully rendered, beautifully rendered, but they are all rendered essentially the same. You don't have the same sense of the difference of light and shadow; you don't have the same sense--these seem immutable, not as if they could be ruffled by the breeze at all, immutable shapes. And look at the difference in the bird, who himself, or herself, seems to be a shape against a black background. You don't get the sense--there's no sense of movement, as you see, of the birds, as you see at the Villa of Livia at Primaporta. The bird is one shape among many shapes. The sinuous snake that makes its way up the tree has--you have some sense again of--they're sort of teasing us here--there's some sense of depth, because as it slithers all along here, you get the sense that it is intertwining itself with the trunk of the tree, so that maybe there's a hint of some depth and some motion there. So there's this interesting play, I think, that the artist has created here. But on the whole this again is a painting that clearly respects all the tenets that have come to be, from the point of view of these artists Third Style Roman wall painting, even for a subject as unlikely for this as a gardenscape.



We have talked about Third Style Roman wall painting in Campania. We have talked about the fact that a lot of it seems to be connected in some way to members of the imperial household. And we see the same also in Rome, and it's to Rome that I would now like to turn, and specifically to the Golden House or the Domus Aurea of the emperor Nero. I show you a view of the famous octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea. It is one of the greatest rooms in Roman architecture. It's an octagonal room that has a large oculus. It is made out of concrete. It has radiating alcoves, and it is in a sense a grandiose version of the frigidarium that we saw in the Stabian and Forum Baths at Pompeii. It is part of a very major architectural revolution under Nero. It is extremely important. We'll talk about it in great detail, vis-à-vis the architecture, in a later lecture. But I do want to bring up--just contextually it works better for me to talk about the paintings separately, and the paintings in connection to paintings in Pompeii. And it's to those paintings that I'm going to turn now, the paintings in Nero's Domus Aurea, that we will see are both Third and also Fourth Style Roman paintings. So once again we seem to be in a situation where we are looking at a palace, in this case, commissioned by an imperial patron, in which it looks like there was an important transition from one Roman wall painting decoration style, to another, in this case the Third Style to the Fourth Style.



The Domus Aurea paintings are important for three major reasons. The first reason is we can date them exactly. We know that these paintings, both of the Third and the Fourth Styles, were done in the Domus Aurea, between 64 A.D. and 68 A.D. We also know, and we know this very rarely, the name of the painter who was responsible for the Third and Fourth Style paintings in the Domus Aurea. His name is one you will, I hope--you will; not hope, I know you will never forget, because his name was Fabullus, F-a-b-u-l-l-u-s, Fabullus; and he was indeed, as you shall see, truly fabulous. Fabullus is known from--we know him from the writings of Pliny, P-l-i-n-y; many of you have probably read the writings of Pliny, tells us a lot about art, ancient art. And Pliny tells us that Fabullus was the painter for the Domus Aurea, in Rome, and he tells us a couple of other interesting tidbits about Fabullus. He tells us that Fabullus always used to paint in a toga. Now painting in a toga is like painting in a three-piece suit today. You wouldn't paint in a--painting in a toga, it makes no sense to paint in a toga. But he obviously--whether he really painted in a toga we don't know, but that was his reputation, which means he dressed up for the event, took it very seriously.



We also know from Pliny that, or Pliny tells us that the Domus Aurea was Fabullus' prison. Why was it Fabullus' prison? It was Fabullus' prison because any of you who have visited the Domus Aurea--and those of you who haven't, I hope you will, when you're in Rome, because it's an extraordinary place to see--will see that it is corridor, after corridor, after corridor, after corridor, and we only have today a very small piece of the Domus Aurea preserved. So if Fabullus' job was to paint all of the walls and all of the ceilings of the Domus Aurea, it would have indeed taken a lifetime, it would have indeed served as a kind of prison for him. I suppose a later--it might be interesting to think of him in connection to--he was not as great as, but he was, in a sense, the Michelangelo of his time; think about Michelangelo and the Sistine Ceiling and all the time that he devoted to painting that extraordinary space, also in Rome.



I show you a couple of views of the corridors. I'm not going to go into detail now on exactly why this is the case, but the Domus Aurea is now underground, it's subterranean. It was razed to the ground and covered over in part by a later Roman emperor that we'll talk about in the future. So when you visit it today, you need to go underground. It was buried for a long time and rediscovered in the Renaissance. And it's interesting because we know that the famous painter Raphael, the famous Renaissance painter Raphael, went underground and was one of the first to see the paintings of the Domus Aurea, because Raphael left a graffito on the wall, which basically says, "Raphael was here." And we're fortunate that he left that, because it tells us again that he was here. And we're not surprised because this is a loggetta in the Vatican today that was designed by--it was painted by Raphael. And you can see how much the paintings of the Domus Aurea--more weathered, obviously, than the one on the left--but the paintings of the Domus Aurea had a huge impact on Raphael.



I'm going to show you three rooms in the Domus Aurea. The first is the--and I'm sorry I have to show this to you in black and white; it's the only--it was very hard to photograph there, and it's the only image I happen to have of this wall. But I am showing you a room called the Sala degli Uccelletti, which means the Room of the Birds, and like the other paintings I'm going to show you today, it dates to 64 to 68 A.D. You can see that this is a Third Style Roman wall painting. It partakes of all the features that we've already described for Third Style Roman wall painting. It has a flat wall, as you can see here. It's not painted red or black, but in this case white, which makes it even more delicate looking, but they have definitely observed the integrity of the wall and painted it white. You can also see that the architectural members that there are, are very attenuated and look like stripes on the wall from a distance. You can see that some of the frames are vegetal or floral: very delicate, as you can see here. And then in the central panels--and it's the reason that it's called the Sala degli Uccelletti--we have little birds, and those little birds float in the center of these panels: once again a decorative motif, among many. So the flatness of the wall observed, a wall that is flat, and to be decorated by the painter. So that's the Sala degli Uccelletti: Third Style.



This is a vault in the Domus Aurea, which is useful for us, because here we can get a better sense of the color. Once again the background is white, and once again the integrity of the wall has been respected. The artist has divided that wall into a series of panels, but within those panels we see once again sea creatures, in this case floating in the center of those framed panels. We are meant to read them as framed panels, not as views into some other world. Note also that some of the frames are done with vegetal and floral motifs: very, very delicate, very attractive, very ephemeral in a sense, very lightweight against that white background. So very much again another example of Third Style Roman wall painting.



But then there is this room, and this room is Room 78, and Room 78 is extremely important for us, because we see something else is happening in Room 78. Yes, it does still have a white wall. Yes, it does still use a floral decoration for some of the frames. Yes, it does have framed panels, in this case not with black but with red frames, as you can see here: all elements of the Third Style, absolutely. So it partakes of a number of Third Style elements. The white wall itself is a very Third Style thing to do. But you will notice, of course, that something new has happened here, and that is more substantial architecture has been--the representation of more substantial architecture--has been reintroduced. If you look at these architectural elements that frame some of the panels, you will see that we see once again real columns, real columns that seem to support projecting lintels, and then through those--once again a white background in this case--but through those we see other elements of architecture. Here a two-storied columnar monument, and over here what seems to be a broken triangular pediment, supported by substantial columns.



So architecture is -- substantial architecture is reintroduced in the central zone, flanking the panels on either side. But it is a different architecture than we've ever seen before, because we never see a complete building. We see only fragments of buildings--this broken triangular pediment on its own is an example of that--fragments of buildings, which we will see are depicted in what I would describe as illogical space. They don't look like they're actually occupying space, the way a regular building would, or in what is characteristic of the Second Style, but fragments of buildings depicted in illogical space.



And then, very important, in the uppermost zone, we see a depiction of a number of these fragments of architecture, all jumbled together, almost to create a building; although it isn't a building that actually works. I like to call these architectural cages, because they are individual elements, individual fragments, again that are grouped together, architectural cages, that often have in them very strange mythological and other creatures, most of whom are very difficult to identify today. So we see this incredible transition between the Third Style Roman wall painting, that Fabullus is using for the Domus Aurea, to something that is transitioning us into what we call the Fourth Style. In fact, I would call this room a Fourth Style Roman room, a Fourth Style painted room, and the genius behind this I would speculate was Fabullus himself.



I want to show you another example of Fourth Style, because we believe Fourth Style--remember the date of the Domus Aureus, 64 to 68. So if it is being--if it is coming to the fore, the Fourth Style at that time, it means that it is about the time of the earthquake in Pompeii. And we do see paintings in Pompeii that we believe date between the earthquake of 62 and the eruption of Vesuvius of 79 that are examples also of Fourth Style Roman wall painting. This is one of them. It's a wall from the House of the Vestals in Pompeii. It dates to 62 to 70 A.D., and we can see exactly what I was describing at the Domus Aurea. We look at the bottom part and we see that it still looks like a Third Style wall, in that we see golden panels and red panels with floating figures in the center, and with floral decorations around those. We see over here a mythological panel with a black frame around it that is meant to look like a panel picture hanging on a flat wall. All of that is exactly what we saw in the Third Style.



But again what separates this from a Third Style painting is this reintroduction of architecture, over here--architecture presented against a white background--but it's not a full building, it is a fragment of a building, a fragment of a building with substantial architectural members and a projecting entablature above. And then in the upper zone, again against a white background, those architectural cages, those fragments of architecture that have been jumbled together and are used as a milieu for these very strange creatures--animal, human and the like--that are located in them, these architectural cages that are also decorated with strange and interesting ornamentation at the uppermost part. So another example of Fourth Style.



Our very best examples of Fourth Style Roman wall painting all come from a single house in Pompeii. It is a house that we looked at together before. It is the House of the Vettii. You'll remember the kitchen in the House of the Vettii, for example, the wonderful garden that we explored there. It is also a house that has an incredible array of paintings, and it shows us several stages of the Fourth Style. And I should mention also that while we call these styles First, Second, Third, and Fourth, as anything else, they have substyles and transition periods; one can refer to Early Second Style, mature Second Style, Late Second Style, Early Third Style--there are certain subtleties. Because again, remember, the artists who were making these were not thinking, "Oh, I'm transitioning from the Second to the Third Style." They were just moving on. They were experimenting with things they hadn't experimented before, and they soon found themselves in a different milieu. So there are those subtleties. And we can see those in the House of the Vettii. I can show you Early, Middle and even Late Fourth Style at the House of the Vettii, which is just what I'm going to do now.



We're going to begin with Garden Room Q, which is the one that you see here; which you can see, from the Monument List, we believe dates to 62 to 70 A.D.; Garden Room Q. Now if all of Garden Room Q that was preserved, was the bottom part--if you didn't have that very top zone, and I asked you what style is this? You would probably tell me Third Style, and you'd be right that it was Third Style. But the addition of that zone in the uppermost part gives it away, as a Fourth Style wall. But it's again a very good example of an early one, because we can see this transition. So in the bottom, again very much adhering to the tenets of Third Style Roman wall painting: respecting the flatness of the wall; dividing the wall into a series of zones; a socle that's black; a main section that's red; sort of wings on either side that are also black. But as you look at this wall from a distance, those black elements look like stripes, large black stripes on the wall, and even within those black stripes we see these very attenuated, delicate colonnettes. Close up you can see that they're colonnettes, but from a distance again they look like gold stripes on a flat wall. Floating mythological figures in the center, as is characteristic of the Third Style, and then there was a panel painting over here that was rudely removed by treasure hunters at one point. So panel pictures, as well as floating mythological figures. And then at the uppermost part you see this addition: white ground, architectural cages, as I've described them, with a whole panoply of interesting mythological and other figures that are inserted into those architectural cages. So a very early example of Fourth Style Roman wall painting in the House of the Vettii in Rome [correction: Pompeii].



These again are so interesting in detail. If you blow this up to the size that we see it here, you will see that this is that black background in between the red panels that we were looking at before. You can see all kinds of strange things going on here in detail. A female figure, semi-naked. She's clashing her cymbals. She's dancing here, and she is supporting, on her head--she's oblivious to the fact that she's supporting on her head -- the base of one of these colonnettes; as you can see here, pays no heed whatsoever that she's serving as a support for the colonnettes. And then either side of her what we call herms, h-e-r-m-s, which are part human and part pedestal, male heads, bearded male heads carrying libation dishes, or whatever, on either side, and then a very interesting sacrifice scene down here. So again, as I've said so many times, looking at these paintings, the details of these paintings, is a very intriguing experience.



The room that seems to be a good example of the mid-Fourth Style is the House of the Vettii, Room of Pentheus, which we date to around 70 A.D. You see it here. It is very well-preserved. It is a room in which the color gold abounds. As you can see, a maroon socle, the gold central zone. It partakes of Third Style in that you can see that the main parts of the wall are flat, with a panel, a mythological panel picture that is surrounded by a frame -- so just to make absolutely sure that the viewer understands that what they are looking at here is a panel picture that hangs on a flat wall, not a window into something that lies beyond. But we see in this central zone the reintroduction of architecture, substantial architecture, where you can really make out the columns and the pediments, but not full buildings, fragments of buildings: fragments of buildings that are represented in very illogical space, as you can see here. Again, substantial elements like this, with the supporting the columns, supporting the lintel with the coffered ceiling, represented in perspective. So all of that brought back. But again these are not full buildings, as we would see in the Second Style, but these fragments in illogical space.



And a detail again of the same, that I just described, and it's interesting to compare it to some details from Second Style Roman wall painting. Think Fannius Sinistor or the Metropolitan Museum Cubiculum, where you can actually -- you really have a sense of what this building was. There's a doorway that leads in, and then there are a series of tiers, and there's a balcony, and everything connects to one another. But here we see something quite different, where we see not a whole building, or parts of a building together, but rather these individual pieces that are depicted, as I mentioned, in a very illogical way.



The glory of Fourth Style Roman wall painting--it depends on your taste, because it's very gaudy as well--but one could say that the greatest preserved or--the most interesting, let's put it that way--the most interesting preserved Fourth Style wall is also in the House of the Vettii. It is in the Ixion Room of the House of the Vettii. We believe it dates to 70 to 79. It is our, an example of full-blown Fourth Style, at its most incredible. And it's almost as if this artist wanted to be remembered for posterity--we don't know his name unfortunately--but remembered for posterity as the person who created the textbook example of Fourth Style Roman wall painting. And what's fascinating about it is what he has done is he has mixed together all of the earlier styles: First, Second, Third, Fourth.



First we see the socle down here is--it's all done in paint, but it is painted to represent marble or to imitate marble incrustation, just as we saw in the First Style. So the marble incrustation of the First Style, used for the socle, but again in paint, not in relief. The Second tier we see the substantial columns supporting lintels and entablatures with coffered ceilings, represented in depth; that's a Second Style element. Third Style, these panels, red with mythological paintings in the center, with frames, and over here a white panel with floral decoration and floating mythological figures; those are elements of the Third Style. And the Fourth Style, reintroduction of architecture in the central zone, fragments of architecture, not full buildings, fragments of architecture depicted in illogical space. And then in the uppermost tier, these architectural cages, peopled with all kinds of strange figures, animals, divinities, personifications, and the like. So all of those four styles brought together in one place.



Here's another view, one that perhaps gives you an even better sense, not of everything I've described, but of the overall appearance of this room as one walks into it. It's actually a very small room, but it gives you the sense of grandiosity. And this is interesting too because you see in this case the artist has kind of matched up -- he's represented two very similar fragments, one on either side, that in a sense, as you stare at it, gives you the sense, or at least gives me the sense, that perhaps maybe there is something that continues behind the wall or behind the central mythological panel picture that you see here. But this is quintessential, quintessential Fourth Style Roman wall painting. And I think I had--I meant to show you also one more detail here, where you can see again--here you can see one of these elements with the fragments of architecture, an illogical space in detail, and you can see even here too there are strange things going on. We see masks reintroduced in the Fourth Style. We see in this case that mask is supported by a panel picture that represents a curved staff, an animal, some baskets on top of a table. You try to interpret exactly what all this meant. But it's interesting how much detail is put into these. Even though each of these individual items are difficult to see, when you walk into a room like this, you tend to look at the whole, not at the individual details, and yet the artists, patrons and so on have paid a great deal of attention to that detail.



I want to show you lastly, and thought we could talk about this for a few minutes ourselves together, one last Fourth Style, or part of a Fourth Style Roman wall painting. It is a fragmentary wall that we attribute to the Fourth Style that came from Herculaneum, and dates also to this latest phase, sometime to 70 to 79. And it's quite interesting, in view not only of what we've discussed today, but in everything we've talked about with regard to the four styles of Roman wall painting in the last week or so. I wondered what part of the wall you think this came from, and what you find interesting about it, vis-à-vis our general discussion of Roman wall painting. Someone like to volunteer to begin? Yes?



Student: This may be off, but one thing I noticed was it looks like curtains up on the top right-hand--



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Yes.



Student: [Inaudible]



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Yes. Yes, we've been debating this whole question of the black curtains, and there's a post now online, and I hope that you'll all add to that, as we continue that conversation. This one, in this particular case, it seems incontrovertible that what is represented here is a curtain. There's no question that's a curtain. It's hanging up there. So we get the sense that it has been raised on what is a kind of a stage set that lies behind. So, great point. What else strikes you about this? Yes?



Student: Based on the perspective, wouldn't this be like a flanking panel to maybe the central one?



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Yes, based on the perspective that's used here, based on the fact that there's a white background--which isn't always the case in Fourth Style painting, but it tends to be the case, for most of it--one could speculate that this is either one of those elements that has been reintroduced in the main zone, on either side of the central panel, or--what else might it be? Yes?



Student: The illogical space on the right.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Right, the illogical--part of a building in illogical space. But it might be in the central zone, as one of those side wings, but it might also be way up in the top, as one of the architectural cages that we see in the uppermost part; that's also possible. So what is being depicted here? Obviously a stage set of some sort. How would you describe this architecture in the foreground? You all know. Just state the obvious. It looks like, why? It looks like Second Style because--?



Student: It's projecting the--it's substantial. It's in perspective and it's projecting out.



Professor Diana E.E Kleiner: Good. We have substantial architectural elements. It's clear that these are real columns with real capitals at the top. Those capitals project into our space. The artist has made an effort to depict recession into space, as well, because you can see the way in which these piers are angled, for example, back, to give one the sense that we are looking at something depicted in space. You can see the coffered ceiling up here, the projecting entablatures, the mask, which is another reference to things theatrical. But is there one-point perspective here? Or is there any attempt to depict one-point perspective? Or is it some other kind of perspective, and i

Professor Kleiner discusses special subjects in Roman wall painting that do not fall within the four architectural styles but were nonetheless inserted into their wall schemes: mythological painting, landscape, genre, still life, history painting, and painted portraiture. The lecture begins with an in-depth examination of the unique Dionysiac Mysteries painting in Pompeii in which young brides prepare for and enter into a mystical marriage with the god Dionysus and simultaneous initiation into his cult. Professor Kleiner then presents a painted frieze from Rome that depicts the wanderings of Odysseus against a continuous landscape framed by Second Style columns. She subsequently analyzes Roman still life, remarkable in its similarity to modern still life painting; a scene of daily life in Pompeii; and a painting depicting a specific historical event--a riot in the Pompeii Amphitheater that caused the arena to be shut down for ten years. The lecture ends with a discussion of painted portraiture on Pompeian walls, including likenesses of two different women holding a similar stylus and wax tablet.

Transcript



February 5, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning. The title of today's lecture is "Exploring Special Subjects on Pompeian Walls." And that's exactly what I'm going to do today, to explore a number of scenes: a frieze of figures, a landscape scene, portraits on Pompeian walls, and also still life painting. And we're going to look at them both in the context of the architectural style walls that we've been discussing thus far this term, especially the Second, Third, and Fourth Styles, but we'll also look at them as interesting in their own right.



We ended last time with a discussion of Fourth Style Roman wall painting, and I want to show you again what I consider the quintessential Fourth Style wall. It's the Ixion Room in the House of Vettii, in Pompeii, and you see it here once again in all its garish glory. It's an amazing painting. We talked about the fact that it is a kind of compendium of all the styles that went before. We described, for example, the socle, which attempts to imitate marble incrustation in paint, which of course makes reference to the First Style of Roman wall painting. We talked about the fact that the Second Style elements could be seen in the substantial columns that are located in the second tier, or in the main tier of the painted wall -- columns that support a lintel above and a coffered ceiling. We see those here; we see them over here as well--those, again, elements of the Second Style.



We talked about the Third Style features in this particular painting, the mythological landscape in the center that has a frame, a black frame around it, to make it abundantly clear that this is not a window to something else but rather meant to look as if it is a flat panel painting hanging on the wall--Third Style element. Over here, another Third Style element, the floating mythological figure, in the center in this case, of a white panel with a border that is made up of floral or vegetal motifs--again elements of the Third Style. With regard to Fourth Style, the introduction of architecture, once again, on either side of the main panel in the main zone. These are not representations of complete buildings but rather, as we discussed, fragments of buildings depicted in illogical space, and then in the uppermost tier we see the architectural cages that we also described as characteristic of the Fourth Style. So all of these elements, as I said, a compendium of all of these painting styles, all in one place, is where Roman painting ends up right before the destruction of Mount Vesuvius.



We also have looked--in fact, I want to return at the beginning of today's presentation to the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. We've looked at it twice already. We looked at it from the standpoint of its architectural evolution. We looked at the two phases, first and second phases, of the Villa of the Mysteries, and you'll remember the plan. This is the second phase plan, which I show to you again, and you'll recall the design of the villa, where you enter at the top. You enter into the peristyle, then into the atrium, then into the tablinum; this unusual sequence of rooms that is more in keeping with villa design, according to Vitruvius, than to house design. And we looked at a room, a Second Style wall painted room, called Cubiculum 16, and I can show you where Cubiculum 16 is on this plan. You see it right over here. And you'll remember that this was an outstanding example of mature Second Style Roman wall painting -- this idea of opening up the wall illusionistically. Remnants of the First Style wall still here. That wall is dropped down. We do have substantial columns, with projecting entablatures, a coffered ceiling above and, in this case, a lintel, and then an arcuated lintel; all of these elements typical of the Second Style, and especially the opening up of the wall to see a vista that lies beyond, in this case a tholos or round shrine, surrounded by blue sky. So quintessential Second Style, in Cubiculum 16.



The room that I want to turn to today, also in the Villa of the Mysteries, is Room 5. Room 5 is located over here. You see it right to the right of the tablinum, and close to the southern side, close to the great bay window that was added in Phase Two to provide magnificent views out over the sea. Room 5, it's a plain rectangular room, or so it looks in plan, fairly large in scale--not as large as the atrium but fairly large. And while the plan is on the screen, I just want to point to the entranceway, to the room, this very small entranceway here--it's actually very important in terms of our decoding of these paintings that we find in there--this small entranceway. And then what you see in plan here are actually windows, rather than additional doorways. And we're going to see that the designer of this particular room, the painter, took the corners, took the location of the door and also the corners of the room, and the location of the windows, into great consideration when he painted the scenes on this wall.



This is a view of Room 5 as it looks today. It's often also referred to as the room with the Dionysiac Mystery Paintings, mystery paintings that we'll see feature the god of wine, Dionysus. You can see from looking at this general view that the paintings are quite well-preserved. We'll see that they cover all four walls of the room, except for the space--except for where the windows are, obviously. And you can also see that this is like nothing we've looked at thus far this semester, in that what we have here are a series of very large, monumental figures that seem to walk around the room in a kind of procession, and you see those extremely well here.



With regard to the style of wall that it is, I show you another view over here where you can see those same large figures walking from the doorway along the side of the left wall. But you can also see the design of the wall as a whole, and if you look at it carefully you will note that the figures are, of course, placed against these large red panels. Between those red panels, what look -- they're clearly not columns, but kind of like flat pilasters here; that resting on a socle, down below; and then above, a meander pattern frieze; and above that another, a course that represents, in paint, what looks like variegated marble -- variegated marble, the implication being again it would have been very expensive to bring from somewhere else.



So as we look at this, we think, "Well it's kind of like a First Style wall." But you can see that it's not a relief wall, it's not built up in stucco, it's flat, because it was done entirely in paint. And yet, as you look at these very large figures, you see that they are standing on a ground line that projects into the spectator's space, and that suggests to us that what we are dealing with here--if we have to categorize this and put it into First, Second, Third, or Fourth Style -- we're going to call it a Second Style Roman wall painting, because it has, again, residual from the First Style, but it's done entirely in paint, but it has this projecting element at the bottom, this baseline on which the figures stand and on which the figures process. So a Second Style Roman wall painting with monumental figures.



And those monumental figures tell a story, and it's a very interesting, very intriguing, very mysterious story indeed. And it is from the mystery scenes here, by the way, that the Villa of the Mysteries got its name. This is a view over here, an excellent view of the small doorway that you need to take to enter into the room. And as you enter into the room and you make a sharp left--well first, of course, you enter in the room and you get a glimpse of the entire space -- but as you turn to your immediate left, you begin with the beginning of the story. And the artist again has orchestrated this in such a way as to make it look like this woman, who is standing here, has actually entered through the doorway of the room, and is now beginning to process from that doorway, along the side of the room.



If we look at the woman, we see that she is wearing quite a heavy garment, over here. But it's a very jaunty representation of this woman, because you can see she has her right hand on her hip, in an interesting way. And then, most interesting of all, is the fact that she wears a veil over her head, and it's a kind of diaphanous veil, as I think you can see. It's over her head, protects her hair, and then it wraps around her--she wraps it around her chest. She's holding one corner of it, with her left hand, and the rest cascades down her back. The artist has paid a great deal of attention to that veil, because he wants to identify her for us, and to tell us that she is a bride. Brides were often depicted with voluminous veils, like that, as you see her here. And she is a bride--as we're going to find out as we interpret these scenes--she is a bride, probably a young Pompeian woman, who is about to enter- who is about to participate in these religious rites that are going to allow her--it's kind of like a fraternity or sorority initiation that she's about to undergo: let's say a sorority initiation that she's about to undergo, because she's about to go through something that's going to enable her ultimately to enter into a mystical marriage with the god of wine, Dionysus.



She enters here. Then she comes upon two other figures. There's a seated woman, as you can see, who holds in her left hand, a scroll. She has her right hand on the shoulder of a little boy. Note that the little boy is completely naked and completely oblivious to the fact that he is naked. He holds in his hand a scroll, which he has--another scroll--which he has unfurled, and it looks as if he is--well there's no question, he's very intent on looking at the text on that scroll--and it looks as if he is reading from the text of that scroll. And we interpret that scroll, or we interpret his participation in this scene, as probably the fact that he is reading the liturgy, the liturgy that has to do with this cult of Dionysus and with the mystical marriage of women with the god Dionysus. It's a wonderful depiction of that boy.



And I also show you here the rest of that particular side of the room. We're going to look at all the figures in order, but I just wanted you to get a sense of the rest of the wall as it unfurls -- this left wall as you first come into the room. And I wanted to point out, using this image, that again about how sophisticated this particular artist was, because he takes into consideration, as I mentioned before, the corners of the room, and they become part of the narrative. As you can see here, there's an empty space, but the story line, as we'll see, continues across the corner, and the figures over here interact with the figures on the other side of the bend in the wall, in again a very, very sophisticated and interesting way, and we'll follow that through.



Before we do though, I just want to show you a head detail of the seated woman, to give you a sense of the extraordinary talent of this artist, whose name, unfortunately, has not come down to us. We see this head here, and you can see the way in which the artist has captured the moment: what this woman is going through, what she's thinking about. She's seated. She's listening to the liturgy that's being spoken by this boy. You can see that the artist has paid a great deal of attention to her eyes, which are wide open and very nicely painted. But one gets the sense, or at least I get the sense as I look at this, that she is not only wide eyed at what's going on, but you also have a sense that she's kind of almost jaded. She's kind of seen it all. She has a sense of what the moment is and what is about to occur. Notice also the way in which her lips are slightly parted, and especially the hair.



The artist, as we'll see, who was responsible for painting this--and it may have been more than one artist; it may have been a designer who worked with obviously others in a workshop. But whether it's a single individual or several, it is very clear that this person or persons have a very good sense of what hair, real hair, is actually like. It's the same as I mentioned when we talked about the gardenscape of Livia, and I said that that artist had clearly looked at nature and was actually depicting what he saw and knew about nature. Here is somebody, I believe, who has really looked at human beings, who has really looked at the way in which hair grows from the scalp, because you can see the way in which he has shown that hair growing from the scalp, and he understands that when you part your hair in the middle, there may be a certain part of the scalp that you actually see through the hair, and he has represented that extremely realistically here. So although we don't know the name of this particular artist, we can acclaim his talent here, as we look at details such as this one.



The story continues from the boy reading the liturgy to the figure that you see here. It is a figure, again, of a woman. She is holding some kind of a dish, and she has on that dish probably--it's very hard to identify exactly what's there--but she has probably some items that have something to do with this cult, with this mystical marriage of these Pompeian women with Dionysus. She is dressed in--she has a light colored top and a purple--there's a lot of purple in this scene--a very vividly purple skirt, as you can see down here. She is the first woman of the group to wear a laurel wreath over her head, as you can see. And she and all of them, by the way, wear bracelets. You can see bracelets around her lower arm. Some of them wear these arm bracelets up higher on their arms, as we'll also see. And she's one of the only figures that actually looks out at us, the spectators. She really is basically confronting us. We link eyes with her when we look at this particular painting, and the artist is obviously trying to establish fairly early on a connection between the viewer and what is happening in this scene.



The beginning of another scene here, with a series of women--and I have a better view of it here--where you can see what's happening next. Here we have three women who are standing at some kind of a table, and one of the women, the woman on the right, has a pitcher from which she's pouring some kind of liquid. Whether it's water or wine or what, we're not absolutely sure. It might well be wine, given that this is the Mysteries of Dionysus. She may be pouring wine. But whatever it is, it has been interpreted as a purification scene, in which something--and we can't see what it is that's underneath this purple piece of cloth that one of the women is holding up and revealing. They are purifying that or either an object or a series of objects on this table.



It's a wonderful depiction of these three women, one woman holding the edge of the table over here, and looking to her compatriot who is pouring the liquid on this side. And a real tour de force--it's not so easy to depict a figure from the rear and make it work, but this artist has done so. A very monumental woman, seated on a wonderful throne here, with a purple hem, as you can see down below. But look at the way he's depicted her garment. It's tight in some places and molds her body, and cascades in others. She's also wearing a scarf that's tied back behind her head, and she too wears a laurel wreath over that scarf. This woman has a laurel wreath as well. So they're purifying; as part of this rite, they are purifying. Women, three women, are participating and purifying this object or objects here. This woman has her--she's not really looking as you--well she isn't looking at what she's doing, as you can see. She's doesn't seem to be watching the purification, but rather is looking at this fellow over here, and given what he looks like, I guess that's not surprising. Her glance is caught by him. Now who is he? He is what we call a Silenus, S-i-l-e-n-u-s, and a Silenus is an older satyr, s-a-t-y-r. Who were the satyrs? The satyrs were the compatriots of Pan, P-a-n; compatriots of Pan. And so a young Satyr grows up into an old Silenus, and you see that Silenus here, and he's a very interesting figure.



You can see that he's completely naked, and in fact, well there are naked men and naked woman in this, as we'll see. But it's interesting to see which ones are and which ones aren't. He is, and you can see that this great purple mantle that he had draped around his body has completely, or almost completely, fallen off. He is playing a lyre, as you can see here, and probably singing, along with his lyre playing. And not only has his garment fallen off, but you can see that he is not--one foot is on the pedestal, on which the--or on a base, on which the pedestal that supports the lyre is located. But another leg has slipped off that pedestal. Why is that? He's quite tipsy. We know that the Silenuses and the satyrs did a lot of drinking, very serious drinking. He has clearly imbibed, and he is not very much in control of himself any longer. So he's probably pretty oblivious to the fact that his clothing has fallen off and that he too has slipped off the base, as he sings. So it's not surprising that this woman casts her glance towards the goings on next to her.



Here are the--I mentioned the satyrs, and we see two of the young satyrs right next to that older man. And the satyrs again are associated with Pan. And goats are also associated with Pan, and you can see one of them is feeding the goats here. These young boys--and it's true of the men too; I neglected to mention it--all have sort of Pan or animal ears, as you can see very clearly here, the pointed animal ears. And this one is playing a flute. So one playing a flute, one feeding the goats, both of them seated on a kind of rocky area over here. This figure is of particular interest. It's a woman clothed with a white garment that is sleeveless. She has one of these bracelets on the upper part of her arm. It is clear that she is afraid and she is fleeing from something. You can see that she holds up her left hand, she holds up her left hand, as if she is trying to ward something horrific off. And you can see that she is -- by the way, while she's holding up her hand to ward it off, you can see that she's absolutely mesmerized by whatever it is that she's seeing. Her eyes are staring straight ahead--wide eyed, staring straight ahead--to look at whatever it is that is on one hand fascinating, and on the other horrific. She is clearly in a rush, because you can see that the purple mantle that she wore has been caught in the breeze; as she tries to escape, the breeze is caught in that, and it almost serves the purpose of a kind of parachute that's about to rescue her from whatever it is that she has seen and that has frightened her.



We are now at the first corner of the room. So again, the artist has taken the corner into consideration and created this dramatic interaction between this woman and whatever it is that she's afraid of on the other side of the corner. And before I show that to you, I just wanted to show you a close-up of her face, to again give you a sense of how talented, how extraordinarily gifted this artist was in capturing the moment, in capturing the feelings that this woman must have been going through. Once again, the very wide eyes, fascinated by what she sees, but seemingly all knowing. She's seeing something that she doesn't quite expect, but you get the sense that perhaps she did know all along that she was going to see something of this nature. The parted lips, once again, and the expert way in which the artist has shown the way hair naturally grows out of the scalp of the head, again achieved magnificently in this head detail.



Now the object of her fear is what we now see over here. Here again we see the corner itself, an empty red space, the woman fleeing on this side. What is she fleeing from; what is she afraid of? This horrific mask that is being held by one of the satyrs. We see another set of two young satyrs here, and an old Silenus again, and one of the satyrs holding up this horrible mask, and that seems to be what has put fear into the eyes of this particular woman. With regard to the scene of the satyrs, you can see that--the Silenus and the satyrs--the Silenus is seated on some kind of marble block, as you can see here. He looks very similar to the one that we saw before. An older man with those animal ears, as you can see, one of the satyrs holds a mask. All of these figures, by the way, do not have any--are semi-naked. You can see that they have bare chests, in all cases, and the mantle's only covering the lower parts of their bodies. And the Silenus, while looking back toward the woman, is holding a large cup from which one of the satyrs is drinking. It's a kind of--I always think of this as a kind of Mory's Cup--and you see that the Silenus is holding it, the younger satyr is drinking from it. So again, this has a lot to do with drinking and getting drunk, this mystery and--at least from the male point of view, because it actually seems to be the men who are drinking, and not the women who are drinking, in this particular instance.



It's a wonderful--let me also show you a detail of the young satyr drinking out of the cup, and you can see how gifted again this particular artist is. I don't think this artist always gets the hands right. He tries. They're sometimes a little bit awkward, but on the other hand he really has made an effort to show the way in which hands and fingers grip something, both from the bottom and also from the top. He's very good with the eyes. Again you get--it's just wonderful the way he has achieved showing this satyr on one hand greedily drinking from the cup, but at the same time with one eye--you can see one eye, and that one eye is very much on what it is that he's doing. He's looking at that liquid quite intently, as he drinks it, and I think that's very well achieved here. And again this extraordinary way in which the artist has depicted the hair of this young man as it grows out of his scalp. Particularly talented; you don't see that very often in Roman painting.



The center--we're now on the back wall; we've turned the corner, it's the back wall, the wall that you face when you come into the room and look ahead. And we see that the scene that follows the Silenus and the satyrs with the mask is the scene that you see here, and it is the most important scene in the painting, because it is a scene that represents Dionysus himself, this man with whom all of these Pompeian women are anxious to be initiated into his rites, and to enter into mystical marriage with him. Here he is, and he is wasted, clearly. Look at him. Despite the fact that he's about to enter into marriage with all these attractive young women, he's completely out of it. He is lying in the lap of Ariadne, his mortal lover; you see her here. And look at his eyes, they're sort of rolled up into the top of his head. He couldn't possibly support himself, without Ariadne's help. His arms are outstretched behind him; in fact, she has to put her arm around his chest in order to protect him.



And I think it's interesting to see the way in which women are represented as protective beings, in these paintings. The woman earlier on who puts her hand around the boy who's reading from the liturgy, and now Ariadne who drapes her arm around Dionysus: Dionysus, the god of wine. You can see again that he had a mantle--and that's about it--on, but that is slipping off. And you can also see that he's so drunk that although he's kept one sandal on, he's lost the other sandal. You can see his bare foot over here. You're looking at the bottom of the foot. That sandal is gone, and if you look for it, you can find it; here it is, it has fallen off and it is located closer to Ariadne. Look also at the staff that Dionysus usually carries: the thyrsus, t-h-y-r-s-u-s, the thyrsus of Dionysus. It's there and it helps to identify him, as does the ivy wreath that he typically wears. Note the yellow ribbon that is tied around the thyrsus. But one wonders how that thyrsus is being supported, because you can see I guess it's just leaning slightly against the chair on which Dionysus sits, but one wonders how it is being supported. But it crosses his body here, and is meant again as an identifying attribute for the god of wine.



The fact that we see Dionysus in this state and also on the lap of Ariadne is interesting, especially the lap of Ariadne. Because again, she was his mortal--she herself was a mortal--his mortal lover. And I think one of the ways of interpreting this as--a scene like this--seeing that Dionysus could unite with a mortal woman gave hope to the women of Pompeii who were hoping to be initiated into this mystical religion, and to embark on a mystical marriage with Dionysus. This gave them hope that if another mortal woman was allowed to enter into a relationship with Dionysus, then they too would be able to follow in Ariadne's footsteps. And so this is a very important message, I think, of hope to those women who were hoping to become initiates of this particular cult.



The next scene that we see is also a very interesting scene and a very important one. It's the one that comes right to the right of the scene of Dionysus and Ariadne. And we see here the discovery of the most important cult object in this scene, which is the phallus. We see a woman kneeling. Her arms are wonderfully depicted, as they seem to barely touch whatever it is that lies beneath this purple cloth. We see down below a basket that is certainly the basket in which the phallus, the secret ritual--the most important but secret ritual item in the Dionysiac religion--was kept. And there's been a lot of speculation, what was behind the purple cloth. Is it an erect phallus? Very possibly, that's exactly what it is, that would have been kept again in this basket, but is underneath here.



Although the speculation has been so wild that we even have a scholar who has written an article suggesting that the profile of this particular cloth here is so similar to the profile of Mount Vesuvius that what we have here is a reference instead to Mount Vesuvius and to the fact that this scene takes place in Pompeii. It's a very intriguing idea. I can't imagine that it's correct, but nonetheless it gives you some sense of the kind of scholarship and some of the speculation there has been about what is actually going on here. But it seems to be the covering, in this particular case, and possibly about to reveal the secret--the most important secret item in this cult.



Over here we see another fascinating figure. We've gotten to another corner and we can see that she straddles the empty red space in that corner. A figure of a woman who is winged; the only winged figure that we see in these scenes. You can see her large outstretched wings behind her. She is naked from the waist up. She's wearing a fantastic skirt--I love this skirt--with purple around the waist and purple at the hem, and then a wonderful--it flips out, it's brown, and it flips out, and it matches these great tall boots, brown boots, that she also wears. And she's sort of on her tippy-toes as she herself puts up one of her hands, perhaps again to ward something off; we don't know what. But with the other hand what's most important, she has her hand behind her back and she's about to bring a whip, which you can see, down on the back of one of the initiates.



And as we look across the corner--again the artist masterfully taking the corner into consideration in his design vis-à-vis the content and the execution--we see the way in which that whip is about to come down on the back of one of these initiates who's kneeling and has her head in the lap of a woman who protects her. Here is the scene. So again we see the figure, the winged figure with the whip. We see the object of the whipping, this initiate here. She is kneeling. She is in the lap, in part, of a woman who seems to protect her, or try to protect her. The woman who is trying to protect her, her eyes are very wide. She is staring up at the winged figure, imploringly it seems, almost imploring her, "Please, enough, enough, please stop." And she is very nurturing to the young girl who is undergoing this initiation, as she pats her on the head, as you can see here. An incredible view of this woman, the way in which the upper part of her body is exposed for the whipping, the rest of it covered in a voluminous purple mantle, as you can see here.



Also figures to her right, a naked woman who is placed in front of, interestingly, a very heavily clothed woman, in a dark garment, which only serves to accentuate the lightness of this woman's flesh. This sort of contrast or tension between clothed and unclothed also seems to play a very important part in this particular painting. But this woman is incredible. Again, the artist has enjoyed trying to represent figures from the rear, as well as from the front. And you see he has also shown her on her tippy-toes, as she is--well she has cymbals above her head and she's crashing those cymbals, and then she is dancing on her tiptoes, down here. But it's an incredible feat because she also has this gold mantle that is over her shoulder and between her legs, and somehow she's keeping this mantle balanced as she is dancing and as she is playing her music. And then there's another thyrsus of Dionysus that seems to be located--that is located between these two women, and one wonders again how in the world that thyrsus is being held up, as this woman is participating in this dance and music-making over here at the right.



To get back to this figure, I just want to show you a detail, because I think in this detail you really get, almost more than anywhere else in this painted frieze, the extraordinary talent of this particular artist. Here the artist gets these hands really right. You can see this, the limp hand of the woman being whipped almost says it all--it's an incredible detail--as does the more nurturing hand of the woman who is trying to protect her. And I think you can get a sense of what she must be going through by the way in which the artist has represented her face. He has cast her eye--her eyes are--this is one of the only closed eyes; it may be the only closed eye in the scene--her eye is closed, or almost closed, and it is sunken, it seems to be sunken in a darkness here, that gives you some sense of the pain that this woman must be going through: pain that she obviously feels, however, is worth it. And look also at the way in which the hair has been depicted here. You really get the sense of sweat drenched hair, of this woman again who's going through what is almost certainly the most difficult moment in her life, but one that she hopes is going to be well worth it, at the end of the day. It's an incredible detail, I think.



After that scene, there is a window, and then at the very end of that wall--we're now facing the room on the right wall of the room--there is one last corner, and we see here what is represented across that one last corner. It is a very young woman, seated on a kind of a throne here. She has an attendant standing next to her, and then there's a small winged cupid at the left, and then across the corner we see another cupid, standing on a base, leaning on a pedestal, winged again, his head resting on one of his hands, and he is looking across the corner at what is going on, on the other side. And he looks very, very admiring. And in fact whom is he admiring? He's admiring another one of these young initiates, a young woman who seems to be readying herself to become a bride, who's getting ready for her initiation. She wears a glorious golden garment that is wrapped, and wrapped around her waist is a purple tie, a purple ribbon or tie, as you can see here. She is again accompanied by another woman, an attendant, and the two of them together are actually fixing her hair, to get her ready again for her mystical marriage--I have a detail of her to show you in a moment.



And then this wonderful anecdotal detail here, where we see the other cupid, winged again, holding up a mirror in his hand, a rectangular mirror. And if you look very, very closely--and you can study this detail on your own as well--if you look very closely you can see that there is a reflection of the young woman's face in that mirror. So a lot of attention being paid to the readying of this woman, to be a bride, to enter into the mystical marriage with Dionysus. And we see a detail here where we can see her; see how pretty she is; see how her--again the artist has shown this extraordinary ability to depict hair as it really is, growing out of her scalp. You can see the part of her hair, the scalp showing through, the way in which the hair grows from that. And then you can see that not only is she working on arranging it, but she's getting help from the attendant. The attendant also has a section of her hair in her hand, and the two of them together are trying to get her ready for her mystical marriage. Her arm is up. You can see both of her bracelets: one around her wrist, and then another bracelet up on the upper part of her arm.



Then we have another window, and then the last figure that we see is this woman here, a woman who is seated on a very elaborate throne. She too is veiled. She has again a combination gold and purple garment: bracelets, she's wearing bracelets. But she is veiled. So again the implication is she too is a bride. She seems very placid. She seems somehow a little bit older than some of the other brides. And what has been speculated--she's very pensive; you can see she leans her chin on one of her hands. She seems to be sitting there, right at again the doorway of the room. She seems to be seated there, basically surveying everything that's happening in front of her. And because she looks a little bit older, because she looks a little bit wiser, because she is looking out at the panorama of what's happening in front of her, it has been speculated, and I think quite convincingly, that the woman we see here is probably the matron of the house -- probably the wife of the man who owned and built the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, who was herself an adherent to the cult of Dionysus, and has set aside this secret room in her house for the cult of Dionysus in which she can help initiate other young women into this mystery cult.



Just one, a couple of quick words about religion and cults during this period. The Roman religion was the Roman state religion. Everyone essentially adhered to the Roman state religion, which was very closely allied with the government of Rome. So Church and State very closely allied in Roman times. But as time went on, a number of religions had emanated from other parts of the Empire, especially the Eastern Empire. The cult of Dionysus, the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis, began to take hold, both for men and women. Women had a particular predilection for the Egyptian goddess Isis and for the Dionysiac mystery religions. And initially, because they were not accepted by the state--the only religion that was considered legitimate was the Roman state religion--since they weren't accepted by the state--and this included Christianity--these religions had to be celebrated in, or the rites had to be done in secret. And so we see underground rooms, underground buildings being built for this purpose--I'll show you one a bit later in the course--but we also see rooms in houses being set aside for these kinds of rites. And that seems to be what happened here. The woman of the house, the matrona, the materfamilias of this particular family, who lived in the Villa of the Mysteries, has set aside Room 5 as this secret chamber in which she can practice the Dionysiac rituals, and she can also encourage other women, in Pompeii, to partake of those same rituals.



I put on your Monument List, you'll see an image, a drawing of all of these scenes that I've now gone through, in order, and I think it's helpful for you to have that as a reference, just to be able to follow along again the narrative and where each of the scenes that we've described comes up. And then just one last view of the room as a whole. I bring it back because I just wanted to end our discussion of this particular monument with the point that this is really quite unique in terms of the paintings that we've seen thus far this semester; that is, to have a painting with such monumental figures that tells the story that this particular painting does. And it's such a famous set of paintings that I think because people know it so well, they think, "Well that must be comparable to other things from Roman times." But this is the only painting that we have like this. It doesn't mean that there might not have been others, but I think it probably means that there weren't a lot of others, that this was truly an exceptional work of art, that is preserved in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii.



I want to show you in the half an hour that remains a number of other paintings, in much less detail, but paintings that also are of special subjects, that also belong to Second, Third or Fourth Style walls, and are particularly interesting in a variety of ways. The first of these is also mythological in subject matter. I'm going to show you the so-called Odyssey paintings. We're moving back to Rome. These are located in a house on the Esquiline Hill, one of Rome's original Seven Hills, in Rome. And while--I think I neglected to give you a date for the Mystery paintings, but those are 60 to 50, and these paintings are a little bit later, 50 to 40 B.C. They are also extremely interesting, because they seem to represent scenes from the tenth and eveventh books of Homer's Odyssey. And Vitruvius, the architectural theorist, writing in the age of Augustus, Vitruvius tells us that the Greeks were particularly interested in representing the wanderings of Odysseus in landscapes. So he tells us--that's very important for us to know because it means that the Greeks painted paintings like this, illustrations of Odysseus' wanderings. And yet we see one of these paintings in this house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, between 50 and 40 B.C.



Books X and XI focus on Odysseus' coming upon the Laestrygonians--I put that name on the Monument List for you--the Laestrygonians, and what happens when he meets the Laestrygonians. And we see one of the scenes here. We see, in fact, that several scouts, working for Odysseus, get off their boats on an island and they come across this beautiful young woman who has just fetched--you can see she's holding a pitcher--she has just fetched water from a well, and she's walking down this mountain and she comes upon these scouts of Odysseus. And being a friendly sort, she says to them: "I'd like to invite you back to my father's house for dinner." Well her father is a man-eating giant, as are the other Laestrygonians. And the scouts fall for it, and they come with her to meet her father, and the father immediately cooks up one of the three for dinner.



And various other adventures happen on this island, but what's particularly interesting for us is the fact that these scenes again are from a well-known work of literature. But the figures are very small in relation to the landscape. It's clear that the artist, whether originally Greek artists were particularly interested in the landscape and the telling of a narrative across that landscape, a landscape that is magnificently rendered, as you can see, by these artists. There are a number of scenes still preserved. After that dinner, by the way, where one of the scouts gets consumed, after that the Laestrygonians decide that they don't want any more of Odysseus and his crew. And they take boulders, as you can see in this scene here, and they begin to attack the ships of Odysseus, destroying most of them, and only the one with Odysseus himself is able to escape, and he makes his way, at that point, to another island, to meet up with the enchantress Circe. So we see all of this very carefully described here.



But as we look at these scenes, I think we're particularly struck--or at least I'm particularly struck, and I would imagine you'll share this--by the interest of this artist in depicting the landscape. We have an artist again, whether it's the original Greek artist, but certainly copied here by an artist in Rome, we see an incredible interest in landscape, by someone who is clearly not only looking at earlier models, but looking at landscape itself, and is very interested in depicting all kinds of anecdotal details: inlets of water, as you can see here; rocks and the way in which the rock is cast in shadow on one side and is lighted on the other; the way in which branches bend, both when people pull on them, or when they are buffeted by the breeze or by the wind, as you can see with that tree at the uppermost part of the peak. So again the artists here are particularly interested in nature and in the display of nature, and in that way very comparable to what we saw in Livia's gardenscape at the Villa at Primaporta.



I mentioned already that it is believed that these paintings on the Esquiline Hill are based on Hellenistic Greek models that probably were made in about 150 B.C. So a copy, and in that regard should strike you as very much the same trend, as we've seen so often in the beginning of this semester, of the Romans looking back and admiring Greek art, and incorporating it -- a kind of Hellenization of Roman art and architecture, because of this reverence and because of this incorporation of earlier Greek scenes and prototypes. And so we see that here. And there are three reasons that scholars believe that what we're looking at here is based very closely on a Greek model. One of those is that passage in Vitruvius that I already mentioned. Vitruvius tells us that the Greeks were particularly interested in representing scenes from the Odyssey against a landscape background. So that certainly tells us that it's likely these are based on earlier Greek originals. The second has to do--you've probably noticed this--with the fact that many of the figures in these paintings are labeled, and those labels are--if you look very closely you will see--in Greek, and not only are they in Greek, but some of the words are misspelled. So since those words are misspelled, it has been speculated--and I think again quite convincingly--that those who are misspelling them don't really know Greek, and may be Roman artists, who are not familiar with that language, are copying it and making mistakes in the process. So that also suggests to us that earlier Greek models are being looked at, absorbed, and even copied here.



But most interesting of all, for us aficionados of the Second Style, is the fact that very careful--the archaeologists, who have looked at these with great care, have determined that the landscape scenes that we've studied are continuous beneath the columns, that when they copied these, they copied--perhaps they had a scroll that they had from somewhere else, a Greek scroll, that came from a library that had images on it, and they unfurled that scroll and they copied it here. They did that first, they copied--so we had a continuous landscape scene, and it was only after that landscape scene was painted that the artists went back and painted the columns on top. They put these Greek paintings, or copies of these Greek paintings of Odysseus' wanderings, based on this Greek prototype of the mid-second century B.C., they put it into a Roman context by providing these Second Style columns or pilasters--pilasters, I believe--pilasters, by creating these Second Style pilasters and making this into a vista or panorama that would have been seen through the window, in a sense, of a Second Style painting. So it's a Romanization of an original Greek painting, in an extraordinary way that tells us a good deal about how the Romans were thinking about these Greek prototypes at this particular juncture.



I showed you last time the Villa at Oplontis, the Caldarium 8, and we looked at the soffit of Caldarium 8, and we saw these floating mythological figures, and we saw women in niches with shells at the top. And I pointed out to you, at that time, that we also have a number of small panel pictures, representing still lives, with fruit and the like. And these in a sense get lost in the overall scheme of these Second, Third, and Fourth Style walls, but they're very interesting, if we look at them in greater detail. And I want to show you just two examples today. This is a--it's blown up, obviously, way beyond the size that it was--but it gives you some sense of what these look like in detail. It's a still life painting that comes from the Villa of Julia Felix, in Pompeii, which dates to around 50 B.C. And it probably--we do believe that it is a detail from a Second Style wall. And we look at that detail here, and we see that these--for those of you who enjoy modern art, for example, I think you'll agree that this is- tends to be as modern as Roman Art gets, because we see it has a very contemporary appearance, I think, this particular still life painting. We see that the artist has shown a striking penchant for, or a sensitivity for composition, for light, the way in which light falls on objects that are made of different materials, be it metal or stone. The artist has shown that kind of sensitivity, I think, here, as well as to composition, the way in which a group of objects are composed in relationship to one another.



If we look at this painting, I think we'll agree it's quite a tour de force. We see some interesting things, which are not that easy to decipher. We see over here, for example, a cloth with fringe that hangs on a nail on the wall. We see over here, also hanging on the wall, four dead birds. We see a plate, an oval plate of what seem to be eggs. We see a pitcher over here, which again looks like a metal pitcher, bathed in light on one side, with a handle. And then we see here what looks like some kind of a beaker, with something that may have been used to stir whatever liquid was inside. All of this on a stone pedestal. And then leaning against that stone pedestal we see one of these clay vessels, which seems to have an inscription on that clay vessel.



So what is this still life painting? Is it just meant to be a mix of objects that would be found in the kitchen of a house? Or is it something more than that? Do these have meaning beyond that? Is there some religious symbolism here, for example? This is not easy to decipher, and no one really has done that satisfactorily, up to this point, but it's something that one would want to keep in mind, as one thinks about the meaning of these still life paintings. And keep in mind again, if you think back to a room like the Ixion Room, there are a number of these small panel paintings in the Ixion Room. When you look at the room as a whole, these are not easy to see. They're so small that they're lost in the overall scheme. So you'd really have to go up very close to these, if you could even reach them, if they're way up in the top it would be difficult, but if they're down below, go up close, look at them, and try to figure out for yourself exactly what is going on here.



Another one from, in this case, from Herculaneum, which is not so ingeniously called Still Life Painting with Peaches and Glass Jar--but that's very descriptive, that's exactly what it depicts--which is later in date, around 62 to 79, and probably was a panel in either a Third or a Fourth Style Roman painting. We see two tiers here. We indeed do see peaches, and the artist again has really looked at peaches to depict this--shows the peaches on the vine, with the leaves, as you can see here--and wants to make sure that we know what a peach looks like inside, as well, so has cut a section off one of these and shows the pit inside, just to make sure that we get a full sense of how peaches grow, and of what happens when you open a peach. And then down here, below, a glass vase, and you can see that the artist has filled that vase halfway with water, so that he can explore the effects of light on that water, and the reflection of that water on the glass vase itself. So clearly again artists that--there may be other reasons that they juxtaposed these particular items, reasons that may be beyond our comprehension today. But while they may do that for ritual or other reasons, they also are clearly very concerned with just exploring composition, light, and so on and so forth, as I said before, which is a very modern thing to do.



We also see among the paintings that I've called "Special Subjects" today, genre scenes, scenes that represent daily life in Pompeii or Herculaneum. I'll show you just one of those here. It is a painting of--it's usually called Painting of a Magistrate Distributing Free Bread, and it comes from House VII.3.30 in Pompeii, a wall painting from VII.3.30 in Pompeii -- dates to around A.D. 70. And what's depicted here--whether the magistrate is distributing free bread or it's bread being sold, we're not absolutely sure--but what you can see here is piles and piles of round breads that are being distributed to those who stand in front of the bread stand. And I can show you a detail also of the same, where you can get a better sense of the shape of the breads. You remember the petrified bread that we looked at from Pompeii, and the division into shapes that make it resemble pizza. The same kinds of breads can be seen here, and it's that bread that is being distributed to these people down below. While this painting comes from a house, and it may have just referred to the particular profession of someone who lived in that house. But paintings like this we believe--and it may or may not have been the case with this one--could also have--were also used as shop signs, to advertise what was being sold in one of those tabernae, that often opened off houses in places like Pompeii and Herculaneum, and that may have been the case here as well.



Just a few words about what we might call history painting, among the Romans. This is a fascinating and very famous painting of the Amphitheater at Pompeii. You see it on the left-hand side of the screen. It comes from House I.3.23 in Pompeii, and dates to between 59 and 70 A.D. And it purports not only to represent the Pompeii Amphitheater, which I remind you of here, and you'll recall the very distinctive staircase of the Amphitheater at Pompeii, and you can see how carefully that is rendered here by the artist to make sure that we know this is indeed the Amphitheater at Pompeii. It purports to represent a very famous historical event, at least in terms of local history, and that is a brawl that broke out between the Pompeians and another group of individuals who lived in the area called the Nucerians, N-u-c-e-r-i-a-n-s. The Pompeians and the Nucerians, a brawl broke out between them. You can see that brawl being represented in the oval arena there. The brawl was so serious that the local magistrates decided to punish both the Pompeians and the Nucerians, and they did something quite extraordinary, and that is that they decided to close down the Amphitheater in Pompeii, for ten years: count them. Can you imagine the city of Pompeii without an amphitheater for ten years? That was a very brutal punishment. But it seems to have happened, and it is memorialized, that very event is memorialized in this painting, in this house at Pompeii.



This painting is also very valuable--I think I've mentioned this to you before--is also very valuable, not only for showing us the shape of the amphitheater--which, of course, as you know, still survives--the oval shape and the seating, but for a detail that doesn't still survive, and that is the awning. I mentioned to you that in amphitheater design, they put poles at the very uppermost part of the amphitheater, and they were able to put an awning on those poles to protect people in inclement weather. And we see the representation, our only preserved representation in paint, of one of these awnings. So again, it is very valuable in terms of helping us understand amphitheater design.



The last two paintings I want to show you today are both portrait paintings, and you have to think of these portrait paintings, like the mythological panel pictures, as paintings that were inserted into walls, inserted into probably mostly Third and Fourth Style Roman walls. And when those treasure hunters hit Pompeii and Herculaneum, these were the ones they went to first, and they cut a fair number of these out of their original contexts and made off with them. But some of them fortunately have found their way into, especially into the Naples Archaeological Museum.



This is the first one that I want to show you, an absolutely fetching portrait of a young woman from Pompeii, that dates to around the middle of the first century A.D., that is, 45 to 50 A.D. And we see it here, and it's an incredible painted portrait by clearly once again a very talented artist who's done an extraordinary job of capturing this woman. It's a very appealing portrait. We see her, she's a quite attractive young woman, with wide, sort of hazel colored eyes, sharp, straight brows, straight nose, sort of Cupid's lips. As you can see down below, the hair is magnificently rendered. You can see that she has a bevy of corkscrew curls. Those in the front, toward the front of her face, are highlighted, and match very well the color of her eyes. She wears gold hoop earrings that also mimic the curlicues of her locks. And then you can see also that she wears something that appears to have been fashionable to wear, among Roman and Pompeian women, and that is a gold hairnet, at the very apex, which adds shine and glimmer to the hair; but also you can see the hair beneath it through that. Down below you can see she wears a green garment and a sort of purple or brownish mantle over her shoulder, and she holds a stylus to her lips.



And she has in her other hand, as you can see, a tablet, in front of her, and it is clear, as she puts that stylus to her lips, she is deep in thought, very pensive, figuring out what it is that she's going to write on her wax tablet, because these were wax and they would write into the wax tablets. Because she is caught in this moment of deep thought, a number of scholars have suggested that she must represent the Greek poetess Sappho; which is why I've put that painted portrait of Sappho on your Monument List. But you can see I've put Sappho in quote marks. I think this is almost certainly not Sappho. It is probably a Pompeian woman, and she may not be thinking about the poetry that she's about to write, but perhaps the shopping list that she's putting together before she makes her way down to the central market of the city of Pompeii, or sends her slave to go down to the central market of the city of Pompeii. But it may also be that she was literate, and that she wants to underscore the fact that she was literate. It may also be that this was just a set way of representing women in portraiture in Pompeii. Because this is not the only portrait we have of a woman with her stylus to her lips and her tablets in her hands.



Here's another portrait that we have, also from Pompeii, with a woman represented in exactly the same way. This portrait is from House VII.2.60, and dates to around 62 to 79 A.D. -- the portrait of a woman, and presumably her husband by her side. She again has the stylus to her lips; she has the tablet down below. You can see that he holds a scroll, which has a red place marker up above. So this portrait of the two of them may either allude to the fact that they are both literate, that they can both read and write. It's also possible that the scroll that he holds may indicate that he's a magistrate. Or lastly, and one of the more popular solutions, is that this may--he may be holding the marriage certificate, the marriage between the two. The portraits are very interesting. You can see that she isn't quite as gorgeous as her other counterpart. Her hair is not arranged in those wonderful golden locks, but is kind of fizzy over her forehead and down her neck. As you can see here, her ears stick out. She has a uni-brow. But she's more than happy to be represented, as she was, preserved for posterity, as she was, along with her husband over here.



And if you look at the portrait, you will see again that it has a black frame around it, and then a maroon frame, which tells us again that this was inserted into a wall, a Third or Fourth Style wall, just like the mythological paintings were inserted into those walls, as a painting that was located in the center of that wall, and in this case emphasized the owners of this particular house, and their undying love for each other--their relationship honors their marriage--and served as a kind of counterpart to a portrait of the loving couple that one might put on a mantelpiece, or on a piano, in one's house today. So you have to think of it as quite comparable to that. Again, when you wander through Pompeii, you don't see many of these portraits in situ, in large part because they were so popular with treasure hunters. But fortunately we do have a few preserved from both Pompeii and Herculaneum, and those can be seen in museums like Naples today. Thank you.



[end of transcript]

Professor Kleiner discusses the transformation of Rome by its first emperor, Augustus, who claimed to have found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. The conversion was made possible by the exploitation of new marble quarries at Luna (modern Carrara) on the northwest coast of Italy. The lecture surveys the end of the Roman Republic and the inauguration of the Principate and analyzes the Forum of Julius Caesar and the Forum of Augustus. Professor Kleiner shines a spotlight on Caesar's attempt to link himself to his divine ancestress Venus Genetrix and on Augustus' appropriations of Greek caryatids and other decorative motifs that associate his era with the Golden Age of Periclean Athens. Finally, she analyzes the Ara Pacis Augustae, a monument commissioned upon Augustus' return to Rome after achieving diplomatic victories in Spain and Gaul, and serving as the Luna marble embodiment of the emperor's new hegemonic empire.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 10-14 (historical background), 148-151 (Forum of Julius Caesar), 158-161 (Forum of Augustus), 184-192 (Ara Pacis Augustae and Horologium Augusti)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 21-44

Transcript



February 10, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everyone. Back to Rome today, back to Rome, which was beginning to emerge as the world's, or the ancient world's, greatest superpower, an emergence that we're going to see had a profound impact on Roman architecture. And we'll also see that there were a number of men who effected this superstardom for Rome, and they're men that I'm going to talk about with you today. These included Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Mark Antony, and Octavian Augustus, especially Octavian Augustus: Augustus, first emperor of Rome, and it's the reason that I have decided to call this lecture today "From Brick to Marble: Augustus Assembles Rome."



You see on the left-hand side of the screen a portrait of Julius Caesar. It's a green diabase portrait of Caesar. It's now in Berlin, and I believe actually that it is a portrait that was commissioned by Cleopatra herself. She commissioned it for a building that she and Caesar were putting up in Alexandria, called the Caesareum that honored Caesar, and you can see that he is represented as he was--it's a quite realistic portrait with the lines and wrinkles, with his receding hairline and so on accentuated in this portrait. On the right hand-side of the screen we see an image of Pompey the Great, a marble portrait that is now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, in Copenhagen. And a portrait that shows that Pompey the Great very much wanted to ally himself with Alexander the Great, because if you look at his very full head of hair, you can see that he wears it in the center, pushed up in a kind of pompadour, which is a reference to the same kind of upsweep that was worn by Alexander the Great.



I want to give you a little bit of information about Caesar, about his life, about some of his accomplishments, because these are going to have an impact on the architecture, on our discussion of the architecture that he commissioned in Rome. We know that Caesar was elected consul, in 59 B.C. He then joined with Pompey the Great, and with a man by the name of Crassus, to form what is known as the First Triumvirate. The result of that First Triumvirate was in part that Caesar received a consulship in Gaul. But despite all good intentions, just a few years later, in 54 B.C., the Triumvirate fell apart. Difficult times were the case in Rome between 53 and 50 B.C. There were food shortages and riots in the city, and the Senate was very concerned that these uprisings would lead to a takeover by the populace of the city. Pompey took charge. He took control of the Senate and he restored order, and his reward for so doing is that the Senate was willing to work with him to try to overthrow his rival, that is, Julius Caesar. Crassus, the other member of the Triumvirate, had since died.



But Caesar got the upper hand, at the end of the day, and it was Caesar who defeated Pompey the Great at a very famous battle, the Battle of Pharsalus, which took place in 48 B.C. After the Battle of Pharsalus and his defeat by Julius Caesar, Pompey fled to Egypt where he was murdered, and in fact the Egyptians slit Pompey's head, put it on a plate and presented it to Caesar. Now you'd think Caesar would have been happy about that. He wasn't, because although he was thrilled to have defeated Pompey the Great, he did not like seeing the head of a fellow Roman delivered to him on a plate. Caesar, at that point, despite his victory, what was foremost in his mind was his affair with Cleopatra, and he stayed in Egypt with Cleopatra for a period of time. But in 45 B.C., by 45 B.C., he had returned to Rome. He was acclaimed Dictator in that year, in 45, and after that he pursued fiscal reforms for Rome, and also he commissioned a number of very important public works, and that's where Roman architecture obviously comes into play. Despite the fact that he initiated those reforms and built buildings and built up the city in interesting ways, the aristocrats in Rome considered Caesar a tyrant. They considered him a tyrant because they felt that the influence of Cleopatra had rubbed off too much on him and his ambitions were too monarchical, and the aristocrats encouraged his murder. And he was assassinated, as all of you know, by Cassius and Brutus in the year 44 B.C., on the Ides of March, and he was divinized by the Senate, he was made a god by the Senate, in the year 42 B.C.



In his biography of Julius Caesar, the writer Suetonius, who was a secretary and a biographer to the emperor Hadrian in the second century A.D., Suetonius wrote a biography of the Twelve Caesars, a very famous biography that many of you may know served as the basis for Robert Graves' very well-known I Claudius, which also accentuates again the biographies of those first Twelve Caesars. And although Caesar himself was dictator, not emperor, he is the first of the Caesars who is covered by Suetonius. And in Suetonius' biography of Julius Caesar, he tells us about some of these major architectural commissions that Caesar embarked on in Rome. And it's interesting to read about these because we'll see that all of them seem to have been the best and the greatest. And I think one of the explanations for this is the time that Caesar spent in Alexandria, in Egypt, with Cleopatra. She wanted to show him the sites, and in fact they went on a very famous barge trip together, down the Nile, in which she showed him the pyramids and the sphinxes that were there to be seen. And he was extremely impressed by what he saw in Egypt, and decided that one of the most important things that he could do, that he could contribute to posterity vis-à-vis Rome, was to make Rome into a city that was the equal of Alexandria, that had similar large-scale buildings and impressive monuments, the way Alexandria did.



So he came back to Rome, he undertook this major building project, and Suetonius tells us that he built--he wanted to build, he started to build a Temple to Mars that Suetonius describes as the biggest in the world. Why? To compete with the buildings of Alexandria. A vast--not just a theater--a vast theater. Greek and Latin public libraries. We know, of course, that the greatest library in the ancient world at this particular time was the Library at Alexandria. So he wanted libraries in Rome that could compete with the great Library of Alexandria. And he was also particularly interested in engineering marvels. He built, or he began to build, a highway from the Adriatic, across the Apennines, to the Tiber, and then most famously a canal cut through the Isthmus of Corinth. That was, in large part, achieved, and one can still see that canal, if one visits Corinth in Greece today. So he had vast ambitions. But many of these ambitions were cut short by his assassination in 44 B.C. He was not able to achieve architecturally all that he had hoped.



One building that he was able to complete, or almost complete, was a forum in Rome. The Forum Iulium, I-u-l-i-u-m, which is after his family name Iulius. The Forum Iulium, or as we usually call it the Forum of Julius Caesar in Rome was a building that he was able to begin in the year 52 B.C., and then it was inaugurated in 46 B.C., which is a couple of years before his assassination. It wasn't quite finished at the time of its inauguration and it was left to Caesar's follower, Augustus, first emperor of Rome, to actually complete some of the details of the forum. But for all intents and purposes it was done by 46. I show you a Google Earth aerial view of the Roman Forum, as you see it here--we've looked at this before--the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, just for you to get your bearings, the Circus Maximus, the Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Hill, the Victor Emmanuel Monument here, Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali here, the so-called Imperial Fora, of which Augustus' forum, which we're also going to talk about today is a part.



The Forum of Caesar is very close to the Roman Forum. It's located just to the left here, and above, the wedding cake of Victor Emmanuel. You see it here, and you can barely make out the three columns that are still preserved from the temple that was located inside this forum. So you can see it was adjacent to, and in fact connected to, the Roman forum that lay over here. So a forum, and in that forum a temple, a temple to Venus, Venus Genetrix, G-e-n-e-t-r-i-x, Venus Genetrix, who was the divine ancestress of the Julian family. The Julian family traced its ancestry back to Venus via Aeneas, through Aeneas. So this was the very special patron goddess of not only Caesar himself but of the Julian family.



This is a plan of the Forum of Julius Caesar, as it would have looked when the building was inaugurated in 46 B.C. And I think you can see here that it has two major prototypes, models that were being looked back at when this was designed, beginning in 52. You can see that it is based heavily on earlier Roman forum -- Samnite/Roman forum design -- as we saw it in the city of Pompeii; think of the Forum of Pompeii. But it also was based in part on a building that we have not looked at and which no longer survives, but we have information about, and that is that Caesareum, or Caesareum of Julius Caesar, that he and Cleopatra put up in Alexandria. And we know enough about that building to know it too was an open rectangular space with colonnades around it and a temple as part of it. So this whole idea of temple in a rectangular complex. We see it in Alexandria. Contemporaneously we see it earlier in Pompeii at the Forum of Pompeii. So a great open rectangular space, open to the sky, with colonnades on either side. You can see on this side there are some additional chambers, and based on what those look like in plan, I am sure you can tell me what they are. Does anyone know? Think back to what we saw in Pompeii that looked similar to this. What are these here? What?



Student: [Inaudible]



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Storage did you say, or--



Student: Storage.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Storage. Not exactly storage; shops, tabernae. Remember the tabernae that we saw fronting the houses in Pompeii. These are a series of shops, or tabernae, opening off the left colonnade of the forum, and then on one of the short sides, pushed up against the back wall--in fact, in this case, almost projecting out of the forum to a certain extent--the Temple of Venus Genetrix. We can see it in plan, and it dominates the space in front of it, just as the Capitolium did at Pompeii. We can see the general plan conforms to early Roman temple architecture, as we've described it, with its use of the Etruscan plan and the Greek elevation. We can see that there is--well I'll show you this in a moment, but take my word--it has a high podium; it has a deep porch; it has freestanding columns in that porch. It has a façade orientation, although one idiosyncrasy of this particular temple is that the staircase is located, not just on the front, but on the two sides, but only at the level of the podium. The staircase does not encircle the building, as it would have in a Greek temple, but it goes beyond the front to the sides of the podium, to allow access to it that way as well. A single entrance, because this is the Temple of Venus and not the Capitoline Triad, and then columns, freestanding columns on either side, but a flat back wall very much in the Etruscan manner. So a temple that is very much in keeping with the other kind of temple architecture that we have seen thus far.



What's significant though again is that the choice of goddess to honor here, the fact that it is Venus Genetrix, a personal goddess, from the point of view of Julius Caesar: someone who was associated closely with his family, with the genesis of his family, and not with the Roman State as a whole. And that's a very important distinction, the difference between putting up a temple to the Capitoline Triad, a very state-oriented thing to do, and putting up a temple to your own personal goddess. It signals a certain change vis-à-vis the way these individuals thought about themselves, and may again have had something to do with the way Caesar was perceived in Rome, and to his eventual demise. In fact, I should also add that Caesar, because of his relationship with Cleopatra, ended up putting up a statue of Cleopatra as the Egyptian goddess Isis, in this temple as well, standing right next to Venus Genetrix. Which was a pretty arrogant and probably a pretty stupid thing to do in Republican Rome where Cleopatra was considered a very interesting public figure, because she did come with him to visit Rome at one point, but was also maligned by many among the aristocracy as an enemy of Rome.



I'm showing you here a view of the Forum of Caesar, as it looks today, and you can see the columns on the left-hand side, from the colonnade. Some of those still stand. You can see the staircase or the foundations of the staircase and the podium, tall podium again, of the Temple of Venus Genetrix. But you can see that only a very small number, three in fact, of the columns are preserved. So it is in actually quite ruinous state. And what you're looking at here is actually not even, for the most part, the Julian building, because we know that this building was seriously damaged in a fire, later, and that it was restored by the emperor Domitian, in the late first century A.D., and then by the emperor Trajan, into the early second century A.D. And so what stands today is primarily a later structure. But we do believe it was based very closely on the original Julian building, and in that regard is a very good reflection of what it would have looked like.



This coin over here shows the temple as it was in the time of Julius Caesar. We see the altar in the front, the altar; because the sacrifice always takes place in the front of a Roman temple. The temple itself, with its columns that are parted on this coin, only to show the statue of Venus Genetrix inside: the cult statue. The colonnades on either side. And then if you look closely at the pediment, you can see that there's sculpture in there, and we have literary descriptions of what that sculpture depicted, and we know it was a scene of Venus rising from the sea: so Venus Genetrix rising from the sea. The closest thing probably to it is something like, for those of you who know it--Botticelli's Primavera [Birth of Venus] in Florence is probably sort of the idea here for emerging from the waters, and her depiction in this particular pediment above. And we know that there were also scenes of cupids carrying the arms and armor, probably of Mars.



This is me with a former graduate student of mine and pointing out--he wrote a dissertation on the Forum of Caesar, which was afterwards published as a book. But he's pointing out to me here some of the architectural detail that still survives, that one can see when one wanders through that forum today. And you can see the very deep drill work here, deep drill work that is actually not characteristic of the time of Julius Caesar, but rather of the time of Domitian and Trajan. So probably this decoration belongs to the later renovation of this particular structure. This gives you perhaps the best idea of what the temple would have looked like in the forum: a restored view of the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Julius Caesar, with its inscription telling us that Caesar, a dictator of Rome, put it up; "fecit," as you can see here. You can see the tall podium. You can see the façade orientation, although again there was a staircase on three sides of that podium. You can see the birth of Venus in the pediment above. You can see the columns over here of the side, the colonnade of one--of the left side of the forum, which would have had statues on bases. The shops behind.



And most importantly what this restored view shows you is the relationship between the Temple of Venus Genetrix and Caesar's Forum, and the Capitolium, on the top of the Capitoline Hill. Because when you take away the Victor Emmanuel Monument, which is there now and which we saw in the earlier image, you can see that the building that was up on top of the hill at this particular time was of course the Capitolium, the Temple of Jupiter OMC. And I mentioned to you at the time we talked about the Temple of Jupiter OMC, although the Campidoglio, as redesigned by Michelangelo, with the Senatorial Palace in the back, which is where the Temple of Jupiter OMC was, faces modern Rome. The ancient temple faced ancient Rome, faced the Roman Forum, and so you see it facing the Roman Forum in this restored view. So I don't think it was coincidental. The Romans were very careful, as we've learned, about how they sited their buildings, and they liked to make references from one building to another. I don't think it is any coincidence that Caesar chose this site for his Temple of Venus so that anyone who gazed at it would also see, out of the corner of their eye, the Temple of the Capitoline Triad, on the Capitoline Hill, and that would only enhance Caesar's stature in the eyes of his contemporaries.



You see now portraits of Mark Antony, on the right-hand of the screen, a black basalt portrait of Antony, now in England, and a portrait of Rome's first emperor, Octavian Augustus, on the left-hand of the screen, a fantastic bronze image of him that was part of an equestrian statue found in the North Sea near Greece. With regard to Antony and Octavian, after Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C., it was Mark Antony who rose to power. Octavian was only 19 at the time--so your age--and he was the grandnephew of Caesar. So he had a familial relationship, although a fairly distant one, to Caesar: the grandnephew of Caesar. And this 19-year-old upstart tried to overthrow Mark Antony, and he was not successful. In the wise "If you can't beat them, join them" way of thinking about life and the world, Octavian joined, with Antony, with Mark Antony, and a man by the name of Lepidus, to form what we know of as the Second Triumvirate, and that happened in the year 43 B.C. Once they had formed the Second Triumvirate together, Octavian and Antony took all of their military forces--and each of them had a considerable amount--and they combined them, with the objective of going after Cassius and Brutus: Cassius and Brutus who you'll remember had murdered Caesar. And they were successful at so doing. They beat and murdered Cassius and Brutus at the Battle of Philippi, in the year 42 B.C. A very important battle, the Battle of Philippi in 42 B.C.



Mark Antony, who not only rose to power after Caesar's assassination, but rose in the life and times of Cleopatra. They had entered into--well there's some rumors that this happened, or began much earlier in time. But at any rate, Mark Antony takes up with Cleopatra and he joins her in Egypt and he spends a good deal of his time in the eastern part of the Empire with his paramour. Octavian very smartly realized Antony is distracted. "This is a perfect time for me to try once again to gain the supreme power that I want. I don't want to be part of a threesome, I want to rule Rome completely, myself." And he defeats Antony and Cleopatra at one of the most famous battles of all time, the Battle of Actium, a naval battle which took place off the northwestern coast of Greece, in 31 B.C. After that very famous battle, Antony and Cleopatra commit suicide and Octavian becomes the sole emperor of this newly emerging super power, and he is appointed as Augustus, which meant that he had a special kind of majesty, in the year 27 B.C.



We have additional information about Augustus from Suetonius' biography of him--he wrote one of him obviously as well--and from Augustus' own account of his life and of his accomplishments. I mentioned that Octavian--and that's called the Res Gestae Divi Augusti--I mentioned that Octavian took the title of Augustus in 27 B.C., and he was emperor of Rome for a very long time, from that year 27 until his death in A.D. 14, at the age of 76, which was a very ripe old age to live to, at a time when most people--women were dying in childbirth at 10 to 20, and men were dying, for the most part, in their thirties. So 76 was a very old age indeed, in ancient times, and it meant that Augustus was emperor of Rome for a very long period, as you can see.



Now at his death, Augustus deposited three documents, besides his will, with the Vestal Virgins in Rome, and these included instructions for his funeral; a kind of state of the union address; what was the situation in Rome and in the Empire, at the time of his death, or right before his death? And then most importantly for us, a résumé of his acts, a résumé of all of his accomplishments during his lifetime, which were meant to be carved on two bronze plaques that were to be set up in front of his tomb in Rome. These are the famous Res Gestae Divi Augusti, and that means the list of things accomplished of the divine Augustus, because Augustus, like Caesar before him, was made a god, was transformed into a god at his death. And this lists all of his accomplishments at home and abroad--the battles that he won, the cities that he formed--but most important for us, it lists dozens and dozens of building projects. For example, it lists eighty-two temples that he either restored or built in Rome, in Rome itself. So it gives you some sense of the magnitude of this man's building objectives and is very important to us as a compendium of what he does. Some of these buildings still survive. Some of them don't. But this is a very informative list indeed, and it shows us that to Augustus, as to Caesar before him, the building of buildings was extremely important: the making of buildings not only to remake Rome as a great city of the ancient world, but also to leave something for posterity, and, of course, both of them were successful in both of those objectives.



Very important for us today are also the words of Suetonius. Suetonius tells us that Augustus bragged that he--and I quote--"found Rome a city of brick, and left Rome a city of marble." A city of brick, meaning that brick tile that we saw in Pompeii, he found a Rome that was built out of that same kind of brick tile that we saw at Pompeii, but he wanted to transform, he left the city of Rome a city of marble. And that's exactly the major thrust of today's lecture: Augustus builds Rome as a marble city in the model of ancient Greece, in the model of Athens, in the Greek part of the world. It's a rhetorical exaggeration, but we're going to see, from the two Augustan buildings that I show you today, that it wasn't far off the mark, that he really did create a city of marble, on the Tiber, and he left for posterity that Greek marble city, a Hellenized city that builds on the Hellenization of Roman architecture that we've already talked about.



What made Augustus' boast possible was the fact for the first time in its history a high quality marble was available to Rome, in close proximity; that is, marble from Italy itself, as opposed to imported marbles. We've seen up to this point that the Romans wanted to build marble buildings; that they created faux marble walls, the First Style, at Pompeii for example, and also in Rome. That they created temples with columns and superstructures that were made out of tufa, or travertine, and then they stuccoed those over white, to make them look like marble, even though they were not marble. But that they just didn't have access to marble readily enough to transform, to actually make these buildings out of marble itself. There was some flirtation with it. They did import a certain amount of Greek marble to use, for some buildings, but it wasn't available at a low enough cost to allow the kind of full-scale marble building that they wanted to do. What happens in the end of the reign of Caesar and into--or the dictatorship of Caesar and into the emperorship of Augustus is that all of a sudden a high quality, relatively inexpensive marble becomes available.



Because what happens is the Romans begin to exploit, in the late Caesarian period and into the age of Augustus, the marble quarries at Luna, on the northwest coast of Italy. This is the same town as modern Carrara, the same quarries that were used centuries later by none other than Michelangelo himself. Carrara marble, you all know Carrara marble, called Luna, the site called Luna in ancient Roman times. So Luna or Carrara marble. I show you a view here of the marble quarries, or one of the marble quarries, at Luna/Carrara, what it looks like today. This is a re-enactment of bringing the marble blocks down from the mountain for use in construction. They basically do it the same way today as they probably did it in ancient Roman times. And it was fairly easy to get this. Since it was on the coast, it was fairly easy to load this marble into boats, bring it down to Ostia, and then up the Tiber to Rome. And that began to be done, with great success, especially in the age of Augustus.



Going to Carrara today is a pleasure. It's an interesting place to visit, especially if you go there at the time of the marble exhibition that they have and the competition that they have where people make whatever out of Carrara marble and compete for prizes. And I show you a view taken during one of these contests here now on the screen. And there are some amazing, amazing works of art, we might call them, that come out of these competitions. Here's one of my favorites. You see over here the Luna marble version of an Italian Cinquecento. These Cinquecentos, which were miniscule, are not--not many of them exist today, although you do see some antique versions here and there. But I had one of these once, and you can see a picture of me in fact here, in front of American Express, not far from the Spanish Steps, the Piazza di Spagna, with my Cinquecento. It was a long time ago. But you can see how small it is. I'm actually standing on the front passenger side and popping up through the sun roof. But my size there--and I'm about 5'7--compared to the car, gives you some sense of how small these cars were today. So the Italians have been very good about this sort of thing for some time, and continue, as you well know, to drive, for the most part, small cars through the city. And another one of my favorite entries into the competition are these Luna marble decapitated heads of Juan and Evita Perón that were put forward in one of these competitions some years ago.



With regard to transforming Rome into a marble city, now that Carrara marble was available at a fairly low cost, compared to the importation of Greek marbles, Augustus begins to build his marble city. And I'm going to show you two major commissions of Augustus today. The first of these is the Forum of Augustus in Rome, a forum--or the Forum Augustum in Rome--that was very much in Augustus' mind from the beginning of his rise to power. In fact, it's Suetonius who tells us that the reason that Augustus built a forum in Rome was because even though there were already two forums in Rome--that includes the Roman Forum and the Forum of Julius Caesar--even though those two existed and were both being used, that the population--Suetonius tells us the population was growing by leaps and bounds, as were the need to try judicial cases, and that the spaces in the forums--of the Roman Forum, and in the Forum of Julius Caesar--did not allow for the needs of the populace or for the needs of these judicial cases, and that they needed to build another forum. Well, that's a good story, but the likelihood is it had pretty much nothing to do with that--it may have had something to do with that, but not a lot to do with that--because Augustus had ulterior motives.



Augustus -- it was at the Battle of Philippi, that battle of 42 B.C. when Mark Antony and Octavian joined forces to defeat the assassins of Julius Caesar. It was right before that battle that Augustus vowed that if he won, if he were successful, that he would build a temple to Mars the Avenger, Mars Ultor, U-l-t-o-r, Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, in gratitude for helping him avenge the death of Julius Caesar, the murder of Julius Caesar, the assassination of Julius Caesar. And so when he was successful, he said, "I will build that temple." And that temple needed an environment, and as we've seen, Romans often built temples inside complexes, whether it was sanctuaries or forums, and so he had a good excuse to build a major forum in Rome, as a domicile for the Temple of Mars Ultor. He didn't get around to it for awhile--again, the Battle of Philippi, 42--but he had a lot of other things to contend with, namely Mark Antony and Cleopatra. It wasn't until after the Battle of Actium, when he got rid of the two of them, that he had time to build this Temple to Mars Ultor. And we see it beginning to go up in 28 B.C.--so considerably later than the original battle--28 B.C., and it was dedicated in Rome, on a very important date, the date of 2 B.C. So begun in 28 B.C. and dedicated in 2 B.C., and that's the date that I've given you on the Monument List, the dedication of the Temple of Mars Ultor and the Forum of Augustus in 2 B.C.



We see its plan here. We will see momentarily that it was built in very close approximation [proximity]; in fact, right next to the Forum of Julius Caesar. Why? Because, of course, Augustus wanted to associate himself with his divine adoptive father Caesar. So he puts his own forum right next to Caesar's. We see the Forum of Augustus here. We can see that it follows in the main, the plan of the Forum of Julius Caesar. It is a rectangular space, open to the sky, with colonnades on either side, with a temple in the center, pushed up against the back wall, and dominating the space in front of it. The only change here is the addition of these hemicycles, one on either side, looking very much like the hemicycles that we looked at from the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, at Palestrina: these embracing arms that served to accentuate architecturally and visually the temple in the center, and that also served as a place--there are niches on either side where they could put statuary and the like, seen through the columns, as you can see here. The Temple of Mars Ultor itself, again very similar to temples, early Roman temples that we've been talking about, using the Etruscan plan: façade orientation, single staircase, deep porch, freestanding columns in that porch, freestanding columns on either side, but yet, like an Etruscan temple, a flat back wall. As you can see here, some columns inside, decorating the cella of the temple, and then a single niche for the cult statue inside. And note here also the base--I'll say something about the statue that stood on that base later.



Here's a Google Earth view of this part of Rome, showing the connection between. You can see here the Forum of Julius Caesar as it looks today. This is the entrance. We're moving back toward the Capitoline Hill. These are those three columns that I showed you before, are still preserved, as well as the columns of the colonnade, on the left side, that entered into the shops. Here's the modern Via dei Fori Imperiali, built by Mussolini. What Mussolini did was slice the Roman Forum and Julian Forum from the so-called Imperial Fora, to which they were originally attached; and any of you who've been in Rome recently know that this entire area is being excavated. The plan is--the street is still there now, but the plan is eventually--we'll see whether this really happens, because it would be a traffic nightmare--but the plan is to take that Mussolini street down eventually and reunite all of these forums in some great archaeological park someday. It would be exciting if that were to happen. So the modern street.



But initially the Forum of Caesar would have stood exactly next to the Forum of Augustus. We see that here, and if you look carefully you can see the remains of the Temple of Mars Ultor, as well as a precinct wall that is preserved. It was a 115-foot precinct wall, protecting the forum from just the area we were talking about before--that question about housing for the well-to-do and the less well-to-do in ancient Rome--protecting the forum from the so-called Subura, S-u-b-u-r-a, which was that area of Rome in which all of those rickety, wooden tenement houses were located and which were constantly going up in fires, to protect the temple--because marble can burn--to protect the Temple of Mars Ultor from all of that stuff that was back there in the Subura. Here's another view from Google Earth, taken from the other side, showing the remains of the Temple of Mars Ultor, pushed up against the back wall, and then that precinct wall, that is very well-preserved, snaking its way around, dividing the forum proper, the sacred space, from the residential area called the Subura that was behind.



Here's a view of the precinct wall as it looks from the outside of the forum today. There are some additions that were made in later times, Medieval-looking windows and the like, but for the most part it's preserved as it was. You can see we're dealing with ashlar blocks, made out of peperino stone, p-e-p-e-r-i-n-o. We've talked about peperino before. It's a form of tufa, a stone that was used here with ashlar blocks, for the encircling precinct wall. You can see the coloration of those peperino blocks, grayish/brownish color here. And you can see the difference between that and the temple, the remains of the temple, the columns, the steps of the temple, as well as some other decoration, and also some of the walls were made out of Luna or Carrara marble: Luna or Carrara marble for this temple.



This is a view of the Temple of Mars Ultor as it looks today. It's in ruinous state, but enough is preserved for us to get a very good sense of what it originally looked like. You can see that the podium is tall. You can see that it's made out of tufa. You can see that the steps are sheathed in Carrara marble, brought from those quarries that we discussed before. You can see that the columns were also made out of solid Carrara marble. We see that here. We see a wall in Carrara marble, and we see the distinction between that and the peperino walls. You can also see, in this very good view, one of the hemicycles on the left-hand side, and you can see those niches that I mentioned before, that would have held statuary that you could see through the columns.



This is a restored view in the Ward-Perkins textbook, which shows you what the temple would have looked like in antiquity, when it was in its final form, and you can see everything we've described: the tall podium, single staircase, façade orientation. You can see also that there was sculpture in the pediment, and we know something about that. You can see the columns on either side, and you can see in the second story--you can barely make them out but take my word, those are, instead of columns they are figures of women that we're going to say something about, and you can see those again on both sides. So this gives you a sense of what the temple would've looked like in its heyday.



The favored capital column type, and capital of the Romans, the Corinthian, is what is used here. You can see a preserved capital, and how beautifully rendered they were: very high quality, capitals done out of Luna or Carrara marble. We can see the characteristic triple row of acanthus leaves, the spiral volutes growing out of those, the central flower that we see always in the Corinthian order for the columns that were used for the temple and for most of the side columns on the first story as well. But in some cases those columns were replaced with others that have instead of the spiral volutes growing out of the acanthus leaves, pegasi, winged horses, and I show you a detail of one of those pegasi here. A capital with an animal, replacing the spirals, is called a zoomorphic capital: zoo, z-o-o; zoomorphic, z-o-o-m-o-r-p-h-i-c, zoomorphic capital. And it's interesting to note that we see similar zoomorphic capitals in Greece a bit earlier than this structure, at a gateway that I'm going to show you at a place called Eleusis--we'll return to this when we discuss Roman Greece later in this semester--and these have, instead of pegasi, these have bull protomes, the tops of bulls emanating out of the acanthus leaves. But I show it to you to make one point, and that is that it seems very likely that there was some interesting architectural exchange--ideas, architects and so on--going on between Athens and Rome in the late Republican period, in the time of Julius Caesar and into the age of Augustus, and it's an issue that we'll return to in the future.



We're going to see that Augustus not only builds his marble city in order to make it look more like Greece, more like Athens, and to connect his new Golden Age with the Golden Age of Periclean Athens, but we see very specific Greek models being used. For example, one of these is a frieze from the Forum of Augustus. The other is a frieze from one of the three temples on the Acropolis, in Athens, of the fifth century B.C., the so-called Erechtheion, or Erectheum, in the Latinized version, and one of these is from one and one of these is from the other. And I just wondered quickly if any of you want to guess which is the Roman one and which is the Greek one that it copies? You can see this alternation of the lotus and palmette leaves here. Any quick thoughts? How many of you think this is the Greek one? How many of you think this is the Greek one? This is the Roman one; this is the Roman one at the top, this is the Greek one down here. The Greek one down here, more deeply undercut, which is I think what throws people. The Roman one, from the Forum of Augustus up above. But the important point for us again, that they are looking back at Greek buildings of the fifth century, and they are copying what they see.



We see here a model of the Forum of Augustus, with the Temple of Mars Ultor inside that forum, with the embracing exedrae or hemicycles on either side. You can see that the exterior of the structure was quite plain, just in the way that a domus italica outside was plain, and it was only when you got inside that you got a real sense of the glory of the architecture. So I think you can see well here. And most interesting for us, I mentioned that these columns on the temple were Corinthian; the columns on the first story over here were Corinthian. But in the second story, on the left and right sides of the forum, the columns are replaced by figures of women, by figures of maidens, and I show you two of them have survived--two of them are well-preserved. I show them to you here. These figures of maidens that replace the columns, that support the capitals, on top of their heads, and they flank this shield in the center with the depiction of a male head. This is the god Jupiter, a certain guise of the god Jupiter, Jupiter Ammon, as you can see him here, and we have information that tells us that Alexander the Great used to place shields in the Parthenon in Athens, and elsewhere, after great military victories, and it is possible that that sort of thing is being referred to here, because we know Augustus, like Pompey before him, had a thing for Alexander and liked to associate himself with Alexander.



But most important for us is the fact that these maidens have clear precedents in the Greek world. The famous Porch of the Maidens on the Athenian Acropolis, fifth century B.C., the Erechtheion again--E-r-e-c-h-t-h-e-i-o-n, in the Greek version--the Erectheion of Athens, fifth century B.C. Same set of maidens. We know that these had fallen into disrepair in the age of Augustus. Augustus visited Athens three times. He did not like seeing these in disrepair, and in fact he had his own architects replace one of them with a Roman copy, and while they were doing that, they made plaster casts of these maidens, they brought those plaster casts back to Rome, and then in reduced scale they duplicated them for the Forum of Augustus in Rome. So appropriations from Greece; appropriations in part because Augustus liked them, but also I don't think there's any question that he was trying to draw a relationship between himself, his new Golden Age, and the Golden Age of Periclean Athens.



We also have evidence for what the pediment, the sculpture in the pediment looked like, and I want to turn to that now. This is a relief that dates to a slightly later period that purports to represent the pediment of the Temple of Mars Ultor. And I show it to you here, and we can tell from this exactly what the sculptural display was all about in the pediment of this temple. We see here in the center, not surprisingly, Mars Ultor himself; Mars Ultor depicted with a bare chest. Next to him, to his right, to our left, we see a figure of a woman. This is Venus, and Venus, as you can see, has something on her left shoulder. It is a Cupid. So Venus with Cupid, Venus the consort of Mars. And then over here a personification that we believe depicts Fortuna: Fortuna, the goddess of Fortune, who brought fortune to Augustus in his battle. And then over here, a seated figure of Roma, with her arms and armor. Keep this figure in your mind, because I'm going to show you another seated Roma very soon. And then over here, a reclining figure of the Tiber River, the river on which Rome was built. Over here, a seated figure we believe is Romulus, the founder of Rome, on the Palatine Hill. And over here a reclining personification of the Palatine. So, most important, that the building honored, of course, Mars Ultor, and that Mars Ultor was depicted in the pediment.



There was also a cult statue inside the Temple of Mars, and we believe we know what that looked like as well, because we believe we have a copy of it in a relief from Algiers that is still preserved, that depicts Mars, in the center, this Mars Ultor again, this time the warlike Mars Ultor, because you can see he's wearing his breastplate and his helmet. His consort, Venus, is once again by his side. Venus is leaning on a pedestal. She's very seductive. Her drapery is falling off her shoulder, as you can see, as she looks toward Mars. And then Cupid down here, offering her a sword in a sheath, probably Mars' own sword. And then over here a figure that's very controversial, a youthful looking figure with a bare chest, and you can see a full cap of hair, and we think that he is actually the divinized Julius Caesar, very botoxed compared to what--he's rejuvenated compared to what he looked like in that green diabase portrait that I showed you before: a very youthful, divine Caesar, which shows you what happens to people in Roman times when they were divinized. They were able to shed a fair number of years and were depicted in much younger versions in their divinized state. So this probably a reflection. As you can see, the figures stand on bases, and figures that stand on bases in Roman relief sculpture are usually meant to be statues, and we believe that this is again a rendition of what that triple set of statues would have looked like inside the temple.



To return to the plan quickly, just to make the point that the sculptural program--we're concerned here primarily with architecture--but the sculptural program was very complicated, but very interesting, and the figures were very carefully aligned with one another to get the message across. So as you looked at the temple, you would have seen Mars Ultor in the center of the pediment. If you were allowed to walk into the temple, which usually only the priests could do, you would see the cult statue with Mars Ultor in the center there. There was an equestrian statue that was put up, of Augustus in 2 B.C., when he was given the title Pater Patriae, the father of his country. And then all along the colonnades there would've been statuary, including an image of Aeneas on this side, Romulus on this side, and the so-called summi viri, the great men of Rome, both Augustus' colleagues and also his rivals, in their portraits on either side: a kind of giant picture gallery, a giant portrait gallery of Rome, of the great men of Rome, of the greatest men of Rome, namely Augustus himself, and of his ancestry, both divine and mythological, via Aeneas and also Venus.



The second marble building that I want to show you today is the famous Altar of Augustan Peace, the Ara Pacis Augustae, which is one of, if not my most favorite building and monument in Rome, and one that I've had a personal obsession with my entire scholarly life. I've written a lot on this monument and have a lot of thoughts, which have changed significantly over the years, about this very important structure. We know about it--Augustus tells us about the Altar of Augustan Peace himself in his Res Gestae. He tells us on his return--and I'm quoting Augustus here, from the RG--on his return to Rome from Spain and Gaul; he had gone to Spain and Gaul, which were the western part of the Empire, in order to make some diplomatic treaties. "On my return to Rome from Spain and Gaul, after successfully restoring law and order to the provinces, the Senate decided" (and this happened in 13 B.C.) "to consecrate the Ara Pacis Augustae, on the Campus Martius" (the so-called Field of Mars, an area of Rome) "in honor of my return, at which officials, priests and Vestal Virgins should offer an annual sacrifice."



We believe that the monument being referred to here is the one that you see now before you, The Ara Pacis Augustae, made entirely of Luna or Carrara marble, solid Luna or Carrara marble, and even more of a marble building, in a sense, than the temple and forum that we've looked at thus far. It is a marble building that we believe that we know. We know its dates quite specifically. We know that it was consecrated on the 4th of July--an easy date to remember, for all of us--the 4th of July in 13 B.C. was when it was consecrated, and it was completed and dedicated on the 30th of January in 9 B.C.; the 30th of January just happened to be the birthday of Augustus' wife, Livia. No coincidence there. She was obviously lobbying for that. So on her birthday, 30th of January in 9 B.C., this structure is dedicated.



We know that it--there's a lot of controversy as to exactly what event is referred to on this monument, because we'll see that there is a procession that refers to some historical event. We will also see that the monument is covered with all kinds of sculptural decoration, including flowering acanthus plants, including mythological and legendary scenes, including historical scenes. And trying to decipher the web of all these and their relationship to one another is fairly complex.



What's important to us as we look at this is--and I want to show you here, from Ward-Perkins, a plan and an axonometric view, which will give us a very good sense of what this altar was all about. We can see that the altar proper was located in the center of the structure. It's a kind of u-shaped altar, which goes back to Greek precedents. The most famous u-shaped altar of the Hellenistic period, some of you may know it, the Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, the great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, which you see in the uppermost part, now in Berlin. But these u-shaped altars were used in Greece, and you can see that same u-shaped form here, used for the altar. The altar proper, where the sacrifice was actually made, is located inside this precinct, which is open to the sky, and most importantly has double doors: a doorway on the eastern side of the monument and a doorway on the western side of the monument. Even though there are two doors, you note that there is only a single staircase on the western side. So the Romans, despite the fact that they've given it a dual focus by putting two doors, they still give it a single focus by a single staircase. So facadism of Roman architecture reigned supreme, as you can see here.



The fact that there were double doorways -- very significant, and we've tried to sort out why that might be. There are two possible precedents or two possible references that are being made here. One, to a Greek altar, a Greek fifth-century B.C. altar, which shouldn't surprise us since we've seen that Augustus is looking back at the fifth century B.C. in Greece and mining it for architectural ideas and associations. We see here what is a restored view of the Altar of the Twelve Gods, or the Altar of Pity, that was located in the Greek marketplace, in Athens, the Athenian Agora, the marketplace in Athens, fifth century B.C. You can see that it consisted of an altar in the center, with a precinct wall, with double doorways, one on either side here, and with relief sculpture. So it looks like that might well be an important model, again not surprisingly since it dates to the fifth century.



But also important, and I show you an image of it on a Roman coin here, is the so-called Shrine of Janus--the two-headed god, J-a-n-u-s, the Shrine of Janus, which we know is located in the Roman Forum. And tradition had it that when the doors--because it had double doors; well it had two sides because he was a two-headed god. So two sides, both with doors, both with double doors, and that when those double doors were closed, it signaled that peace reigned throughout the Empire. And we know in the Res Gestae, Augustus tells us that he closed the doors of the Shrine of Janus, he brags, three times during his reign. So it is very likely that the double doors on the Shrine of Janus are referred to, not surprisingly, in an altar that was put up to peace, to the peace that Augustus brought to Rome through his various military victories and also through his diplomatic conquests, his diplomatic treaties like the one that he signed in Spain and Gaul.



I want to take you quickly through the monument--and keep in mind always that it's made out of Luna or Carrara marble--to show you some of the--this is not a course in sculpture, so I'm not going to go into the sculpture in any detail, but I want you to be aware of it because some of the motifs are important in our understanding also of architecture. We see here two views of the altar. You see these winged lion griffins that are very popular motifs in the Augustan period, as well as the spiraling acanthus plant that was also popular in Augustan times. A figural frieze that represents the Vestal Virgins that were referred to as those to which offerings are--the sacrifice is taking place in part in honor of them. But we see here a sacrifice itself where the animal victims are being brought in for slaughter.



We also see if we look at--we're now inside the monument, we've looked at the altar proper. If we look at the precinct wall, the inside of the precinct wall, we see that is very well-preserved, and we see it is zoned, essentially two zones, with slats, all done in Carrara marble, slats down below that look like either a wooden wall or perhaps a fence of some sort. Then above, also depicted in Carrara marble, these great garlanded swags that you see hanging from pilasters, but also from the skulls of bulls--I'll show you a detail in a moment where you'll see those skulls better--the skulls of the bulls that have been sacrificed on this altar. And then above the swags you can see these libation dishes. And what has been speculated--and I think it's ingenious on the part of the scholars who first came up with this--that what they think is being represented here is actually a copy or a rendition of the wooden, the temporary wooden altar that would've stood on this site. Because remember they're consecrating it already in 13 B.C., but the structure itself isn't built until 9, and they have to keep offering this annual sacrifice. So they have to offer it somewhere. So the suggestion is they made a makeshift wooden altar, that looked like this, with actual wooden slats, wooden poles, real garlands and so on, and that what they've done on the altar is to create a rendition of that on the interior precinct wall of the Ara Pacis.



A detail of these garlands. Here you can see the bull skulls or bucrania extremely well, and I thought you'd be interested to see, and perhaps not surprised, that we can see very close renditions of this also in painting of the time. This painting on the left comes from the House of Livia in Rome. We didn't look at it; we looked at the Villa of Livia at Primaporta, and we looked at Augustus' house, but when we did that I told you Livia had her own house across the street from Augustus', and this painting is from that. It's clearly a Second Style wall, residual First Style: done in paint; projecting columns; garlands hanging from those columns, garlands interlaced with ribbons, just as you see here. And when this was painted, which it was in antiquity, it would've looked very similar to what you see on the other side of the screen. So interesting inter-relationships between decoration in sculpture and architecture, and decoration in paint.



The axonometric view again shows you--here's that inner precinct that we've just described--that the outside had a series of panels, square panels, four of them on the short sides and then--or on the front sides, where the doors are, flanking the doors -- and then on the other sides, the north and south, a frieze. And I show you a detail of that frieze; a frieze, the subject matter of which is somewhat controversial. I'm not going to go into that here today. Suffice it to say though that Augustus, senators, magistrates, members of the priesthood, members of the imperial family, all take part in these processions that are located on the north and south. Those processions rest on these acanthus plants down below, which when you think of it has absolutely nothing to do with reality, because how could a procession of human figures be supported by acanthus plants below? Impossible, and yet it is--some of that fantasy thinking that we saw in Third Style Roman painting, and I show you--I remind you of a detail of Garden Room Q over here, where we saw some of that fanciful Third Style painting, seems to come into play here. In fact, the delicate acanthus leaves, absolutely beautifully rendered in the Ara Pacis. You see the same sort of thing in the black background of the Garden Room Q. So again, interesting correspondences between painting and architectural decoration.



The frieze on the south side has a portrait of Augustus himself. You can see him here veiled, taking part in this procession, as well as members of the imperial family, including children. Here's a little boy in a toga, and here's a little boy who's very controversial in some kind of a foreign costume. And I mentioned that I've written a lot on this, and in my most recent article on this subject I talked in particular about these children in foreign dress as possibly children who were what we call "pledges of empire," or hostage guests, that belonged--that were children of very important rulers of other parts of the world who were brought to Rome to live with the emperor in his house, in the palace, to be trained, with the objective of eventually sending them back to their native lands to serve as rulers. It was Augustus' way of creating a kind of hegemonic empire that he controlled, by getting all of these people on his side and then placing those friends of Rome into important positions around the world, and I think that's referred to in these scenes. Again, I'm not going go in any detail into the mythological scenes, but they are scenes like Roma, seated on a pile of arms and armor, just as we saw her in the pediment of the Temple of Mars Ultor. And here a scene that seems to have shown Mars overseeing Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf. So references to Rome's historic and also legendary and mythological past clearly in this monument.



Perhaps most interesting to all of us from the point of view of architecture is the original location of this monument in relationship to Augustus' tomb, and also what has been happening there in recent years, under the direction of the famous American architect Richard Meier. I show you a view from Google Earth, an aerial view, showing the Mausoleum of Augustus, this large round tomb that we will look at on Thursday, showing a piazza around it, and showing, from the air, the Richard Meier Museum that has been built to enclose the Ara Pacis. This was not--right near the Tiber River--this was not the original location of the Ara Pacis, which was up over here. It ended up beneath a palace in the Renaissance period, and at that time some pieces of it were taken apart and made their way to museums in Rome, but also to museums as far away as Paris. And it is actually to Mussolini that we can be grateful for bringing all of those pieces back together and reconstructing the Ara Pacis--couldn't reconstruct it, because that palace is still there now--but reconstructing it right on the Tiber River, next to the Mausoleum of Augustus, and then having this whole piazza redesigned as the piazza honoring Augustus: the Piazza Augusto Imperatore honoring Augustus, but also honoring Mussolini, because there's a major inscription to Mussolini, as well as buildings very much in the so-called Fascist style.



We see the Meier building again here. And I show you the travertine--because Meier was careful to use at least some travertine in this structure--the travertine base; although this was not his, this actually belongs to an original precinct that was located before, that was done by Mussolini's architect, with the entire text of the Res Gestae. Fortunately Meier kept that and kept that wall as part of his own building. Here you see one of the Fascist structures in the area, built by Mussolini, and then the famous Alfredo Ristorante. I'm not actually recommending it, but it's well known; there are better restaurants to eat in Rome, but because it has a certain historical caché, at any rate I just mention to you that it's there.



This is the interesting inscription that makes reference to Mussolini. And note the flying victory figure, which we'll see decorates often Roman arches, carrying this bundle of twigs and rods that the Romans, the Roman bodyguards of the emperor used to carry, these so-called fasces. If you ever wondered where the word Fascism comes from, it comes from the Roman fasces. Mussolini's name, you can see part of it here, M-U-S-S-O-L; part of it scratched out after his death and discredit in the '30s. And then ultimately, what's been interesting to me is I've watched this inscription and photographed it year after year, whenever I'm there. I've noticed recently that he's having--there's something of a revival -- and he is, Mussolini is having something of a revival in Italy, and there's a good deal of interest in him, and they have filled his name -- when they redid the museum they also re-filled in his name, as you can see here.



I just wanted to make a point about the siting of the Ara Pacis and its relationship to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Remember, it's no longer--its original location--now it's over here, right next to the Mausoleum on the Tiber. That was not its original location. It was located over here, along the ancient Via Flaminia, the street that Augustus took when he returned from Spain and Gaul. It was put up right here, and it had in front of it an obelisk that was brought from Egypt, and that obelisk was part of a sundial that was orchestrated carefully enough so that the shadow from the sundial would fall exactly on the center of the Ara Pacis, on Augustus' birthday. That's how carefully orchestrated it was, and the fact that there is an Egyptian obelisk, and there's mention in the inscription on that obelisk of the victory over Cleopatra and Antony, at the Battle of Actium, and that the Ara Pacis commemorates his diplomatic treaties in the western part of the Empire, in France and Spain, seems to me to be a reference to the fact that Augustus was victorious in all parts of the Roman Empire: the western as well as the eastern part of the Empire, referenced here.



And then close proximity to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Because we've already talked about the fact that in the minds of the Romans, victory in battle and victory over death were essentially synonymous; both of them referred to here. I'm not implying that this was planned as a complex. The Mausoleum, as we'll see on Thursday, dates to 28 to 23. It was built much earlier than the Altar of 13 to 9. But I think when they decided to add the Ara Pacis to this complex, there was a great deal of thought that was given to siting it in relationship to the tomb, and to thinking about the whole as a complex, at least at that particular juncture. And I show you two more restored views, where you can see the obelisk and the way in which it cast--it served as a sundial--cast a shadow toward the Ara Pacis. And then, even though this is a little bit out of focus, the relationship of the very large tomb to the obelisk and ultimately to the Ara Pacis. So an area that was not planned as a complex but grew into one.



An image of Mussolini, a wonderful photograph of Mussolini, visiting the Ara Pacis after it was restored and dedicated and placed in a complex designed by his architect. And then an image down here of Richard M

Professor Kleiner explores sepulchral architecture in Rome commissioned by the emperor, aristocrats, successful professionals, and former slaves during the age of Augustus. Unlike most civic and residential buildings, tombs serve no practical purpose other than to commemorate the deceased and consequently assume a wide variety of personalized and remarkable forms. The lecture begins with the round Mausoleum of Augustus, based on Etruscan precedents and intended to house the remains of Augustus and the new Julio-Claudian dynasty. Professor Kleiner also highlights two of Rome's most unusual funerary structures: the pyramidal Tomb of Gaius Cestius, an aristocrat related to Marcus Agrippa, and the trapezoidal Tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, probably a former slave who made his fortune overseeing the baking and public distribution of bread for the Roman army. Professor Kleiner concludes the lecture with a brief discussion of tombs for those with more modest means, including extensive subterranean columbaria. She also turns briefly to the domed thermal baths at Baia, part of an ancient spa and a sign of where concrete construction would take the future of Roman architecture.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 181-184 (Mausoleum of Augustus), 319 (Via Appia), 341-342 (Tomb of Caecilia Metella), 358-361 (Tomb of Eurysaces), 364-366 (Tomb of Cestius)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 167-168

Transcript



February 12, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everyone. We are on the cusp of Valentine's Day. So I thought it was appropriate for us all to tell Rome how much we love--Rome or Roma--how much we love her. And so I've done that here. I've loved Rome for as long as--for a long time, certainly from the age that you are now. And I know that there are many of you in this class who feel the same way, and I hope that those of you who entered this class, without having those strong feelings for Rome, have come to love the city and its civilization as much as I do. So this is a kind of Valentine lecture, for Rome. And I think that the particular topic that it is, is appropriate, in the sense that we are going to be looking at a number of quite eclectic monuments today, very different monuments, one from the next, and they're full of surprises. And Rome is always full of surprises; Rome a city, of course, that you see layers upon layer of civilization, that one peels back to get us back to antiquity, but along the way experiences some amazing things. So I think that this particular lecture, which will talk about the varied nature of Roman architecture, especially architecture commissioned by individual patrons to preserve their memory for posterity, again is particularly appropriate.



I've called today's lecture "Accessing Afterlife: Tombs of Roman Aristocrats, Freedmen, and Slaves." We spoke on Tuesday about public architecture commissioned by the emperor Augustus, public architecture that we noted was made primarily out of marble, out of Luna or Carrara marble, that was quarried on the northwest coast of Italy itself, and the objective of it being to try to conjure up the relationship between the new Golden Age of Augustus and the Golden Age, fifth century B.C., of Periclean Athens. Just as Julius Caesar had tried to create a kind of Alexandria on the Tiber, we see Augustus trying to recreate an Athens on the Tiber. And Augustus was, of course, very much--in his objectives was very much in keeping with other objectives that we've been studying for some time: this Hellenization of Roman architecture that we have addressed on a number of occasions.



We spoke last time about the Forum of Augustus in Rome, featuring the Temple of Mars Ultor, that temple that Augustus vowed he would build if he could be victorious over the assassins of Julius Caesar, that is, Cassius and Brutus. He was so, at the Battle of Philippi, and he built this forum and he built this temple again as its centerpiece. And you'll recall again that it was made, for the most part, out of Carrara marble. We see the columns of Carrara here, a wall, the seventeen Carrara marble steps, and so on. We also talked about the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, put up to the diplomatic agreements or treaties that Augustus made with those in Spain and Gaul: a monument that was put up near his earlier mausoleum, a monument that was also made out of Carrara marble, and in fact solid Carrara marble. And this monument too had precedents in the Greek period. It looked back to a number of sources, but one of those, as we noted on Tuesday, was the Altar of the Twelve Gods, or the Altar of Pity, a fifth-century B.C. monument that was located in the marketplace of ancient Greece. So again, both of these buildings, looking back to Greek prototypes in their general format, and also, of course, in the material out of which they were made, namely marble.



When we talked about the Ara Pacis, we talked about the fact that it eventually ended up being part of a kind of architectural complex, that while this architectural complex may have not been planned from the start, it grew up over time into something where all of the buildings related to one another in interesting ways, both in terms of their content and also in terms of their architectural design. The complex included the Mausoleum of Augustus, the tomb of the emperor Augustus, which was the first monument built on this site, and eventually the Ara Pacis, which you'll recall was actually not located originally where it is now. It was located in an area a bit here to the upper right originally, on the Via Flaminia that Augustus took when he returned to Rome from Spain and Gaul, but that it was moved, or the remains of it were moved over to this location, next to the Tiber, by Mussolini, because as we noted last time, in the meantime a palace had been built on top of the original location of the Ara Pacis, and that area was no longer available for use.



But again, the Mausoleum of Augustus, the first building of this complex. You see in this aerial view from Google Earth that the mausoleum ended up becoming the centerpiece of the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, that piazza that Mussolini's architects designed to commemorate Augustus and also to commemorate Mussolini, because that inscription I showed you last time is inserted into the building over here. If we look at this aerial view of the Mausoleum of Augustus, which you'll see from your Monument List was begun in 28 B.C.-- and in fact that should ring some bells for you and we should say something about its genesis in 28 B.C. Because you'll recall that important date of 31; 31 the Battle of Actium when Augustus was victorious over Antony and Cleopatra and became sole emperor, or began his march to becoming sole emperor of the Roman world.



It's interesting to see him building this massive mausoleum only three years after the Battle of Actium; that's really quite striking. Why did he do that? Well the reason that he seems to have done that is despite the fact that he lived until 76-years-old, which was very old in ancient Roman times, as I mentioned last time--despite the fact that he lived to that ripe old age, he was not in terribly good health, even as a young man, and he was very concerned about his own longevity. How long was he going to live? He knew he had accomplished a lot already by this victory over Antony and Cleopatra, and by some of his other military victories, but he wasn't actually sure how long he was going to last, and so he begins to build this gigantic tomb eventually to hold his own remains. And he completes that tomb in five years. It's built between 28 B.C. and 23 B.C. And you'll recall the date of the Ara Pacis is considerably later; 13 to 9 B.C. So the Ara Pacis was only added to this complex later, and at that point the whole thing was orchestrated with the addition of the obelisk, and we talked about how the obelisk cast a shadow on the Ara Pacis on Augustus' birthday, and so on and so forth.



With regard to the tomb itself, we're going to see something quite striking today, and that is that the tomb is architecturally very different from the Ara Pacis Augustae, and indeed from the Forum of Augustus. And it's a good example of the eccentricity, as we'll characterize today, of Roman tomb architecture in general. Keep in mind that Roman tomb architecture is the most personal of any form of Roman architecture, which makes it particularly interesting to study, because the only practical requirement for a tomb was that it be able to hold the remains of the deceased. That's all it needed to do, whereas other buildings had to do all kinds of other things: have running water through them, and so on and so forth. But that was not the case here. So that the patron and the architect could come together to create buildings that were unique to that individual and again were eccentric to a certain degree, and that is indeed what we will see, and that is the case also in the Mausoleum of Augustus.



As we look down on the Mausoleum of Augustus, in this aerial view, we see the general plan of it. We see that there was a central burial chamber; that there was a hollow drum, and around that hollow drum--and all of this is made of concrete construction--around that hollow drum a series of concentric rings, a series of concentric rings, as you can see them here, again made out of concrete. And then the outer wall--which you can also see in this view--the outer wall was faced with travertine, which is also interesting; not Luna marble, travertine blocks. And let me show you another somewhat closer view, also from Google Earth, to show you the structure. So again the central burial chamber; the hollow drum; the concentric rings around that; the travertine wall around that. But, of course, you're looking essentially at the core. This is not what the original entire monument looked like. And what it was, was in fact there was an earthen tumulus, or an earthen mound, that was placed on top of these concentric rings, and then at the very apex of that earthen mound was a gleaming bronze statue of the emperor Augustus himself.



I think I can make this clearer by showing you a plan of the Mausoleum of Augustus. And we see all the features I've already described: the central burial chamber, the hollow drum, again all made out of concrete construction, and the concentric rings around that. And then the cross-section at the top is particularly helpful I think because you can see the way in which the concrete has been built up by means obviously of annular vaults, the annular vaults that ultimately support the gleaming bronze statue of Augustus, at the apex. And you can also see in this cross-section the earthen mound, the way in which the earthen mound is piled up on top of that substructure, that concrete substructure, to create the dome-like shape of the mausoleum on its own.



Now scholars who believe--and we all believe in fact--that again Augustus was a philhellene, that he had a particular penchant for things Greek. So you look at something like this and you ask yourselves, "Well, what's Greek about this? Why didn't he, when he came to make the decision about his last resting place, why did he not want to be laid to rest in the manner of the Greeks? Why doesn't this--why wasn't this tomb made in the form, for example, of a Greek temple, or something like that? Why did he choose this particular form?" So scholars have debated for quite some time whether there are any tombs like this in Greece, or in Asia Minor--what kind of tomb was Alexander the Great buried in, for example?



Well we don't know exactly for sure, but that's one possibility, that it might have something to do with Alexander's tomb. Others--because Aeneas came from burning Troy--others have suggested perhaps--and that's in Asia Minor--perhaps the way the Trojans were buried might have something to do with this selection. But I think the model is much closer at hand. I think the model--myself, I believe that the model comes from Italy, and that it's a very interesting choice on the part of Augustus, because I think what it tells us is that Augustus may have wanted to build public buildings in Rome that conjured up ancient Athens, but when it came to deciding about how he wanted to be buried, he wanted to be buried in the manner of his Italian ancestors.



Let me show you what I think is a really important comparison. We're looking on the left-hand side of the screen once again at the Mausoleum of Augustus, as it looks today. Here you see the central entranceway. You see what remains of the concentric, concrete rings. You see some of the travertine facing for the outer ring of the structure. And you see, of course, that the uppermost part, namely the earthen mound, is no longer there. But if I compare the Mausoleum of Augustus, to what you see here on the right-hand side of the screen, which is an Etruscan tomb, an Etruscan tomb from the so-called--and I put this on the Monument List for you--the Banditaccia Cemetery, which is at a site called Cerveteri, Cerveteri, a very important Etruscan site. And this tomb we believe dates to the sixth century B.C. Cerveteri is an extraordinary place to visit now because there is one tomb after another of this type. You go into the site and you feel like you're on another planet or some such, as you wander among these extremely well-preserved tombs at Cerveteri. And Cerveteri, by the way, is right off the highway, between Rome and Florence. So it's a very easy site to get to and very well worthwhile; there's nothing quite like it anywhere in Italy, anywhere indeed in the world.



And you see these series--and I've just chosen one here to show you--you see these series of tombs, and I think if you look at it you'll see the similarity of this to the Mausoleum of Augustus. These round Etruscan tombs have central burial chambers. They have stone facing around the outermost part of the structure. And you can see that piled on top of that is an earthen mound, and if you expand the size -- the Cerveteri tomb is much smaller. Actually the individual Cerveteri tombs are smaller than the Mausoleum of Augustus. The Mausoleum of Augustus is 290 feet in diameter; it's a very large building. But if you expand the size of one of these, what we call tumulus, t-u-m-u-l-u-s, tumulus tombs, at Cerveteri, if you expand the size, if you plant this with trees--because we know that the Mausoleum of Augustus was planted with trees on the earthen mound; there's been quite a bit of controversy about what kind of trees. For a long time people said cypress trees. Now people seem to favor juniper trees. But whatever, trees of some sort, decorating that earthen mound. So if you enlarge this, if you put some junipers on top of it, and if you stick a gleaming bronze statue of Augustus at the apex, you will have essentially the Mausoleum of Augustus. So I'd like to suggest to you today that the Mausoleum of Augustus indicates to us that when it came to his tomb, Augustus wanted to be buried like his Italian ancestors, like the Etruscans, and that is why he chose this particular type of tomb in Rome.



The Mausoleum of Augustus, like so many other monuments that we've been looking at this semester, survives in large part because it was re-used over the centuries in a wide variety of ways. You can see in this engraving that it was used at one point as a garden, a very nicely manicured garden, as you can see inside the remains, inside those concentric circles, a very nice garden. It was also used as a fortress at one point by the well-known Colonna family of Italy. It was used, believe it or not, as a bull ring--a little touch of Spain in the midst of Rome, as a bull ring--and it was used most recently as a music hall. It was a music hall before it was turned back into the Mausoleum of Augustus. So again, this very--a very similar saga to this building and to its post-antique history, as to so many others that we've talked about.



Another important point to make about the Mausoleum of Augustus is that, although Augustus intended it as his own last resting place, he didn't intend for him to be the only person who was laid to rest there. He wanted this to serve as a family tomb, for him, his wife, his--well it turned out his daughter didn't end up there, but that may have been the intention originally, that she would. She was discredited because of all the adulterous affairs she had and Augustus eventually banished her in 2 B.C. from Rome, razed her house to the ground, and did not allow her to be buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus. But for his wife, for his nephew and son-in-law, Marcellus, and others, he wanted to create this family tomb where he, his family, and presumably, since his objective was to create a dynasty, presumably where his successors of the dynasty that he founded would also be laid to rest.



And there are inscription plaques that have come to light, from the Mausoleum of Augustus, and I can show you a couple of them here, that do indicate that was exactly the case. We see this plaque over here, which actually has the name Marcellus inscribed there. This is the Marcellus of the Theater of Marcellus, the nephew and son-in-law of Augustus, who was laid to rest in this Mausoleum. His sister, "soror," Octavia, also laid to rest; that is, Augustus' sister, Octavia, also laid to rest here. And it continued to be used as a burial place again after Augustus' death and through the so-called Julio-Claudian emperors, who we'll look at next week: Tiberius and Caligula and Claudius. And we see, in fact, an inscription plaque over here that honors Agrippina the Elder: Agrippina the Elder, the mother of Caligula, the third emperor of Rome, and it was Caligula who laid his mother to rest in this tomb. So very much a family tomb created by the emperor Augustus. And I should also mention, with regard to burial practice at this time, that everybody was--imperial individuals, and those lower on the social pyramid as well--were all cremated at this particular time. So you have to imagine that there were urns for each of these inside the tomb somewhere as well.



Now it may not surprise you to hear that once the emperor chose the form of his tomb, that he set in motion a fashion that just about every aristocrat wanted to follow. So all of a sudden, after the construction of the Mausoleum of Augustus, again between 28 and 23, there is this efflorescence of round tombs in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. And I want to show you just one example of that. This is the so-called Tomb of Caecilia Metella. It dates to 20 B.C. So it began to be put up not too long after Augustus' mausoleum was built. It is located on the famous Via Appia in Rome, the Appian Way. The Appian Way, which you see--this is a Google Earth image once again where you can see a stretch of the Appian Way, or the Via Appia, that is modern asphalt, although there are remains--and I'll show you later an example of this--there are remains of the polygonal masonry pavement that would have been there initially, looking very much like the pavement that we saw in Pompeii, for example. And you can see the Tomb of Caecilia Metella right over here. Like the Mausoleum of Augustus, it was re-used in ancient times, and there was a fortress and a palace that was added to it. And you can see also there, in a reddish earth color, the remains of that fortress and palace that abutted the mausoleum or the Tomb of Caecilia Metella.



And while this is on the screen, you can also see that while the tomb was essentially a cylindrical drum, resembling the cylindrical drum of the Mausoleum of Augustus, it was placed--it was given some height by being placed on a podium--the kind of podium that we saw at the sanctuaries, or the podium that we saw at the Villa of the Mysteries--to raise it up. It's not as big as those, but it's sizable, and it raises this round tomb up a little bit, so that it can be more readily seen as people make their way along the Via Appia. The Mausoleum of Augustus does not have a similar podium. So that's a unique, a different feature that is added to this particular structure. You can also see there's an inscription on the front, and we'll talk about that in a moment, and then there are crenellations at the top. There's some dispute about when those crenellations were added, whether they belonged to the original tomb or not. I think it's highly unlikely that they belonged to the original tomb, and they may have been added at the time that this was made into a fortress, as I've already mentioned.



This is a view of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, as it looks today, this tomb of this woman of 20 B.C., and you can see that it's actually quite well preserved, and we can get a very good sense of its original appearance. You can see the concrete podium down here, without its original facing; it was surely faced. You can see the great cylindrical drum, of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, and you can see the facing. And, once again, the facing for this tomb, just as in the Mausoleum of Augustus, is not Luna or Carrara marble. It is travertine, but very, very nicely cut travertine blocks, as you can see here. Very well done. She was undoubtedly a well-to-do patron who was able to hire the best architects, the best artisans, and they have done an outstanding job of cutting that travertine.



You can see also that there is a frieze that encircles the monument at the uppermost part, right here, and that frieze depicts garlands and skulls of bulls, bucrania; the same sort of thing that we saw in the inner precinct wall of the Ara Pacis. Although this pre-dates the Ara Pacis, so we can't say it was the influence of the Ara Pacis. This is again 20, whereas the Ara Pacis wasn't begun until 13. And it shows us that this motif was very much in the air, during the Augustan period, this motif of garlands hanging from bucrania, which of course makes reference to sacrifice, and it could be a sacrifice in honor of a funerary event, as well as anything else, and we again see that very well here. One very interesting fact is that the frieze is not made out of travertine but out of pentelic marble, p-e-n-t-e-l-i-c. Pentelic marble is marble from Mount Pentelikon in Greece. So it tells us that marble was imported from Greece, or marble that was imported from Greece was purchased and used for the frieze of this particular structure, and we'll see that it was used also for the inscription plaque. So it tells us something. It tells us that there was--that some patrons made the decision to spend a little more for the material for what they considered the most important part of the monument. So in this case the most important part of the monument was the frieze, and also the inscription plaque that preserved this woman's name for posterity. So they paid a little bit more in order to get that more expensive material for those critical details of the monument.



Here's the inscription. We're very fortunate that it's still preserved today. We see it still inserted into the monument. Again, it's done in pentelic marble, and I think you can see, even in this view, the difference between pentelic marble and travertine. Travertine has more texture to it than the plainer marble, as you can see. And her name is given here, Caecilia Metella: Caecilia Metella down here. And it tells us that she was the daughter F(filia), f-i-l-i-a, the daughter of Quintus Q. Creticus--Creticus, C-r-e-t-i-c-u-s--who may have come from Crete; it's possible. And it also makes reference to the fact that she was married to someone by the name of Crassus. This may be Crassus the Elder; we're not absolutely sure. But what it does indicate to us is this is an aristocratic woman. This is an aristocratic woman whose family has a great deal of money, who are honoring her with this tomb, in the mode of the day; which of course was the tomb type that was chosen by Augustus himself.



You may have noticed up here, in this same detail, not only the frieze that we've already described, with the garlands and bucrania, but that there is a relief here that represents a Roman trophy. What is a Roman trophy? What the Romans did at the end of battle, if they were victorious, is they went over to the nearest tree trunk on the battlefield and they took arms and armor from their defeated enemy and they tacked that arms and armor up on that tree trunk, to create a military trophy commemorating their victory, right on the battlefield. And that's exactly what you see here, a tree trunk with a breastplate and a helmet and shields and so on, all tacked up to that trophy. So we have to ask ourselves, what is that trophy doing on this particular monument? It's highly unlikely that it refers to--there are some instances; we do hear about woman trying to raise money for troops and so on and so forth. But we don't--and even thinking that they might go into battle -- but for the most part Roman women did not participate in battle. So it is highly unlikely that this refers to a military encounter that she had. More likely it either refers to a military encounter of her father or her husband, or it may be a more generic reference to victory. We've talked about the fact that in the minds of the Romans, the victory in battle, victory in the hunt, often were conflated with victory over death. So it could be a more generic reference, but I would guess it may have something to do more specifically with the conquest of her husband or her father.



The structure today is just right there, out on the Via Appia; easy to see. There is a small museum that isn't all that often open, but sometimes it is, that is in the remains of the fortress, and the palace next door. You can see that the outside of the monument, they've inserted a lot of finds just from--it doesn't mean they came from the Tomb of Caecilia Metella -- but from this area on the Via Appia. There were tons of Roman tombs out here, and all of this paraphernalia that you see, statuary and fragments of friezes and cornices and so on, all come in part possibly from this monument, but more likely from the other tombs in the area. Those have been inserted into the wall in a kind of interesting way. And then here's the museum itself. The museum doesn't have--the stuff that's in there is pretty much the same sort of thing that you see here. But going into the museum is interesting because you can see into the central chamber of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella and see the concrete construction and so on.



I mentioned already that Roman tombs could be very eccentric indeed, and I want to show you one of the two most eccentric tombs, in my opinion, from ancient Rome that one can see in the city of Rome today. And the first of these is the so-called Tomb of Cestius, because we believe--in fact, we're absolutely sure--that it honors a man by the name of Gaius, G-a-i-u-s Cestius, C-e-s-t-i-u-s; Gaius Cestius. It was put up in 15 B.C. That is in the age of the emperor Augustus. In this Google Earth aerial view, we see what that structure looks like today. It is a Roman tomb in the form of an Egyptian pyramid. It's the only Roman tomb in the form of an Egyptian pyramid that we can see in Rome today, but we know there were others in antiquity. We have reports that tell us that certain others that existed at a certain time were torn down, at one point. There was one, for example, not far from the Vatican, that was torn down at one point, because it got in the way of the street. So this is not unique in the sense of the only one, although it is the only one still surviving today. We have no idea how many of these there were. There were certainly some. Whether there were a lot, we can't be absolutely certain.



But here it is, a Roman tomb, in the form of a pyramid. Now when it was first put up, it was put up outside the Servian Walls of the city, because all--as we've talked about the fact that by Roman law the necropolis or city of the dead needed to be located outside the walls of the city. But as the city grew, and as there was a need for a new wall--and this happened in the third century A.D., and we'll talk about it way at the end of this semester--the Romans ended up building a new wall, the famous Aurelian Walls. And the circuit happened to be planned for this particular--to pass this particular point where the Tomb of Cestius was. And fortunately they recognized the aesthetic and historical value of this tomb, and decided not to tear it down, but rather to incorporate it into the Aurelian Walls. So what you see in this aerial view are two of the walls--two parts of the Aurelian Walls abutting, and in fact incorporating, the Pyramid of Cestius, but in antiquity--when it was first built, excuse me, it stood alone. And what you see over here is a gateway that also belongs to the later Aurelian Walls. So again, fortunately this particular tomb was preserved.



These two engravings are helpful in showing us that the inner core of the Tomb of Cestius was concrete, and the outer pyramidal shape was faced once again with travertine. So travertine clearly the material of choice by aristocrats--because we're going to see that Cestius was also an aristocrat--for their tombs in the age of Augustus: concrete core, travertine facing. And then if you look at this cutaway view over here, you will see that the burial chamber inside was very, very, very small; very, very, very small. So small enough that there was not a lot of space for these burials; but we'll see that we still believe that this too was a family tomb.



The burial chamber has had, and still has, remnants of painted walls. And I show you an engraving here of those walls that was made when they were in somewhat better shape than they are today. And I wondered if any of you--you're such experts now on First to Fourth Style Roman wall painting--if any of you could tell me--I'm sure all of you could tell me--what style painting is being used in the burial chamber of the Tomb of Cestius?



Student: Third Style.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Third style. Why Third Style?



Student: There's floating mythological features and very thin columns.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Very thin candelabra here, and mythological figures. How are those used that make--that show that this is a typical Third Style wall?



Student: They have a blackout laying around them and they're just floating around in space.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: That's the word, floating. They are floating in this random space, right in the center of the panels, as we know was characteristic of Third Style Roman wall painting. So 15 B.C., Third Style Roman wall painting. And if you think back to some of the palaces or villas that we looked at and their dates--think of Boscotrecase for example, 11 B.C. You see this is roughly contemporary to what's happening in Campania at this particular time.



And here are two details of the remains of those paintings, and you can see one of these floating mythological figures that looks like a victory figure: female, winged, carrying a wreath over here, flying in the center of the panel. This also shows you, in this case, the panels were white, very similar to the walls, for example, of the Third Style in the Domus Aurea in Rome. And then here, this candelabrum, very attenuated, very delicate, that is used in place of columns; both of these motifs decorating the flat wall that was so characteristic of Third Style Roman wall painting. Here's another view of the pyramid as it looks today. You can see it is exceedingly well preserved, one of the best preserved of all Roman tombs. You can see again the way in which the later wall was built into it, and you can also see the travertine blocks and how carefully carved they were by the designers, by the artisans.



And here, this is very helpful, because it shows you that the--at least one, but I can tell you that two sides of the tomb, the eastern and western sides of the tomb, had in the center of the pyramid the name of Cestius. That's how we know it was his tomb. You see it here, Gaius Cestius. And it also includes all of his titles. So he was very happy to advertise his titles on this monument, the purpose of which, of course, was for those who mourned him to feel proud of him and his achievements. But even more important than that, from his point of view I am sure, and from the point of view of the Romans in general, was that his name and his deeds be preserved for posterity so that someday--in 2009, we're sitting in this classroom looking at this--we think back on Cestius, his title, what he did, what he achieved, and the way in which he was memorialized. So this whole idea of preserving memory, not only in your own time, but into the far flung future.



This tomb, as I said, despite the fact that the burial chamber is small, we do believe it was a family tomb. We have evidence for that, because two bases were found that seemed to belong to this tomb; in fact, it's Cestius' name, or members of his family, Cestius, you can see there, are named in these inscriptions. These have markings on the top that suggest to us that statues stood on them, at one point. So these were statue bases, probably placed right in front of the entrance to the pyramidal tomb. And if you cast your eyes over this inscription you will not only see the name Cestius a few times, but you will see another very important name, and that is M. Agrippa. That's Marcus Agrippa, that's the Marcus Agrippa, the longtime--the boyhood friend and longtime close confidant and onetime heir and son-in-law of Augustus; all of those things. He's mentioned here. So he is a member also of this family. So it demonstrates to us again we are dealing with an aristocratic family. So all of those tombs I've shown you thus far--the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, and the Tomb of Gaius Cestius--are all examples of aristocratic tomb architecture in the age of Augustus.



Why did he choose a pyramid for his tomb is a very interesting question to ask, and I would suggest here--and it's not rocket science to figure this out at all--I would suggest here though that the reason has to do with Augustus' very important victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31. It was at that time, and even before, that an interest in things Egyptian came into Rome. We saw that Augustus himself made reference to his victory over that pair, over Cleopatra and Mark Antony, in the complex with the Ara Pacis and the Mausoleum of Augustus, by inserting that obelisk in the center; an obelisk that I have mentioned to you was actually brought from Egypt itself. So these references to Egypt, initially under Augustus himself, had political import. It was there to show that Augustus had been--that obelisk was there to show that Augustus had prevailed over Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and because he had prevailed, he could steal obelisks from Egypt and bring them back to decorate Rome, as trophies essentially. So that was a political statement on his part.



But as time went on, Egyptomania became a kind of fashion statement. I think that it caught on; it caught on after Egypt was made a Roman province in 30 B.C., right after Actium, and we begin to see this wave of things Egyptian spreading through Rome, and it's likely that Cestius--perhaps a combination of both, since he's from Agrippa's family, this combination of political reference, but also just this was an interesting--this was the style at this particular point, to do things in the Egyptian manner. You might remember some of those Egyptianizing motifs that we saw, for example, from the Black Room at Boscotrecase, which was also a villa that was closely connected with the imperial family. You remember Agrippa Postumus who was the son of Agrippa himself, born by his wife Julia, after Agrippa's death; hence his name.



Another view of the back of the Pyramid of Cestius, the Mausoleum of Cestius, which again shows us how well preserved it is. You can see the Aurelian Walls, you can see the gate that we looked at before, and you can also see that the back is actually in a modern cemetery. This is the so-called Protestant Cemetery, and if you are in Rome and have time, this is one of the most interesting places to visit. It's again a bit off the beaten track. Not that many tourists go there, but those that do are rewarded, because it's a cemetery where many expatriates were buried -- people who flocked to Rome because they loved it. Authors, scholars, poets, painters came to Rome, ended up spending the rest of their lives there--coming from all different countries around the world--spending the rest of their lives there, dying there, and eventually being buried in the so-called Protestant Cemetery.



Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, is buried there, as is John Keats. And the Keats tomb, Keats marker, is my favorite by far in this cemetery. You can see his tombstone here, which doesn't even give his name, it just identifies him; and you'll remember he died very, very young, in his early twenties I think it was. You see him here referred to only as "the young English poet." And down below it says, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." It's an amazing stone. It does show the lyre, which makes reference, of course, to the fluency and so on of his mellifluous poetry. And over here, a companion of his, Joseph Severn, who doesn't hesitate to mention his relationship to John Keats. So you see Keats' name in Severn's tombstone but not in Keats' own tombstone. But I show this to you just because it's one of those more fascinating places in Rome. And many of the tombs, by the way--there are many tombstones here that clearly are based on ancient Roman prototypes. So it's a fascinating place to wander. And by the way, you can do that in our own Grove Street Cemetery, where there are a number of tombs that are done very much in the Roman style.



If you think the Tomb of Cestius is unusual, the weirdest tomb by far in Rome, from ancient Rome, is the one that I turn to now, and this is the Tomb of the baker Eurysaces, the Tomb of the baker Eurysaces that was put up in Rome in the late first century B.C. And that again is another tomb from the age of Augustus. But in this case we believe, although the inscription doesn't tell us this for sure, but we believe it is highly likely that Eurysaces is from a different level of Roman society, not an aristocrat, but a working man who probably--either he himself or his family were slaves originally, eventually freed. He takes up the profession of bread making and he ends up building this extraordinary tomb that I'm going to show you in some detail, in Rome. As we look at this particular view, we see the Tomb of Eurysaces, as it looks today; it's right over here. We see it has behind it a great travertine gate, which is actually later in date. It dates to the time of the emperor Claudius. We'll talk about it next week. So you have to think that away for the moment. That was not standing when the Tomb of Eurysaces was put up. You can also see, however, that this gate was placed in an aqueduct system. That aqueduct was begun during the time of Augustus. So you can imagine that at least some of that aqueduct system stood at the time that this tomb was built.



The tomb, as you can see here, was a three-storied structure, very eccentric in its appearance. The ground line today is much lower than the modern ground line. So you have to go right up to the monument. You can look down at the first story. So you're only seeing a part of the first story here. You can see that it is made of tufa blocks. You can also see the interior is concrete, the core of the structure is concrete, and then on the second and third stories, the tomb is faced with travertine. So travertine again used for tomb facing in the age in Augustus. And we see this very unusual design where there are these great--not piers--cylinders, great cylinders; great cylinders that are placed here vertically, and then cylinders placed in the next tier horizontally. Vertically placed cylinders. They're not columns. You don't see any capitals. They're very fat. So they are cylinders, vertically, and then horizontally. And some scholars have suggested, and I think quite convincingly, that these may actually make reference to what were grain measures. Grain measures were these cylindrical structures in silos, in a sense, in which they stored grain in ancient Roman times. So that is very possible, since we know that this man was a baker, that this may make reference to these grain storage cylinders that were used in the process of baking.



With regard to the siting of the tomb--this is particularly interesting--I show you this plan over here, which indicates to us--here you can actually see the plan of the Tomb of Eurysaces, and you can see that it is very unusual in shape. It is trapezoidal in shape. Why is it trapezoidal in shape? It probably is trapezoidal in shape because the tomb was located on a piece of property that was between two major roads of Rome that exited and entered the city at this particular point: the so-called Via Labicana and the Via Praenestina. So two major Roman roads that come into the city at this point. And remember, the Tomb of Eurysaces, like all Roman tombs during this period, was outside the Servian Walls, so built outside the walls, but between these two streets.



Now this model over here, which by the way comes from a museum in Rome that again is off the beaten track, but I can highly recommend the Museo Civilità Romana, which is in a building built by Mussolini in the 1930s for a World's Fair, and the buildings--and it and other buildings like it out there, in a place--part of Rome that we call EUR from Esposizione Universale di Roma, E-U-R, EUR. That whole area built up by Mussolini for the World's Fair. But the buildings were so substantial that they decided to keep them, and they still stand, and this museum was placed in one of them. It is a museum of casts, where you can go and see works of Roman art and architecture from not only Rome but from around the world, all in one place. Now they're not originals, they're casts, but it'd be a great place to study for the exam for this course, for example, because you can walk around and see so many of the buildings that we've talked about. And there are these wonderful models of many of them.



And we see here a model of this aqueduct, the later gate here, and the Tomb of Eurysaces. And this shows you very well the way in which these two streets, the Labicana and the Praenestina, came into Rome at this point, converged exactly on the façade of this tomb. And this--it is clear that Eurysaces--and I'll tell you how he did this in a moment--had enough money that he was able to buy what was certainly one of the most choice pieces of real estate, outside the walls of Rome, one in which everyone who came into Rome from either of those two thoroughfares would see the façade of this tomb. This is a man who wanted to be remembered for posterity. It's another example of how tombs were used for the purposes of retaining memory over time.



This is also interesting because it shows what happened. What you see with the dotted lines here is one of these later gates that was made for the Aurelian Walls. And in this case, the Tomb of Eurysaces was right smack dab in the middle of where they wanted to build an outcropping of this wall. In this case they decided that they were not going to build the wall into it, but that they were going to build the wall on top of it. But fortunately, again, they did not destroy it completely. They did shear off the front of the tomb, which actually took away the façade, but they allowed the debris to fall into the tower, and then they covered it up. So when this tower was eventually torn down to free the Tomb of Eurysaces, they found the fourth wall and the debris from that wall, including a portrait statue and an inscription inside the debris, which was extremely fortunate, and which allows us to reconstruct the monument.



Here you see the model in this EUR Museum that shows you what the tomb looked like in antiquity. You see the three levels, the three tiers. You see the entrance to the burial chamber here. And this is the façade that we're looking at; this is the part that no longer survives. This is the fourth wall or the façade, now gone, but we can again reconstruct it from those remains. And you see them here, and you see it was relatively plain on three tiers, except for a portrait statue of Eurysaces and his wife, an inscription down below. And you need to think away the frieze up there, because the frieze was probably not on this side of the monument, although there was a frieze around the other three sides. You can see one of those sides here, and I'll show that frieze to you momentarily.



This is a view of the tomb again, where we can see so well those cylinders on two stories. And you can also see here that in the area between the vertical and the horizontal cylinders, on three sides of the monument, there is an inscription, and it repeats over and over again, and it tells us that this monument was put up by Eurysaces, Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, who was pistor and redemptor--p-i-s-t-o-r, r-e-d-e-m-p-t-o-r--pistor and redemptor. That means master baker and contractor--the contractor is the most important part--master baker and contractor. We know this is a man who made bread and sold it to the Roman armies. This was a pretty lucrative thing to do in the age of Augustus when there was so much military conquest. He made a fortune selling bread to the Roman armies, and it is with that fortune that he was able to buy this choice piece of real estate and to put up this extraordinary monument in the late first century B.C.



The portrait relief still survives. It's in the Capitoline Museums today. You see it here. It had fallen in again to the debris, from the fourth side, but here it is with Eurysaces standing next to his wife, Atistia--we know her name and I'll tell you how in a moment--Atistia, in that portrait relief. And we're not going to go into this in any detail, but if you compare it to the figures of Augustus and his family, from the Ara Pacis, I think you'll agree with me that the Ara Pacis is serving as a model, and that this portrait group is clearly based on aristocratic--even though this is probably a middle-class pair, formerly from a slave family, freed people. They are shown here very much as if they are members of the court, wearing similar costumes, depicted in a similar way, with similar hairstyles.



And I point to just one detail. If you look at this view of Livia, on the Ara Pacis, Augustus' wife, and you see the wonderful way in which the artist has depicted her hand, the shape of her hand showing underneath her garment here; the same is done here for Atistia, you can see--and that's A-t-i-s-t-i-a--for Atistia. You can see her hand. In fact, it's even better done here because you can see the shape of the knuckles and so on, underneath the garment, the very diaphanous garment that she wears. So clearly a very special portrait artist, probably hired to do these portraits; a portrait artist who may have been hired at great expense. And also very significant, and in keeping with what we saw for the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, is the fact that although the tomb is faced in travertine and the relief around the monument is in travertine, this is done in marble, in, if I remember correctly, Greek marble, as well. So imported marble that is brought from elsewhere and at greater expense is used for the most important portrait relief.



The scenes around the--the scenes, the frieze scenes, are particularly interesting because they depict in the greatest of detail the profession of the making of bread. They depict Eurysaces' daily achievement of making bread that he sold to the Roman armies. I'm going to just show you the scenes very quickly, and you can see the style is very different. It's a much more journalistic style, with figures that don't have the elegant proportions that we saw in the portrait relief, and it is carved on travertine, not on marble. We see here the grain being ground between two stones, and we see the way in which these men in tunics worked that. We also see that the upper stone is rotated by a mule that is attached to a wooden handle that comes off the uppermost stone there. We have millstones just like this, from Pompeii, and I show you the actual millstones. So these depictions on the Tomb of Eurysaces: very accurate in terms or what millstones looked like in antiquity.



Another scene here in which we see two men at a table with big gobs of dough, that you can see here, dough, for the bread. Another scene--this is one of the more important scenes--where we see four men standing behind a table, that are forming that dough into loaves. And over here a magistrate, who has a short-sleeved but long garment, is supervising them. And the four men are very interestingly rendered because they're rendered almost exactly the same. If you look, if you compare this to the Ara Pacis where figures are represented in different postures, a lot of variety, clearly based on Greek prototypes. Here we see something very different. The major objective of the artist is to get the story across, to show these men making these loaves. But look at them. Each one--they're bare chested, and we'll see why they're bare chested. It's hot in this part of the bakery. So they've taken off their shirts. There's some attempt to depict their musculature. But they're essentially shown in exactly the same way, the same curly hair, almost as if they were cut from a cookie cutter, because again it's not the form that's of interest to the artist here, but getting that narrative across. And if you try to figure out whose legs belong to whom, believe me, you'll have a difficult time of it. So the artist is not--is much less concerned with formal things than he is with getting the story across.



With regard to why they've taken off their shirts, they're right near the oven. And I show you the scene that depicts the dome-shaped oven in which the loaves are being baked, and you can see that this oven looks very much like a modern pizza oven, and in fact the pole that they use, the wooden pole with the flat end, is just the sort of thing you see at BAR or any other major pizza place, either in New Haven or elsewhere in the world. And, in fact, these dome-shaped ovens are still used in rural areas. And I took this view in Greece, in a small rural town, and you see these in Italy in some very small towns as well, still being done in exactly the same way. There are a number--because of the cylinders on the Tomb of Eurysaces, there are some scholars who've suggested that the Tomb of Eurysaces is in the form of a bakery [an oven]. While I do believe that there is reference to those grain--to those storage bins, silos that were used for the storage of grain, I do not think that the Tomb of Eurysaces is in the form of an oven. It makes reference to baking, but I don't think it's in the form of an oven, because this is what Roman ovens looked like. They were dome-shaped. This has a very different appearance, as you can see.



Perhaps the most important scene in the frieze is this one, where we see two--we see the loaves have been baked, they're ready to go to market, and they're put in these large baskets--you can see them here--and then they are weighed in this scale, in this ancient scale. And I think this is a form of private propaganda on the part of the baker Eurysaces. What he is telling the public who gaze up on this tomb, not only in his own day but for posterity, is: "My bread was always, not only of high quality, but of the appropriate weight. I never cheated the public. I treated you fairly. I was an honest baker and contractor." I think that's what the message is here. And, in fact, you may think this is a stretch, but I think that one could easily compare this report that Eurysaces provides of his profession on the frieze of this tomb as a kind of baker's version of Augustus' Res Gestae. The list of things accomplished during his life is laid out in narrative form, for not only his contemporaries but for posterity to see.



The portrait group again--and I mentioned that there was an inscription found with that portrait group; a very interesting inscription which tells us that Eurysaces put up this monument to his wife Atistia, and Atistia's bodily remains, he says, are buried in hoc panario--in hoc panario, in this panarium. What is a panarium? A breadbasket; which is again why scholars have said, "Well the whole tomb is in the form of an oven." But I think the breadbasket being referred to here is not the tomb, but rather the urn in which Atistia's remains were placed. In the excavation in the nineteenth century, when that later gateway was removed, they found one urn, one urn, not two urns, one urn, presumably the urn of Atistia, and that urn was in the form--it was drawn at that time. And we can see this view of it here, a cross-section, the lid, and the main body of the urn. And you can see it looks like a breadbasket.



And I show you--we have lots of examples of urns in the form of breadbaskets from Roman times. There's one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and any of you who are going down there anytime soon to look at Roman antiquities and other things, you can see one there. This one is in the National Museum in Rome. And women's remains were often placed in breadbaskets to accentuate or to speak to their domestic virtues, if they were good at taking care of the house and baking bread and so on. But in this particular case I think it is much more likely that the reference here is not to her, to Atistia's cleverness as a housekeeper, but rather to her husband's profession, which is very, very interesting in terms of what it tells us about the gender wars of antiquity, that here's a tomb that has been put up by this baker, with his money that he's made from his profession, in honor of his wife. But what he depicts -- what he is preserving for posterity is not the outline of his wife's life, but the outline of his life, what he has accomplished. His name is plastered on three sides of the monument. He's got three sides of the monument with the successive phases of the baking of bread in all of its aspects. Yes, he has a very nice portrait relief of his wife, but of course he's standing by her side. And he does mention her name down below. So he gives her some due. But this monument, as far as posterity is concerned, is about Eurysaces and not about his wife, and I think it tells us again very--a great deal about the motives of this particular individual.



I want to say just a very few words about two other tombs out on the Via Appia in Rome, the Appian Way again. And I show you a view of the Via Appia, as it looks today. You can see that although much of the road is modern, you do find bits and pieces of ancient ground out there. You can see some polygonal blocks here and some rut marks from the ancient road, and you have to be very careful when you drive out there in your Cinquecento, or whatever--or you bike ride out there, as this fellow is doing, or you take your motorbike or whatever--because if you're going too quickly and you don't expect it, all of a sudden you hit some ancient road, and that makes a huge difference in terms of your ability to move forward.



I want to show you one tomb, very fleetingly, out there, which is the one that you see over here on the left-hand side of the screen. There are remains of many tombs on the Via Appia. Most of them are just piles of concrete, but a few of them are better preserved, and this is one of them. It's a tomb of freedmen and freedwomen from 13 B.C. to A.D. 5. We call it the Rabirius Tomb because of an inscription that tells us members of the Rabirius family were buried here. The reason that I show it to you is that the eccentric tombs that I've shown you today are absolutely marvelous and tell us a lot about the Romans as patrons and their desires vis-à-vis memory. But it is not--those are not the conventional tomb types. We see many more of this sort of thing, which we call a house tomb, a tomb that resembles a house essentially. It has a sloping ceiling and a main façade, and in that façade there is usually a portrait relief, either vertical or horizontal, but these horizontal ones represent members of the family. Some may be deceased, some may not be deceased. The message is that even if someone has died before another, that they will eventually be re-united together in perpetuity.



But if you look at this carefully, you will see that what it looks like is as if these individuals are still alive and looking out of the window of their tomb, as if out of the window of a house; this very close association in the minds of the Romans between houses of the living and houses of the dead. And that is absolutely the case here. And you'll remember, we can trace this all the way back to the eighth century B.C. You remember the Villanovan hut urn that I showed you, and I told you that women's remains were placed in--women's cremated remains--were placed in these huts that resembled Romulus' huts. And so this whole idea of a house serving as a tomb goes way back, and continues to be a leitmotif of Roman tomb architecture throughout the entire history of Roman architecture, and it's something that I hope you'll keep in mind.



Also just in passing, I want to mention--we've looked--the tombs that we've looked at thus far today have been--they've been of all different social classes, from emperor to freed slave, but at the same time they have all been tombs, including the Rabirius Tomb, of the well-to-do. If these were freed slaves, they were ones that made a fortune, like Eurysaces did selling bread to the Roman army, and with that fortune were able to build monumental tombs, at great expense. But there were lots and lots of people obviously, who lived in Rome and Pompeii and in other cities who could not afford those kinds of tombs, and you might be asking yourselves, "Where are all of those people buried?" Well they tended to be buried underground, in what we call columbaria--c-o-l-u-m-b-a-r-i-a, columbaria--underground burial chambers, that were either burial clubs that you could join for a small amount of money; you could join one of these clubs, buy into your last resting place that way.



Or they were burial chambers that were created by the very well to do, for example, the emperor and empress, Augustus and Livia. We know they had thousands of slaves, literally thousands of slaves. We have a record of some of Livia's slaves. She had slaves, not only to tend the garden and that kind of thing, but she had a masseuse, she had several hairstylists, and she even had a slave, we know, who set her pearls, that was her whole job was to set her pearls, day in and day out. So they had tons and tons of slaves, and some of those very well to do also established these burial areas where their slaves could find a last resting place. And, in fact, the one that I show you here, the Vigna Codini, is one such, that belonged to the Augustan-Julio-Claudian family and was used for the remains of some of their slaves. And you can see that each individual had a little niche; again, people were cremated. The cremated remains were placed usually in an urn, that was placed inside one of these niches, and then there would be a small inscription, referring to the deceased. So this gives you a sense again of those who could not afford individual tombs and how they were buried.



In the five or seven minutes that remain, I'd like to switch gears entirely and look at something very different, as a prelude to what we'll be talking about next time, because next time, next Tuesday, we are going to return once again to innovative Roman architecture; architecture made of concrete and with a variety of interesting innovations. We'll do that next week, as I said. And I want to give you an introduction to that by turning to this one example from the Augustan period that is noteworthy enough for us to say something about it. What you're looking at here is the plan of what was a spa essentially, in ancient Roman times. It's located in Campania, at a place called Baia, so in the vicinity of Pompeii and Herculaneum and Oplontis and Boscotrecase and so on. We've already talked about the fact that that was an area that was a mecca for the well-to-do, the glitteratti from Rome who went down there for their vacations. It was a resort area. Many of them had villas along what is now the Amalfi Coast. Others had villas on the Island of Capri. I can't remember if I told you but Augustus and Tiberius, his successor, owned twelve villas on the Island of Capri, one of which we'll look at next time. And this was an area also where there were sulfur springs and mineral baths, and so the natural thing to do, for those who were coming here, as a resort, was to create for them a place that they could go to relax and enjoy the thermal springs and the sulfur baths and so on and so fort, and that was this place, this spa, at Baia, which consisted of a bunch of thermal structures that were terraced out over a hillside.



You have to think of the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, turned into a spa. Because they treated it--architecturally it was done in exactly the same way. They took a hillside, they terraced that hillside, they poured concrete on that hillside, creating a whole host of interesting structures in which one could relax and get away from it all. You see a plan of that spa here and the way in which it was terraced, via concrete construction, over this hillside. I am only going to show you one thermal bath from it, and it's this one that we see over here. It is the so-called "Temple of Mercury" -- that's what the locals have long called it. It is not a Temple of Mercury, it is a thermal bath, but nonetheless we call it that because it's been called that for such a long time. As you look at the plan of the Temple of Mercury, you're going to say to me--every one of you will say the same thing,

Professor Kleiner features the architecture of Augustus' successors, the Julio-Claudian emperors, whose dynasty lasted half a century (A.D. 14-68). She first presents Tiberius' magnificent Villa Jovis on the Island of Capri and an underground basilica in Rome used by members of a secret Neo-Pythagorean cult. She then turns to the eccentric architecture of Claudius, a return to masonry building techniques and a unique combination of finished and unfinished, or rusticated, elements. Finally, Professor Kleiner highlights the luxurious architecture of the infamous Nero, especially his Domus Aurea or Golden House and its octagonal room, one of the most important rooms in the history of Roman architecture. The construction of the Domus Aurea accelerates the shift in Roman building practice toward a dematerialized architecture that fully utilizes recent innovations in concrete technology and emphasizes interior space over solid form.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 14-16 (historical background), 135-136 (Domus Transitoria), 268, 290-292 (Domus Aurea), 361-362 (Underground Basilica)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 45-6

Transcript



February 17, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everyone. Augustus founded the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The name says it all: Julio-Claudian, Julio for the Julian side of the family, Julius Caesar and Augustus; the Claudian for the Claudian side of the family. That was Augustus' wife from--her side of the family, excuse me, the Claudian side of the family. And there were four emperors in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. These were Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Every one of them, all four, made an important contribution to the evolution of Roman architecture, and we'll talk about the contributions of those four today. But we'll also see that the single most important contribution, from the standpoint of Roman architecture, was by Nero, the notorious emperor Nero, which is why I do call this lecture "Notorious Nero and His Amazing Architectural Legacy."



An architectural legacy that would have been impossible without some of the earlier concrete constructions that we've already discussed, specifically the frigidaria of Pompeii and also the thermal bath at Baia, which I remind you of here. The so-called Temple of Mercury, we see it again with its dome made out of concrete construction, a view from the exterior. And down here, at the left, a view of the interior of the monument, and I remind you of the way in which is that designed so that light streams through the oculus in the dome, down onto the sides of the wall, creating light effects: a circle that corresponds to the shape of the opening above, and then falling initially on the pool of water that would have been located there, as well as across the walls, which probably would have been--that were certainly stuccoed over--and probably would have been covered with mosaic. So a very spectacular interior indeed, and one again that had an important impact, as we'll see, on the architectural designs of the Roman emperor Nero.



I want to begin though with the first of the Julio-Claudian emperors, and that is with Tiberius. And you see a portrait of Tiberius now on the screen, just to give you a sense of what he looked like. Tiberius, again the son of Livia by a former marriage, the elder son of Livia by a former marriage, who becomes emperor of Rome right after Augustus. And the portrait that you see here is a marble portrait of Tiberius that is now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek in Copenhagen. Tiberius was emperor of Rome from 14 to 37 A.D., and with regard to architecture, he completed projects begun by Augustus. He also was responsible for restoring Republican buildings that had fallen into severe disrepair by his reign, and this included several temples, a basilica, warehouses, and also a theater. Tiberius also initiated some new building projects in Rome. These included a Temple to the Divine Augustus, Temple to Divus Augustus, his divine adoptive father, because Augustus was made a god, as Caesar had been before him, at his death. Tiberius also put up a series of arches to his relatives, and also a camp for the Praetorian Guard.



But what we'll see about Tiberius is that his real passion was not the public architecture that Augustus had been so fond of--think the Forum of Augustus and the Temple of Mars Ultor, or the Ara Pacis Augustae, which were among Augustus' most important building projects. Tiberius was interested instead in private architecture--architecture in a sense for himself and his nearest and dearest--and he began a palace on the Palatine Hill. He did not think the small, modest House of Augustus, despite the fact that it had those nicely painted walls, he did not think that that befit his own grandeur, and he began a major palace on the Palatine Hill, on the northwest side of the Palatine Hill. And he renovated and built villas elsewhere, outside of Rome, especially on the spectacular Island of Capri. And indeed, during the reign of Augustus, and also the reign of Tiberius, that family, the Augustan and Julio-Claudian family, built twelve villas--count them, twelve villas--on the Island of Capri, one more spectacular than the next. It's worth mentioning, by the way, that Augustus' taste, even in villas, was somewhat more modest than Tiberius. Augustus used to decorate his villa, we are told, with dinosaur bones and things like that, of historical interest, whereas Tiberius spared no expense in introducing every luxury possible into his villas.



With regard to the palace on the Palatine Hill, the so-called Domus Tiberiana, I just want to mention it in passing. There's very little that survives of the substructures that Tiberius was responsible for beginning, for that palace. They were made out of concrete construction, and you can see here what's called the Clivus Palatinus, which is a ramp way leading from the Roman Forum, up to the Palatine Hill. And you can see some of the remains of those substructures over here. The ones that we see were probably restored later and may or may not date to the Tiberian period, but they give you some idea of the sort of construction that he began on the Palatine Hill. And I mention this just because we'll see that Caligula and some of the other emperors continued to add to this palace, and then the entire Palatine Hill is redesigned by the emperor Domitian in the late first century A.D.



Much more interesting and much more--and there's much more information for us to look at--are the villas on the island of Capri. And I'm going to show you one, the best preserved, from that island, the so-called Villa Jovis: the Villa Jovis, the Villa of Jupiter, which is an interesting name, when you think about it, for a villa for the emperor Tiberius. The Villa Jovis, which was put up sometime in the years in which Tiberius was emperor; that is, from 14 to 37 A.D. It's a spectacular place, beautifully situated. And I'm going to take you there today. Now the only way to get to the island of Capri, which by the way is one of my very favorite places in the world; I don't know how many of you've been there, but it's quite extraordinary--the island of Capri. You can't jet to the Island of Capri, you have to arrive there by boat, and most people take a boat, unless they have a private yacht, but those of us who don't, have to take a boat either from Naples, usually a hydrofoil--although they have larger boats as well--a hydrofoil from Naples or from Positano. And I actually show you--this is a view on the left-hand side of the screen of Positano on the Amalfi Coast. You go down to the beach; there's a place where you can pick up a hydrofoil. It takes a very short time, half an hour or so, less, a little bit less, to get over to the Island of Capri from Positano.



So we're sitting on one of those hydrofoils--or at least eight of us are, because that's usually what they fit--and we're making our way from Positano toward Capri. As you go there, if the weather is good enough, and if the sea is calm enough, they will take you to see the famous grottos, the Green Grotto and also the Blue Grotto. And again I can just give you a little sense here of--in this view--of how blue is blue. I mean, it's really a neon blue, when you go to see the Blue Grotto. It's a spectacular sight and a very special color blue that you really don't see anywhere else in the world. So they'll drive you around in the hydrofoil to see the grottos, and then you eventually get to the dock at Capri, and this is what you see as you get off the boat at the island of Capri: again a very beautiful spot to visit.



As you go up, you make your way from the dock up to the funicular. You take the funicular up to the main part of town, and one of the first things you see is the popular Bar Tiberio. I show it to you, not to--it's a fun place to go--but I show it to you mainly because it's one of these examples of the way in which the Roman emperors have had a lasting impact, even today, that so many of these bars and restaurants and so on are named for Rome's emperors, or for some of the monuments that we've been studying in the course of this semester. And this bar is no exception, and in fact if you go through the doors that lead into the interior of the bar, you will see a portrait of Tiberius etched on the doorway. So Tiberius very much lives and thrives in the center of downtown Capri still today.



What most tourists go to Capri to see, besides just to walk around a magnificent island and to test out some of the beaches, which tend to be on the rocky side, is to see the most famous rocks of Capri. And these are the so-called Faraglioni. You see them here. You go up to the so-called Gardens of Augustus, and then up to a spot where you can see these particularly well. They're magnificent. They are the landmark spot on the island of Capri, and they have survived coastal landslides and sea erosion, to look as wonderful as they still do today. And this is, of course, the photo op on the island. I don't think there's anyone who visits Capri who doesn't take a photo or have a photo taken of themselves at the Faraglioni.



The villa that I want to show you is again the best preserved villa of Tiberius on Capri. And again I mentioned that it's called the Villa Jovis, and it dates to 14 to 37 A.D. It's a trek to get up there. You have to walk essentially. The streets are such that there are no cabs or cars that can get you there. You have to make it on your own. And there are two paths. I've made the mistake of taking the more arduous path, which looks like this, to get up to the top, but there's another path also that takes you by some very attractive houses and villas, which are fun to see. And you will see the largest lemons--has anyone ever been on the island of Capri?--you'll see the largest lemons on Capri, as well as on the Amalfi Coast in general, that you've ever seen anywhere: gigantic lemons on lemon trees, as you make your way up to the Villa of the Villa Jovis.



Now here is a plan of the Villa Jovis, as well as a cross-section, from the Ward-Perkins textbook. And if we look first at the cross-section, at the uppermost part of the screen, you will see the way this building was made. You will see that the architects have taken advantage of developments in concrete construction to create a series of barrel vaults in tiers, and those barrel vaults in tiers are where--are the cisterns of the villa, where the water was kept to supply the baths and the kitchen and so on, of the villa. You see those there, and in this plan down here you can see the cisterns again and the way in which a pavement has been placed on top of those tiers of barrel vaults, to create a very large court here. The entranceway into Tiberius' villa on Capri was over here. You can see a series of columns, four in total, that you see as you make your way into the entranceway of the villa. Along this side of the villa, which is the southern side of the villa, you see the baths--not surprisingly placed on the southern side--extensive bath structure for the emperor. On the western side you see a series of rooms that are for the entourage of Tiberius. The kitchen is located on this side as well.



And then perhaps the most important room of the house, from our standpoint, the hall or the aula--a-u-l-a--the aula of Tiberius' villa at Capri. And you can see the shape of that aula. It's a kind of hemicycle with large picture windows that allow views that lie outside. And it should remind you of the second phase of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, where we also saw that attractive bay window with the panoramic views, out beyond. The panoramic views were much more spectacular here than even from the Villa of the Mysteries, because as I think you can see also from this site plan, that this is located right at the edge of a promontory. It's in fact 1,095 feet above sea level, and you get some incredible views of the sea and of other islands from this location. On this side, the northern side of the structure, is where the apartments of Tiberius were located; a series of rooms for the emperor himself, and including also an imperial loggia, where he could walk out and get some attractive panoramas privately on his own. You can also see that there is a corridor that leads from the private apartment to this very long walkway, that is located right at the edge of the cliff on this side. This is called technically an ambulatio--a-m-b-u-l-a-t-i-o, an ambulatio--and it was just for that. It was for taking pleasant walks, getting nice views of the sea from there, especially for the emperor and special invited guests. And right in the center was a triclinium--you see it right here--a triclinium or dining room where the emperor could dine and could look out again over views that were possible from this particular locale.



This is a view unfortunately in black and white, but it's the only one that I have that gives you a sense of the remains today from above, the extent of those remains. And you can see again the concrete construction I think quite well from this, as well as the fact that although all the foundation walls are there, there's no decoration, the ceilings are missing, and so on and so forth. You see the cistern here, the location of the aula up here, the area for the entourage of Tiberius, and the private apartment on that side. A church and a statue on a base were added later, and so of course you need to think those away.



This is a view of some of the remains as they look today, just to give you a sense that when you're actually up there and wandering around. The walls don't go up all that far, but you can also see that they do preserve the entire plan of the structure, which is why we have such a good idea of what it looked like in antiquity and how all of those pieces fit together. You can see that the construction is concrete and the facing is stone, irregular stonework, the kind of opus incertum work that we've seen elsewhere in Campania. Because remember this is an island, but it's off the coast of Naples, Pompeii and Oplontis; it is in that same general area of Italy. And this is one view and one--I have many more spectacular ones than this one--but this is one that gives you a sense of the sort of thing you can see. This one I took right from, I think from near the aula; just to give you an idea of what you see from there. Beautiful views of the sea. In some areas you can see the rocky outcroppings as you look down, and then views of some other islands in the area, for example Ischia, and so on.



The successor to Tiberius was a man by the name of Caligula. Caligula became emperor at the death of Tiberius. And we see a portrait of him here, on the right-hand side of the screen, just again to give you a sense of the man. He had a very short--he was very young when he became emperor of Rome--he had a very short reign, only three years. And he was somewhat unbalanced, and it was not long after he became emperor--oh, by the way, he was very popular when he was a boy; he was a prince, very popular. He used to run around the military camps with his family, in a little military costume, and he wore these distinctive military boots called the caliga, c-a-l-i-g-a; which is how he got the nickname Caligula, from those boots. He was extremely popular with everyone, and everyone was quite excited when he became emperor of Rome.



But his power went to his head. He became a despot, and he spent most of his time cavorting with his three sisters. I show you them here on a coin, and they're all named: Agrippina, Julia, and--Drusilla was his favorite, so of course she's in the center there--Drusilla. And he also did strange things like conduct faux wars essentially, faux wars with faux enemies: for example, his war against Britain, so to speak. And he also spent a good deal of time trying to work it out so that his horse, Incitatus, could become a senator. So this gives you some idea of the kind of man we're dealing with here. He was occupied with all of that and really not that much with architecture. And again, he was only emperor for a very short time, so there was a limit to what kinds of architectural contributions he could make. But he didn't make none. I mean, he made some, and in fact one of them is particularly important, and I want to emphasize those to you here.



So again, Caligula was emperor between 37 and 41 A.D. He had little public building. Again, he continued the tradition of Tiberius, and that is in having much more interest in private villa architecture than in public architecture. But again it's only fair--as we judge him in terms of his architectural contribution, I think it's only fair to remind ourselves that again he was only emperor for three years. If he had been emperor longer, perhaps his contribution would have been greater. He did finish several buildings, begun by Tiberius--and we're going to see this as a pattern, that is, emperors coming to the fore and completing buildings by their predecessors. And he did build a couple of new things, including two new aqueducts and a circus located near what is now Vatican City. He thought the Domus Tiberiana was a terrific idea and consequently he added to that palace; that's the palace that Tiberius began on the slopes of the Palatine Hill. But his main interest was villas outside Rome. He built a number of those. I'm not talking about Capri now, those were already built, and he could go down and enjoy those as emperor of Rome, but he wanted to ring Rome with a series of villas, and he began that work. And later on, according to Pliny the Elder, Rome was ringed with the villas, not only of Caligula, but also of Nero. So these were going up apace around the city of Rome itself.



The single most important contribution though that Caligula made, and it is very significant, is to alter--it was during his reign, during his brief reign, that the recipe for Roman concrete construction was altered. What they did was make the decision to lighten it up, and they did that by taking the stone rubble that had been used in the mixture of concrete for some time, taking that stone rubble and dispensing with it, getting rid of it, because it was too heavy, and mixed the liquid mortar instead with a very porous, yellow tufa, and also with pumice, which is a soft light stone resembling cork. So when you think of replacing heavy rubble with something that resembles cork, you get the sense that that is going to lead to lighter domes; lighter domes are going to lead to domes that are able to span greater spaces. So this is no small accomplishment. This is very, very significant. It happens during the reign of Caligula, and we'll see already today that the so-called Golden House or Domus Aurea of Nero, would not have been possible, the span of that dome would not have been possible without this change in the recipe in concrete that happened under Caligula.



The other development under Caligula that I want to make reference to really has more to do with religious practice, but it also has an important impact on architecture, and that is the impact of mystery cults on Roman religion. I think I've mentioned to you already that the Romans practiced a state religion, and that state religion was considered the religion that everyone should adhere to. But over time, because of Rome's connections to other parts of the empire, especially the Eastern Empire, a whole host of different kinds of religions, mystery religions, exotic religions, began to infiltrate Rome. They came back through the army, they came back through commerce, to Rome. And initially they were not accepted. You were not allowed to practice these openly. And so we saw an example with the Villa of the Mysteries where the woman of the house created a special room, room number five, for the celebration of the cult of Dionysus, because that was considered a secret religion at that particular point. But these mystery religions, Caligula himself showed some interest in them, and it began to look as if perhaps they would be able to begin to come up from underground. They didn't during his reign, but I think again his contribution in that way was also an important one. They did continue to have to meet in secret.



And one sect in particular I want to make reference to today, the so-called Neo-Pythagorean sect, because we'll see in the next monument that I want to show you, that it was that sect that was celebrated in a very interesting underground basilica that I want to turn to now. It doesn't date to the time of Caligula; in fact, it's a little bit later, in the reign of Claudius. But I want to show it to you here, because again it was Caligula's beginning to be more accepting of these kinds of things that led in part to their proliferation, initially underground and then above ground as well. This is the so-called Underground Basilica, because it is located underground. It dates to around A.D. 50. And you can see from this site plan its location. You can see it marked "basilica" up there, and you can see that it's near a street we've already talked about, the Via Praenestina in Rome, which you'll remember is one, along with the Via Labicana, that came and converged on the Tomb of the Baker that we looked at last time. In fact, if you look at this site plan, you see the trapezoidal plan of the Tomb of the Baker right here. And when we discussed the Tomb of the Baker, I made the point to you that it was located, or it was sited, in front of a great gate, the so-called Porta Maggiore, or the great gate that spanned two aqueducts. And I said to you, I urged you to think away that great gate because it was built later. It was built, in fact, during the reign of Claudius. We're going to look at it momentarily.



So you see the great gate here, and you see the Tomb of the Baker, and that gives you a sense of the location of the basilica, the Underground Basilica of 50 A.D. If you look at that basilica, you see the plan is exactly like the basilica in a civic context--the basilica at Pompeii, for example--with a central nave and two side aisles, divided by that nave, that central space, through architectural members, in this case through piers rather than columns; and then at the end, to give some emphasis to one short side of the space, an apse, that you also see there. This underground basilica was used for religious worship. So we see once again what I've referred to as the interchangeability of form: the idea of creating a certain building plan for a civic center, the law court or basilica, and then using it in other ways. We already saw the basilican plan being used in house design at Herculaneum as a banqueting hall, and here we see it as a religious, a place for religious worship underground: a basilican form being used for religious worship underground.



The Underground Basilica is miraculously preserved. Why? Because it's underground and it didn't--it consequently was kept in very good shape over time. It's very difficult to get permission to go down and see it, but it is a marvel, as you can see from this image here. How did they create this Underground Basilica? How did they make this building underground? Well they cut trenches in the tufa rock, in the tufa rock; remember we've talked about how ubiquitous tufa rock was in Rome, both on the hillsides, like the Palatine, and elsewhere. So they cut trenches in the tufa rock, and then they poured concrete into those trenches to create the walls and also the barrel vault that you see so well here. And once that concrete had dried, they cut it out in such a way as to create the piers that you also see very well in this structure. So we're looking at that central space; we're looking at the piers, the arches above those piers, and then that's supporting a barrel vaulting ceiling, as well as a semi-vault in the apse of this structure.



Another view gives you a sense of the relationship of the central space to the aisles. It's a fairly small structure but nonetheless it is quite light and airy, as I think you can see here, as we look from the central nave toward one of the side aisles. You can see the piers and the arches above those piers, and you can also see the way in which the walls are decorated. They're made out of concrete but they're stuccoed over and divided into a series of panels that are decorated with pretty strong resemblance to Third Style, and that resemblance becomes even clearer as we look up to the vault above. This is how we surmise that this building was put up to the Neo-Pythagorean cult, because of the figures that we see floating in the central panels here. Those who have a good understanding of the Neo-Pythagorean cult have suggested that these track extremely well the beliefs of this particular cult.



But interesting for us is again the close resemblance of this to Third Style Roman wall painting. It's done in stucco. The stucco is painted, but you can see it's divided into a series of panels with floating mythological figures, or floating religious figures in this case, inside the panels. And look then very carefully at some of the floral decorations, which you will see also resemble very closely the flimsy candelabra and so on that are characteristic of Third Style Roman painting. This shouldn't surprise you. The date of 50 A.D. is still well within the Third Style. We've talked about the very long life of the Third Style, that it was used already in the late first century B.C., but that it didn't really go out until about 62 A.D. So 50 was still in that period of the Third Style; it doesn't surprise us to see decoration like this, in this very interesting Underground Basilica.



Caligula was murdered in 41, and his wife and daughter--he had one daughter--were also murdered at the same time. He had no family member to succeed him, and his uncle Claudius was chosen as the next emperor of Rome. Many of you may know the interesting story, quite captivating story, of how Claudius was chosen as emperor. He was someone who was not highly respected by his family--and I'll say more about that in a moment; no one ever thought he was going to amount to anything. And when, after Caligula's death, Claudius was such, kind of timid, that he hid behind a curtain. But as the Praetorian Guard wandered through the palace, trying to figure out who in the world they were going to appoint as Caligula's successor, they saw a pair of feet underneath a curtain. They pulled open that curtain and they saw Claudius, and they thought, "Well he's going to be no trouble at all. No one thinks much of him. We're going to be able to get everything we want if we appoint Claudius as emperor." And so they did, they bowed down, and they said, "You are now--", or they put him up on their shoulders, "You are now emperor of Rome."



Well Claudius surprised them because he was a very smart individual indeed, as we shall see. This is a cameo, a famous cameo that represents Claudius, just for you to get some sense of what he looked like, over here on the left, with his wife, and then possibly--these two figures over here are controversial--possibly with Tiberius or some other member of the imperial family. This is blown up into colossal size. It's a fairly small but very beautiful cameo, and these cameos were used as presentation pieces in ancient Roman times.



Claudius was emperor of Rome between A.D. 41 and 54. I mentioned that his family did not have much respect for him. They thought he was weak and sickly, and they thought he was dim-witted. And the only reason they thought he was dim-witted, because the poor fellow stammered, and they thought that that reflected an undisciplined mind. Not at all, he was very, very intelligent indeed, and he surprised them. He surprised not only the Praetorian Guard but also his family, when he became emperor. He turned out to be a unique individual with a predilection, as we shall see, for an entirely new kind of, and very distinctive form of architecture, and one that I believe--and I'll try to make the case to you today--reflected his very distinctive intellect.



We need to know therefore something about him and how he came--how he had trained himself intellectually before he became emperor of Rome. He was fifty-years-old when he became emperor. He had been, in the years prior to that, a scholar, an historian, an antiquarian, a linguist. He wrote a history of Rome by himself--it was not ghostwritten--and he wrote several volumes, also on his own, on the Etruscans; he was particularly interested in the Etruscans. We know he added a few letters to the Latin alphabet to give it more range, and he was the last Roman, as far as we know, to be able to read and also write Etruscan. This gives you a very good sense of the man. With regard to architecture, he rejected categorically the interests of Tiberius and Caligula in villa architecture, and he returned to the construction of public architecture--he looked to Augustus as a model for this--and especially to public works.



Let me show you one example. You see on the screen a site plan of the port of Rome. I've already mentioned the fact that the port of Rome was located at Ostia, Ostia the city at the mouth of the Tiber River. We saw the plan of Ostia, a colony already founded in the mid-fourth century B.C., in around 350, and it grew over time and it had its efflorescence, as we'll see in a later lecture, in the second century A.D. Here the plan of Ostia over here. The Tiber River, and then at the mouth of the Tiber River, at a place that we call Portus, a location that we call Portus or Porto--it's on the Monument List for you--the actual harbor itself. What we're looking at above is a coin of the emperor Nero. You see Nero on the obverse and on the reverse a representation of what we think is the port built by Claudius.



We have a description of the port of Claudius by Suetonius in his Lives. Suetonius tells us that the port had curving breakwaters, curving breakwaters. And if we look at this coin of Nero that was struck by the emperor between 64 and 68 A.D., we see on the back what is clearly a port, with curving breakwaters. So we believe that this must be a depiction of the port built by Claudius sometime during his reign, that is, between 41 and 54. What does that coin tell us about what that port must have looked like? We can see that there is a large statue in the upper center. There is a river god reclining below, probably the Tiber himself, to locate this port, and also a series of boats in the center. But most important again are the curving breakwaters, which you can see are made up of a series of columns; they look like colonnades, one on either side, curving colonnades. This plan down here shows us the likely plan of the Claudian harbor, roughly circular, again with breakwaters on either side, with columns on either side. This area was added to by the emperor Trajan, in the early second century A.D. He added a five-sided port as well, and you can see that here, in this plan as well. But think that away for now. All that would've been there was Claudius' port with the curving breakwaters.



This is a painting of both of those ports, that's on the wall in the Vatican. I've walked by it many times and only recently really noticed it and took a picture of it, and I think it'll be helpful to you today because it gives you a sense of what this port looked like in antiquity. We see the later port of Trajan over here. But again think that away for now and concentrate on the curving breakwaters of Claudius' port. You see here this colossal statue, possibly of Neptune, over here, a lighthouse, over here, and the boats in the center of this. But most important for us again are those curving breakwaters and the fact that they were made up of columns. The columns are all that survive today, and what a set of columns they are.



I show a detail of some of them to you here. And you should be struck by these columns, because these are columns unlike any other columns that we have seen in the course of this semester. If you look at these columns very carefully, you will see that the capitals on the top, which are very severe--they're not exactly the Doric order but they resemble the Doric order--very severe, and they are finished; you can identify them as capitals. And the bases, I'll show you a view of the bases in a moment, the bases, as we'll also see, are also finished with very nice moldings down below. But in between the bases and the capitals, we see something again that we've never seen before, and that is a series of drums, of column drums, piled one on top of another. But those drums are not finished, or they're left in a rough state -- one or the other. They have either been deliberately left in a rough or rusticated state, or they were unfinished.



Why might they have been unfinished? They might have been unfinished because the project was late, they were rushing it, they wanted to get it done, they needed to use the harbor, and so they said, "Look, to save time just put those columns up the way they are and don't bother finishing the drums of the column." Or one could argue that it might have had to do with expense, that it was getting too expensive, and that they decided not to finish the drums for that reason. Or it might have been deliberate, or it might have been deliberate: the idea to leave those drums rough, to make them look rusticated.



I'm going to make a case today that it's the last, that this was a deliberate move on Claudius and his architects. And one of the main reasons I can make that--if this is all we had, if we had only this port of Claudius, only these columns in this style, it would be very difficult to make the case. But as we're going to see, when we move from this to that great gate, or the Porta Maggiore, which was put up under Claudius, and then not today but next time, to a building that was put up in Claudius' honor after his death, we will see that all three of those have these rusticated columns or piers in common, which suggests to us--it suggests to me for sure--that these are--that leaving them in this rusticated state was deliberate on the part of the patron and his architects. And I'm also going to suggest that it had to do with Claudius' peculiar personality, and especially his interest in antiquarianism, in the past, in the history of Rome, and the history of the Etruscans, and so on.



Here's another detail of one of the columns over here, where you can see the rough drum, and then down below the base on which that sits, a molded base, very carefully molded. The architects, the designers, the artisans could finish these columns perfectly well if they chose to. They did it on the base, they did it in the capitals, but not in between. Here's another one where you can see a series of columns engaged into a wall, and again you can see the rough or rusticated drums. Then down below the molded and finished bases. So this difference between what we call finished masonry or dressed--d-r-e-s-s-e-d--dressed masonry, or rusticated masonry: masonry that is deliberately left rough.



Again, in order to underscore this point, I want to turn now to the great gate or the Porta Maggiore in Rome, also built by Claudius between 41 and 54 A.D. You already know its location, near the Tomb of Eurysaces, near the Underground Basilica that we also discussed today. And I had mentioned to you already that the purpose of this gate was to serve as a crossing point for two aqueducts: aqueducts that had been begun earlier, were worked on by Caligula, and then completed by Claudius. And there were two of them that crossed at this very point, and they needed something to mask that crossing, and so they built this great gate, the Porta Maggiore.



If you look at this general view of the Porta Maggiore, you will see much of what I have already described. It has two open archways. The uppermost part, which is the attic, which has an inscription--it's a three-tiered attic, as you can see, and if you look carefully you will see it has an extensive inscription, making reference to Claudius and to the aqueducts and so on. Down below we see a series of smaller arcuations, surrounded by columns on either side, supporting pediments above. If you look closely you can see that the pediments are finished, the pediments are finished, the lintels are finished, the capitals are finished, but the blocks of the column and the blocks of the rest of the structure are left in a rusticated state. They are not finished, and we see that very stark difference between the rusticated masonry and the finished masonry: the smooth masonry, the dressed masonry and the rough masonry in this structure. This gate, by the way, is made out of travertine--travertine cut stone construction.



Here's another view that I think shows you better the way in which this gate masks the crossing of those two aqueducts. You can see two channels there, and one would have had pipes running through it one way and the other would have had pipes running through it the other way, and that's how they crossed in antiquity. And I'll show you a model that may make that even clearer in a moment. You can also see the location of the Tomb of the baker Eurysaces right next to the so-called Porta Maggiore.



Here's the model that I showed you when we looked at the Tomb of Eurysaces, the way in which the Praenestina and the Labicana come into Rome and converge at the façade of that tomb. Here you see the great gate or Porta Maggiore behind it. And this is the best illustration I can give of the way in which those two, the pipes of the two aqueducts, cross behind the attic of the gate, which is one of the reasons it had to be as tall as it did, and one of the reasons it had to have tiers was in order--because it was separated behind. You can see that very well here, as well as the rusticated, the contrast between the rusticated masonry and the finished masonry of this great gate.



This combination of the two is a very mannered thing to do, and it's interesting that later Renaissance architects in Italy--and for those of you who are aficionados of the Renaissance, you may know the work of an architect by the name of Giulio Romano who created the famous Palazzo del Te in Mantua. And I show you a detail of the Palazzo del Te, just to make the point, the more general point--you don't have to worry about Giulio--but just to make the general point that these Renaissance architects, like Giulio Romano, looked back to buildings like the Porta Maggiore in Rome when they also conceived of buildings in which they contrasted rusticated masonry with smooth masonry, as you can also see so well.



And here are two last details of the Porta Maggiore, and I think these show you, almost more than anything else I have thus far, this incredible contrast between the finished and the unfinished masonry, between the smooth and the rough. And here you see, you can see a detail of the pediment, of the smoothness of that; of the lintel down below; of the capital, which is completely finished; and then even of the uppermost part of the column. And this is a particularly interesting detail, I think, because it gives me the sense, as I look at it, that what the patron and architects are trying to do is give us a sense that the column actually lives inside the rusticated drums. I get the sense as I look at this that this finished column is just--is very anxious to bust out of the rusticated masonry in which it is confined; it's very anxious to emerge from that rusticated masonry.



And I can't help but think of the Renaissance again, and especially of Michelangelo. For any of who've seen his slaves in the Accademia in Florence, the slaves that seem to--he took these big blocks of Carrara marble, and he represents the slaves as if they are still immersed in that marble, but trying to break free from that marble, as if these images of human beings were somehow located inside that marble and just waiting for the genius Michelangelo to free them from that marble. It's the same sense that I get here when I look at this, and it makes me think again that a very intelligent, a very refined mind is behind sorting out this kind of thing, and conceiving of something of this nature. And given the education and the bent of Claudius, he is just the kind of man who might have done that. And I think we need to see the architecture of Claudius, this rusticated architecture of Claudius, which is contrasted to the smooth and finished architecture, at the same time, as something that really is reflective of the peculiar personality of this man.



I think it's also important to say though that this kind of architecture, at this time, is very old-fashioned. The whole idea of using cut stone travertine construction, after what we've seen is going on in concrete construction, is a very old-fashioned thing to do, and again shows us a man who is looking to the past, who's looking to the history of Rome, to the history of the Etruscans, perhaps rather than to the present. But, on the positive side, one could also say that what he is doing here, he is using stone construction, but he is using it in a very different way, and indeed an almost anti-classical way, to the way in which Augustus used it. Think of Augustus' Ara Pacis. Think of Augustus' Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus in Rome. Both of those marble buildings, in that case Luna or Carrara marble, based on ancient Greek prototypes. This is also stone architecture, and in that sense again old-fashioned, but it's travertine, not marble. But it is anti-classical in its use of this rusticated, as well as smooth masonry. So I do want you to ponder this architecture of Claudius and think for yourselves about whether you think again it is due, the form that it takes is due to the very interesting and unusual personality of this one man.



From Claudius, I want to turn to the notorious Nero, and his amazing architectural legacy. And you see a portrait of Nero here, on the right-hand side of the screen, and a coin with his mother on the left. The mother of Nero was Agrippina the Younger. Agrippina the Younger was the last wife of Claudius, and it was rumored that Agrippina the Younger murdered Claudius with a bowl of poisoned mushrooms. We don't know if that's true or not, it may be just rumor mongering. But it's perfectly conceivable because she certainly had a motive, and that is she thought she would have more power if her teenage son--because he was only about 17-years-old at the time--was on the throne of Rome, instead of her older husband. And this coin that you see on the left-hand side of the screen, of the young Nero and Agrippina I think says it all; I mean, mother and son almost nose to nose. This gives real meaning to being 'in your face'; as you can see here, Agrippina is certainly in the face of Nero on this coin. And she was with regard to his life, dominating him in the very early years of his reign.



Nero was born in A.D. 37. He was emperor between 54 and 68. At his death, his murder--he was forced to commit suicide actually in 68--he suffered a damnatio memoriae, which was a condemnation by the Senate of him, a damnation of his memory; and an attempt to destroy his portraits, and also his architectural monuments, followed that damnatio memoriae. Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors. He was the adoptive son of Claudius, and as I've already mentioned the real son of Claudius' last wife, Agrippina the Elder [correction: Younger]. I mentioned already that Agrippina--or I gave you the sense--that Agrippina was a quite aggressive woman who aggravated Claudius and Nero both. We talked about the poisoned mushroom stories, and the fact that when her son became emperor, she received, at least for a while, enhanced power in Rome.



But Nero eventually paid his mother back by having her murdered in A.D. 59. He also got rid of his wife Octavia, a beautiful young girl whom he had murdered in 62. So by the age of 25, Nero had gotten rid of the women, the two women, who had dominated his youth, and his much-touted madness--he was not unlike Caligula in some of the wild things that he did--his much-touted madness began to appear. That said, despite his madness, he was absolutely adored by the populace. It was a great show to watch Nero, and people liked seeing what he would do next. He was adored by the populace. He was however hated by the aristocracy and in 68, he was hunted down by his enemies and he was forced to commit suicide.



I would call Nero a patron of architecture extraordinaire. His contribution to the development of Roman architecture is indeed extraordinary. He had a passion for the arts, which undoubtedly led to his devotion to building. He wrote and he sang poems. Nero was a musician. He collected Greek works of art. He traveled to Greece to participate in the Olympics. Whenever he did that, they were always fixed in his favor. When he traveled around Greece and Asia Minor, he stole--if he saw a work of art he liked, he stole it, and he brought it back to Rome to display. He interwove his life with his art, in the same manner as Claudius did. He took advantage of that very famous fire in Rome, which took place in 64 A.D., to--legend has it that he fiddled while Rome burned. He wasn't fiddling actually but he was participating in some sort of musical performance; we know that. And after the fire raged through the city and caused incredible havoc and great destruction, what Nero did was instead of rebuilding the land for the people of Rome, he just expropriated 300 to 350 acres of prime real estate in downtown Rome, and he used it to build his own villa, his own palace, in the center of Rome, the famous Domus Aurea or Golden House, because it had a gilded façade. Nero's architecture was intimately bound up with the vicissitudes of his life and his distinctive, if not warped, personality, as we shall see.



Nero built two palaces in Rome, and I'd like to begin with the one--I'd like to deal with those in consecutive order. The first of these, as you can see from the Monument List, is the so-called Domus Transitoria--the less well-known one and less well-preserved one--the Domus Transitoria in Rome that was built sometime before the fire, before A.D. 64, because it was very significantly destroyed in that fire of A.D. 64. I'm showing you a Google Earth image of the part of Rome in which this building found itself. We are looking down--we've seen this one before--we are looking down at the Roman Forum, the Colosseum in the uppermost part there, the Palatine Hill over here. And if we follow the Roman Forum toward the Colosseum and toward the later Arch of Constantine, we will see that there is a spur hill over, and that spur hill is located between the Palatine Hill and one of Rome's other hills, the Esquiline--E-s-q-u-i-l-i-n-e--the Esquiline Hill.



Nero's dream was to link the buildings that were going up on the Palatine. We've already talked about the Imperial Palace, begun by Tiberius, continued by Caligula. Claudius had no interest in that. But then Nero returns to it, and he's continuing to build this palace on the Palatine. But his dream is to link that with property that he also owns on the Esquiline Hill, and to make one truly grandiose palace that links those two hills, across a spur hill called the Velia, V-e-l-i-a, which is in this uppermost part of the Roman Forum, closest to the Colosseum. That was his dream, and he began to try to realize it prior to 64 A.D. The building is called the Domus Transitoria because it served as a point of transit between those two hills, between the Palatine and the Esquiline Hills. Again, because it was so seriously destroyed in fire, and also because it was deliberately destroyed by later emperors who were following the damnation, the damnatio memoriae, the damnation of Nero's memory, and felt that it was their right, in a sense, to destroy his buildings. So those two things together, deliberate destruction plus the fire, essentially destroyed most of the Domus Transitoria. But a couple of sections are preserved underground, and they're very important for us to look at because they give us insight into the later Golden House or Domus Aurea.



I want to show you the two sections that are still preserved in restored views that you will find in your textbook, in Ward-Perkins. One of these is located beneath the--while this is still on the screen, if you look at the Palatine Palace here, just a little bit up beyond where my finger is, there is the dining hall of the later first century A.D. palace that we'll look at soon, next week. You see it there. And one of the buildings, a fountain of Nero's Domus Transitoria, is located under that. And then over here, this temple that you see right close to the Colosseum, is a later Hadrianic Temple of Venus and Roma. The domed room that I'm going to show you, is under that. So both of these are underground, beneath later structures.



This is a restored view from Ward-Perkins of the fountain, the fountain court of Nero's Domus Transitoria, and we see a number of important features. We see an open court with a pool, with columns around it. On the northern wall over here, we see the fountain itself. We see that what the architects have done is create, using a niche, a place in that niche, a series of other niches, that served as the location of the actual water from which the fountain emerged, and the water would cascade over this wall down here, and then end up in a long basin in front of it. The wall is what's most interesting. If you look at it, you will see that it is essentially scalloped, with columns in the front and then additional columns in the receding bays, creating a kind of in-and-out effect, very similar to theater architecture, and I show you a restored view of a typical theater, of earlier date, just to give you a sense of what this is based on. You can also see that opening up off this central court, screened by columns, are barrel-vaulted rooms on either side. These were used as special dining areas; so special dining areas with beautiful views out onto this fountain court on either side.



And then this restored view also gives you a sense that the pavements were variegated, were done in different designs. And we know that these pavements were made out of marble and that the walls were revetted with marble. This isn't the faux marble of the First Style, this is real marble, and it's our first example in Rome of a room that was revetted with marble, brought from all parts of the world: marble brought from Africa, marble brought from Egypt, marble brought from Asia Minor and also from Greece, in various colors, to decorate the fountain court of Nero's Domus Transitoria.



The other room, and perhaps the more important of the two, is the domed room--definitely more important of the two--the domed room in the Domus Transitoria of Nero. And you see a restored view of it here. What are we dealing with? We are dealing with a structure that is clearly based on the thermal bath at Baia and the frigidaria of Pompeii. It is a concrete structure. It looks as if it's round. In fact, you can see a circle inscribed in the pavement, down here below. The structure is made out of concrete. It has a dome and an oculus. But even though it is inscribed in a circle, if you look carefully at the walls, you will see that although they are curved--they follow the curvature of the circle--there are eight sides to this wall. So the architect is starting to explore the idea of an octagon. This is not an octagon--it's a circle inscribed in an octagon, in a sense--but it is an exploration into an eight-sided form, that we're going to see is very, very important for a later development in the Golden House of Nero.



Also what we see here that's very interesting, that's a further development of the frigidarium and thermal bath idea, is instead of this circular structure and an octagon ending with these radiating apses, the four radiating apses that we saw at Baia, for example, we see that they extend into corridors on either side, which expands the space in a way that we have not seen before. You see, they don't end on either side with these apses with walls, they expand into these long corridors, as you can see, creating a kind of cross shape, and certainly adding to the interesting spatial relationships and spatial possibilities, and the use again of vista and panorama, as we've seen. We see here also, on either side here, a series of columns with metal grills on top: so wonderful views through those columns to what lies beyond. And then on this side, a small pool that had white marble and then colored marbles around that.



So you have to imagine again the overall appearance of this in antiquity, when light would have streamed through the dome of the central space, onto the walls that probably had mosaic on them, through the grills and the columns, onto the water of the white pool here, which was also surrounded with variegated marbles -- these same marbles brought from all over the world. The view must have been quite spectacular. This is certainly again a form of ostentatious palatial architecture that Augustus eschewed, but was becoming of increasing interest to the likes of Tiberius, Caligula, and ultimately Nero. And again, just to make the same point again, we can trace this back to the experiments of the frigidaria at Pompeii: that's the Stabian Baths too, the thermal bath, the Temple of Mercury at Baia. But look at the difference that it makes when you extend those apses into corridors, creating a much freer spatial situation and adding to the vista and panorama idea that has been so popular, as we've long seen, with the Romans.



In the time that remains, I want to turn to Nero's most important architectural commission, and I can't over-emphasize the significance of this structure that I'm going to show you now, the so-called Domus Aurea or the Golden House of Nero, again because of its gilded façade. We've already talked about the fire that raged through Rome in 64, and that when that fire, when the smoke from that fire died down, that Nero expropriated 300 to 350 acres in prime downtown Rome, for his own use, for a private palace, the so-called Golden House. We see a site plan here, also from Ward-Perkins, where you can get a sense, not only of the extent of this--look how it covers ground from the Circus Maximus, all the way across, to the Esquiline Hill, as you can see so well here. So the Palatine Hill, the Esquiline Hill, and also even the Caelian Hill over here. He dug an artificial -- or he had his architects dig an artificial lake in the center of this, as you can see here.



And the Golden House was very extensive. There's only one part of it that remains today, under the--or as part of the Esquiline Hill in Rome, and we therefore call it the Esquiline Wing of the Domus Aurea of Nero. This palace had an incredible set of gimmicks, gimmicks that were so noteworthy that the names of the architects have come down to us, the architect and engineer who are responsible for this. And I think it is largely they came down to us largely because of these incredible gimmicks that they created for this structure. Their names were Severus and Celer; Severus and Celer. And I believe I have put their names on the Monument List for you. Yes I have, underneath the plan of the Esquiline Wing. So Severus and Celer; their names suggest to us that they were Roman architects, in fact.



And these gimmicks included a 125-foot statue of Nero himself, a colossal stature--or the Colossus, as it is designated here--a colossal statue of Nero assimilated to the sun god Sol, S-o-l, the sun god Sol, and it was done in bronze and it was done by a famous artist, whose name we also know, Zenodorus--I've also put his name on the Monument List for you--Zenodorus, who was a very famous bronze caster. So Zenodorus' Colossus, the gilded façade. And what were some of the gimmicks that Severus and Celer added to this palace? When you ate in the dining hall, if you were invited as a special guest to eat with Nero, while you were eating the coffered ceilings of one of the dining rooms would drop on you all kinds of wonderful fragrances and flower petals, while you ate. There was also a bath that gave you a choice of sea water and salt water and water from the sulfur springs of Tivoli; you had your choice, if you were bathing at Nero's Domus Aurea. And most spectacularly of all, and I think what Severus and Celer had particular fame for, was they created a banqueting room that had a revolving ceiling, supposedly, a ceiling that revolved with the heavenly bodies. So an incredible array of gimmicks, as I said before, in this extraordinary palace, but all of them clearly possible vis-à-vis architecture at this time.



I'm showing you here a plan of the Esquiline Wing. This is the one part of the palace that survives today. We'll talk about what happened to this palace in a later lecture, but you can see it here. Dozens and dozens of rooms around a five-sided court, as you can see at this location. And then here, what is the so-called octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea, which is a remarkable room. And I think it's fair to say the single most important room that I will have shown you thus far this semester is the octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea. And you see it here. You can see the plan of the octagon, and then the radiating spaces out from it.



I'll return to that plan in just a moment. Just to mention though, by using Google Earth again, I can show you the particular location of the Esquiline Wing on the Esquiline Hill today. What happened to it eventually--and again I'm not going to go into the details now but I will in the future--after Nero's damnatio memoriae, some of this was destroyed and much of it was incorporated into later buildings. Eventually a bath of the emperor Trajan ended up on this site, and the emperor covered over what remained of Nero's Domus Aurea, what hadn't been razed to the ground, and incorporated some of it into his later bath.



And, in fact, this hemicycle of Trajan's Baths is actually the entranceway today of the Domus Aurea. You can see it right here, and you can see that the other remains of both Trajan's Baths and of the Domus Aurea have been incorporated into a modern garden, a very attractive garden where you can wander and see some of the remains of both. And actually what you see here--it just shows how amazing Google Earth is--this circle that you see here is actually--it has a grate on top today--but it is actually the oculus of Nero's octagonal room, which is down below, which is located underground. So if you visit the Domus Aurea, which is, as you can see, right near the Colosseum, you go into the entranceway through the hemicycle of Trajan's later baths, and you find yourself in a series of corridors.



We've talked about these corridors before, because we talked about the paintings that Fabullus did, for Nero's Domus Aurea; first the Third Style paintings and then the Fourth Style paintings. And you'll remember that the Domus Aurea was described as Fabullus' prison, because there were so many rooms and corridors that it would take a whole lifetime to paint them. And you see some of those here: barrel vaulted corridors, stuccoed over, and then painted in the Third and Fourth styles. Another gimmick that you see throughout the Domus Aurea are a series of bridges that are built to carry water from one part of the palace to another.



Another view here showing one of the corridors, and what you see here is something that we have not discussed yet, but is the wave of the future, and that is concrete faced with brick. After the fire there was realization--the fire of 64--there was realization that stone burned too easily, it was not an effective facing any longer, and that they needed to come up with something else. Brick worked better with fire. So the decision was taken to move--and this is not the tile brick in Pompeii, this is real brick--and the decision was taken to begin to use brick-faced construction for these buildings. At this time it was stuccoed over, as you can see here: stucco, and then painted on top. So you wouldn't have actually seen the brick in antiquity, but we'll see it was not long until the Romans recognized that brick was a very attractive material in its own right, and began to leave it exposed. But we're not there yet. The paintings, the Fourth Style paintings of Fabullus. You'll remember this one that we've already looked at, with the reintroduction of architectural fragments and the architectural cages in the Domus Aurea.



This is the single--as I've already said--the single most remarkable and important room that I've shown you thus far this semester, the octagonal room in Nero's Domus Aurea. You see this cross-section plan, an axonometric view from Ward-Perkins here. And you can get a very good sense of this. This is truly an octagonal room. The experiment in the domed room, where they had inscribed a circle into an octagon, gave them the idea that they were going to try to make an actual octagonal room out of concrete, and they succeed here. You can see the eight

Professor Kleiner features the tumultuous year of 68-69 when Rome had four competing emperors. Vespasian emerged the victor, founded the Flavian dynasty, and was succeeded by his sons, Titus and Domitian. The Flavians were especially adept at using architecture to shape public policy. Professor Kleiner demonstrates that Vespasian linked himself with the divine Claudius by completing the Claudianum and distanced himself from Nero by razing the Domus Aurea to the ground and filling in the palace's artificial lake. In that location, Vespasian built the Flavian Amphitheater, nicknamed the Colosseum, thereby returning to the people land earlier stolen by Nero. Professor Kleiner discusses the technical and aesthetic features of the Colosseum at length, and surveys Vespasian's Forum Pacis and Titus' Temple to Divine Vespasian. The lecture concludes with the Baths of Titus, Rome's first preserved example of the so-called "imperial bath type" because of its grand scale, axiality, and symmetry.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 16-17 (historical background), 78-80 (Temple of Vespasian); 153-155 (Templum Pacis), 268-269 (Baths of Titus), 276-281 (Colosseum), 312-313 (Temple of Divine Claudius)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 63-73

Transcript



February 19, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everyone. We are finally there. We are finally at the Colosseum, the very icon of Rome. And because I think of the Colosseum as the very icon of Rome, I've called today's lecture "The Creation of an Icon: The Colosseum and Contemporary Architecture in Rome." But before we discuss the Colosseum, I want to say a few words, a few more words, about Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors. And I show you a portrait of Nero here, ensconced in his Domus Aurea, with the Fourth Style wall of Fabullus behind him. And I wanted to just say, and bring your attention to the fact, that it really is quite amazing that we have the names of so many of Nero's artists and architects. And that can only attest to the fact that he must have gathered around him truly the greatest artists of the day, artists whose accomplishments were so superb that their names had been recorded for posterity at a time when very few artists and architects names are recorded.



And I just want to remind you of that group. Think, of course, of the painter of Nero, the man who was responsible for painting the Third Style walls of Nero's Domus Aurea, Fabullus himself, and who also appears to have been the innovator of the Fourth Style of Roman wall painting. There was also Zenodorus, who was the most famous bronze caster of his day, a Greek artist of great renown, whom Nero hired to make his colossal statue, the colossal statue 125 feet tall, out of bronze, that depicted Nero in the guise of the sun god Sol, and a statue that was referred to as "The Colossus." And lastly, but not least by any stretch of the imagination, were the two architects of Nero, Severus and Celer--Roman architects we believe--Severus and Celer, who were responsible for the Domus Aurea itself, for all the architectural innovations and experimentations at the Domus Aurea. And it was they who we believe were the creators of the remarkable octagonal room: as I mentioned last time, probably the most extraordinary room we've seen thus far this semester, and one that's going to have lasting impact on later Roman buildings and complexes. So the octagonal room, and also I mentioned to you other things in the villa, including a banqueting hall with a revolving ceiling. So these men, also great architectural innovators.



So when Nero is forced to commit suicide in 68, we have to ask ourselves, what happened to those artists? What happened to those innovations after Nero was discredited? And I mentioned also last time that when Nero committed suicide, when he was discredited, he received an official damnatio memoriae from the Senate, a damnation of his memory, which meant that his portraits could be, and were encouraged to be, destroyed, and the same with his buildings. So what is going to happen to the evolution of Roman architecture when one of its greatest patrons, someone who encouraged the greatest architects and artists of the day, when he and his memory are annihilated and his buildings are destroyed? What is going to happen to architectural innovation?



That's the main question we need to ask ourselves today, as we look at the buildings that were commissioned by his successors, by members of the Flavian dynasty--Vespasian, Titus and ultimately Domitian. We'll talk about Vespasian today, a bit on Titus, and then more on Titus and Domitian on Tuesday. What happens to these innovations when they begin to take over and when they begin to commission buildings? And we're going to see it's mixed. We're going to see a certain move back toward a conservative vision, but we're also going to see that Nero's innovations live on, and that's the most exciting piece of this particular Flavian puzzle, as we shall see.



So we see again Nero here. And when Nero died in 68 A.D., what happened was not only that he received a damnatio memoriae, but there were no other Julio-Claudians to succeed him, and Rome and the Empire were plunged, once again, into a very serious civil war, a civil war that was as profoundly troubling as the civil war that had followed Caesar's death -- Caesars death, as you know, in 44 B.C. And what emerged after this civil war, or during this civil war, was one of the most complicated and difficult years in Rome's history, the year 68 to 69, during which Rome had four emperors, not co-emperors, as Rome was to have much later in its history, but competing emperors, in very quick succession, some of them holding onto power for only a few months. These men were Galba, G-a-l-b-a, whose portrait you see on a coin in the upper left; Galba who becomes emperor right after Nero's death. And you can see him in a no-nonsense, realistic portrait on that coin in the upper left. He is succeeded very soon after by a man by the name of Otho, O-t-h-o. You see him on the gold coin on the right. Otho who saw Nero as a soul mate and had himself rendered very much with a Neronian hairstyle, as you can see. And then third, a man by the name of Vitellius, V-i-t-e-l-l-i-u-s, Vitellius who seems to have had more chins than any other emperor in the history of Rome, as you can see in this wonderful portrait now in Copenhagen.



And then ultimately Vespasian, V-e-s-p-a-s-i-a-n, Vespasian, who was the only one of these four who was able to hold onto power long enough to create a new dynasty: a new dynasty that he called after his family name--Flavius was his family name--the so-called Flavian dynasty. And fortune was on his side, because he had two sons to succeed him, Titus and Domitian; and because he had two sons to succeed him, he was able to create a quite successful dynasty, as we shall see, that had lasting power. So this is our second main imperial dynasty, the Flavian dynasty, as opposed to the Augustan and Julio-Claudian dynasty.



Now Vespasian came to power in a civil war, and like Augustus before him, he recognized that although coming to power in a civil war could give you the authority that you needed to govern, it didn't give you the legitimacy. It was very important in the eyes of the Romans to have had an important foreign victory, to give your dynasty legitimacy. Augustus came to power after his civil war with Mark Antony, but he looked to his victory over the Parthians, in the eastern part of the Empire, to give his reign legitimacy. Vespasian does the same thing. He comes to power in a civil war. He beats back other Romans. So he has to look elsewhere for legitimacy, and he also looks east.



He looks specifically to Judea, and he sends his son in, his son Titus in, to do war against Jerusalem, and Titus was victorious in the early 70s A.D., in this very important Jewish War, that I'll have more to say about later today and also especially on Tuesday. So Vespasian also is a--with his son Titus--is a victor in a foreign war, and that becomes the basis of their right to rule, and we'll see references to those Jewish Wars, in their art, even in our conversation today. I also want to say with regard to Vespasian, not only was he a great military strategist, but he also seems to have been an extremely shrewd politician, someone who recognized that you could use architecture in the service of ideology--and that's in fact what we're going to see him doing today--and he starts this from the very beginning of his reign.



I go back here to--and we'll look at it a number of times today; it really is going to loom large in today's discussion--the site plan of Nero's Domus Aurea that we looked at last time. And you'll remember the location of the Golden House of Nero, up on the Esquiline Hill, the only part of it that still survives, the so-called Esquiline Wing, which you can see there. And here, the great artificial lake. The Colossus by Zenodorus, located over there. And you can see the way those are deployed in that 300 to 350 acres of area that Nero had his architects build up.



Vespasian, as he thinks about how to move forward, with architecture and to begin to commission buildings, the first thing that strikes him, very wisely, is he does not want to associate himself with Nero; in fact, he wants to disassociate himself with Nero, who has now been damned. But he looks back at the Julio-Claudians and he recognizes that there is some merit in linking himself with them, and quite specifically with Claudius, who was the best--after, in addition to Augustus--was the best of the more recent lot, and Claudius was made into a god at his death. So he looks to Claudius, and he notices the fact that there is a Temple of Claudius that was begun on this very property by Claudius' wife, his last wife, Agrippina the Younger--the woman with the poisoned mushrooms--Agrippina the Younger, who also, you'll recall, was the mother of Nero.



And Agrippina the Younger had begun, after Claudius' death and divinization, a temple in honor of Claudius. Nero, who had no particular affection for his mother, and as you'll remember had her murdered, decided that he didn't want any part of her building project either, and put a stop to it; especially when he decided that he had other plans for this particular area of Rome, namely to build his pleasure palace. So Nero stops construction--he doesn't destroy the building but he stops construction on it--and just leaves it as it is. The light bulb goes on for Vespasian, and Vespasian says to himself: "The best way that I can use architecture to make a connection, to make a link between myself and the Julio-Claudians, especially Claudius, is to finish the Temple of Claudius that Agrippina began." And that's exactly what he sets out to do, and he does this at the very beginning of his reign. We give a date of A.D. 70 to the so-called Temple of Divine Claudius, or as it is often referred to, the Claudianum in Rome, and you see again the location of that Claudianum right here.



Now all that survives of this building today is its platform, and I'm going to show you some details of that platform in a moment: a tall, great platform, like the platforms of the sanctuaries that we looked at earlier this semester, upon which the temple rested. All that survives is part of that platform. And what I show you first here is a restored view that comes from the Ward-Perkins textbook, where you can get a very good sense of what this platform looked like. It was a two-storied platform, as I think you can see very well. It had barrel-vaulted chambers. It was made out of concrete; barrel-vaulted chambers made out of concrete. And then, on the front, there were doorways at the bottom and windows on the second tier. And the facing, the facing for the concrete was travertine, cut stone travertine, which should immediately ring a bell, because you'll remember that it was cut stone travertine that was also used for Claudius' harbor at Portus, and also for the Porta Maggiore in Rome.



And you'll remember also the intriguing combination of rusticated masonry and smooth masonry for those two Claudian buildings. The same is true here. So when Agrippina made a decision to put up a building honoring her husband, after his death, a temple that would be to him as a divus, she turns back to the style that he himself seems to have favored, this combination of rusticated and finished masonry, to use for that building. And I think this underscores the point that I made last time. This choice of style, of this rusticated masonry style, is not something that happened by happenstance. It is likely because of Claudius' own predilection as a patron, so that when Agrippina decided how it would be best to honor him architecturally, she wanted to honor him in the style that he himself liked. So she uses again this combination of rusticated and finished masonry.



I can show you again some preserved sections of the podium of the Temple of Divine Claudius that will make this even clearer. Before I do--and you see it on the right-hand side of the screen--just to remind you, at the left, of some of the great podia that we looked at earlier this semester. And since the exam is coming up, there's no time like the present to see if you know your stuff. Can anyone identify this podium here on the left-hand side of the screen?



Student: Is that the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur?



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Excellent. The Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina; that's the podium. And you'll remember what was characteristic of it is that it was made out of concrete. It was faced with opus incertum. It had travertine at the corners and over the arches, and it had lateral arches, as well as others, to allow the free flow of space. So this idea of these great concrete podiums that served as the base for sanctuaries, it's the same idea here. We see again a podium that also has arches, as you can see, and then on the front of those arches, in this case, great pilasters. And if you look at those pilasters very carefully--and again it's done out of travertine in this case--when you look at those very carefully, you see something very interesting here, that makes these slightly different from the other two that we saw.



Because you can see that the capital is finished; you can see the upper part of the pilaster; and then if you look very--and then below that, of course, you see these rusticated blocks. But if you look at the--in between each of those rusticated blocks, very carefully--and I'll show you a better image in a moment where you can see this even more clearly--you will see that part of the pilaster emerges in between each of those rusticated blocks, giving us even more the sense that that finished pilaster is somehow inside the rusticated blocks, waiting to emerge, in a very interesting way.



And we could psychoanalyze Claudius. We've talked about his past and how he was not--he was ignored as a child, and he was shunted aside because he stammered and so on. One could go very far and say that's Claudius waiting inside to emerge sometime; it's like a cocoon that allows the butterfly to emerge at some point later in life. We could try that. I don't know whether you would buy that. But it's one way in which one can think about this sort of thing. But clearly, whatever it meant, if it was just to point to his antiquarian interest, his interest in more old-fashioned stone construction at this particular point, it does seem to have something to do with the particular personality of this particular patron.



Here's another--here's just comparing the podium of the Claudianum to the Porta Maggiore in Rome, just to remind you of the rusticated columns there, the rusticated drums of these engaged columns, and then at the uppermost part the way in which the upper part of the column and the capital are dressed smooth and seem to emerge. And that's when I first made that point about the likelihood that the column--that we're supposed to read this as the column completed inside, just waiting to break free; and we see the same thing, but a further elaboration of that here.



And I think you can see that much better in this particular detail, where you can again see the entire pilaster behind the rusticated masonry. You see the finished capital, the finished entablature up above, and then you can make out the entire pilaster all the way down to the base, and then superimposed, or so it seems--it's not really superimposed, it's just carved in this way--but in between those, these rusticated blocks. Again giving me, at least, the sense that the pilaster is done inside, it's just waiting somehow for its debut out of this travertine block.



Now what about the rest of the complex? We don't know exactly, but we have some general sense that it is quite likely that it was similar to the sanctuaries that we looked at earlier, the Sanctuary of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina, and Hercules at Tivoli. And, in fact, we do have some fragments of this, on what is called the Marble Plan of Rome. I've referred to that before, the so-called Forma Urbis--Forma Urbis, F-o-r-m-a, new word, U-r-b-i-s, the Forma Urbis--which was a marble plan of Rome, that was made in the early third century A.D., which was housed in a building that I'm going to show you later today. And there are fragments of this structure there that give us a sense of what it looked like in antiquity.



So we would've had the podium. It's mis-restored here; you have to imagine the two tiers that we just looked at before, not this sort of thing. But those beneath, serving as the podium, or the decoration of the podium, and then above a large rectangular space with a temple, pushed not quite to the edge of the back wall, but toward one of the walls, dominating the space in front of it, as you can see. We don't know exactly what that temple looked like, but it was probably a fairly conventional temple, on the order of so many that we've looked at this semester. What's interesting about this, that's different from the other sanctuaries that we saw, is that in the rectangular space above they seem to have planted a lot of bushes, as you can see here, and that becomes a very popular way of decorating these kinds of complexes in the Flavian period. We'll see another example later today.



The greatest, the most famous building that was put up by Vespasian, in the Flavian period, was the so-called Colosseum, which he began in the year 70 A.D.: so contemporaneous to the construction of the Claudianum. But it wasn't finished until after his death--he died in 79; he was emperor for nine years; died of natural causes--it wasn't completed until his son Titus became emperor, and Titus completed it and dedicated it in the year 80. We see a view of the Colosseum from above, a Google Earth image of the Colosseum, from above. It was a very large amphitheater that could hold 50,000 people. It was made of concrete, as we shall see. And this aerial view is very helpful because it shows its scale, its size. It shows that in Rome today it serves as a kind of giant traffic circle, as you can see here.



The Romans love the Colosseum, because it is an icon of their civilization, but at the same time they hate it, and they're always saying, "Would that we could just get rid of it, so that traffic would be smoother in this part of Rome." And, in fact, there was a scheme a number of years ago now--probably several decades ago by now--there was a Texan who was actually interested in buying the Colosseum and bringing it to Texas [Laughter] to display on his ranch. And fortunately--Italy gave some thought to that, but they decided obviously that they were not going to part with the Colosseum--and fortunately it has stayed intact--and I don't think the Romans would have been too happy about that, at the end of the day, despite the fact that they curse it out on a fairly regular basis.



But we see it here, and it's a useful view because it shows it in conjunction to so many of the other buildings and complexes we've been talking about thus far this semester. We're looking back from it, toward the later Arch of Constantine, that we'll look at, at the very end of the course; the Palatine Hill in the upper left; the Roman Forum beginning over here, with the Temple of Venus and Roma that was done in the second century; we'll talk about that also later. Here the great Via dei Fori Imperiali, designed at the behest of Mussolini. And on the right side, of course, the Imperial Fora, with the Forum of Julius Caesar and the Forum of Augustus that we have also looked at this semester. So here you see it here.



And I'm going to show you once again the site plan of Nero. Because it's important to know--one of the most important things to know about this monument is where it was sited. And where it was sited shows us again how incredibly shrewd Vespasian was when it came to establishing a political agenda, and when it came to trying to court the favor of the public. He decided to raze--I mentioned this before--he razed to the ground Nero's Domus Aurea: destroyed it, destroyed it, despite the fact that it had been done by these great architects, despite the fact that it had revolving ceilings. It would've been a really cool place for him to live himself--think about it--he and his dynasty. But he decided to raze it to the ground, for political reasons, to discredit Nero; and he hoped to gain favor with the populace. And what he did, smartly, was to say, "What I am going to do with this property? I'm going to return this property to the Roman people. I'm going to build on it something that they would really like to have."



So what he does is he fills in the artificial lake, and he uses the area on which the artificial lake was originally located to build the Colosseum; he puts the Colosseum right on the location of the artificial lake. And the message is clear. What did the Roman people want more than anything else? They wanted another--they wanted an amphitheater where they could go, a large amphitheater, where 50,000 of them could pack in and watch animal and gladiatorial combats. There is no better way to gain favor with the Roman populace than to build a building like this. And to build it on top of Nero's pleasurable artificial lake--pleasurable only for himself--was a huge coup on the part of Vespasian. And we see that happening here, and right in proximity to the Temple of Divine Claudius.



Notice the fact also, the location of the Colosseum, very close to the Colossus. The name of the Colosseum was really the Flavian Amphitheater, after the family name Flavius, the Flavian Amphitheater. That's how it was known in antiquity. But it came quickly to be known as the Colosseum, not because of its colossal scale, which is what most people think, but because of the Colossus, because of the statue of Zenodorus that stood nearby. And, by the way, the other thing that Vespasian did was to have the features of Nero erased, on that portrait, and to make them into the more generic features of the sun god Sol himself. So the statue continued to stand, but it was fixed up, it was redone, remade, so that it would look like Sol and not like Nero.



But again the Colosseum takes its name from that. So if you are in any--we used to have a Colosseum here, in New Haven--but if you are, in the future, in any arenas that are called Colosseums, you'll know that that name goes back to the Colossus of Nero, the Colossus of Sol, not to the Colosseum itself, ultimately. Although I think those who named those arenas were obviously thinking about the Colosseum in Rome. So the location of the Colosseum, extremely important, and a political statement on Vespasian's part. And we see this man, this emperor of Rome, Vespasian, very cleverly using architecture to further his own personal and political agenda.



This view, also this plan--a cross-section and axonometric view that all come from Ward-Perkins--are also very helpful in us getting a sense of this building. And I think you can see very quickly that, like all other amphitheaters, it had an oval or an elliptical plan. It was built up with concrete: a series of barrel and annular vaults. And that elliptical plan included essentially radiating barrel vaults that--barrel vaulted ramps and passageways, and a series of annular vaulted corridors that provide lateral circulation and that are buttressed by the thrust of the seating. So it's a scheme that we know already from the Amphitheater at Pompeii. We know it also particularly well from the Theater of Marcellus in Rome. The Theater of Marcellus in Rome was just down the street practically--I'll show you an aerial view later to show you its proximity to the Colosseum; it's not right next to it, but it's within striking distance. And clearly the experiments, the architectural experiments in the Augustan period, at the Theater of Marcellus, were very important in terms of this particular design; it basically follows the same general scheme. The major difference, of course, is that since the Theater of Marcellus was a theater, it was semi-circular in plan, whereas amphitheater architecture is always elliptical in plan, and that is the case also for the Colosseum.



If we look at the--I mentioned that there are annular vaulted corridors. We're looking at the corridor on the first floor of the Colosseum. And you can see very quickly that it is of course made of concrete. How else would you get these annular vaults that you see here? They're very well preserved; they're easy to study. And you can see that those annular vaults rest on great stone piers, these stone piers made out of travertine. Again, you can see that extremely well in this particular view. That's the first floor. On the second floor, however, we see something entirely innovative, and that is the introduction of a new form of vault that we haven't seen before. This is the so-called groin or ribbed vault--spelled exactly as you think it would be, g-r-o-i-n; the groin vault or the ribbed vault. And you get--when you take two barrel vaults and make them intersect, the angles that you get create this kind of groin vault; and I show you a diagram here, which makes that clear, I think, to you.



And then a view of the second story corridors, to show you these actual groin vaults, these ribbed vaults that you see here, which are very interesting and add something, I think, to these structures. And they become very, very popular. After they begin to be used in the Flavian period, they become very popular, and we'll see the proliferation of groin vaults, from this time on. So we talk--I talked at the beginning about what are the innovations of Nero's Domus Aurea continued under the Flavians? Well we know that the architects of Nero did not use groin vaults, but they were very interested in the free flow of space, and that interest in the free flow of space continues here, as does experimentation with concrete, and we see it in the use of these groin vaults on the second story of the Colosseum in Rome.



When you visit the Colosseum in Rome today, you'll note that it does seem quite stripped bare, unfortunately. But it's important for you to be aware of the fact that it too was highly decorated, as so many other Roman buildings. And we do have engravings that were made, engravings and paintings, that were made when the Colosseum was in better condition, and when some of that stucco and painted decoration still existed. And I show you two drawings here that give you some sense of that, and you can see that all the surface was covered with stucco, and then with figural decoration, all of which was painted, both the vaults themselves, as you can see above, and the corridors, all of that very elaborately decorated in ancient Roman times.



This is obviously an exterior view of the Colosseum in Rome. The exterior of the building is actually quite well preserved, and I think as you gaze at it, you certainly are struck by the similarity of the scheme to the scheme of the Theater of Marcellus in Rome. In this case, the Theater of Marcellus appears to have had three stories, only two of which are currently persevered. This had four stories, four tiers, as you can see here. Again, the structure itself is concrete; the facing is travertine. We see these great arches, these great arcades, just as we saw them in the Theater of Marcellus. And then also, just like the scheme of the Theater of Marcellus, columns that are placed in between those arches on the first three stories. The columns in between those arches on the first three stories, just as the Theater of Marcellus, have no structural purpose whatsoever. They do not hold the building up, as they would have in a Greek or Etruscan context. The building is held up by the barrel and annular vaults that are made out of concrete.



So these columns have no structural purpose whatsoever, and they are here essentially as the icing on the cake, as ornamentation or decoration, but ornamentation or decoration that has certain meaning to it: a meaning that certainly conjures up ancient Greece. Because you can see here that they have used all the Greek orders: the Doric order, the Ionic order in the second story, the Corinthian order--all of these are engaged columns--the Corinthian order in the third story, and then in the fourth story we see they used pilasters; these are Corinthian pilasters once again. So Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Corinthian again at the uppermost part; columns that have no structure, that are used here as pure decoration, but decoration that again has an ideological connection.



At the very top you can see the detail of the pilasters. Between them you see some travertine blocks that are brackets that stick out. Those were to support the wooden poles that you'll remember from our conversation about the Amphitheater at Pompeii, supported the awning that was used when there was rain. Two more views of the exterior of the Colosseum, a little bit closer up, where you can see very well here the Doric order in the first story, the travertine facing, the Ionic order in the second story, and then the Corinthian engaged columns here, and the Corinthian pilasters, and then also the brackets, extremely well preserved, on the Colosseum in Rome.



The interior is a different story entirely. It is not as well preserved as the exterior. It is fascinating however to see. And I think you can tell from this particular view of the interior, where, as always, we have so many tourists inside the Colosseum. I think they are very useful because they give you a very good sense of scale, of how truly enormous this building is. They also show you that much of what was once there is no longer there, in the interior of the structure. As we look down on it, we can see the elliptical shape of the arena. We can see the substructures here, all made of concrete. The ones that are below the arena itself were used for the storage of props, but also for the housing of the animals that were brought up for animal combat. There were small and larger cages down here, and I'm going to show you what those looked like in a moment. So that's the location of those, but again not in very good condition today. Even more striking is the fact that although you can see again the concrete substructures for the seats on which the cavea rested, if you look very carefully you will see there's only a single cuneus that is still preserved, with a small number of marble seats. The whole thing was sheathed in marble in antiquity. All of the seats would have been marble. Only that small section is preserved, and I can show you another view where we see the same.



Here we're looking at that one cuneus over here, with that one set of marble seats, the only marble seats that are still preserved in the Colosseum today. "Why is that?" you ask yourselves, and you might ask me. The reason for that is that the Colosseum was used as a marble quarry, practically from the time--not too long after it was built, but certainly in the post-antique period it was used very significantly as a marble quarry. By whom? By the great princes and even by the popes; the popes did not hesitate to plunge [correction: plunder] the Colosseum for the marble that they needed for the buildings that they were putting up around Rome. The Colosseum ended up in some extraordinary buildings. So it was not for naught, but at the same time obviously it changed the face of the interior of the Colosseum forever, as we can see so well here.



Two models of what the substructures would have looked like in the area of the Colosseum where the animals were kept. And they had a system of ramps and pulleys, and they took the animals either up the ramps or by pulley, from these cages. You can see they had metal grills in front of them. Diverse animals, kept down here below and then brought up when needed, through openings in the pavement of the arena. The arena would have been paved with concrete--we have other examples of that elsewhere; I'm going to show you one today--and there would have been holes in that, by which you could bring the animals up to the arena.



This is a restored view of what the Colosseum would have--the interior of the Colosseum would have looked like in antiquity when a performance was--when a gladiatorial performance was taking place. We see that what they did was they covered over the arena with some kind of ancient version of Astroturf. They planted--they put trees that they probably--I don't know, real or fake trees, I'm not sure which; props that took the shape of mountains, as you can see here; and then the gladiatorial--the animal combat would take place against that backdrop. You can also see the seats, the cavea, the wedge-shaped sections of those seats, the cunei; the 50,000 people packed in for this special event. And then at the uppermost part you see the awning, or this particular artist's rendition of the awning. I think it's very amusing that the artist has rendered it like an oculus, which is pretty unlikely that it looked quite like that; but I guess that's a very Roman thing to do, so he did that. But it looks probably in antiquity quite a bit more like the awning that we saw in the painting in Pompeii that represented a characteristic awning for a Roman amphitheater.



The Colosseum, extremely famous in its own day, continued to be famous in antiquity. I show you here a coin, the reverse of a coin of a boy emperor by the name of Gordian III--you see Gordian up there--the reverse of his coin in the early third century A.D., showing the Colosseum. So we certainly know from that, that it was still in good condition and being used in the third century. We see the outside, with its tiers of columns. We see something, an event going on inside. We see people in the seats, and we see those poles that supported the awning here. And, most interestingly, we see the Colossus, which was clearly still standing also in the third century A.D.: the Colossus in which the features have been changed from those of Nero to those of Sol, with the rayed crown. It was very easy to do that because, as I had mentioned, Nero had been shown originally himself as Sol, with the rayed crown. So all they had to do was change the features of the face. They could leave the crown, and that crown clearly still there, in the third century A.D.. But just again as a reminder that the Colosseum gets its name from that colossal statue that stood next door.



And this one last view of the Colosseum. This is a model--which you have on your Monument List--a model that probably gives you as good an idea as any of what the exterior of the building looked like in antiquity. And I use it here to show you two things. One: That we do believe, on the second and third stories, there were statues; statues placed in the niches beneath the arches. And this also shows you very well the way in which the wooden poles rested on the brackets, those wooden poles to serve to support the awning of the structure.



Anything and everything goes on at the Colosseum. When I started going to the Colosseum more years ago than I want to say, the Colosseum was very easy to get into. You popped over there, you could walk in, in a flash; never a problem. It's become one of the greatest tourist sites in Rome. And, in fact, a warning, if you're going to be making your way--I think at least one of you mentioned to me a Spring Break trip--but if you're going to be making your way to the Colosseum anytime soon, or in the future, it's actually not a bad idea to go online; you can now go online and you can get tickets online for places like the Colosseum. You don't need it for most places, but for the Vatican, the Colosseum, the most popular, it's not a bad idea to get tickets in advance, because then you can go on the short line, instead of the line that you're going to have to wait for hours to get in.



But while you're outside, there's always something going on. This also never used to happen, but recently the Romans have gotten smart about realizing that everyone wants a photo op, and so they supply a host of gladiators outside the entranceway. And especially since everyone is on line for so many hours, you might as well have something to do. So they stock the place with modern gladiators, who are more than willing, for a certain number of euros, to pose in your pictures. And you see a young woman here taking her boyfriend or her husband, whomever, a picture of him playing the gladiatorial role with this sword, as you can see. And lots of fun--it's fun just to stand there and watch everybody posing for these extraordinary pictures.



We saw that in the Colosseum the substructures were very poorly preserved. And so I wanted to show you another amphitheater where they are well preserved, so you can get a better sense of what those substructures would have looked like in antiquity. And so I take us, back south, we go down south to Campania once again, to a place called Pozzuoli--and Pozzuoli is very near to Baia, and near to Naples, and near to Pompeii and Herculaneum and so on--a town that has one of the best preserved Roman amphitheaters from the ancient Roman world. It dates to the late first century A.D.



And I show you a view here of the substructures of the amphitheater, the Roman Amphitheater at Pozzuoli. And you can see what I mean: the annular vaulted corridors down below, well preserved, as are the cages in which the animals were kept in antiquity. The grates are gone, but the cages are still there, as is much of the ceiling. And it's actually a fun place to wander through, because the light effects are incredible; the light effects through the openings in that ceiling, that were the openings through which the animals were transported, by ramp or by pulley, up to the arena.



Here's another view where you can also get a great sense of these substructures, of the places where the animals were kept, and also of those openings in the ceiling that allowed them to be brought up above. And you can also notice very well here the fact that the construction--in this case, late first century A.D.--is concrete faced with brick, faced with brick. And we talked about another important part of Nero's architectural revolution was the fact that they began to build buildings that were brick-faced concrete buildings. We talked about the fact that that had to do with the fire, and the decision taken that brick was more fireproof than stone, and they began to use it, and we see it being used here. So another important facet of Nero's architectural revolution that was not lost with the emperor's death.



And here you can see the very well-preserved pavement of the arena, done in concrete, with these openings in it, the same openings that you saw just before, from down below, through which the light came. These are the openings through which props, animals--some of them are very small; some of them are larger--would allow some things to be brought up through them. But you can also see there was a big open area in the center that was also used--covered over, when there was an event--but that was also there in order to allow a freer flow, and allow the attendants to bring the animals up to the top. So again, a very well-preserved pavement of the arena. And you can also see in this view that the seats, the cavea of the Theater [correction: Amphitheater] at Pozzuoli, also extremely well preserved. You can't tell here, but the division into cunei the same. So we look to this amphitheater to give us a better sense of what the interior of the Colosseum would have looked like in ancient Roman times.



We talked about the Temple of Divine Claudius. I remind you of a model of it here again, and the relationship of that Temple of Divine Claudius with the temple, conventional temple, on top of a very tall podium. The fact that that looked back to the architectural experiments, very early on, second, first centuries B.C., at the Sanctuaries of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina, and of Hercules Victor at Tivoli; it was that kind of thing that was being looked back to. And it's interesting to see that it was that same plan, that idea of a great open rectangular space, with a temple as part of it, that was used--and with the temple put along one of the longer ends--that was used by Vespasian for his own forum in Rome, the so-called Forum Pacis; it's sometimes referred to as the Templum Pacis, because we're not actually sure how it was used. We don't think it was actually used as a typical forum with shops and a law court and so on, but may have been used in a different way, and I'll speak to that in a moment. So we don't quite know what to call it, and we call it either the Forum Pacis or the Templum Pacis.



In order to see its location, I show you this view of all of the Imperial Fora in Rome, those fora that line the Via dei Fori Imperiali, across from the Roman Forum. We've already looked at--here's the tail-end, or the side of the Roman Forum here, and right next to it, two fora that we've already discussed: The Forum of Julius Caesar and then the Forum of Augustus. Nothing else; this wasn't there then; this wasn't there then. But Vespasian decides to build a forum himself, in close proximity to the Forum of Augustus. In fact, it's interesting to see that it faces--the temple is actually on this end--so in a sense it faces the Forum of Augustus. So another smart, strategic move on the part--a smart political move on the part of Vespasian to associate himself not just with Claudius, a good emperor who was divinized, but also with Augustus, the founder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the first emperor of Rome: so to build his structure facing that of Augustus'--his temple--facing that of Augustus'. But you can see that he wants to outdo Augustus, so he makes his larger than Augustus'.



This area here, that's labeled as the Forum of Nerva, wasn't a forum at all, at this point, it was a street called the Argiletum--A-r-g-i-l-e-t-u-m. And that street, the Argiletum--and you can see it labeled up there--that street led into a part of Rome, a residential area of Rome, that I've referred to before, called the Subura, S-u-b-u-r-a. The Subura was again a place where there were a lot of--I've mentioned it again; there were there, a lot of apartment houses, mostly made out of wood: rickety apartment houses that were lived in by a large number of people, with lesser means. And there were consequently always fires there. And you'll remember that Augustus' architects had to build that large precinct wall out of peperino to protect the Temple of Mars Ultor from the fires that used to break out all the time in the Subura. So you have to imagine this as a street, in between the Forum of Augustus and Vespasian's Forum Pacis, in ancient Roman times.



Also interesting is again the plan: a rectangle with a temple on one end, dominating the space in front of it. You can see that there are columns all the way around. There are these alcoves that open off the center space, and you can see they're screened, from that center space, also by columns. We know that some exotic materials were used here: marble that was brought from other parts of the world. We saw that beginning already under Nero -- bringing marble from Asia Minor and Africa and Egypt and so on, for his buildings. That also continues under the Flavians. So another Neronian innovation that remains important. We see it here. We see red granite columns used for the colonnade. We see yellow columns from Africa, used for the columns that screen these alcoves from the larger space. And then we see white marble for the rest. So this combination of imported marbles used for the Forum Pacis in Rome.



The Forum Pacis no longer survives. You can't see any of it today. We do know its location though, and we do have a good sense of its plan, once again from the so-called Forma Urbis, from this marble map of Rome that has a few fragments of the Forum Pacis. You can see one fragment here, one fragment here, and then a third fragment up there. And those fragments are enough, when we look at those, study those and compare those to other buildings, to allow a very accurate reconstruction. It tells us the shape of the temple, and it shows us, without any question--because one of the fragments includes lots of this--that this too, like the Claudianum in Rome, had bushes, had bushes as a kind of garden, that decorated the center of the structure. So bringing the country, in a sense, into the city, for these incredible complexes.



This is a restored view--and you see it also on your Monument List--of what the Forum Pacis would have looked like in antiquity. A quite severe façade, as it seems, with a number of entranceways. The temple pushed up--in fact, not only pushed up against the back wall, but part of the colonnade that flanks it on either side. You can see the red granite columns. You can't see the yellow columns that would have been further in, screening the alcoves from the colonnade. You see an altar right in front of the temple. You see the bushes that were part of the plantings that made this look like a kind of garden complex in front of the temple. We don't actually know if it was used as a temple. We have no divinity that's been associated with it. We actually think it may have been used as a museum, as a museum, and I'm going to say more about that in a moment.



Here's another reconstruction. This one is from Ward-Perkins. You can see that it is roughly the same as--it is the same as the other, with one exception, and that is it shows an entranceway that's made up of three doors and a number of columns. This was thought, for a very long time, to be the case that there was an elaborate entranceway, with columns and projecting entablatures, the sort of thing that we haven't seen yet in built architecture, but we did see in Second Style Roman wall painting. But that idea has been discredited, and now people believe it is much more likely that the façade was very plain. The reason that this idea came to the fore is that eventually, when the Argiletum was filled in with a forum by Vespasian's second son Domitian, Domitian did build a forum that is in part preserved, and which we will look at next week I believe. But that forum had on the walls a series of columns with projecting entablatures. And that does still exist now, or part of it does still exist. So I think that's what originally gave archaeologists the idea that that was there before, and was part of Vespasian's complex. But that seems not to have been the case, and the reconstruction that you have on your Monument List is the one that you should go by.



Let's get back to the whole point about the museum, whether this served as a kind of museum in the time of the Flavian emperors. I mentioned the great victory that Titus had over Jerusalem, a victory--at least from the Roman point of view it was great; obviously it was not great for Judea, because the area was taken over by the Romans and the famous Jewish Temple was destroyed. And Titus also did not hesitate to ramble through the--with his men, with his soldiers--go through the Temple and pick and choose what he wanted to bring back to Rome as spoils. He took the great seven-branched candelabrum from the temple. He took the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple; he took a whole host of other items from the Temple, and he brought them back to Rome as trophies. And we see this famous scene on the Arch of Titus, an arch that Domitian put up in honor of his brother--and we'll look at that on Tuesday.



The Arch of Titus has a scene that depicts the Roman soldiers bringing the seven-branched candelabrum, and a table with other objects on it, from that temple, back to Rome, and parading with those through an arch. Those spoils we know were placed by Vespasian, by his father, with whom he shared a joint triumph, because of this victory over Jerusalem; it was placed in the Forum Pacis, once that was built. So it was in part a place where he could display the spoils of war, because of the fact that the legitimacy that he gained through this conquest was so important to his dynasty, to the right of his dynasty to rule, and to the right of his sons to rule after him. So he wants to make that point clear.



But again he's very shrewd politically and he also wants to make sure that the people have access to this. He wants to remind them when Nero was emperor of Rome, he had things in his villa that he would never have dreamed of sharing with you. You weren't able to come in and dine there and have petals and fragrances fall on you while you dined; you were not allowed into this space. "But now you can come to the Colosseum and you can go to this museum. And while you're in the museum, you might as well look at these great spoils that I captured from Jerusalem, that bring credit to me and legitimacy to my dynasty."



He also took--what's also interesting and makes this more museum-like, is that he also took some of the statuary that Nero had stolen from Greece, when he went there to compete in those Olympic Games and so on, that he had stolen from Greece, and elsewhere, and put up in his villa, he also put those in the museum and opened that collection also to the Roman people. And we even know some of the statues that were there, that were taken from Nero's Domus Aurea, and put into this museum. One of them was a famous cow; a cow that had been done by the well-known Greek artist, Myron, M-y-r-o-n, the Cow of Myron. And the second was an image, a sculpted image--we're not sure; I don't think we know whether it was in marble or bronze, the original--but an image of a reclining Nile River, who is surrounded by sixteen kids, who are running around, up and down on top of him and around him. Another famous statue that was in Nero's possession, that gets put into what appears to have been a very important museum.



You see here another Google--an excellent Google Earth view, aerial view, of part of the Roman Forum. The Colosseum, of course, is way over here, and we can see the central part, or part of the central part of the Forum. We're looking back toward the Victor Emmanuel Monument. We're looking back toward the Campidoglio, as redesigned by Michelangelo, the oval piazza. And, in fact, here we can even see, in the upper left, the Theater of Marcellus. So you can see that the Theater of Marcellus was basically in a diagonal dialogue, in a sense, with the Colosseum, that was located back over here. The reason that I show this view to you now is to point out also the Tabularium, which we've already looked at. The archive sits on the back of the Senatorial Palace, redesigned by Michelangelo. But right in front of it there was a temple that was put up in honor of Vespasian, at his death, by his son Titus. And then when Titus died only a few years later, also of natural causes, his brother, Domitian, became emperor, and Domitian decided to rededicate the temple to both of them, to Vespasian and also to Titus.



So it became the Temple of the two divi, because Titus was also divinized at his death. And there were statue bases that were found, that stood in front of this temple, with inscriptions indicating that they honored those two individuals, and that they were depicted, undoubtedly, in statues in front of this temple. Only three columns of that temple still survive; some of the foundations as well, of course. And you can see it in the Roman Forum, right near the Tabularium in Rome. If you look at it, you can see that these are Corinthian fluted capitals [correction: columns]. It was probably a quite conventional temple. But you do see that there is a frieze that seems to represent a number of sacrificial implements: a libation dish and a pitcher, and so on and so forth. A very large chunk of that frieze and entablature is still preserved today. It's not with the temple but rather in the Tabularium itself, and I show it to you here.



An extremely well-preserved section of the decorative frieze of the Temple of Vespasian, the Temple of Divine Vespasian in Rome, which you see again dates to around 79 to 81 A.D. And it's very instructive, not only in terms of the way in which Titus first, and then his brother, were thinking of honoring members of their family, but also in how ornamental this is. This is decoration that is more richly textured than any that we've seen thus far, and also more richly undercut. The artists are beginning to use the drill to create very deep shadows among the decorative motifs, to make them stand out even more. And you might remember--I didn't bring it back to show you--but you might remember that section that I showed you from the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Julius Caesar, where I mentioned that that had been restored in the time of Domitian, second son of Vespasian, and also in the Trajanic period. And that the very deep carving indicated to us not only that it had been done later, but also the fact that the Flavians were particularly interested in this very ornamental decoration, very deeply undercut ornamentation. And we see that so well here. We see also the interesting--the variety of motifs in this frieze, and in the decorative part of it.



And then the frieze itself is very interesting. If we look at the objects, we see that they are mainly objects that are used in ritual sacrifice. We see the skulls of bulls, just as we saw them in the inner precinct of the Ara Pacis, one on either side. We see a libation dish. We see an axe, over here; that's to knock out the animals. Here's the knife to slit the throat of the animals; the pitcher to pour wine on an altar; a whip, for whatever purpose that had; and then over here a helmet, as you can see. So all of these implements that were used in sacrifice, regularly used in sacrifice, arranged like a still life, against a blank background.



And I don't know about you, but when I look at this I am reminded of some of Fourth Style Roman wall decoration; of the still life paintings that we saw in the Third and the Fourth Style, where you have individual objects against a blank background. And also the decorative nature of this conjures up some of the decoration that we see, the profusion, the almost overly decorative element of Fourth Style Roman wall painting. And since this dates to 79 to 81, and you'll remember the Fourth Style is 62 to 79 at Pompeii -- but we know that the Fourth Style continued on; it was the Fourth Style that was the most popular style post 79, obviously not in Pompeii or Herculaneum, but elsewhere in the Roman world. So this very much in keeping; we're seeing in architecture something very much in keeping vis-à-vis decoration, as we see in Fourth Style Roman wall painting.



The last monument that I want to show you today is in many respects the most important. That seems like a strange thing to say, because what could be more important than the icon of Rome, the Colosseum? But when we think about it, the Colosseum was actually a fairly conservative building. Right? It goes back to the Amphitheater at Pompeii in its general plan, and it is quite similar to, in fact very similar to, the Theater of Marcellus, which was done at the time of Augustus. And Augustus was trying to connect his reign to that of Periclean Athens, and was using stone construction. And the Colosseum is of stone construction, although it also, of course, makes use of annular vaults made out of concrete, and also innovates with the new groin vaults. But for all intents and purposes a relatively conservative building at this time, the Colosseum was.



The building that I'm now going to show you was not that way at all, even though it's a building that is much less well known than the Colosseum, and it also doesn't exist any longer, unfortunately. And those are the Baths of Titus. A very important structure for us, the Baths of Titus--the Thermae Titi--the Baths of Titus, that date to A.D. 80, right smack in the middle of Titus' brief reign of 79 to 81. They were put up in Rome, and they were put up in Rome, not surprisingly--you know the narrative here--not surprisingly on that land that had earlier been expropriated by Nero: another instance of the Flavian emperors giving back to the people. You've given them a museum, you've given them an amphitheater, and now you're going to give them a bath. Next to an amphitheater, the bath is what they wanted most of all -- a place where they could go to bathe, but also hang out with their family and friends. So again, giving back to the people what they wanted; a wise, shrewd political move on the part of Vespasian, being followed by his equally shrewd son, Titus.



The location of the Baths of Titus was next to--actually what you see here, on top of the Golden House, is actually the plan of a later bath, the Baths of the emperor Trajan, which we'll look at in the future. But the smaller Baths of Titus were put to the--I believe it was, yes--the west of the Esquiline Wing of the Golden House. Right just between the Golden House and where you see 'Esquiline' written up there, was the location of the Baths of Titus. All that survives of the Baths of Titus is part of one wall, a brick-faced, concrete wall, with some engaged columns; that's all we have. But the building was still standing--the building was still much better preserved in the sixteenth century, when it was drawn by Renaissance architects, most specifically by Andrea Palladio--his name I put on the Monument List for you. Andrea Palladio drew a very complete plan of it, and it is on the basis of that plan that modern plans are made of the Baths of Titus. And I show it to you here. And we believe this is a very accurate plan of the Baths of Titus. And I compare it for you here with? Again, those of you studying for the midterm, what's this?



Student: Stabian--



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The Stabian Baths; Stabian Baths in Pompeii, second century B.C. Very good. And we talked about that as the typical earlier bath structure. And just a very quick review, to remind ourselves of its major features. It had the palaestra over here, surrounded by columns on three sides; the piscina or the natatio, swimming pool at the left. And then most importantly the bathing block on the right side of the structure. A men's section and a women's section, with that sequence of rooms: the apodyterium or the dressing room; the tepidarium, rectangular, or the warm room; the caldarium, hot room, with an apse and a cold water splash basin; and then, most importantly, the frigidarium, that small, round building [correction: room] with radiating alcoves.



That was the typical Roman bath structure, until we begin to see our first example in Rome of the so-called "imperial bath" structure, the plan that is used by the emperors for the baths that they build in Rome. It is possible that Titus' was not the first. There's been some speculation--we know that Nero had built a bath--there has been some speculation that Nero's Bath may have been the first example of the imperial plan, but we don't know for sure. But Titus'--of the ones that we know, have the specifics about, we know that Titus' was definitely an example of this imperial bath structure.



And the features that are outstanding here, that we need to focus on, are the fact that this imperial bath structure had a very elaborate entranceway, that consisted either of columns on square bases, or piers, in the front. There seemed to have been a series of groin vaults -- anytime you see an X in plan that means a groin vault. An elaborate stairway, some more columns or piers here, and more groin vaults, and another stairway, leading into a double palaestra, in a sense; or you could call it a combined palaestra here, on the southern side. And you can see the cistern; on the outside of the precinct, you can see the cistern that fed water into this bath structure. It's roughly rectangular, as you can see, and unlike the Stabian Baths at Pompeii, where you have the bath complex on the right side, you can see that the rooms that are used for bathing are at the center of the plan, which makes sense from the Roman standpoint.



You know the Romans were very focused on axiality and symmetry, and that's exactly what they've done here. They've placed the bathing block in the center. They've lined the rooms up axially with one another. They've placed rooms on either side, symmetrical rooms, it's the same on the left as it is on the right. The rooms are symmetrically disposed around that central bathing block. And they've taken the frigidarium, which was the smallest--albeit the most interesting architecturally--but the smallest room in the bath, and they've made it the largest room in the bath. Because you can see at F a very large, cross-shaped room, with an apse on one end, a groin vault over the center, a single large groin vault over the center, flanked by and buttressed by, two barrel vaults, one on either side. And then opening off those barrel vaults a series of rectangular alcoves with, as you can see, with walls that are s

Professor Kleiner investigates the major architectural commissions of the emperor Domitian, the last Flavian emperor. She begins with the Arch of Titus, erected after Titus' death by his brother Domitian on land previously occupied by Nero's Domus Transitoria. The Arch celebrated Titus' greatest accomplishment--the Flavian victory in the Jewish Wars--and may have served as Titus' tomb. Professor Kleiner also discusses the Stadium of Domitian, the shape of which is preserved in Rome's Piazza Navona. Her major focus is the vast Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill designed by the architect Rabirius and featuring Domitian as dominus et deus (lord and god). Constructed from brick-faced concrete and revetted with multicolored imported marbles, this structure was divided into public and private wings, and was so magnificent that it served as the urban residence of all subsequent Roman emperors. The lecture concludes with the so-called Forum Transitorium, a narrow forum begun by Domitian and finished by his successor Nerva, which features a temple to Domitian's patron goddess Minerva and a series of decorative columnar bays that create a lively in-and-out undulation that heralds the beginning of a "baroque" phase in Roman architecture.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 16-17 (historical background), 116-118 (Arch of Titus), 120-121, 134-141 (Palace of Domitian), 156-157 (Forum Transitorium), 209-211 (Stadium of Domitian)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 73-84

Transcript



February 24, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning. Today's lecture is entitled "The Prince and the Palace: Human Made Divine on the Palatine Hill." And I want to begin essentially where we left off, and that is with the emperor Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian dynasty, and the political shrewdness that Vespasian demonstrated, when he made the decisions that he did -- when he made the decision especially to use architecture to further his political agenda. And you'll recall that the way in which he did that was that he--and I'm going to show you the site plan once again on the Esquiline and Palatine Hills; the site plan that shows us how he did this. How he did this was he recognized that he didn't want to associate himself with Nero, but it was to his advantage to associate himself instead with the emperor Claudius.



And he did that by finishing the platform, and indeed the temple itself that we looked at last time, and that is the Temple of the Divine Claudius, the Claudianum, that had been begun by Agrippina the Younger. He completed that as a nod to Claudius; and again, a very smart political move on his part. He also, as you'll recall, razed the Domus Aurea of Nero to the ground, covered up what was left of it otherwise, and then he filled in the artificial lake, and he used the property that the artificial lake was on, to build the Colosseum, which itself was a shrewd gift to the Roman people, to gain their favor, and he did succeed in that regard.



Equally important, perhaps even more important, is the decision that Vespasian made in the year 79 A.D., and that decision--and we see a portrait once again of Vespasian, on the right-hand side of the screen, now in Copenhagen--the decision he made in 79 was to appoint his elder son, Titus, as co-regent. And we see a portrait of Titus on the left-hand side of the screen, in military costume. It's a portrait that was found in Herculaneum, so that we know it needs to date prior to 79: so very likely sometime in the seventies, that particular statue was put up. Now the reason it was smart politically to appoint Titus as his co-regent was that Titus was extremely capable. He was also extremely popular in Rome, with the people, with the Senate, and what it did was to ensure the succession: to ensure the succession. And so when Vespasian died of natural causes in 79 A.D., Titus was prepared to take over, and indeed he did, and he took over without any contest whatsoever, which was a great accomplishment.



Titus, however--oh, and Titus, by the way, was young when he became emperor; he was in his early thirties, about thirty-two, full of energy, and he needed it for what lay ahead, because he was unlucky. And his reign was affected by three major events, the first of which you know intimately already, and that is the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Titus' reign was 79 to 81. So in 79 A.D., Vesuvius erupts and Titus has to deal with the consequences of that, covered over, as you well know, almost all of Campania. In the year 80 he suffered, or Rome suffered, a very serious plague, which Titus also had to deal with. He had to marshal all of his energy and all his ingenuity to deal with a very serious plague in Rome, and that plague was followed by a fire, also an exceedingly serious fire. So Titus had his hands full, and perhaps it's not surprising, given all the stress of those years that he too died of natural causes in 81, at a very young age.



But despite what he went through during 79 to 81, Titus' claim to fame was something that happened much earlier, and I've mentioned it before, and that is something that happened already in the year A.D. 70. And it was in the year A.D. 70 that Vespasian sent his elder son to Jerusalem, to Judea, to get involved in a major military war. And it was Titus, as you'll recall, who was victorious in the Jewish Wars, and that took place in 70 A.D. And it was extremely important, not only in itself, from Rome's standpoint, but also because it provided legitimacy to the Flavian dynasty. I mentioned that when a Roman dynasty came to power in a civil war--which was the case, both for Augustus, after the civil war that Rome was plunged into after Caesar's death, and was the case again for Vespasian after the chaos of the year 68/69--they needed a foreign victory to gain legitimacy. So for the Flavian dynasty, the war over Jerusalem gave them that legitimacy, and was therefore extremely important in terms of the art and ideology of the Flavian dynasty.



I want to turn to an arch that was put up in honor of that very victory over Jerusalem, sometime after A.D. 81. It was the so-called Arch of Titus, one of the most famous Roman monuments of all, and it was put up, although it bears Titus' name, it was put up not by him, but by his brother Domitian, his younger brother Domitian, who succeeded him after Titus' death, which is why we date it to sometime after A.D. 81. I want to show you first its location, because that itself is significant. We are looking at the Google Earth view of the Roman Forum. You see the Roman Forum here. You see the Colosseum up at the top center. You see the Capitoline Hill or Campidoglio here; the Victor Emmanuel Monument here--I've pointed these out many times before--the Via dei Fori Imperiali of Mussolini; the Imperial Fora to the left; again the Roman Forum here; and the Palatine Hill, which we're going to be concentrating on today.



But you'll remember that Nero's hope was to link the Palatine Hill with the Esquiline Hill, which is right up to the left of the Colosseum, and to do that via a spur hill--a spur hill that's located just right here, a bit above my finger--a spur hill called the Velia, V-e-l-i-a, that was to link the two. And you'll remember Nero's plans for his Domus Transitoria, this palace that was to serve as a point of transit between those two hills, and you'll recall also the remains of some of the rooms from the Domus Transitoria. So this was again land that had been built up by Nero. So it's not surprising to see the Flavians--once again Titus following suit, and then his younger brother Domitian following suit--to use land that had earlier been used by Nero for new Flavian monuments, in this case an arch put up to the victory that Titus celebrated over Jerusalem. And if you look very carefully, again just a bit, a few inches above where my finger is, you will see the Arch of Titus standing on that spur hill, on the Velia, between the Palatine and the Esquiline Hills.



The Arch of Titus, again which dates to after A.D. 81, was placed right next to the Sacred Way, or the Via Sacra. It doesn't span the street, but it's placed right next to it, adjacent to it, and I think you can see that very well in these two views here, which also show that quite a bit of ancient road actually survives, or a piece of ancient road actually survives, in the Roman Forum. It's on the slope that you see here, and you can see the way in which it goes right by the Arch of Titus that you see to its right. This is a view up the hill, up the Sacred Way, toward the Velia, and here down, from the Arch of Titus, down into the rest of the Forum. And again you can see the polygonal masonry of the ancient road still preserved. The ancient way, the Via Sacra, was the road that the triumphant general took when he returned to Rome, after a great military victory; so this is exactly the road that Titus himself would've taken when he came back from Judea and walked in triumph, or rode in triumph, in his chariot, along the Sacred Way and up to the Capitoline Hill. Because the triumphant general, who was garbed with the attributes of Jupiter, in this procession, made his way up to the Capitoline Hill, would get off his chariot up there, right at the altar, in front of the Temple of Jupiter OMC, and make a sacrifice to Jupiter. So you have to imagine Titus doing this; along with Vespasian, because you'll remember I mentioned to you that they celebrated a joint triumph, that Titus was willing to share his triumph with his father Vespasian. So they both would've come in, in triumph, into Rome, after this great victory. Once again you can see the arch in the view on the right.



Another view of the arch here, which shows it on the Velia; and here you can get a very good sense of the way in which that spur hill unites the Palatine and the Esquiline, as well as the proximity of the Arch of Titus to the Colosseum. We are seeing that the Flavians are building up a certain area of Rome, with their monuments, and this is no exception. The view that we see here, from the Forum, of one side of the Arch of Titus, shows a modern inscription, but we'll see that there is an ancient inscription on the other side. And we're also going to see that although the arch looks very well preserved, it was actually quite heavily restored by an architect by the name of Giuseppe Valadier, and that happened in the nineteenth century that Valadier--V-a-l-a-d-i-e-r; Giuseppe Valadier--restored the Arch of Titus. And the part of the arch that is ancient is essentially the central section, right here--mostly on the other side actually; on this side just the spandrels and the inner panels here, and on the other side we'll see--well I'll show you when we get to the other side. So this side important to know that the inscription is a modern one.



Here's the other side of the arch, where you can see again the central section is ancient, with the spandrels, these triangular areas here; the columns on this side are ancient; the keystone is ancient; the frieze up above the keystone is ancient; the inscription is ancient on this side. But all the rest was restored by Valadier, as I said in the nineteenth century. And Valadier did something very interesting, and archaeologically very forward thinking, in that since the center of the arch was made out of Greek marble, pentelic marble--p-e-n-t-e-l-i-c--pentelic marble from Mount Pentelikon in Greece--which in itself is interesting because we saw that the Flavians were using imported marbles in their buildings; I've mentioned that already before. So we see a continuation of that trend here, use of pentelic marble for the arch. But when Valadier did the restorations, or the reconstruction, he used travertine for the modern parts of the arch, so that when you--it probably isn't so evident to you from this view, but when you stand in front of the arch you can see the difference in the materials, and he wanted to point out to the spectator that there was a difference between the ancient part of the monument and the modern part of the monument, as restored by him.



This view on the left, there are quite a number of preserved paintings and engravings that show the arch before the Valadier reconstruction, and you see one of those over there. And you can see we're looking at the same side of the arch here as we are here. So once again you can see the ancient -- what survived of the ancient arch: the central part; the two columns on bases; the keystone; the spandrels; the frieze; and then the inscription. So, and we see that here. And this is another one of those Roman monuments that was essentially preserved because of re-use over time, or at least the part of it that still exists. And this was turned into, as so many other monuments, was turned into a fortress at one point, a fortress that was owned by the Frangipani family in Italy.



So that's the ancient part; the rest restored by Valadier. And you have to also reconstruct in your mind's eye that this arch would've served as a kind of statue base for a representation, or for a sculptural group, in bronze, that would've represented Titus, and perhaps Vespasian also, together, seated in a chariot, being led by four horses, a great quadriga group that was customarily placed on the top of such arches. Below that the inscription plaque, below that, as I've already described, a frieze--I'm going to show you that frieze in a moment. Then the spandrels, and then in the center here, two great panels, one on either--figural panels--one on either side of the arch.



You see the inscription here. It's interesting because it tells us that it was the Senate and People of Rome, the SPQR, the Senate and People of Rome, who put this up to the Divine Titus, Divo Tito, as you can see here, and--the Divine Titus, who was the son--there's an F for filius right over here--the son of the Divine Vespasian. So the divinity of both of these men, both of whom were made gods at their death, is alluded to here. So the Senate and People of Rome put this up to the Divine Titus, the son of the Divine Vespasian. And you can see all of these little holes that are located in some of the letters. The reason for those is that those were where bronze letters were actually attached. So these letters were inscribed and then bronze letters were attached to them so that the inscription would gleam in the sunshine, and so that you could see it from considerable distance.



Down below the inscription plaque we see the frieze, which purports to represent this great procession or parade that took place when Titus returned from Jerusalem, and had his triumphal procession along the Sacred Way, and up to the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter. And you can see that the artist has made the figures fairly small, but at the same time has made each one distinct from the other, so that this is more readable from the ground. And then below that, the decoration of the keystone. And then in either spandrel, or triangular area at either side of the keystones, we see victories, flying female figures of victory, that are of course making reference, in a general way, to this great victory that Titus had over Jerusalem.



Important from the architectural standpoint are the columns and especially the capitals. I show you a detail of one of the preserved--there are two again--but one of the two preserved capitals from this side of the arch, the side that faces the Colosseum. And you see it here, and it's a distinctive capital that we have not seen before. It's a capital that actually combines the Corinthian and the Ionic, because you can see the Corinthian acanthus leaves growing up here: flowers, as we see, in the usual Corinthian order, and then prominent volutes of the Ionic order up above. We refer to this as the composite capital; the composite capital, combining Corinthian and Ionic. We see it quite infrequently in Roman architecture, but we do see it on occasion. So it's good for you to know about.



In the center of the bay I mentioned that there were two great figural panels, and these figural panels make reference to Titus' victory over Jerusalem, to this important event, from the point of view of the Flavians, that gave their dynasty legitimacy. And we see one of those here. We actually see an image of Titus in his chariot, and he's riding alone, without his father. He's riding alone in his chariot, with the exception of a female figure who accompanies him. And you can see that female figure is winged, and she is a personification of victory--so she is heralding the victory that he has had in Jerusalem--and, in fact, she holds a laurel wreath above his head, crowning him, because of that victory. The chariot is led by four horses, who are whizzing by, as you can see here, and they are led, at the front, by a woman in a helmet and military costume, who might well be Roma, the personification of Rome herself. And what is she doing? She's welcoming Titus back to Rome, after his great victory over Jerusalem.



Over here, two other figures, two other male figures, both headless today, but one of them in a toga, and the other figure with a bare chest and a mantle wrapped over the lower part of his body. Because we have the same figures in other reliefs, we know, despite the fact that they are headless, that these are personifications of the Senate. The dressed person, the person in toga, is the Senate, the Genius--g-e-n-i-u-s, like genius--the Genius Senatus, or the Spirit of the Senate. And this, the Genius Populi Romani, which was the representative of the Roman People. So keep in mind again, it was the Senate and People of Rome that put up the arch to Titus, the son of the divine Vespasian; and we see themselves, or their personifications, represented in this scene.



More interesting from our standpoint, vis-à-vis architecture, is the other scene, on the other side of the central bay, where we see the Roman soldiers, or a group of Roman soldiers, bringing back spoils or booty, trophies, from Jerusalem, things that they have stolen from the temple in Jerusalem. And you can see the famous seven-branched candelabrum that they are carrying here. The weight is so great that their shoulders bend under that weight. And we also see them with a table over here that has a number of sacrificial implements and so on, that were taken also from the Temple in Jerusalem. So they carry these along in this parade, for the people to see, for those in Rome to see, to get a real palpable sense of what it meant to have this victory, and of the spoils that are being brought back. And you can see that--this is represented very illusionistically--and you can see that they seem to be walking through an arch, that is also represented here: a very interesting scene indeed.



And you'll recall what they did with those spoils. They took those spoils and they put them in the Templum Pacis that we talked about last time, or the Forum Pacis that we talked about last time, that served essentially as a kind of museum where the people of Rome could see these images. So once again the Flavians always showing an affinity for, and an interest in, the people of the city -- the people of the city that they were trying, of course, to court favor from. So we're seeing Domitian, who again was the commissioner of this monument, continuing on in the same vein as Vespasian and Titus, honoring this victory that gave legitimacy to the Flavian dynasty, but also always acknowledging and thinking of the impact that it's going to have on the Senate and the People of Rome.



The central bay, if you stand right below it and look up, you will see the vault of the interior of the arch, and you can see that it has a coffered ceiling, as we've seen so often in Roman monuments; quite well preserved, with the coffers and then the rosettes in the center. And if I show you another detail of that, you'll get an even better sense of it, and also of how ornate the decoration is. We've talked about the fact that the Flavians had a particular interest in very ornate decoration, and you can see that as well here. In fact, the drill has been used so extensively that it almost dematerializes the vault, I think, in a very interesting way, creating a kind of overall tapestry of dark and light. And then in the center a panel that is surrounded by a garland, and in the center of that panel a depiction--you can probably barely see it from where you sit--but a depiction of Titus being carried to heaven on the back of an eagle. In this case Titus is not in military dress but in a toga. He's on the back of an eagle, with outstretched wings, and that eagle is taking him up to the heavens.



What this is, is a representation of apotheosis--a-p-o-t-h-e-o-s-i-s--apotheosis, or divinization: the divinization--because the Romans believed that they could make humans into gods, after their death--the making of Titus into a god after his death, and the depiction of--the material depiction of him actually being carried to heaven on the back of an eagle, a very powerful image. And the fact that it is in the archivolt of this vault here has led scholars to suggest that it is possible that the Arch of Titus in Rome served as Titus' tomb. And that seems to be corroborated by the fact that behind the attic, or inside the attic of the arch, is a staircase, as well as a chamber, and I show both of them to you here: a spiral staircase and a chamber, a chamber that might well have served as a burial chamber for an urn of Titus. The urn was never found--was not found in the excavation of this monument, so we can't prove this, but I think it's very possible that this arch served as a tomb for the emperor Titus.



Titus was succeeded, as I've already mentioned, by his younger brother Domitian, whom you see in two portraits here: a portrait from Munich, on the left, in military garb, and then a bust-length portrait in Rome, on the right-hand side of the screen. Domitian was born in A.D. 51. So he was only your age, about nineteen, when Titus went off to the Jewish Wars. There was never any question that Domitian would succeed his brother. Vespasian was in this for the long haul. He created a dynasty and expected both of his sons, first Titus, his older son, and then his younger son, Domitian, to succeed him. So Domitian's eventual rise to power was never in question. And yet Domitian was jealous of his brother, who was very popular in Rome, as I've already mentioned, and who had this great military victory on which the Flavians based their claim to rule. And Domitian was very jealous of his brother. He felt out of the loop, and so when he succeeded Titus--quicker than he thought, because Titus died way before his time, in his thirties, as you know--when Domitian succeeded Titus, he came to power as a very embittered man, and he never got over that bitterness.



And, in fact, what we see Domitian doing is really reverting to the megalomaniacal way of thinking of people like Caligula and Nero, exercising his imperial prerogatives to the fullest and, in fact, even insisting that he be addressed as "lord and god," dominus et deus; which I've put on your Monument List for you, dominus et deus, that's lord and god. And he, not surprisingly, given his bent, he not surprisingly moved away from the public architecture that Vespasian and Titus had favored--for Vespasian, of course, buildings like the Colosseum, for Titus, the Baths of Titus--the public architecture that had been favored by his father and his brother. He moved back to being interested in building palatial architecture, essentially to his own glory. And we're going to see that the major monument that he commissioned was the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill, that had been begun by Tiberius and Caligula; he completed that palace in the nineties A.D.



Before we get to that, which will be our main focus today, I would like--because it's extensive and there's a lot to see--I would like to say a few words about another commission of Domitian, because he wasn't without the desire to at least build some public buildings, and I'd like to begin with one of those here. This is a model of the so-called Stadium of Domitian, a stadium or a race course, that was put up during Domitian's reign; we date it usually to the latter part of his reign, 92 to 96 A.D. And you see that model again here. And you can tell a lot about this building from both the scanty remains, but also from other evidence that allows us to be able to reconstruct it relatively accurately. You see it here.



These stadia were hairpin in shape--as you can see, a straight end on one side, a curved end on the other--but long, elongated, a kind of elongated oval with one straight side, as you can see. It was put up in very similar fashion to theaters and to amphitheaters, in that they built a concrete hill and lined that concrete hill with stone seats, and then buttressed it with a wall, as you can see here, that was decorated, just like the Theater of Marcellus, or like the Colosseum, with in this case two tiers of arches, two sets of arcades, with columns in between them, those columns again having no structural purpose whatsoever, just used as decoration for the monument. And then the exits and entrances, again done very similarly to amphitheater or theater architecture, as we've discussed it thus far. So the main difference is it's not quite as tall as amphitheaters, for example, or theaters, and just two tiers of columns, as you can see here. And the main difference in plan is that it's a hairpin shape, again with one straight side and one curved side.



Only a small--one can see today, and this is essentially underground or what survives of it is underground, although there's one section that can still be seen, as I'll show you in a moment. But what's absolutely miraculous is the fact that the actual hairpin shape of the Stadium of Domitian is preserved, in its entirety, in the shape of one of Rome's most famous piazzas, and my favorite, by far, the Piazza Navona, which you see from the air here, in a Google Earth image. And you can see again the exact shape: the straight side and the curved side, of Domitian's Stadium, still preserved in the Piazza Navona in Rome. It's a wonderful piazza. For those of you who've been there, I'm sure you have enjoyed spending time there. For those of you haven't, it really is a mecca within Rome. And you can see not only is it a pleasant place to walk but also a place to see great buildings, for example, Francesco Borromini's Sant'Agnese in Agone, and Bernini's Four Rivers, famous Four Rivers Fountain, in the center of the piazza, in dialogue with one another.



And as we look at this from the air, and we look at the curved end of the Piazza Navona, you can see there's one street that you can take out of that curved end, one small street. If you take a left, and then a left again, you will see the remains of the Stadium of Domitian; I'm going to show those to you in a moment. And if you stay in the center of the piazza, near the Four Rivers Fountain, and you go sort of diagonally across from that, you will end up at one of the four best ice cream places in Rome; you can get some of the best gelato in Rome. You can get good gelato almost anywhere in Rome, and in Italy, but the very best, this is one of those four; I'll say something more about that in a moment.



Here are the remains of the Stadium of Domitian that can still be seen. Very few tourists notice this, but it's well worth looking at, because you can see the brick-faced cement construction that served for the--that was how the substructures of this building were built--and I think you can even see that from a distance here--made out of concrete, faced with brick -- but the arcades and the columns, that I showed you before, out of travertine, ashlar masonry travertine, which was one of the last buildings actually in Rome to be made of travertine ashlar masonry. Just to show you also that again--just as when we were in Capri I showed you the Bar Tiberio, and its reference to Tiberius--it's amazing what those who put up restaurants and bars and so on, around Rome, it's amazing--it demonstrates the strong sense of history that Italians have. Because just the fact that they recognize that these are remains from the Stadium of Domitian--everyone thinks of this structure as the Piazza Navona--but the fact that they are well aware of the fact that it was Domitian's Stadium, so that the wine bar across the street--and this is one that was just opened the last couple of years--the wine bar across the street is called the Domiziano: the Domiziano, after Domitian, because it's right across the street from the Stadium of Domitian.



With regard to ice cream--I take my gelato seriously, and I'm sure all of you who've been to Italy feel the same way. It's not like American ice cream--not that American ice cream isn't good--but it's absolutely fantastic. And so I will make some recommendations this semester. And this is the first one that I'm going to make, because it's one of my favorites, and everyone agrees this is one of the best ice cream parlors in Rome. It's called Tre Scalini. It's also a restaurant, a restaurant you can pass on. Like so many restaurants in the center of famous piazzas, it's not the best, but--and you don't have to sit outside, although they will try to beckon you to sit outside, because it costs more to eat the ice cream outside than it does if you just walk into--walk through the door--there are actually two doors, one on that side, one on this side--go right up to the counter, take a look at what's there, and make your order.



And my recommendation for this particular gelateria is the tartufi; they are very famous. This is the best tartufo in Rome, without question, if you like chocolate. It's a chocolate bomb essentially, as you can see in these images here. It is one big, well fairly large, very rich chocolate, with big, the biggest chocolate chips you ever saw on it, and then they put a dollop--I don't even like whipped cream, but when it's panna on top of the tartufo, I go the whole way. So you have the panna on top of the tartufo. And if you sit outside and are willing to pay extra, they'll throw a pirouette on top; if not, you have to forego the pirouette. But I really highly--whether you like chocolate or you don't like chocolate--I've gone with people who are not the kind of chocoholic I am, who like this anyway. So it's really a treat, and at least once when you're in Rome you have to indulge in a tartufo at Tre Scalini.



I want to move from Domitian's Stadium to the building that we're going to concentrate on today, because again it is so extensive, and that is Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill. We usually refer to it as Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill, or the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill. But the nomenclature is complex, because in antiquity it was referred to as the Domus, the Domus Augustana--like the Domus Aurea, the Golden House of Nero--the Domus Augustana: Augustus' House, essentially. Because by this point the word Augustus had become synonymous with emperor; so every emperor was the Augustus. So this is the Domus Augustana, which again continues construction.



We talked about the fact that Tiberius had begun a palace on the Palatine Hill, on the slope of the Palatine Hill that Caligula had added to that. His successors: Claudius was not that interested in palatial architecture, as you'll remember; Nero had other plans for the Domus Transitoria, and for the Domus Aurea. So it was left to the Flavians, specifically to Domitian, to complete the Imperial Palace, which he does, and then it is dedicated, as you can see from the Monument List, in A.D. 92. We also know the architect of the Domus Augustana, and that was a man by the name of Rabirius, R-a-b-i-r-i-u-s; a very important Roman architect by the name of Rabirius.



To get back to the nomenclature for a moment. So the actual name of the palace was the Domus Augustana. But here's where it gets complicated. There's also a public wing of the house and a private wing of the house. The public wing--and you can see it in this Google Earth image from the air--the public wing is on one story--and we see that over here--and that was referred to in ancient times as the Flavian House, the Domus Flavia, the Domus Flavia. The private wing was on two stories, or part of it was on two stories--you can see it here; it's even larger, more extensive--and that was called, in ancient times, also the Domus Augustana. So this word, the Domus Augustana, referred both to the private wing, as opposed to the Domus Flavia, but also to the palace as a whole. So I just wanted you to be aware of that, because as you do your reading in the textbooks and so on, you might find that a little bit confusing. But we can simplify it completely and just call it the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill, which is what I suggest we do.



So once again we can see quite good [well], in this view from the air, the way in which this Domitianic structure was planned and built. We see over here, for example--and I'm going to show you these in plan, and also the remains shortly--we can see on the upper left what is a basilica; next to that an audience hall; a great fountain court over here; a triclinium or dining room over here; and then fountains on other side that belong to the Domus Flavia or the public section of the palace. And then over here the private area, as I said larger, on two stories, right here, with a court in the center and a whole host of small rooms surrounding that, living quarters and so on, for Domitian and others; a peristyle court; another peristyle court; and then a great sunken stadium over here on the right. This was a far cry from Romulus' huts, as you see them; Romulus' village, of the eighth century B.C., that I remind you of over here, and show you what has happened in the interlude.



But what's extremely important I think, given Domitian's view of himself as lord and god, as dominus et deus, it's interesting to see what he builds. And he certainly felt that he was very much in the tradition of Romulus; he wants to associate himself with Romulus, and also, of course, with Augustus, who lived, as you know, on the Palatine Hill. But at the same time he wants to inject his living space with the kind of grandeur that had not been--that was certainly true under Nero in his Domus Aurea, but that had not been true for any of the other earlier Roman emperors. So the Domus Aurea, the impact of the Domus Aurea once again, is something we should think about as we look at this incredible palace.



This is a plan from the Ward-Perkins textbook that perhaps shows you better than the view from the air exactly what this structure was all about. We see the public wing on the left-hand side, the Domus Flavia of the palace on the Palatine Hill. And it includes, as you can see in the upper left corner, a basilica: a basilica, a room with a central space, divided by two side aisles by columns. And that was a basilica that Domitian himself sat in and tried cases in, as the judge. Then, next to that, an audience hall, or an aula, a-u-l-a; that was the place where Domitian met with visiting dignitaries. Then on axis with the--up in the upper right, a lararium, which was a place where they kept household gods and so on--then on axis with the audience hall, the peristyle, the peristyle. And if you look at that in plan, it's got columns, of course, as peristyles do.



But look at what's in the center of it. It actually is a fountain, and it is a fountain that is octagonal in shape. So the impact of Nero's Domus Aurea immediately clear, the impact of that remarkable octagonal room on the architecture of Domitian and on the architect Rabirius: so an octagonal fountain. And then on axis with the aula or audience hall, the peristyle, is the triclinium or dining room of the house: a very large dining room with panoramic windows through which one could see a very interestingly elliptically shaped fountain, one on either side. Now as you look at that plan of the Domus Flavia, and especially at the basilica, the audience hall and the triclinium, there is one feature that all three of those have in common, that I haven't yet mentioned, which is what? All three of them have what? No one?



Student: A half circle.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: A half circle; okay, exactly, an apse, an apse on one end, and all of those apses face in the same direction. The basilica has an apse; the audience hall has an apse; the triclinium has an apse. Those were Domitian's apses. That's where Domitian sat, dominus et deus; he wanted to be honored and, in fact, worshipped, as lord and god, and he needed a space to do it in, and he wanted to sit on a throne, underneath the dome of heaven, in a sense. So the dome of heaven was a vault, made out of concrete and decorated in some way in antiquity, probably with mosaic, or whatever, to give it the sense of a dome of heaven. He wanted to sit in that space in every one of those rooms. So whether he was trying a law case, welcoming visiting dignitaries, or eating in his triclinium, he wanted to sit beneath at least a semi-dome of heaven. And that's indeed what he did, as he was again worshipped as dominus et deus. So this is a very important, I think, phenomenon in this particular monument, and one that is well worth thinking about, in terms of the way in which architecture is used by given individuals to define themselves, to define their lives, and to define their era.



Over here again the private wing; I'm going to hold on that for a moment and we'll come back to that shortly. This is a detail of the basilica, where we see the plan of the basilica, and also a cross-section of the same structure. And you can see it is completely in keeping with other basilican architecture we've looked at, both in civic locations and elsewhere. A central nave with an apse on one end--again, imagine Domitian sitting over here; the central nave divided from the side aisles by columns, fairly simple but very interesting structure in the context of this particular palace.



Over here an outstanding restored view that probably gives you a better sense than almost anything I can show you of the Domus Flavia or the public space of Domitian's Palace. Here's, of course, the basilica over here, and you can see that this room, like all of the rooms in this palace, were done in marble, and that marble was of various colors, as you can see here, and it was marble that was brought from all over the world. We've talked about the fact that the Flavians did this. We've talked about this as the case for the Templum Pacis, for example, bringing marble from Egypt and Asia Minor and Greece and elsewhere in the Roman world, bringing it all here and using it, using that variegated marble to make--to ornament, obviously, this palace in Rome. Over here the aula or the great audience hall; the Aula Regia we call it, over here, also with the marble on the floor, as well as on the walls. You can see that this particular room--and it was apparent in plan as well--has scalloping around the perimeter of the room: a series of niches, as you can see, with statuary in them, surrounded by columns, two tiers with other windows up above, as you can see. And here you get a sense of that space in which Domitian would have sat: the apse of the room, the curvature of the wall, made, of course, out of concrete--as this entire structure was--made out of concrete, with a semi-dome. And you have to again imagine Domitian sitting beneath that, or inside that apse and beneath that semi-dome here.



The peristyle court, open to the sky; columns all around, covered colonnade, two stories, and then in the center this octagonal fountain. Leave it to Domitian, leave it to Rabirius, to transform Nero's octagonal room into a fountain, in the context of this palace. And then on axis again, with the Aula Regia, and with the peristyle, is the triclinium. And this restored view again gives you a very good sense of that apse in which Domitian would have sat enthroned, with the semi-dome above his head, two tiers; again, the walls decorated with variegated marbles brought from all different parts of the world; as well as with columns. And then picture windows, through which you would see these very interesting elliptical fountains, as you dined, one on either side of the structure. There's a lot of controversy as to how the rooms that were roofed, were roofed -- whether they had barrel vaults or not. You can see this particular restored view shows one flat roof and one barrel vaulted roof. We're not absolutely sure about that, and again scholars continue to argue which was the case here.



I mentioned statuary in the Aula Regia, and we have some evidence for what that statuary might have been like, and the way in which it was used by Domitian. I show you two examples. These are two statues, one representing Hercules, on the left, and the other, on the right, representing Apollo. And these are truly colossal in scale, and they are made of beautiful materials, again imported materials -- in this case a kind of maroon colored stone, and in this case a greenish colored stone. Again, they're very large in scale, colossal in scale, and you can see the exaggerated musculature of both of these figures. And I think they are very telling in terms of--as we think about Domitian sitting in rooms like the Aula Regia, greeting visitors, and when you think about what this man, who wanted to be worshipped as lord and god thought of himself, and you see the kind of statuary that he surrounded himself with--this is a very different man than his predecessor Claudius--the kind of imagery that he associated himself with. It's a way of pumping himself up, I think, by having himself surrounded by these very athletic figures of Hercules and also of Apollo.



What do you think this is, just from looking at it? The remains--you can see the remains are not as extensive as one wishes they were, but enough is there to allow a reconstruction of the whole. What are we looking at here?



Student: The octagonal fountain.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The octagonal fountain, the octagonal fountain of the peristyle court. Excellent. See it's really--most people, who wander around these remains, would not be able to figure out for the life of themselves what this was. But you'll be glad when you go up on the Palatine Hill to know, as you stand here, that this was once an octagonal fountain, with a spectacular water display undoubtedly.



This is the triclinium, or what survives--sad--what survives of Domitian's triclinium. This is his apse; this is the very apse in which Domitian would have sat enthroned, as he ate with special invited guests, as he held a state dinner in Rome. And you can see, if you look very carefully, again the construction is brick-faced concrete construction. We talked about the fact that after the fire of 64, a decision was made to begin to use brick as a facing, because brick was more fireproof than stone. And we see that borne out; the entire Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill was made of brick-faced concrete construction. But if you look very carefully, you will see some stucco and you will also see some marble revetment. So, in this case, that brick was covered over with marble, to give it a much more luxurious look for the dominus et deus. Also interesting here--actually there's a tarp on top of preserved mosaic, and I'll show you that mosaic in a moment--but what's interesting here is that the pavement rests on something that should remind you of something we saw earlier in the semester, which is what? You're nodding, so.



Student: The hypocaust.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The hypocaust. It's a hypocaust system; just as we saw in the Stabian Baths in Pompeii, they have raised the pavement up on these piles of brick, and then in between them would have placed terracotta pipes and also braziers with hot, hot coals, and so on and so forth, to heat the floor of the triclinium, so that Domitian could not only sit in his apse, but could have his feet warm while he ate. This gives you again I think a really good window into the kind of man we are dealing with here, and what he was trying to achieve, once again through architecture, through architecture.



This is another view of the apse in which Domitian sat, and here we do see--without the tarp we can see that the mosaic [correction: marble floor] is actually pretty well preserved. And it is the colors that we so often find in Roman mosaics [correction: marble pavements], especially in major public buildings and in private palaces: this combination of green, maroon and white, as you see here, with a variety of very attractive geometric shapes. Again, you can see the concrete construction, faced with brick, and you can see the remains of some of the marble revetment that would have covered the walls and made this all that much more ostentatious in ancient Roman times.



This fountain is a marvel. I love this fountain. This is the fountain that you see, or one of the two that you would see, through the panoramic windows of the triclinium in Domitian's Palace. And this is where I think the genius of Rabirius shows through; and Rabirius shows, in a sense, himself to be the Frank Gehry of his day -- somebody who really enjoyed undulating forms, and the way in which concavity and convexity can be played off against one another, to great result. It's an elliptical fountain. It's fairly small in scale. It's elliptical, as you can see here, and the convexity of that ellipse played off--and you see it repeated again here--played off against these interesting undulating walls; all of this created again out of concrete and faced with brick. So you imagine the bricks have to be very carefully molded to fit where they need to fit into this incredible scheme. And, of course, in antiquity this would have been stuccoed over, and probably had some marble revetment on it, and so on and so forth. But the shape is absolutely marvelous, and I think we are definitely in the presence of a great architectural genius, in the person of Rabirius, who was working for Domitian.



The private wing of the palace, equally spectacular in its own way. I mentioned to you already that it's larger in the space that it covers than the Domus Flavia. And part of it is on two stories, the part that you see over here. There's a fountain court in the center, and then two stories of rooms around that; another peristyle back here; and then a stadium, once again a hairpin shape, with a curved side and a flat side, just like his stadium in Rome. But he already had a stadium, a public stadium, where one could watch racehorses and races and the like. He used this instead. And it's actually sunken--because remember this part is two stories--this is sunken, a sunken stadium next to it. It was used as a place for pleasurable walks, as a kind of outdoor garden where Domitian, and again special visitors, could spend some time, a pleasant place to walk within the city.



We see here another axonometric view from Ward-Perkins, where we can also get a very good sense, not only of the Domus Flavia, as we've already described it: the basilica and the aula on one end; the octagonal fountain in the center; and then over here the dining hall with the two elliptical fountains, one on either side. Here we see again the private area with the sunken stadium over here; with the peristyle court with a fountain in the center; two stories around that; and then over here another couple of other peristyle courts. There are actually three peristyle courts in total here. But what's interesting, I think, when you look at this axonometric view, I think it's interesting to see that--or a kind of cutaway view--to see that from the outside a lot of these spaces didn't look as interesting as they did from the inside. We are definitely moving--we've seen that be the case for awhile, vis-à-vis Roman architecture. Think back to some of the early residences in Pompeii where they were very plain and severe on the outside, but when you went inside and saw the atrium and the impluvium and the compluvium and the garden, it was something else again; this whole element of surprise. And that's true even here, I think, in this palace, where the structures are less interesting from the outside and more interesting from the interiors of them.



Here's a Google Earth image again of just the private part of the palace where we see this interesting peristyle court; the other two peristyle courts behind it; these rooms placed on two stories; and then once again the sunken stadium. The sunken stadium is actually quite well preserved. As you can see here, it's one of the better preserved parts of the villa today. You can get a very good sense, not only of its shape but also of its scale; it's enormous, a huge stadium. And again you have to imagine Domitian wandering around here. And you can see the curved end on one side, but most importantly the concrete construction, faced with brick, and including columns and other marble revetment.



This is a view of that first court, the one that has rooms on two stories around it. Once again, Rabirius has had a great deal of fun with his fountain. He seems to have taken particular pleasure in designing fountains and in letting his imagination run free with regard to fountain design. You see here again he's playing off convex against concave. He's done all of this out of concrete; these shapes are done in concrete, faced with brick, and again the bricks have to be molded very specially to fit the space within that, that they need to accommodate themselves to. And if any of you know anything about those female warriors called the Amazons, they carry shields called peltas, p-e-l-t-a; these should remind you--don't they look like peltae? They look very much like--that's probably coincidental, I'm not implying here that there's any particular iconography to this particular fountain. But who knows? But they do look very much like shields that are carried by Amazonian women. But at any rate, this playing off of convex against concave; Rabirius is clearly enjoying himself with this monument.



Then the rooms on two stories. And you see, just as we saw quite some time ago in the second phase of the Villa of the Mysteries, where they were beginning to open up the exterior and create bay windows and more windows and make it less severe than it had been in the original domus italica, we see that sort of thing here: many more windows used, the wall being opened up. They've gotten so sophisticated in their use of concrete that they are able to open the walls up more, with these rectangular windows of different shapes--as you can see, some large, some smaller, some on the ground, some higher, sort of like windows--and then above additional openings that are arcuated on the top. So clearly he's again enjoying opening up this wall and creating interesting views, from one part of the structure to another.



Two more images of that wonderful fountain, where I think you can see even better the way in which this has all been done out of concrete, faced with brick. And you have to imagine, of course, the spectacular water display, the actually water jets that would've come up. The Bellagio it may not have been, but it probably was something--sort of the ancient version of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the fountains at the Bellagio. Here you see a restored view of this fountain court, where you get a sense that once you add a bunch of statuary and water jets--which you don't see actually working here--and paint the walls, the whole thing would've been even more spectacular still; and I think that gives you some general sense of the original appearance of the palace.



Around the court, the fountain court, and the private wing that we've just looked at, there were a series of rooms, and if you look at some of those rooms in detail, I think you'll be amazed by what you see; some fantastically shaped rooms: some of them cruciform, cross-shaped; some of them going way back to the frigidaria with circular rooms with radiating alcoves. And not surprisingly, again given what Severus and Celer were able to achieve at Nero's Domus Aurea, given the fact that the octagon is clearly also in the mind of Rabirius in this building, we see him creating small octagonal rooms, and exploring and experimenting with those octagonal rooms. And you see a couple of them in plan, on the side, on one of the sides of this fountain court.



I show you here a view from, or several views from the Ward-Perkins textbook, where we see a cross-section, a plan, and also an axonometric view of one of these octagonal rooms that we believe was designed by Rabirius for the Palatine Palace. And I compare it down here to the octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea, which was clearly the model for Rabirius' foray into designing octagons. It's a much smaller room than Nero's octagonal room, but he takes the whole concept a step further. It's an octagon; yes, it's eight sided, just like the Domus Aurea. It has radiating alcoves. Some of them are rectangular, some of them are circular, as you can see here.



And if you look at the axonometric view, you will see two interesting things that are a step forward. One of them is the fact that although in the Domus Aurea the eight-sided room--although the room was eight-sided, the dome was itself essentially curved; it's a traditional dome. What we see happening here though is they take the eight sides and continue that segmented feel into the dome. So we have an eight-sided segmented dome in this octagonal room in the Palatine Palace, which is different than the Domus Aurea. And the other thing, and perhaps even more significant, is the fact that if we look at the individual niches, we will see that they are envelopes of space, in the same way that Nero's Domus Aurea was, and that they have--and just like Nero's Domus Aurea, they have niches within niches.



But what Rabirius has done here is something really quite extraordinary and very different from anything we've seen earlier in Roman architecture, and that is he's placed some of these additional niches or windows or doorways off axis with the niche itself. Now we have seen that the Romans cared above all about axiality and symmetry, and yet we see here--and this is why I call him the Frank Gehry of Roman architects--he is willing to try something entirely different. He is clearly enamored of circles and rectangles and domes and the like, but he is also willing to dispense with the usual axiality of Roman architecture, and explore placing things off axis in a quite inventive way.



And I can show you that even better by looking quickly at the two views of one of these octagonal rooms, from the private wing of the Palatine Palace, where you can see not only--and I hope you can see it from where you are--you can see not only the segments--can you see the segmented dome? I think quite clearly here. You can see these envelopes of space. You can see these openings; this whole idea of creating vistas from one building to another but--and you can see the way in which these vary, that some are doorways, some are windows--but I think you can also see the way in which he is beginning to place--here's a window that is placed completely off axis with the niche.



This is even more apparent in this other view, where you can see one of these radiating niches, and in that radiating niche there's an opening that starts at the floor, and then there's another opening, to the left of it, that's higher up. And again you get this sense of asymmetry, rather than symmetry, in this. And this is again very experimental, very different; it really is different than almost anything I can show you, not only before but even after this great work of architecture, and it gives us some insight into the creativity of Rabirius, and the way in which Domitian was allowing him to be. Because I think this goes above and beyond. Clearly Domitian is imaging himself; I think especially in the public realm of this building, he's very concerned with how he's presenting himself to his public. Over here I have the sense that he has really let Rabirius be Rabirius; that he's let Rabirius do what he wanted to do to create an interesting and architecturally exciting space, in which he could live and could enjoy some of the interesting architectural motifs that Rabirius instills in this extraordinary structure.



Now Domitian was succeeded by John Kerry; no, well sort of, in the sense that he was succeeded by a man by the name of Nerva, who looks very much like John Kerry, don't you think? That's a coin of Nerva on the left-hand side of the screen. Domitian, by the way--I think I may have forgotten to mention, but he ended up just the way Nero did. He was--well in his case he was actually assassinated; Nero was forced to commit suicide but Domitian was assassinated. He was issued a damnatio memoriae at his death. And he was succeeded by Nerva, Nerva who was appointed by the Senate. The Senate had had it with despots, and they decided the time had come to choose one of their own. And they selected Nerva, who was an elderly and very highly respected member of the Senate. And this was the first time the Senate did this--since Augustus founded the Empire in his reign, the first emperor of Rome--this is the first time that an emperor was appointed by the Senate. And Nerva was a highly respected and pretty level-headed guy, and he was able to bring peace and prosperity back to the Empire. He did not last very long however. He had a very brief reign, and therefore very little time to have an impact on architecture. But again you see him represented on a coin on the left-hand side of the screen.



I'd like to show you one building though; I'd like to end today with one building that was actually begun by Domitian and then completed by Nerva. It began as the so-called Forum Transitorium, under Domitian, and became the Forum of Nerva, under Nerva. In order to do this I need to take you to the general plan of the Imperial Fora in Rome. We've looked at this before. You'll remember the location of the Roman Forum here, and obviously down below: the Forum of Julius Caesar that we've already studied; the Forum of Augustus built right next to that, that we've also looked at in detail; and then the Forum Pacis, or the Templum Pacis of Vespasian, which we have looked at more recently, and which you'll recall was built in such a way so that it faced the Forum of Augustus and the Forum of Julius Caesar next door.



I mentioned to you I think already that there was a very large piece of property over here that was--on which stood essentially one of Rome's Seven Hills, the Quirinal Hill--Q-u-i-r-i-n-a-l; the Quirinal Hill of Rome occupied this area. But it was an area that was being eyed by Domitian. You can see from his palace that he had big plans, and once the palace was coming to fruition, he was thinking again about public architecture and the fact that he would really like to build a forum to rival that of his father, a forum that was bigger than that of his father's. And he'd like to put it over here, facing his father's forum, across the Forum of Augustus and the Forum of Julius Caesar. He dreamed those big dreams but he was never able to realize them.



What he did instead was to take this area that was located between the Forum of Vespasian and the Forum of Augustus, the Forum of Julius Caesar; this area that I mentioned to you was called the Argiletum--A-r-g-i-l-e-t-u-m; I think I've got it there, the Argiletum. That area was a street that connected the Roman Forum with an area of Rome called the Subura--S-u-b-u-r-a--the Subura, which was a residential area that I mentioned had in it mostly these wooden apartment houses; large numbers of people lived in the Subura. So there was this street, the Argiletum, that attached the two, or connected the two to one another. And Domitian decided to use that as a forum, to himself, that would be placed next to that of his father. And he placed in that forum a temple of his patron goddess Minerva; his patron goddess was Minerva, and he built a temple to honor her, in this location.



Because this forum was like a street and was so narrow, that had an effect on what could be built there; so that you can see, for example, in plan, that while the Forums of Julius Caesar and Augustus, and the Forum Pacis, all had colonnades, covered colonnades in fact, there was no space to build a covered colonnade here. So what they had to do was place the columns very close to the wall and not put any ceiling on top of those columns. You can see the same here. This is a plan of the original Forum of Domitian, or what was called the Forum Transitorium, because it served as a point of transit between the Subura and the Roman Forum. The Temple of Minerva over here, consistent with temple architecture as we've seen it thus far this semester: a temple with a frontal orientation, single staircase, façade orientation, freestanding columns in the porch, and so on. The entranceway over here. The Forum Pacis would be here. The Forum of Caesar and Augustus at the top. And then you can see these bases for the columns, very close to the wall -- not attached to it, but very close to the wall on either side, because there's no space for colonnades.



Here's a Google Earth image showing the Imperial Fora, as it looks today, part of the later Forum of Trajan, the Forum of Augustus, and what is preserved of the so-called Forum Transitorium over here. This is a model of what the Forum Transitorium would have looked like in ancient Roman times, in the time of Domitian, with the Temple of Minerva, with these columns on either side. And you can see from this model the difference that that makes, when you don't have enough space to build covered colonnades. You've got columns that look like they are projecting out of the wall, with pr

Professor Kleiner analyzes the major public architectural commissions of the emperor Trajan in Rome. Distinguished by their remarkably ambitious scale, these buildings mimic Trajan's expansion of the Roman Empire to its furthest reaches. Professor Kleiner begins with Trajan's restoration of the Forum of Julius Caesar and proceeds to the Baths of Trajan. Situated on the Oppian and Esquiline Hills, these Trajanic baths follow the basic model of the earlier imperial Baths of Titus but increase the size of the complex several times. Most of the lecture focuses on the famous Forum and Markets of Trajan, built on land that the engineer and architect Apollodorus of Damascus created by cutting away part of the Quirinal Hill. The Forum of Trajan consists of a large open rectangular area, a basilica, Greek and Latin libraries, and a temple dedicated to Trajan after his death. Between the libraries stands the celebrated Column of Trajan with a spiral frieze commemorating the emperor's military victories in Dacia (modern Romania) and reaching a height of 125 feet. The brick-faced concrete Markets of Trajan climb up the hill and form a dramatic contrast to the marble forum. The lecture concludes with a brief discussion of the Arch of Trajan at Benevento, which depicts scenes of the emperor's greatest accomplishments and the first representations of his successor, Hadrian.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 17-18 (historical background), 161-169 (Forum of Trajan), 170-172 (Markets of Trajan), 288-290 (Baths of Trajan)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 84-95

Transcript



March 5, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning all. Today's lecture I have called, as you can see, "The Mother of All Forums: Civic Architecture in Rome Under Trajan." And I think you'll see what I mean when we look both at a Trajanic bath building, and also the Forum of Trajan in Rome, what I mean by 'Mother of all Forums.' These were gargantuan buildings, bigger than anything that we have seen before, and interesting in all kinds of ways.



We left off with Nerva, with the emperor Nerva. And you'll recall that Nerva was old, and in fact also relatively sickly, when he became emperor of Rome. You'll also remember--and I remind you of his portrait on the left-hand side of the screen--you'll also recall that he was a member of the Senate, and that he was chosen by the Senate, one of their own, to become emperor of Rome, the first emperor to come from the senatorial ranks in the history of Rome, and he was very popular with the Senate. But Nerva recognized quite early on that, although he was popular with the Senate and with the aristocracy, he was not a favorite of the army, and he realized that was not a good position to be in, and so he wisely decided, very early on, that he would select the most popular military man and the most highly successful military man in Rome, a man by the name of Trajan, as his heir.



And so Nerva adopts Trajan--and you see Trajan's portrait on the right-hand side of the screen--Nerva adopts Trajan in 97 A.D., so that in 98, when Nerva dies--because he dies after only sixteen months in office--when Nerva dies, Trajan succeeds him without contest. Trajan was an extraordinary emperor for Rome. There are a number of important points about Trajan that should be made that have an impact on our understanding and analysis of his architecture. One of those is he's the first Roman emperor to be born outside of Italy. He was born in Spain, the first emperor born in Spain. That's not to say that Spain was the boondocks, by any stretch of the imagination. Spain had already been colonized by Rome and was very highly developed with regard to its civilization. He also came to power as a relatively young man. He was only 45 years of age--a couple of years younger than Obama--and consequently he was in--and he was in very good physical shape, and so he had the physical wherewithal to be the kind of energetic emperor that Rome needed at this particular point.



He undertook many military campaigns, and very successfully, and he was the emperor that extended Rome to its furthest reaches, to its greatest borders, to its most extensive borders, during his reign. And actually these were borders that were never gone beyond. After this point, we'll see that the emperor Hadrian consolidates the extent of the Empire, as reached by Trajan, and no one ever takes it beyond that. So this is going to be the furthest extent of the Empire that we'll see in the course of the semester. And he was also extremely wise when it came to his choice of the kinds of buildings that he wanted to put up, because he followed in the footsteps of Vespasian and Titus, by favoring major public architecture in Rome, and by eschewing private architecture. He wanted, above all, to disassociate himself from Nero, and from Domitian, who had favored palatial architecture, as you'll recall. And so he builds public architecture in Rome, and allies himself in this regard to such earlier emperors as Augustus and as Claudius and as the Flavian dynasts, and we're going to see that in his building projects today.



Like so many other emperors, when he first came to power, he looked around to see which buildings had fallen into disrepair, and he decided to restore as many of those as he could. And he chose very carefully. Again, he obviously did not choose buildings of Nero, many of which had already been destroyed, in any case, but rather looked back further, in fact, dug deep into the Republic, a time, a simpler time in many respects, and a time prior to the shenanigans of the monarchically minded emperors like Nero and Domitian, and he restored buildings from the Republic and from the Augustan period. And he looked back, for example, to the Forum of Caesar in Rome, the Forum Iulium, which you all know well, and we've talked about it before, and I'm not going to discuss it in any detail today. Just to remind you that it began to be restored--that is, the Forum of Julius Caesar--under Domitian, and that that restoration was completed by Trajan at some point during his reign, between 98 and 117 A.D. And I remind you of that here. You'll recall its location, right next to the Victor Emmanuel Monument in Rome. You'll remember that even though it was restored by Domitian and Trajan, it has fallen on hard times.



And if you look at the Temple of Venus Genetrix, you see that all that survives, besides the podium and the staircase, are three columns from that restored version, by Trajan. You see the same three columns over here, and then you'll recall the great open space, with colonnades on either side, and then the market area, the shops or tabernae on the left. I showed you this view as well, pointing out one of the architectural blocks that belonged to the restored building, the building under Trajan. And you can see that Trajan continues this interest in ornamentation that was characteristic of the Flavian period: very ornamental architectural decoration, very deeply carved, with a strong contrast between light and dark. So he does continue this Flavian interest in very elaborate architectural decoration.



You'll remember that the Temple of Venus Genetrix, in the Forum of Julius Caesar, had a pediment that had in the center of that pediment a scene depicting Venus rising from the sea. And there is other Venus imagery, and I show you a detail--and it's on your Monument List--I show you a detail of part of a frieze that depicts cupids--chubby, winged babies, as you can see here, cupids--who are carrying the arms--you can see one of them with a sword sheath over here--they are carrying the arms and armor of Mars: Mars, of course, the consort of Venus, and Mars making reference also to military victory. This frieze, as far as we can tell, does belong to the Trajanic renovation of the building, but it probably does look back to an earlier Julian frieze that decorated the original temple in Rome. And I use that restoration of the Temple of Venus Genetrix, in the Forum of Julius Caesar, as an example of the kind of restoration work that Trajan embarked on, at the beginning of his principate.



But much more important to us today are two buildings, the first a bath, and the second a forum, that are examples of the devotion that Trajan had to public architecture during his reign. And I show you a view here, in fact, a plan of the so-called Baths of Trajan in Rome that were dedicated in A.D. 109. As you can see from the Monument List, we know the architect in this particular case. It is Apollodorus of Damascus. And his name says a lot about him: Apollodorus from Damascus, modern Syria. So it's very interesting. We have an emperor from Spain and an architect from Syria, who worked together. This is a sign that things are beginning to change in the Roman Empire, as the Romans--as Trajan extends those borders even further. It brings in even more multifaceted civilizations around the world, and talent begins to pour into Rome from all of those places. Apollodorus of Damascus, as we'll see today, was an extraordinary architect, right up there with Severus and Celer, and with Rabirius: in fact, one could argue even the equal of Rabirius.



And what's particularly interesting is that Apollodorus of Damascus, like Severus and Celer before him, appears to have been, above all, a great engineer. He actually accompanied Trajan on Trajan's military campaigns, and served as Trajan's military architect. So his first commissions were building bridges--I'm going to show you a reference to one today--building bridges, or building forts and camps on Trajan's military campaigns, and then using that expertise, ingratiating himself with the emperor, who sees that he is enormously talented--because Trajan participated in these campaigns himself--seeing how talented he was, and then putting him in charge of his building projects in Rome, which is really quite interesting. And so these projects are not only aesthetically pleasing and fascinating, but also show extraordinary engineering skill on the part of the major designer, namely Apollodorus of Damascus.



Now these Baths of Trajan are very interesting in all kinds of ways. You can already see, by looking at the plan, their location. They are located on the Esquiline Hill and part of the Oppian Hill, which I don't think I've mentioned before--O-p-p-i-a-n, the smaller Oppian Hill. And the Baths of Titus--well let me remind you first that the Domus Aurea of Nero was built, in part, on the Esquiline Hill. And you'll recall the so-called Esquiline Wing, which is the one wing of Nero's Domus Aurea that is still preserved underground. You'll recall that after Nero's damnatio memoriae, and the coming to power of the Flavian dynasty, that Vespasian and Titus, and even Domitian, razed to the ground Nero's buildings--Vespasian did that--and then he and Titus and Domitian built new buildings, on top of those, and chose to make those buildings the kind of public buildings that the citizenry as a whole would enjoy; from the Colosseum and amphitheater to the Baths of Titus. And you see again the Baths of Titus here, located right again on top of this area that originally belonged to Nero's Domus Aurea.



Trajan follows suit. He not only is interested in public architecture, like Vespasian and Titus before him, but he follows their lead in building these buildings on top of earlier structures, now destroyed, of Nero. So it's again this same message, giving back to the people the land that Nero had taken illegally from Rome during his reign. The Baths of Trajan are based, in large part, on the plan of the Baths of Titus, with some additions. But you can see the extraordinary difference in scale. The Baths of Titus were not small, and yet the Baths of Trajan are at least three, if not four or more, times the size of the Baths of Titus. So this tells us something again about the grandiosity of the vision of Trajan, about the funds that he had at his disposal, and he got those funds, in large part, because of all these military victories in which he took all kinds of spoils and booty, which he used to fund his building campaigns in Rome. And it also tells us something about his ambitions.



Now I don't want you to get the impression that we never had big buildings before. You can think back way to the beginning of the semester when we talked about Julius Caesar and his architecture, and his bragging that he had built a--or one of the authors of that period tells us that Julius Caesar had built a Temple to Mars, the biggest in the world. So in its own day it was, supposedly, the biggest in the world. But we're getting even more ambitious vis-à-vis scale. And I think--perhaps again I'm psychoanalyzing Trajan too much--but I think the fact that this is a man who had the ambitions that he did, to extend the Empire to its furthest reaches, seems to be in keeping with the kind of man who would want to make the buildings in Rome, that he built, a kind of microcosm of that hugely expanded Empire.



With regard to the plan of the baths, you will see that it follows the so-called Imperial Bath type that was initiated by the Baths of Titus, at least with regard to baths that are still preserved. I mentioned to you, when we talked about the Baths of Titus, there may have been an earlier bath of Nero that actually followed this same Imperial Bath form. But we're not absolutely sure about its plan, that is, the Neronian Baths. They existed, but we're not absolutely sure about their plan. But if we look back at the Baths of Titus, you'll remember that what made them distinctive, and what made them differ from the earlier Stabian Baths or Forum Baths at Pompeii, was the way in which they placed the bathing block in the center, rather than to the side; that they arranged the main rooms--the tepidarium, the frigidarium and the caldaria, in this case--in axial relationship to one another. And then all the other rooms of the bath were displayed around those, in a symmetrical way. So axiality and symmetry reigned supreme. And then otherwise we saw here the rest of the precinct, with an elaborate entranceway over here.



We see roughly the same in the Baths of Trajan, in that again the bathing block is located right at the center of the structure, and the main rooms are aligned with one another axially. If you look up to where it says Baths of Trajan that at the northern end is the entrance into the baths. You enter from there, into N, which is a natatio or swimming pool; a piscina. And then you can see that is surrounded by columns. On axis with the swimming pool is the frigidarium, at F, and you can see, just like that of the Baths of Titus, it is a groin-vaulted room: a triple groin vaulted room, as you can see by the three x's over the rectangular area. It has a kind of an apse or exedra at the uppermost part, through which one comes from the natatio into the frigidarium, and you can see that is screened by columns. Then from there into the fairly simple, rectangularly shaped tepidarium, that serves more as a kind of passageway from the frigidarium, into C, which of course is the caldarium, or the warmest room, the sauna of the baths. That also has a rectangular shape, but with these radiating alcoves, radiating alcoves that we're going to see are screened by columns. And they are, of course, facing the southern end where the sun is, and that would, of course, help to heat the caldarium as well.



And then what we see though with regard to the Baths of Trajan, that make them differ from the Baths of Titus, and are part of this evolution of Imperial Bath architecture in Rome, is the fact that the bathing block is placed in this very large rectangular precinct. And this large rectangular precinct has a series of rooms around it, as you can see, real rooms, and rooms that take all kinds of shapes. Many of them are these hemicycle type shapes, screened with columns from the larger central space, but some of them also look like the tabernae that we've become used to in plan. We see all of those there, and these were used, as far as we can determine, as meeting halls, lecture halls, Greek and Latin libraries. So there's this extension of the bath, from being just a place where you went for wellness essentially, to bathe and to relax and to have social interaction with your friends.



They are adding an intellectual element to the bath buildings, so that you can also go there if you want to read--if you want to go to the library and read Greek books, read Latin books--go to lectures, go to seminars, have conversations, intellectual conversations, are also beginning to happen here. So the bath becomes even more of a mecca for people who are interested in intellectual life, as well as bathing and social life, which is a very important development culturally for the Romans. Note here also this great hemicycle, down here, which is part of the bath building -- a hemicycle that had seats on it, which probably served for performances of whatever kind, that would have taken place here. So that's another interesting addition to the bathing scene, and should you remind you of the kind of hemicycles that we saw, for example, in the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, or the Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli, where they also had those performance areas. So bringing in some of those elements from sanctuary design, into bath design, in the Baths of Trajan in Rome.



The Baths of Trajan, some parts of them still exist, but scattered, and in fact they are located now in a kind of a pleasant garden area, as you can see here. This is a Google Earth view that shows you their proximity to the Colosseum; we see the edge of the Colosseum over here. So the Esquiline Hill, in large part. And you can just barely make out here--if you look, see this curved wall, down here, that curved wall is in fact that hemicycle with the--for the theatrical performances that I showed you, just before. And that is actually the entrance -- for anyone going to Rome over break, that's actually the entrance to the Domus Aurea. If it's open--it periodically closes, sometimes, if things are falling down--but if it's open, that's how one gets there. And over here you can actually see this is the--I may have shown this to you before--but this is actually the oculus of the octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea. You can see it, if you wander through this park, you can see it from above, with a grate on top of it, as well as down below, if you visit the palace itself. And then up here, you can see another--just right up above my finger--you can see another curved wall, and there's another one somewhere down here, that are part of those curved rooms, those hemicycle-shaped rooms, that are these lecture halls and meeting halls and so on. And actually that one, the one that's up here, actually has niches in the wall, with shelves, which indicates to us that that was used as one of the libraries. The scrolls would have been placed on those shelves, and then have cupboards in front of them. So one can see remains--it's made out of concrete, faced with brick--one can see remains on the top of that hill.



But a model over here gives you a better sense of what it looked like in antiquity. We're again looking at that large hemicycle that served, with its seats that served for performances here. We're looking at the outer precinct wall. We can see the semi-domes of some of the hemicycles here. And we can also see the bathing block; at the uppermost part, the entranceway; the courtyard, surrounded by columns, which is where the pool or natatio was located. The covered area here was the frigidarium; then the tepidarium. The caldarium is here, and here you can see those radiating alcoves, with columns, that opened them up for vistas and the like, as well as to the warmth of the sun. So an incredible bathing establishment, and one that has taken us a step further in the evolution of imperial bath architecture in Rome, and will serve as the major model for the two most famous and much better preserved baths in Rome, and that is the Baths of Caracalla and the Baths of Diocletian, which we'll look at later in the semester.



But I'd like to turn from the Trajanic baths to unquestionably the most important public building that was commissioned by Trajan during his reign, and I can't overemphasize enough the importance of this building in the history of Roman architecture. And we're going to see that it is two part, in the sense that it has--it is a forum, it has the forum proper, and it also has markets appended to it. They are done in a different architectural style, and herald something very important; a very important development in Roman architecture that's going to be carried further by Trajan's successors.



What we're looking at here is a spectacular aerial view of the part of Rome in which the Forum of Trajan finds itself. We are looking at buildings that we have looked at before; so we can get our bearings. This is, of course, the wedding cake of Victor Emmanuel, over here. You can see a part of the oval piazza, designed by Michelangelo, of the Campidoglio. You can also see--what's this, down here? Forum?



Student: The Julian.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The Julian Forum, the Forum of Julius Caesar, much lower ground level than the rest of the city today. And you can actually see those three columns, from the temple, that I showed you just before, as well as the tabernae of the Julian Forum. And note the relationship of the Julian Forum to the Trajanic Forum. He's restoring Julius Caesar's Forum, at the same time he's building his own. I can also show you here--if you look right above my hand you can see the Piazza Venezia and the Palazzo Venezia. If you look at the center of that building, right over the doorway, there's a balcony. That is the famous Mussolini balcony; that's the balcony from which Mussolini made all his speeches, with his followers gathering in the Piazza Venezia. And from that, from the Piazza Venezia, the street that goes from there to the Piazza del Popolo, is the Corso, the racecourse, the Corso of Rome, which is one of the major streets of Rome, one of the major shopping streets of Rome, as well as one of the major thoroughfares, that takes you--if you go down halfway, take a right, you are at the Via Condotti, and ultimately at the Piazza di Spagna, or the Spanish Steps, which of course is a trek that everybody who visits Rome follows that path, to see the Spanish Steps.



Over here, the forum that we're going to be talking about today, the Forum of Trajan. Much of that forum is underground, and some of it was turned into a garden, as you can see here: a pleasant park, as you can see here. Here we are looking at some of the columns from the Basilica that's part of that forum, from the very well-preserved Column of Trajan. And also over here we'll see the markets of the forum. But I just wanted you to get your bearings again in terms of where it's situated in Rome, and what it looks like today from the air, although it is changing all the time.



And I wanted to show you a Google Earth image as well, because this is much more up to date than the aerial view that I showed you just before. And you'll see the same buildings. You'll see the Victor Emmanuel Monument, and you'll see part of the Campidoglio. You'll see the Mussolini balcony and the Corso, and you'll see the Column of Trajan, and part of the Basilica. But what you see here is that park has been replaced by structures, because they are excavating. I've mentioned this before, they are excavating more of this now, with the hope of someday rejoining the Roman Forum with the Imperial Fora. That may not be able to happen, because of traffic concerns, but it is certainly something that's on the drawing board. And at the very least, right now, without narrowing the street, the main Via dei Fori Imperiali, they are doing excavation in that park area. And you can see what they've brought up.



This is not ancient, it's actually mostly Medieval houses. I hope--I felt there are no Medievalists among you--but I hope they'll eventually realize that these are--well, who's to say?--that they should probably remove these as well and take us back to the original Forum of Trajan; I hope that happens someday. They're not very distinctive. If one looks at them, they're just mainly rectangular rooms. But nonetheless they're at that Medieval level now, and the question is whether they're going to go down any further. But here you can see, not only the remains of the Forum of Trajan, but also the Forum of Augustus. Here's the Temple of Mars Ultor -- that great precinct wall that divided it from the Subura, also visible here. And here we see the great hemicycle that we'll look at today of Trajan's Forum, behind it the Markets of Trajan.



It's important for us to look back at the general plan of the Imperial Fora, to see where the Forum of Trajan fits in. We have already looked at the Forum of Julius Caesar, with its Temple of Venus Genetrix. We have looked at the Forum of Augustus, with its Temple of Mars Ultor. Remember the exedrae on either side of that temple, the embracing arms, that were new at that time, and an important component of the Forum of Augustus. Vespasian adds his Forum Pacis over here. Domitian adds a narrow forum, the so-called Forum Transitorium that served as a point of transit between the Roman Forum and the Subura here. He puts a temple to his patron goddess, Minerva, in that forum. But it is, at his death, it is taken over by Nerva and renamed the Forum of Nerva.



I mentioned to you, when we talked about the Forum Transitorium, that Domitian also had his eye on this property over here. He had schemes as grandiose for public architecture, at one point, as for palatial architecture, but palatial architecture won out and he put all of his effort into the palace, on the Palatine Hill, and never realized any construction in this area. When Trajan became emperor, he decided that he would again focus on public architecture, and that he would build a forum like none other before it. And so he begins to do that. Now that was no small feat in this particular part of the city, because most of this area was occupied by a hill; the so-called Quirinal--Q-u-i-r-i-n-a-l--the Quirinal Hill, in Rome, occupied most of this space.



So what he needed to do--it's great to have an architect engineer in your back pocket, so he set Apollodorus of Damascus to work. He said: "You're a great engineer. All you need to do is take down a good part of the Quirinal Hill, to make way for this great forum that I want to build." And lo and behold, Apollodorus was absolutely up to the job, and that's exactly what he sets out to do. He removes 125 feet of the Quirinal Hill, in order to make way for the Forum of Trajan. And that very number, 125 feet, is actually commemorated in the Column of Trajan, because the Column of Trajan was built to that very same height, 125 feet, to show you, as you stand in the forum, how much of that hill had to be cut back in order to make way for the forum.



You can see by looking at this plan of the Imperial Fora as a whole--and this is--not only did Trajan take the Empire to its furthest extent, this is the last forum that was added to the Imperial Fora, in Rome. You can see, by looking at it in connection to the others, that if you count it, plus the markets--which you see wending their way up what was left of the Quirinal Hill here in plan--if you compare that to the others, you can see that the Forum of Trajan, and the Markets of Trajan, were almost as large as all of the other fora--not counting the Roman Forum--but all of the other Imperial Fora together, which gives you some sense of why I called this "The Mother of All Forums."



Now we're going to look at the plan of this, and I'm going to show you an individual plan in a moment. But what I want to say, while this is still on the screen, is that I want you to look at the exedrae that you see on either side of the main space of the forum, and on either side of the basilica over here. These are not coincidental. They are certainly meant to make reference to the exedrae of Augustus' forum. Trajan modeled himself after Augustus. He became a kind of neo-Augustus. He took on Augustus' hairstyle and his manners, and so he was trying to associate himself, in his life, with Augustus. He's doing it here also, through architecture, by placing those exedrae on either side of his forum.



Here's a plan of the forum itself, on the left-hand side of the screen, where we can see all of its major features. You'd enter into the forum down here. There was a very elaborate entranceway, here. And you can see that the façade is actually not straight, but convex, convex: a convex façade, which is very interesting, curved façade, with an elaborate entranceway over here. The entrance into the main part of the forum, rectangular in shape. There's a base here for an equestrian statue of Trajan. The exedrae on either side, mimicking those of the Forum of Augustus. Colonnades, also on either side, and some additional columns here. And we're going to see that just as in Augustus' forum--another reference back to Augustus--that the columns in this main area are Corinthian below, but in the second tier there are figures -- not figures of caryatids, but different kinds of figures, and I'm going to show you those soon.



Over here the basilica, which is perpendicular to the forum proper. This is quite different from the Forum at Pompeii, where you'll remember the basilica was splayed off, to the side. Here we have it as a more integral part of the forum, and perpendicular to the main space here. It's a very large basilica. It takes the name of Trajan's family. His family name was Ulpius, U-l-p-i-u-s. This is the Basilica Ulpia in Rome, with a central nave, and side aisles, a couple of side aisles around it. So a veritable forest of columns, and then other exedrae, matching exedrae, or, in this case, apses on either end. Then through here you see the location of the Column of Trajan, in a small piazza, and to left and right, libraries, Greek and Latin libraries. And then at the end, a temple.



We don't know what Trajan actually--the northern end of the structure was not completed at Trajan's death, and we don't know if he would have put a temple there. It's highly likely, because what forum have we seen, without a temple at the short end? They all had them. So it's a good guess that Trajan had that in mind too. But the temple that was built there was actually built after his death, by his successor, Hadrian: a temple that Hadrian put up to honor Trajan, and also Trajan's wife, Plotina, P-l-o-t-i-n-a.



Now we know quite a bit. A lot of the forum, some of the forum, is still preserved, and we have evidence for other parts of it that are not preserved. This entrance gate, down here. Believe it or not, we have coins that have an entrance gate on them, and nicely they say--fortunately they say, down below, FORVMTRAIAN, Forum of Trajan. So putting two and two together, we have to go on the assumption that what we are looking at here is a rendition, on a coin, of the entrance gate into the Forum of Trajan, FORVMTRAIAN. And if we look at it here, we see some interesting things. We see, first of all, that it has a single arcuation in the center -- so one doorway. It has a series of bays, that have in them what we call aediculae, a-e-d-i-c-u-l-a-e, aediculae, which are little temple fronts that are--niches with little temple fronts around them, with columns and pediments. And then you can see statuary, inside those. So a series of bays, decorated with these aediculae with statues.



Then a series of circles with blobs in them. I think those series of circles with blobs in them are probably portraits represented on shields, because we have remains of actual portraits on shields from the inside of the forum. So that seems to be the case here as well. And then in the uppermost part, we see that the gate looks very much like an arch, in the sense that it supports a quadriga, at the top, and that quadriga represents two people, possibly the emperor--again, we're dealing with blobs here; we have to do the best we can to interpret them--but they seem to be probably the emperor, and possibly Victory crowning him, the way we saw Victory crowing Titus in his chariot, on his arch. Six horses in this particular case, and then on either side trophies, these tree trunks decorated with captured arms and armor. And we're not absolutely sure what's surrounding them in this case, whether they're prisoners or Roman soldiers.



So this gives you a very good idea of the entrance gate into this structure. And I also want to point out, if you look very closely at the columns and the elements above them in the attic, you can see that the columns project, and the attic seems to have projecting entablatures. So it looks as if we have the kind of scheme here that we saw in the Forum Transitorium, with that wall decorated with columns that project out of the wall, and that have projecting entablature, giving this undulation--undulating movement from projecting to receding, projecting to receding, across the façade of the entrance gate.



The figures that were located on the upper tier of the center--of the main body of this forum again were not caryatids, or female figures, but rather male figures: male figures of captured Dacians, because the war that Trajan had, that enabled him to celebrate and to fund this building, was his wars against the Dacians, D-a-c-i-a-n-s. Dacia, ancient Dacia, modern Romania today. Trajan had two military campaigns there, one from 102 to--excuse me, the first one from 101 to 102; the second one from 105 to 107. He was victorious in both of those, and this forum was built from the spoils of that war, to honor his victory over the Dacians. And we see therefore that the figures that are in the uppermost tier, of the main body of the forum, are depictions of captured Dacians; of Dacian prisoners brought back to Rome.



You see two of them here. Here a headless figure, here a much more complete figure. The headless figure still can be seen on the site, and the one on the left-hand side of the screen now in the Vatican Museums in Rome. The one on the left gives you a better sense of what these looked like in antiquity. You can tell that these are not Romans; wearing leggings, a tunic, a fringed mantle, that the Romans did not wear, a long fringed mantle. And then above you see that he has, unlike Trajan's closely cropped Augustan-type hairstyle, you can see he has very long hair, and also a beard, and this identifies him as a very different--sort of boots that seem to be made out of suede or felt of some sort. So a very different kind of image. Clearly these are again the Dacian prisoners, one after another, aligning that second tier.



And for any of you interested in the fact that the Romans made nearly exact duplicates of things, mechanical copies, you can see in this particular statue--we rarely have this preserved, so it's an interesting example of these points--you see these little excess pieces of marble. The Romans had created a kind of pointing machine, which they used to make exact replicas of originals. And they usually, when the statue was done, they would usually obviously take these away, carve them away, which they didn't do. This one probably was not used, for some reason; it was copied and never put up on the building, and so those points still remain.



This is a model of the Forum of Trajan, as it would have looked in antiquity, with that convex entranceway; the location of the equestrian statue, the exedrae on either side here. You can imagine the Dacians in the second tier. The roofed Basilica Ulpia here. The Column of Trajan, flanked by the Latin and Greek libraries, and then over here the Temple to Divine Trajan. The plan, again, and here I just want to mention, looking back at that plan, that there was also another elaborate entranceway from the main part of the forum, into the Basilica Ulpia, on its long side. And once again, how fortunate we are that we have coins that say BASILICAVLPIA, Basilica Ulpia. So we can guess, I think quite accurately, that this must be the entranceway to the Basilica Ulpia.



Here we see something different. We see three openings, not arcuated openings but trabeated openings, straight lintels above. But look again in the way in which they're represented. It looks like they're quite solid, and that they project into the spectator's space. So again this idea of projection, recession, projection, recession, across this façade. This is very important because, as I mentioned, Roman architecture, using the traditional language of Greek architecture, ultimately developed something that we call a baroque trend in Roman architecture, and you see it happening here, in Rome, based on the experiments of Domitian's Forum Transitorium. And you can see that same, roughly that same scheme here. Up above, once again, a chariot, in this case a four-horse chariot, seemingly with one figure, and a series of standards, being held, possibly by Roman soldiers.



The Forum of Trajan has been the professional, the life work of a professor, formerly of Northwestern University, James Packer, who spent a very long time pulling together all the evidence that the Forum of Trajan still provides, to allow a very good reconstruction of what that forum looked like. It's computer generated. I urge you all to look at it. If you just Google James Packer, Forum of Trajan, UCLA--because that's the, or the Getty, either of those two, because UCLA and the Getty supported this work--you will be able to see computer simulations of his work. There's also a book by James Packer on the Forum of Trajan, that's on reserve for this course. I send you to it, less for the Forum of Trajan, but for any of you working on city plans, again this could be a very inspiring book to look at. Not that I expect you to come up with something like this, but nonetheless I think it can give you an idea of what one can do as one thinks about designing one's own city. He has done enough research to allow a very accurate reconstruction of what this forum would've looked like.



We're looking at the entranceway into the Basilica Ulpia here. We are looking at the marble; you can see real marble and variegated marbles brought from all over the world. So Trajan continues the Flavian tradition of bringing marbles from all over, from places outside of Italy--from Africa, from Asia Minor, from Egypt and so on--for the decoration of these buildings, and an interest in multicolored marbles as facing. We see also up here the Dacian prisoners, and between them, in this instance, these shields, with portraits on them. We have remains of some of those. So that's an accurate reconstruction, the same sort of thing that we saw on the entranceway. Then up there an inscription, several other Dacians, and some other decoration at the apex.



I'm going to show you just a few of these quickly, from Packer's book. You see here a corridor with a barrel vault, stuccoed and painted, lots of statuary. There would have been lots of honorific statuary in this structure. Sometimes instead of the shields, with portraits between the Dacians, we see piles of captured arms and armor, as you can see in that view. Here a couple more, showing again the marble decoration of the walls, varied in color. Here niches with portraits. Over here, more shields with portraits. And here you can see some of the sculptural remains: some parts of a military figure in a breastplate, a man--both of them headless--a man in a toga. And over here part of one of these decorative shields with a portrait. We actually think this is a portrait of Nerva, a portrait of Nerva that would've been placed inside this shield and hung on the upper part of the wall above the columns.



And this is important, and on your Monument List. This is a view of the Basilica Ulpia in Rome, what it would have looked like in antiquity. You can see it conforms to basilican architecture that we've looked at before, with a central nave, divided by its two side aisles--in this case, as you'll recall in plan--and those are Corinthian capitals, as you can see down here. You can see also that it's a gargantuan structure. Look at the size of the people, the men in their togas, and the building itself. And it had a flat roof with a coffered ceiling, and you can see that it had a clerestory. We've talked about the clerestory before. We saw it in the House of the Mosaic Atrium, for example, the clerestory, which is the opening up of the wall, in this case through Ionic columns, to see the vistas that lie beyond, and to let light into the structure. And you can see the vista that lies beyond, of the Column of Trajan and one of the libraries.



This is a photograph that I'm incredibly proud of, because I took it from on top of the Column of Trajan. It's not that difficult to climb the Column the Trajan because there's a spiral staircase in the center of it, that goes up to the top. The part that's hard is getting permission to get in there. It's always locked, and you have to get special permission to do that. So I did it only once, but it was a great thing to do, and you go way up to the top, and you can look down. You can see fantastic views of Rome. But you can also get a very good sense of what the Basilica Ulpia looks like today: not much. But you can see the central space. You can see some of the columns. We can tell that those columns were grey granite. So again, this interest in contrasting marbles, grey granite with white marble, in the Basilica Ulpia and elsewhere. And you can also see the relationship between modern ground level, which is much higher, and ancient ground level, and the possibilities that still remain, if they want to excavate this part of the city -- what more of the Forum of Trajan may be able to be seen. Some of it can actually be seen under the street, and Packer and others have actually gone in to look at what is there, which is what has enabled him to make the kind of accurate reconstructions that he has.



Everywhere in this monument there are references--yes, this is a forum; yes, forums have practical purposes. They're a place for people to meet and to market and to conduct law cases and so on, in the basilica. But this monument reminds you again and again and again and again that it is a monument in stone to Trajan's victories over the Dacians. And not only do we see those Dacians, as we looked at before, but we see lots of other imagery that refers to military victory. This is a fragment of what we think was a frieze, in the Basilica Ulpia, that depicts victories, female personifications of victory, winged, either kneeling at candelabra, or over here, this woman, kneeling on the back of a bull. You can see that she's winged. She's holding the snout of that bull back. She's got a knife in her right hand, and she is about to slit the throat of the bull. And she is doing this to--not only is victory over the Dacians being marked here, but she is also representing the sacrifice that takes place in honor of that victory, by being shown depicting killing a bull.



Back to the plan once again, just to remind you that when we leave the Basilica Ulpia--a doorway also in its long side--we end up in this small plaza, where the temple--where the Column of Trajan is located, flanked by Greek and Latin libraries, on axis with the entranceway, the equestrian statue of Trajan, the other entranceway, the column, and ultimately the temple, at the very end: the temple ultimately to divine Trajan. This is a model of what we think the library may have looked like, or both of the libraries may have looked like from the outside -- fairly smallish square buildings with a portico in the front, and then, most important, a balcony over here. Why a balcony? So that you could come out and look at the Column of Trajan, and read some of the scenes that encircled it. This is a reconstruction, from Packer again, showing what he thinks the interior of one of these libraries might have looked like. It looks larger here than it actually was. But you can get a sense of it, with the reading tables, with the scrolls inside these cabinets here, with the statuary, and in this case he believes that it had a vaulted roof, as you can see on top.



The Column of Trajan, you see it here in two views; an extraordinary work of art, extremely well preserved. Why so well preserved? Well likely because Pope Sixtus V, in the Renaissance, used this column, and also the column of the later emperor, Marcus Aurelius, as important nodes in his reconstruction of the city of Rome. What he did, however, at that time, was that he took the statues of Trajan that would've stood on this one, and Marcus Aurelius on the other, and replaced them with statues of Peter and Paul. And it's Peter who's on the Column of Trajan, and Paul who is on the Column of Marcus Aurelius. But you can see how well preserved they are here. The column shaft rests on a base, decorated with arms and armor, Dacian arms and armor, with a statue of Trajan up at the--a bronze statue of Trajan at the uppermost part.



But what's particularly interesting is the sculpture--I'm not going to go into that in great detail, but I want you to know about it, because it does tell us something about architecture, as we'll see. It's a spiral frieze, done all in marble, of course, that wraps from the base of the column, all the way up to the top. And it tells, in documentary form, the exploits, the military exploits of Trajan, in his two Dacian military campaigns--those two campaigns that I've already mentioned--divided in the center by a Victory writing on a shield. There's been a lot of speculation; there's nothing like this earlier in Roman art quite like this. And so it is a new innovation, probably at the behest of--possibly out of the mind, the creative mind, of Apollodorus of Damascus. And some scholars have suggested, and I think very convincingly, it's an intriguing idea, that because this was located between two libraries, the likelihood--and that the Romans had scrolls--the likelihood is what we are dealing with here is one of these scrolls, sort of wrapped around the column, from base to top, unfurled and wrapped around the column from base to top, with the text removed, with images instead of text. And that makes a lot of sense, again given that you could view it best from the two libraries on either side.



A detail of the base, just to show you how very well preserved the sculptural decoration is. This is not a course in sculpture. I'm not going to go into this in detail, but I want to quickly show you some of the scenes, because again they can be revealing, from the point of view of architecture. This is at the very base. We see a personification of the Danube River, in that area up north, in Dacia, where the Romans went to conquer those tribes. And this is very important, because we know that Apollodorus of Damascus was responsible for building a bridge over the Danube River. It was one of his great engineering feats. And you actually see that bridge located here, which even increases the likelihood that Apollodorus of Damascus was the designer of this particular structure. You see the Roman soldiers have gotten off boats. They're walking through an archway.



Here you see the Roman soldiers. The Roman soldiers did not only do battle, but they also Romanized the areas that they went. We've talked about this a lot: the colonization of the Roman world, Trajan extending the borders to their furthest most points. The Romans get there, what do they do? They start to build architecture. They start to build walls with headers and stretchers. They start to build forts and city walls, in which they put buildings with Roman amenities. Remember, after the war is over, they're often given land by the general, or the emperor -- it becomes theirs, and where they can live from that point on. So they had every reason to want to fill these towns with Roman amenities. And we see the Roman soldiers building cities in many of these scenes.



This is the most famous scene from the column, in which we see a battle between the Romans, inside one of these forts that they've built. They are all with helmets and shields. They have their hands around something; we think these were probably spears that were added in metal, originally. The Dacians down below. You can identify them by their leggings and tunics and scraggly hair and beards, here. They are attacking the camp. The Romans are, of course, going to be victorious, but the Dacians are shown as heroic and valiant, and enemies who are pretty much the equals of the Romans in strength, which only underscores that the Romans were stronger still, to have conquered them. And then over here, if you've ever wondered where the term 'battering ram' came from, you can see it right here--I told you the Romans invented everything--you can see it right here: this pole, with a ram's head at the end, which is serving again as a battering ram, as they try to tear down the walls of the Roman fort.



Perhaps the most poignant and interesting scene happens way up at the top of the column, where the leader of the Dacians, Decebalus, D-e-c-e-b-a-l-u-s, is shown kneeling, almost like one of those Victories, on the bull. He has a knife in his hand. What is he doing? He is kneeling here. He has decided--you can see the Romans; he's got Romans to the left of him, Romans to the right of him. He's about to be taken prisoner by them and paraded in a triumphal procession in Rome, in honor of Trajan. He doesn't want to do that, so he heroically, valiantly, takes his own life. He is about to plunge that knife into his heart, so that he doesn't have to be taken by the Romans. It's very interesting to see them depicting, the Romans depicting, the Dacians in such a heroic way on this column.



I mentioned the museum in Rome that is located in EUR, the Museo della Civiltà Romana, the Museum of Roman Civilization, that has casts and models. I mentioned that they had casts of all the scenes from the Column of Trajan. I show you a view that I took in that museum, just to give you a sense of how one can see those, and how one can see those at eye's level, to get a good sense of them. In antiquity they would have been harder to read. But I should point out that the background was likely painted blue, and there probably would have been some additions, like the metal spears, that might have made it easier to read--almost like Wedgwood--might have made it easier to read in antiquity.



And I also thought I would mention--I'm sure all of you have been down to Ground Zero, but if you go a block or two away from Ground Zero itself, there's the Fireman's Memorial there, that was put up to many of the fireman who sadly lost their lives fighting those fires in the Twin Towers. We see this here: "Dedicated to those who fell and to those who carry on" here. And what's interesting about this, if you look, if you Google this and look at the website for the Fireman's Memorial in New York, you will find out that the designer for this talks unabashedly of his admiration for the Column of Trajan in Rome, and that he used, as an artistic model, for the way in which he massed figures here, showing them in relationship to buildings, he used, as his model, the figures on the Column of Trajan, in Rome.



At the end again, the column, surrounded by the Greek and Latin libraries, the temple over here at the end. You can see it's a conventional Roman temple: deep porch, freestanding columns, staircase, one staircase, façade orientation, just as we saw elsewhere. Here we see an engraving showing the spiral staircase that leads from bottom to top. And over here, that the staircase also goes down below, into a burial chamber. Two urns were found in that burial chamber; the urns of Trajan and Plotina, which tells us, of course, that this also served as Trajan's tomb. So a victory, not only one of his great victories, military victories, but also victory over death.



And then at the apex, we see a good view of the top, with a statue of St. Peter; but we have coins depicting Trajan on--depicting the original statue--the base, the shaft, a portrait of Trajan, a naked portrait of Trajan, a heroicized portrait of Trajan, depicted after death, divinized at the apex of the column. And if you read the inscription on the coin, you see it refers to Trajan as Optimus Princeps. Trajan received many titles. One was Dacicus, D-a-c-i-c-u-s, for his victories over the Dacians; but at the end of his life Optimus Princeps, the greatest princeps of all time. The implication: greater than Augustus. And it is arguable, I think probably correct, that Trajan was the even greater of the two.



This is a restored view, a spectacular restored view, of the building complex, where you can see again the entranceway over here, the equestrian statue, everything that we've described. But I think it's interesting, if you think of yourself having entered into this forum, standing here, looking back at the basilica bearing Trajan's name, looking toward the column and the temple. What you would have likely seen when you stood here was only the uppermost part of the column; because most of it would have been blocked by the very tall Basilica Ulpia. So it's a very theatrical representation, in the sense that you would be standing here with Trajan, during life, looking back toward that column, looking back at the divinization of Trajan, a bronze statue, which would have seemed as if it was floating on top of the Basilica Ulpia. This is a very dramatic tableau, created here by Apollodorus of Damascus. And I think it was not equaled until the seventeenth century by architects like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who also created such spectacular tableaus.



Just to show you again the location of the Markets of Trajan, in relationship to the Forum of Trajan. While the forum was the Romans imposing a rectangular plan on nature--remember, they have to cut back the hill, to make way for it--the markets are something quite different. They are the Romans accepting the shape of the remaining Quirinal Hill, and allowing the shape of that hill to determine the irregular shape of the markets. The markets, unlike the forum that is made out of marble, for the most part--as we've seen, variegated marble--the markets are made out of concrete, faced with brick: a very different material, but a material that is absolutely appropriate, when you want to cover a hillside with tiered buildings, looking back very much to the spa at Baia, looking back to Fortuna Primigenia, at Palestrina. The same idea, to turn this hill, what remained of the Quirinal Hill, into essentially the precursor of the modern shopping mall.



You have shopping--there are 150 shops in the Markets of Trajan. All of these things date, by the way, to the same period, around A.D. 113, the forum and also the markets. We see 150 shops here, on a variety of levels. This is the bottom level, that is located where the exedra, the first exedra is, on the right side. A great hemicycle, with shops. Here, a street, called the Via Biberatica; that name is on your Monument List. And then a covered bazaar up here. All of this on different levels; all of this done in a very innovative way, with concrete faced with brick. You can also see here the very large windows; the semi-dome, that I'll show you in detail in a moment. These large windows indicate to us that the architects are real masters of the concrete medium here, able to de-materialize the wall, by putting up these very, very large windows. That's how good they were in building this, at this point.



The building block here is essentially the taberna: not unlike what we saw in Pompeii, this small space with a barrel vault, an attic window above, and in this case with a post and lintel scheme, made out of travertine, to mark the entranceway into the shop. They took this individual motif, and they replicated it throughout this building, over and over and over again, offering 150 possibilities. Here you see a series of these in a row, a series of these tabernae, with their attic windows, with their travertine decoration, with their sidewalks -- a kind of mini city within a city. And then over here the polygonal masonry of the streets, looking very much like streets in Rome.



Here is a view of the great hemicycle, down on the first story. We see the shops again. What's interesting here is in the second story you see arcuated elements. You can see the facing with--the brick facing, although we do believe this was stuccoed over, in this case. Here, pilasters. But look very carefully. You'll see these pilasters support, in the center, an arcuated pediment, and then on either side these broken triangular pediments, as if the pediment has broken, been broken, to allow the arcuated pediment to show through. We have never seen that before. Yes, we saw it in the paper topics, but that stuff is later. We have not seen that, up to this point chronologically, in built architecture. We have seen it in painting--Cubiculum at the Met, over here, for example--this breaking the triangular pediment to allow something else to show through. This is the beginning of this experimentation that ultimately leads to this baroque element in Roman architecture that I'm going to talk about.



Behind the hemicycle, annular vault, with an additional set of shops, and attic windows there as well. This is the most famous street, from the Markets of Trajan. It's an incredible place to wander, by the way. And they have just recently, in the last couple of years, opened an entirely new museum here, which has a lot of remains from the forum, from the markets, and a great deal of very useful information: an absolute must-see for anyone going to Rome. This is the famous Via Biberatica of the Markets of Trajan, where again you get the sense, once you're in here that you're in a kind of city within a city, but with all these wonderful shops. You can see how skilled they are in using ramps, with polygonal masonry, as well as sidewalks and stairs, so that you can make your way up with either alternative here. Again, the tabernae on either side; the opening up of the walls, with these incredible windows throughout.



A restored view of what the whole thing looked like in antiquity: the hemicycle; the decoration here of the central arcuated pediment; broken triangular pediments over here--a very interesting space, that I'm going to show you in a second--vaulted with a semi-dome, done out of concrete, with very large windows opening up the space. The Via Biberatica, that we already saw here, and then the covered bazaar up there. A quick view of the semi-dome, made out of concrete. It doesn't have an oculus, but otherwise it looks kind of like the dome of the Temple of Mercury at Baia, as you can see. And over here, this wall that I've already described, that shows you how well the Romans can work concrete, now enabling them to open up the wall, much more than they've been able to do so before, and allow even more light into the structure.



The greatest part, perhaps, of the Markets of Trajan is this building here. It's the covered bazaar, and it really is a market bazaar, on two tiers. You can see in this restored view, this series of tabernae down below; the attic up above. You can see that groin vaults are used here, in an incredible way. I'll show you in a moment how. A second story up here, with additional tabernae, opened almost completely to the sky, an incredible feat on the part of Apollodorus of Damascus, assuming he also designed these markets.



Here is the market hall, as it looks today. What is its ancestor? The Ferentino Market Hall that we saw way back when, with its single barrel vault; or some of the cryptoporticuses that we also saw, with their barrel vaults. It's that idea, that market hall idea. But look how sophisticated the Romans have become in their use of concrete faced with brick. They have realized that they don't even need a wall, to support vaults. They can lift their vault on top of individual piers, as they have done so spectacularly here; lift them up. I described this, I think, in the introductory lecture as in a sense opening up a series of umbrellas over the space. They have opened it up so that light can flow in from the sides; light can flow in from either long end, just flooding the whole system with light.



Down below, again, the typical markets, with their attic windows above. But this is a real tour de force, probably the greatest -- certainly the greatest vaulting that we have seen thus far, and again a test to just how far the Romans have come from this to this, by the time of the emperor Trajan. And any of you headed to San Francisco, if you go to the Marketplace there, you will see that that owes so much to Roman antiquity, with all the tabernae-like structures on either side; the vaulting. I mean, this sort of thing absolutely presupposes this kind of architectural development.



In the one minute that remains--and that's all I need for this--I just want to show you one last monument, and make one basic point about it, that really has more to do with the transition from Trajan to Hadrian, than anything else. An arch went up, not in Rome, but in a place called Benevento, which is about an hour's drive from Naples, in the south of Italy, in Campania; a place called Benevento. An arch went up between 114 to 118, honoring Trajan, and all of Trajan's accomplishments. You can see it's covered with sculpture, and each of those scenes represents one of the accomplishments of Trajan. It was put up on the so-called Via Traiana, taking Trajan's name, a road that was built from Rome to Benevento, and was opened during Trajan's reign, and again, a compendium of all his accomplishments.



You can see very clearly that it is based in general form on the Arch of Titus in Rome: a single central arcuated bay; the pedestals supporting double columns on eithe

Professor Kleiner features the architecture built in and around Rome during the reign of Hadrian. The lecture begins with the Temple of Venus and Roma, a Greek-style temple constructed near the Colosseum in Rome, which may have been designed by Hadrian himself. Professor Kleiner then turns to the Pantheon, a temple dedicated to all the gods that combines the marble porch and pediment of a traditional Greco-Roman temple with a vast concrete cylindrical drum, hemispherical dome, and central oculus. The porch serves to conceal the circular shape from view, but upon entering the structure the visitor is impressed by the massive interior space and theatrical play of light. The Pantheon represents the culmination of the Roman quest towards an architecture that shapes and dramatizes interior space. Professor Kleiner next discusses the Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli, a sprawling complex in which the emperor re-created buildings and works of art he observed during his empire-wide travels. The lecture concludes with a brief overview of the Mausoleum of Hadrian (the Castel Sant'Angelo), a round tomb that refers back to the Mausoleum of Augustus and served as the last resting place for Hadrian and the succeeding Antonine dynasty.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 18-19 (historical background), 113-115 (Temple of Venus and Roma), 201-206 (Pantheon), 369-373 (Mausoleum of Hadrian)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 107-124, 204-206

Transcript



March 24, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everyone, and welcome back, after what I hope was a great spring break. This lecture, that I'm going to deliver this morning, has been an inspiration to students who have selected Option 3 for their paper topic: "How to Design a Roman City." Because this lecture has it all. It has great architecture; it has an extraordinary patron -- a man who traveled the Empire, to all kinds of exotic places, some of which we'll be talking about today and some of which we'll be talking about in the future; a love triangle; some of the best buildings that we'll see in the course of this semester, including the Pantheon and also Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.



The patron Hadrian, whom I show you in a portrait from Rome, now on the left-hand side of the screen, was an extraordinary man. He was born in 76 A.D., and he became emperor at the age of 41, after having served with Trajan for a number of years. He was born, like Trajan before him, in Spain, not in Italy, and he also was the most educated, one of the most educated, and most intellectual of the Roman emperors. We'll talk about the impact that that intellect had on his architecture. I mentioned that he already--he also liked to travel. He traveled extensively during his reign, had three major trips that had an enormous impact on his architecture, and also on architecture around the Empire.



And it's also important I think to know that he reversed Trajan's policy. You'll remember that Trajan's major political policy had to do with military conquest, that Trajan was involved in a number of very important wars, and he celebrated those wars, and he extended the Empire to its furthest reaches, reaches that were never gone beyond for the rest of the Roman Empire. Hadrian reversed that policy. He was a peace loving man. He had no interest in being involved in these kinds of military exploits; although he had served with Trajan in some of them, in earlier years, he had no desire to continue that on. And he was much more concerned with consolidating and preserving the Empire, as expanded by Trajan.



And so one of his greatest claims to fame is the great wall, the famous Wall of Hadrian that he built in order to separate the Roman Empire, the Greco-Roman Empire, from the rest of the Empire, this great wall that divided Greco-Roman civilization from the barbarian world that lay outside. And there are fragments of that wall, a quite extensive part of that wall that still survives in Europe today. You can see it in Britain, and I show you an example of some of those remains here on the right-hand side of the screen, that is, of Hadrian's Wall.



Hadrian was also a great philhellene, and you notice in that portrait that I just showed you that he wore a beard. And, in fact, he's the first Roman emperor to wear a beard. Beards were not worn by Romans up to this time, but they were worn by Greeks, and we believe that he wore that beard, in large part, to look more Greek. We also know that, although he wore a toga in public, he was known for wearing the Greek himation, in private, and he did that, we think, in large part because of his love for Greece and for Greek culture. He was so philhellenic in his leanings that he received the nickname "The Greekling," and we'll see, as we look at his architecture, the impact that his love of Greece had on that architecture.



In fact, what I'd like to do today is to begin with the most Greek of Hadrian's buildings, a building that we think he may have designed himself, because we also know that Hadrian was an amateur architect; Hadrian himself was an amateur architect. And we think he designed this very building, the so-called Temple of Venus and Roma. He was also particularly interested, by the way, in religious architecture. Most of his public building was religious architecture, temples, this being one of them: the Temple of Venus and Roma, a temple put up to Roma, as the patron goddess of the city of Rome, and to Venus as the patron goddess of the Roman family. And you'll remember that Venus was a special favorite of Julius Caesar, and of Augustus, and those two thought of her as the special patron of the Julian family. So we also see Hadrian here, conjuring up, I think, his connections to the earlier dictators [dictator] and emperor Julius Caesar, and Augustus, by his emphasis on Venus.



So this Temple to Venus and Roma. You'll see that we don't have a precise date for this monument. We think it was put up sometime between 121 and 135. We know it was dedicated in 135. It seems to have been long in the making. So it's hard to categorize it as either an early- or a mid- or a late-Hadrianic building, because it does seem to have been in production for quite some time. I show you two plans of the Temple of Venus and Roma, because there's controversy about which plan most accurately reflects the original Hadrianic temple. Because we know the temple was -- while it was built under Hadrian and dedicated in 135, we know that it burned down in a very serious fire in Rome, in the late third century A.D., and then was renovated by an emperor, whom we'll talk about later in the semester, by the name of Maxentius, M-a-x-e-n-t-i-u-s; it was renovated by Maxentius in 307 A.D. And we think Maxentius kept quite closely to the original Hadrianic plan, but we're not absolutely sure about that. So that some of the discrepancies that you see between these two plans may have to do with the discrepancies between the original building and the eventual renovation.



But you will see that in the main these two plans--and the one on the left-hand side of the screen is the one that's on your Monument List that you have in front of you. The one on the right-hand side of the screen is the one in your Ward-Perkins textbook. But if you look at its most outstanding features, you will see that most of them are similar to one another, that the main features of these two buildings--of these two plans--are the same. And you should be immediately struck by these plans, both of these plans, and how different they are from what we have characterized as the typical Roman temple; that typical Roman temple, usually with a single cella, with a deep porch, with freestanding columns in that porch, with a façade orientation.



This is very different indeed, no matter which of these two plans you look at. Because you will see that this large temple has a double cella, two cellas, back-to-back--and you see it in both plans--two cellas back-to-back. Well the reason for that is obvious, because it commemorates two divinities, Venus and Roma, and each one needed to have a cella. But these are not cellas within a larger cella, located side by side, as in the Capitoline Triad Temple, but rather two that are back-to-back, two that are back-to-back. Now what this does is take away the façade orientation of the building and give us two facades, in a sense, one on either side. So we see that in both of these. We also see that the columns go all the way around the structure, and so does the staircase go all the way around the structure; we see that in both plans. And then there is a large precinct that also has columns around it. I can also tell you, you can take on faith, that this building also has a low podium.



So what we see here is a temple that looks much more Greek than it looks Roman; in fact, as I said, it doesn't look anything like the typical Roman temples that we've been talking about today [this semester]. Why is this? This has to do with the fact that Hadrian was a philhellene, that he was enamored of Greek architecture, and that he opted, in this case when he himself appears to have been the architect of this building, Hadrian, amateur architect, seems to have designed this building himself. We see that when he was left entirely to his own devices, he wanted to build a Greek temple in Rome, and that is exactly what he did.



Now also important vis-à-vis this temple is location, location, location. This building is located at the edge of the Roman Forum, closest to the Colosseum, and on the Velia; you'll remember the Velia where the Arch of Titus is located, the Arch of Titus. And you'll remember that that was the area that the Flavian dynasts chose to build their buildings on, in order to raze to the ground Nero's earlier Domus Transitoria, and build their own buildings in its place. So we see Hadrian continuing on in that same tradition, returning to the Roman people land that had originally been theirs, that had been stolen by Nero, by building, in this case, a religious structure on that site instead. So that also extremely important.



To get back for a moment to the plan, we see again the major difference between these two versions is that in this case there is a flat back wall for each of the individual cellas; for this one, a niche on either side, niches back to back, almost kissing, as you can see here. And then you can also see another difference is the walls are very elaborately scalloped in this plan, which we can see in the Maxentian renovation that still exists; and I'll show it to you in a moment. But again, we're not sure if that was a Maxentian innovation, in the early fourth century A.D., those back-to-back apses and scalloped walls, or whether they come from the original--whether they restore what was in the original Hadrianic building. I tend to prefer the one on the left because there is every evidence that we already have all of these features in Roman architecture. Think to the Flavian Palace on the Palatine, Domitian's Palace, where we saw the scalloped walls in the Aula Regia, and where we certainly saw these niches with vaults of heaven, semi-vaults up above them. So everything was in place to have that kind of structure; so it's certainly not inconceivable in the Hadrianic period.



Here's a view of the Temple of Venus and Roma as it looks as if you are standing atop the Colosseum, and taking a picture back toward it. And this is very useful, because it shows you--this is not a high podium, this is just the difference in ground level, once again--ancient ground level being lower than modern ground level--and some of the structures that lay below originally of Nero's Domus Transitoria, for example, that this building was built on. Here you can actually see the podium of the temple, and you can see that it is very low, compared to what we're used to. We're looking back at one of those niches. You can see the semi-dome here, as well as the relationship of it to the Arch of Titus, and the Velia, which once again points out the fact that we are dealing here with a building that was put on property that had originally been the location of Nero's Domus Transitoria.



Here are three very useful views, one showing that same niche closer up, taken from the Colosseum; one of those back to back niches, as it looks today. And then this one, over here, which is the other niche, which is preserved inside a later building that was transformed into a museum of the Forum Romanum, at one point. We see it here, and you can see in both cases the semi-dome. You can see the concrete construction, faced with brick. In this one, which is better preserved in large part because it was in part indoors, we can see the columns on either side of the niche, and we also see that scalloped wall that I described before, just like the Aula Regia, with niches flanked by columns. And you can see the beginning of a coffered vault. We're not absolutely sure it was barrel vaulted, but we think the building was barrel vaulted.



We also see, on the left, I remind you of the octagonal room designed by Rabirius, for Domitian's Palace on the Palatine, to underscore again the kinds of experiments that Rabirius was making, that had such an impact, as we shall see today, on Hadrian and his own architectural designs. You'll remember that room. You'll remember that it has a segmented vault. You will remember that it's treated very much like sculpture: that it has niches; that it has niches within niches, windows within niches, doorways within niches; all of them done in an asymmetrical way, that makes the design particularly interesting. Rabirius and his architecture, very influential on Hadrian. Keep in mind that Hadrian, once Domitian--I mentioned this to you when we talked about Domitian's Palace--once Domitian built that palace, it was the palace that all the emperors, from that time to the end of late-antiquity, lived in. Hadrian was no exception. When he was in Rome, he lived in that palace, and he was therefore seeing and experiencing the shapes, the architectural shapes designed by Rabirius, on a daily basis. He liked that octagonal room, in particular, and the others like it in the palace, and it clearly had an impact on him, as we shall see.



The last point I want to make about the Temple of Venus and Roma, by the way, has to do with materials. We have been talking about the increasing use of marble in Roman architecture: under Augustus, marble from Luna or Carrara; under Nero and the Flavians, marble from all over the world, from Asia Minor, from Africa, of all different colors. Hadrian, the philhellene, returns to using Greek marble for his buildings, and the Temple of Venus and Roma is made of Proconnesian marble, P-r-o-c-o-n-n-e-s-i-a-n--I think I got that right--Proconnesian marble that comes from Greece. It's a blue veined marble. He was particularly fond of it, and he used it for the Temple of Venus and Roma.



I want to turn from the Temple of Venus and Roma to the much more famous temple that Hadrian constructed. If the Temple of Venus and Roma was to two gods, Venus and Roma, Hadrian's Pantheon was to all the gods, which is what pantheon means, to all the gods--a temple to all the gods that he built in Rome between 118 and 128 A.D. You see a Google Earth image of it here, the Pantheon, surrounded by modern structures. It is one of the greatest masterpieces of architecture of all times. In fact, if you were to ask a group of architectural experts to make a list of the ten greatest buildings ever built, it's hard for me to believe that not every one of them would at least list somewhere in that list of ten the Pantheon; not only because it's a great building in its own right, but because it has had such an enormous impact on architecture in Roman times, as we'll see in later lectures, but also on architecture in post-antique times; an extraordinarily influential building. And there are some--and I would be one of them, maybe I'd be the only one; I hope not--who would list the Pantheon as the greatest building ever built by man or woman, of any time, in any place. And you can see, as we look at it together today, whether you think I come close or I'm way off the mark on that. But I believe vehemently that it was the greatest building ever built, and it remains an extraordinary structure to see and to experience.



You see it here--oh, and by the way, although I mentioned that Hadrian was an amateur architect, we don't know the name of the architect for the Pantheon. Do I think it was Hadrian? Absolutely not. Hadrian was not this good. He was an amateur architect, not a professional architect. This is an extraordinary work of art. He may have had some input, he undoubtedly did. Because we're going to see that the Pantheon is at the same time complex and simple; it's also traditional and innovative.



And what we're going to see Hadrian and his architect doing here, and also doing at the Villa at Tivoli, is combining, in an extraordinary way, traditional Roman and innovative Roman architecture. Concrete construction, and the original vocabulary of Greek architecture, namely columns, combined in the same place. And he was highly influenced in this regard by his predecessor Trajan. Think of the Markets and Forum of Trajan, the way in which we had combined, in the same complex, a traditional forum and a very innovative marketplace. We're going to see the same thing in the Pantheon. We're going to see the same thing at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. So Trajan exerting--Trajan and Apollodorus of Damascus, exerting a very strong influence, as did Rabirius, on the architecture of Hadrian.



Again this Google Earth image is useful, because it shows us the building in its modern environment. But it's important to keep in mind that the Pantheon in Rome was part of a complex in antiquity, as most temples were, temples that were in sanctuaries, temples that were in fora. We've seen that in the course of this semester that they usually did not stand in isolation, but were part of architectural complexes. We see that here. This model is very helpful in that regard, because it shows us that there was a rectangular forecourt: that that forecourt had covered colonnades on either side; that there was some sort of entranceway here, possibly an arch, possibly an altar also, to all the gods, in front of the temple; and then the temple itself, the Pantheon itself.



Now this model is also very useful in the sense that it gives you an idea of what you actually would have seen, if you had walked into this complex, into this open rectangular space, and walked toward the Pantheon. What would you actually have seen? Well all that you would have actually seen was the porch, the porch, which had an attic behind it, which screened the cylindrical drum and the dome from the viewer. So if you were standing here, all you would have seen was this porch. Now this porch is very traditional. It looks like other Roman temples, the fronts of facades of Roman temples that we've looked at before. It looks like other Greek temples, because what you would have seen was the pediment, columns supporting that pediment.



It was a typical Roman temple, from the front: deep porch; freestanding columns in that porch; single staircase; façade orientation. Very different from the Temple of Venus and Roma; much more Roman looking. And then a high podium; a high podium, which we already mentioned the Temple of Venus and Roma did not have. That's what you would have seen, as you were standing in front of it. You would have thought, well this is very much in keeping with other Roman temples. But of course there was a surprise when one walked through the doors; and that is the very essence of Hadrianic architecture, the surprise that one gets when one actually goes from the outside of the building into the inside of a building.



Before we do that, I just want to show you the back of the cylindrical--because this traditional porch shielded a very innovative cylindrical drum, supported by a hemispherical dome, as you can see here. The construction technique the same, as we've seen from the time of Augustus, from the time of the Temple of Mercury at Baia, the use of concrete construction, faced with brick. It's more sophisticated here than it has ever been before, and we can see that the architect has relieved the severity of the structure by adding three cornices--you can see two of them at least here; there's another one down here--three cornices.



And you can also see very interestingly these brick arches, which tell us a great deal about Roman building practice during this period, especially obviously for the use of concrete construction. Because what those were used for is to help keep the concrete from settling. After the wet concrete had been poured, those arches keep it from settling, until it dries. And then once it dries, those arches are no longer needed, because the building, the concrete walls support the building on their own, and support the dome on their own. And they're no longer needed, but of course they're left there, and then they have a certain aesthetic value in the aftermath. And so you can see very clearly here, as you look at what is preserved--and the building is extremely well preserved, the back of the building--you can see reference to that construction.



These diagrams, both the plan of the structure, the cross-section and the diagram on the left-hand side, also give us some very interesting and important information. They show us that the circular drum was internally half the height of the diameter. You can see that in the diagram on the left-hand side of the screen, of the diameter of the structure, and that it was surmounted by a hemispherical dome, the crown of which is the exact distance, the same exact distance. So this was very carefully orchestrated by the architect to achieve what he needed to achieve here. You can also see, if you look at the plan, that again the predecessors for this are clearly the frigidaria at Pompeii, the thermal bath at Baia -- this round structure with the radiating apses, very similar, but of course done in much, much grander scale.



Now with regard to--and this is the façade of the Pantheon, of course, as it looks today--with regard to how they made this happen, how they were able to take the small-scale frigidaria, the slightly larger Temple of Mercury, the larger still Domus Aurea of Nero, or the domed room in the Domus Transitoria, and turn it into the Pantheon ultimately, has to do in part not only with the skill of the architects, has to do in part also with the increasing sophistication that we've been talking about quite consistently of the use of concrete construction by the Romans, but also has to do with the recipe for concrete. We haven't talked about the recipe for concrete, since the time of Caligula, when we talked about the fact that he had made some adjustments. Well Hadrian made some adjustments, or Hadrian and his architects made some adjustments as well, during Hadrian's reign. And what they did was they--two things. They decreased the thickness, they decreased the thickness of the walls, from bottom to top, and they also did what Caligula had done before, but did it even more so, by mixing--using as an aggregate, at the base of the dome, they used heavy stone, a basalt, a very heavy, thick basalt. But when they got toward the top, they mixed, or the idea was when they got toward the top, they would mix in as an aggregate a porous pumice, which was much, much lighter, and that's essentially how they achieved their goals.



Now before I talk about the exterior of the structure, and take you through the building, I want to mention one very interesting exchange between Hadrian and Trajan's architect, Apollodorus of Damascus. You'll remember that I said that the Temple of Venus and Roma we think was designed by Hadrian himself. And at one point Hadrian--Apollodorus was still alive and highly respected--and at one point Hadrian went to Apollodorus to ask him for his thoughts on the designs that Hadrian was doing for the plans, that Hadrian was doing for the Temple of Venus and Roma, which tells us--if you wondered where I got--how we know that Hadrian was an amateur architect, it's because of this passage, because it tells us that Hadrian was doing some designing and that he was designing the Temple of Venus and Roma. And we fortunately have the Roman senator of eastern birth, Dio Cassius--D-i-o, new word, C-a-s-s-i-u-s, Dio Cassius, a Roman senator of eastern birth--who wrote a history of Rome in the third century A.D., gives us an account of this interaction between Hadrian and Apollodorus of Damascus.



And although I don't like to read to you, I am going to read to you from this quote, because it is so critical for our understanding, both of the Pantheon and for Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. So bear with me as a read this, a bit longish quote. So Cassius Dio tells us, and I quote: "Hadrian first drove into exile, and then put to death Apollodorus, who had carried out many of Trajan's building projects. The pretext given for Hadrian's action was Apollodorus had been guilty of some serious offence, but the truth is that when Trajan was at one time consulting with Apollodorus, about a certain problem connected with his buildings"--that is Trajan's buildings--"the architect said to Hadrian--"; so this seems to have been before even Hadrian become emperor. "The architect said to Hadrian, who had interrupted them with some advice, 'Go away and draw your pumpkins. You know nothing about these problems.' For it so happened that Hadrian was at that time priding himself on some sort of drawing. When he became emperor"--that is when Hadrian became emperor--"he remembered the insult and refused to put up with Apollodorus' outspokenness. He sent him the plan for the Temple of Venus and Roma, in order to demonstrate that it was possible for a great work to be conceived without Apollodorus' help, and asked him"--that is, Hadrian asked Apollodorus--"if he thought the building was well designed. Apollodorus sent a reply saying that as far the Temple of Venus and Roma was concerned, it should have been placed in a higher position." It should've had a high podium, not a low podium, according to Apollodorus, who goes on to say, "'With regard to the cult images--'" Apollodorus goes on to say, "'With regard to the cult images, they were made on a scale which was too great for the height of the cella, for if the goddesses should wish to stand up and leave the temple,' he said, 'they would be unable to do so.' When he wrote all of this so bluntly, Hadrian was both irritated and deeply pained, he had the man slain."



Now the pumpkins--what's critical about this, it tells us two things that are absolutely essential in our understanding of Hadrianic architecture: one, that Hadrian was doing designing on his own, that he was an amateur architect, and he seems to be very much involved in the design of the Temple of Venus and Roma. It also tells us that Hadrian was making some drawings of pumpkin domes. What are pumpkin domes? Well pumpkin domes are undoubtedly segmented domes. They are just the kind of dome that Rabirius did for the octagonal rooms in the Palatine palace; rooms that Hadrian was exposed to by living in that palace himself, obviously fond of them, liked them, started to draw his own pumpkins. And we're going to see that those pumpkins--well we don't have a pumpkin dome in the Pantheon, as we'll see probably fortunately. But we do have them at Hadrian's Villa. And so again very critical for you to be aware of this interesting exchange, very momentous exchange between Hadrian and Apollodorus.



We see here the façade of the Pantheon, as it looks today. You have to think away this very attractive [fountain] but [that] nonetheless mars the view, of the façade of the Pantheon, that was put up in the Renaissance. And you have to imagine the building now stands in isolation, without its colonnades and without its forecourt. So you have to try to imagine them. But you can see how very well preserved the Pantheon is. The ground level has shifted, so we don't see the very tall podium that was once there, although there have been some excavations around it, that demonstrate that it is indeed there, or part of it is indeed there. But we can see the columns across the front. We can see an inscription. We can see the pediment and the attic. And this is a good view because although you see the dome peeping up a little bit on the top, it gives you some sense of when you stood in the colonnade, walking toward it, the forecourt, walking toward it, that you would have only seen essentially the most traditional part of the building, and that is the columns supporting the pediment, with the dome behind.



This is a detail of the inscription of the building. We can also see the columns. You can see that they are grey granite--I've a better view in a moment--grey granite with white marble capitals. The inscription is fascinating. It tells us that M. AGRIPPA, Marcus Agrippa--that's the famous Marcus Agrippa, the childhood friend, confidant, son-in-law, firsthand man, one-time heir to Augustus--Marcus Agrippa; L.F., Lucius Filius, the son of Lucius; COS, consul; consul; TERTIUM, for the third time; FECIT, made it. This tells us Marcus Agrippa, Consul for the third time, son of Lucius, made it; made the Pantheon. What's that all about? Marcus Agrippa lived in the age of Augustus. Well we know there was an earlier Pantheon on this site, that Marcus Agrippa was responsible for commissioning. Marcus Agrippa, like Augustus, commissioned a lot of buildings in Rome. He also commissioned them in the provinces. We'll look at some of those when we go out to the provinces.



Marcus Agrippa, a major building program in Rome, including a pantheon, a temple to all the gods. And we don't--that pantheon no longer exists, although there have been some excavations that have discovered some of it underneath the current building. But it stood on this very site, and we know, from a literary description, that it had a caryatid porch, which is perhaps not surprising, in the context of Augustan architecture. You'll remember the caryatids, in the Forum of Augustus that we looked at earlier in the term. So we know that Marcus Agrippa actually built Rome's first pantheon, his first temple to [all] the gods on this very site. When Hadrian built his own pantheon, on the same site, he decided to piously reference the earlier building of Marcus Agrippa, telling us that Marcus Agrippa made this, made a building that originally stood on this site, which he is basically very modestly saying he restored.



Of course, this building that he made has nothing to do undoubtedly with the Pantheon in Rome; it's a very different and much more sophisticated building. But it was a very modest thing to do. But I think there was a method to his madness in the sense that he was underscoring, by so doing, his relationship once again to Augustus, which was obviously very important for him to do. But this inscription confused a lot of scholars for a long time, who actually called this originally an Augustan building. You can see the pediment up above. You can see all the holes there; those are the attachment marks for sculpture that would have been located in this pediment that no longer survives.



Here's another view showing the grey, the light grey granite columns, the white Corinthian capitals; all of these magnificently carved, very high quality architects and artisans here. By the way, I forgot to mention, when we talked about the Temple of Venus and Roma and the use of Greek marble, that Hadrian not only brought in Greek marble, but he brought in Greek marble cutters, marble carvers, who were responsible for working on these. So he wanted the very best, those who were most familiar with carving Greek marble, to be used for his buildings, and they were undoubtedly used for this one as well. And we can see the depth of the porch, I think also, from this view of the Corinthian columns of that porch.



It's very hard in a classroom in New Haven, even with outstanding slides, to be able to give you a sense of the experience that one has, of the surprise that one has, as one walks through the door of the Pantheon. We see the doors opened here. They are bronze doors. They are original doors, from this extremely well-preserved structure. And the reason that it is so well preserved is because like other buildings in Rome, it was reused in later times, as a church primarily, with a wonderful name, Santa Maria Rotonda; Saint Mary, the rotund Mary essentially, which is perfectly chosen for a building with a giant rotunda, with a great cylindrical drum, that the building has. We see those doors opened up here, and as one walks through this very traditional porch, through the original bronze doors, into the interior, one is struck by the extraordinary nature of the interior of the Pantheon, which you see over here.



And all you're looking at here is the uppermost part, with the dome essentially. And the reason is because it is near--even the human eye, both eyes, can't take in the extent of this interior all in one glance, and even if one uses the widest of wide-angle lenses, you get a tremendous amount of distortion, and you can't really take the whole thing in at once, which makes it extraordinary. And one has to rely instead on this painting by Pannini, that shows you the grandeur beneath the dome, and that gives you a better idea than any image I can show you, however professional, of what the interior of the Pantheon actually looks like.



And you can see in this Pannini painting the wonderful marble revetment, the marble floor, the dome, with its coffers. There are one, two, three, four, five rows, yes five rows, of twenty-eight coffers each; 140 coffers in all. They were likely gilded in antiquity. You see that there is an oculus, through which light streams down onto that gilding, down onto the marble incrustation. The marble incrustation, by the way, extremely well preserved. This is about our best example of ancient Roman marble -- not all of it is ancient, but a good portion of it is, and it gives you a very good sense of what some of these marble buildings would have looked like in antiquity.



And I show you a detail of some of the original marble revetment over here. And this is what those Pompeians wished their walls actually were: beautiful marbles of all different colors, brought from all different parts of the world. So even though Hadrian chose Proconnesian marble for his Temple of Venus and Roma, his Greek building, which we really need to think of as a kind of Greek import for this more Roman building, he is following in the footsteps and Nero and the Flavians, and using multi-colored marble, both for the revetment on the wall, and the marble pavement down below. Most of this building--again, it's very well preserved--is the original structure: the original columns, the original pilasters, still extremely well preserved in the Pantheon.



Because it was used over time as a church, there are lots of accoutrements that one would expect in a church: various saints and niches and so on and so forth. So much of the sculpture is from a later period. And it even has served as a burial place for famous Italians, not the least of which was Raphael, the famous Renaissance painter, who you'll remember left a graffito, when he went down into the subterranean chambers of Nero's Domus Aurea. He was buried here, and his tomb is one of the high points for most visitors to this structure; you see it here. It dwarfs, to most people's minds, the Tomb of Victor Emmanuel, whom you see over here on the left-hand side of the screen. But note all of that Roman symbolism: the eagle with outstretched wings and the Amazonian pelta and so on, all of those symbols of Roman power, still very much used by dynasts, modern dynasts, like Victor Emmanuel.



The dome of the Pantheon had the largest diameter of any dome, up to this point. We know that it was--the diameter of the Pantheon is 142 feet. And if we compare it to the other large dome in Rome, that of St. Peter's, we find that the Pantheon dome still surpasses St. Peter's. St. Peter's is 139 feet in diameter; so just a bit smaller. Now any of you who have been both in the Pantheon and in St. Peter's will probably say to me: "Wait a minute here, the dome of St. Peter's actually looks larger, when you stand underneath it." And I show you a view of that dome here. The reason it does look a bit larger is the dome of St. Peter's is taller. So volumetrically it looks bigger, and visually it looks bigger, but it isn't in terms of its diameter. In diameter the dome of the Pantheon is still the largest dome in the city of Rome.



And as you look at this dome, and compare it to St. Peter's, one can't help but think--and think back to Domitian and his dominus et deus, and his vaults and so on and so forth; the whole idea being having the dome of heaven over one's head. I think one can't help but think, when one looks at this, that there may be some reference here, both to the orb of the earth and to the dome of heaven. And it is certainly an appropriate symbol for a building that honors all the gods.



I think it's important to, at this juncture, to say something about, or to compare, the most important Greek temple, the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens, with the most significant Roman temple, the Pantheon, to see that we have really come from an exterior to an interior architecture, that in the case of the Parthenon, fifth century B.C., Athenian Acropolis, they are thinking primarily of a building that interacts with the rock of the Acropolis and with the urban landscape, and in other contexts these Greek buildings interact directly with nature. That's the way the Greeks thought about their buildings, essentially as an exterior structure. And we see the Romans following suit in their emphasis on façade, the façade of temples in their own religious architecture. But with the Pantheon, that changes. Yes, it does have a pediment in the front, it does have a traditional porch. So that's a nod to traditional temple architecture.



But once you go through that porch, into the structure, and see that great cylindrical drum, the hemispherical dome, the light streaming through, you're in this totally new interior world that has no precedent in early Roman architecture. And that had a huge impact on later Byzantine architecture, Medieval--especially Byzantine architecture. And particularly go to Istanbul and see Hagia Sophia, or the Blue Mosque; they owe everything to the dome of the Pantheon. So we see this final, this real transition here; a transition also in building materials, from stone to concrete construction.



A few more views of this, of the interior of the dome of the Pantheon. These are very dramatic in black and white, and you can see it's just--if you're in Rome and have the time, it's a great deal of fun to go and look at the Pantheon at different times of day, because the light has such an impact on what the interior looks like. And you go in there in the morning, take a look; then go out, have a long lunch, a glass of wine; come back later and see what has happened. And it's also fun to be there when it rains; it's interesting to just have the rain come down and collect. There is a drain, but it doesn't always work all that well. So see water collecting on the edges of the floor, in this extraordinary building.



One last view. I love taking views of the--I have zillions of images that I've taken, including this one of the interior of the Pantheon, at all different times of day. But I think it behooves us to notice and to say that in this kind of new interior architecture, this architecture of interior surprise, it's not only the vault itself, it's not only the concrete construction, or the marble revetment, light plays a very important role. We've seen light playing a very important role from the times of the domus italica, and the Sanctuary at Terracina, for example, up to where we are today, but never more important than here; light that streams through the oculus, light that is used not only to illuminate this building, and illuminate it extremely well, but also to create drama, to create drama.



And you have to imagine it even more dramatic when the coffers were gilded and when the marble down below may have been even brighter still. The marble pavement, by the way, which I didn't show you, is also extremely well preserved. So this light plays a very important and dramatic role in this new, highly developed interior architecture. And I personally know of no other building that one can visit and experience that gives you a better sense than this one of the divine presence on earth. Whether it's one god, multi gods, as were honored here, you really get a sense of spirituality when you stand in this extraordinary temple, and really do get a sense of the divine presence, I think, on earth.



I mentioned that the Pantheon has spawned--lots of buildings have been cloned from the Pantheon, both in ancient times--and I'll show you a couple of examples later in the semester--but also in more modern times there are lots of examples. Woolsey Hall, for example, here on campus is a kind of a pantheon. But look at--the most obvious example, in the United States, is not only Monticello, but also Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, which you see here is clearly based exactly on the Pantheon.



Thomas Jefferson, a great fan of ancient architecture. His library, his personal library, has lots of books on Roman architecture. When you look at a view of the Rotunda and the Lawn at the University of Virginia--I taught, my first teaching job was at UVA; I taught there for three years. But when you look at this building, the Lawn at UVA, with the Rotunda, you can't help but wonder if Thomas Jefferson didn't know that the Pantheon in Rome had that forecourt, because--the Rotunda faces the wrong way, it faces this way. But nonetheless he's got behind it, in his own design, this extraordinary rectangular court, that does conjure up exactly what the Pantheon looked like in Rome.



A few very quick views of the Pantheon. I just hate to let it go, but some quick views of the Pantheon. One of the best ways of seeing it, it's surrounded by not only a wonderful piazza, which is a great place to eat gelato or have a glass of wine, but there are--you can encounter it from a number of narrow streets, and that whole element of surprise is still there. You're walking along the street and wow, all of a sudden, there it is in front of you. And you can see that very well here, as you begin to get a glimpse of it. With regard to eating around the Pantheon, I recommend one of my absolute favorite restaurants in Rome, which is easy to remember because it's Fortunato al Pantheon; you see it over here with its wonderful outdoor space and its white umbrellas.



Right across from the Pantheon, directly across, is a McDonald's. The golden arches are really very much like a Roman aqueduct, don't you think? So references--I told you there are resonances everywhere of Rome. Don't eat--you can eat at McDonald's anytime; go to the other one, much more interesting. And it has the best--I've never had this anywhere else--it has a veal scaloppine al gorgonzola, with gorgonzola, a very thin layer of gorgonzola: delicious. I also told you I was going to keep you abreast of the latest on gelato in Rome. We've talked about Tre Scalini; so I just wanted to show you Della Panna [correction: Palma]. If you're standing at the Pantheon restaurant, look to the right, you're going to see Della Palma, P-a-l-m-a. Of the four best, actually I think it's the fourth. It's not my absolute favorite, but if you like--it's a little bit more Americanized, as you can see from this selection. Notice there are Mars bars, specialità, as well as some of their other flavors. My favorite, personal favorite, is zabaglione, which you see over here. But just to whet your appetite early in the morning.



I want to move, in the twenty minutes or so that remain, I would like to move from the Pantheon in Rome to Hadrian's home; not his home in Rome, which as we've mentioned was the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill, but his Villa at Tivoli. Tivoli, ancient Tibur; we've talked about Tivoli many times before, where the marble, the travertine quarries are located. Tivoli is about a, well I don't know, forty minute drive from Rome today, kind of a high speed drive from Rome today, but in antiquity longer, obviously, but not inaccessible from Rome. Hadrian obviously had no problems getting there in ancient Roman times. It's an extraordinary place, and Hadrian--it was a place that Hadrian used as a kind of incubator for his architectural ideas, and it's highly likely that many of the buildings that we see there were designed in part by him, especially those famous pumpkin domes, because we're going to see that a number of these buildings do indeed have pumpkin domes designed under the influence of the architecture of Rabirius.



It's an amazing villa. It is the most extensive villa preserved, from the Roman world, and likely the most grand of all the Roman villas. And if we think back to Nero's Palace in Rome, what made Nero's Palace in Rome so scandalous was the fact that it was located in downtown Rome. But if you compare Nero's Palace to Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, there's no comparison between the two. Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli is much more extensive. It has much more extraordinary buildings, from the architectural standpoint, and it was decorated even more opulently, with a wide variety of sculpture, mosaics and paintings. It was clearly an extraordinary place. And if Trajan's Forum was in a sense a microcosm of the extent of the Empire under Trajan, I like to think of Hadrian's Villa as the Empire under Hadrian, the Empire that he traveled around so many times.



And I show you in the upper right a map of the Roman Empire. All of that orange area is the area that was under Rome's aegis at the time of Trajan and into the years of Hadrian. And if you look closely, you will see three colored lines; a yellow, a blue and a red line. Those are Hadrian's travels around the Empire, and it shows you how extensive they were. He went everywhere. Why? Because he loved to travel, he just loved to travel. But he also went in order to take a look at provincial affairs at first hand. Now everywhere he went, he either--he himself paid for buildings that were erected, or, more often than that, buildings were put up by local magistrates and so on, local cities, in honor of Hadrian, in order to try to get a favor out of him, or just to honor him on his visits. Some of these were rushed, put up in a rush job in order to be there when he arrived on the scene. So we see this incredible array of building activity during this period. And we will see that reflected as we make our way, beginning already next week, make our way into the provinces. We will begin to see some very interesting Hadrianic buildings in those provinces that reflect what he was doing elsewhere, or in Rome.



But what we see here, what we see at the villa is fascinating. Because all of us, we're just back from break; some of you did some traveling. We know that traveling expands all of our horizons. We go someplace; experientially we're different than we were before, by what we see and what we experience. And we also--maybe not in this new economic climate, but at least in the past, we all tended to pick up souvenirs; a T-shirt here, and a whatever there, a handbag there, and we bring those back, to remind us, and make us have memories of the wonderful trip that we took. Well Hadrian did that as well. He collected souvenirs. But because of his own wealth, and because he had the imperial treasury behind him, he could collect buildings, as souvenirs essentially. So when Hadrian traveled and saw what he liked, what he did was he came back to this laboratory, this architectural laboratory that he had at Tivoli, and he either created--some of these were probably designed by him, others by his architects--he created a series of buildings that were in a sense souvenirs of his travels, either exact duplicates of things he saw, or variations on those themes. And it makes these buildings particularly fascinating to look at.



The Villa of Hadrian had essentially three building phases: an early, a middle and a late. They spanned the entire reign of Hadrian. This villa was clearly Hadrian's hobby, as well as his home, and if he hadn't died in 138, he would've undoubtedly continued to build here. So these buildings go up throughout the course of Hadrian's reign. I show you a view from the air of the villa as it looks today. You can see that there are a series of very attractive pools of water, interspersed with architecture.



If we look at a plan of the villa, you will see that it is different than any other villa we've seen before in that these buildings are actually kind of casually, almost in an ad hoc way, arranged around nature, to interact with nature. We don't see the axiality and the symmetry that is so characteristic of so much of Roman architecture. They kind of meander along, as you might expect architectural experiments to meander. And it has everything there; not only pools but a wide variety of buildings that I'm going to show you fairly fleetingly: this great island villa over here; the Piazza d'Oro or the Golden Plaza; the two sets of baths, a large bath and a small bath. You also see a stadium here, hairpin shaped, that I'm not going to return to. The Canopus: another pool. This was so complete that it even had its own Hades, its own Hell, in the villa. Everything was here. Hadrian left no stone unturned.



I want to show you, in fairly quick succession, examples of the most interesting buildings, of these tourist souvenirs, that Hadrian brings back from his travels. The first I'd like to show you is the so-called Temple of Venus, which belongs to the latest building phase at the villa: 133 to 138. This is Hadrian the philhellene, once again, just as we saw him at the Temple of Venus and Roma. He goes to the Greek island of Knidos, K-n-i-d-o-s, the Greek island of Knidos, on which there was the most famous round Temple of Venus, with the most famous Greek statue of Venus, a statue by the great Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Lots of people went to see it, and interestingly enough it was this temple and the statue, excavated a number of decades ago by a woman, a female archaeologist with the perfect name, Iris Love, for the goddess of love -- and that was really her name, destined to go excavate the Temple of the Goddess of Love on the Greek island of Knidos.



Hadrian goes there. He's enraptured by what he sees. He builds at his villa an exact replica, an exact replica of this Greek round temple. You can see it's the Doric order. You can see it supports triglyphs and metopes, and then in the center a statue of Venus, unfortunately now headless and armless. That's a cast. The original is in the museum on the site. You see it in the museum on the site, over here, based on Praxiteles' earlier statue. There are lots of copies of this famous Praxitelean statue. We see another one here in the Vatican, that's more complete, gives you a better sense of what it looked like. But again, here are the Doric columns and the triglyphs and metopes. So the most important point for you, an exact replica, in this particular case.



The most extraordinary of these sort of architectural conceits, these giant tourist souvenirs that Hadrian brings back from his travels to his villa at Tivoli is the so-called Canopus at Hadrian's Villa, my personal favorite, the Canopus, at Hadrian's Villa, which you see on your Monument List, also dating to the latest period, 133 to 138 A.D. It is meant to conjure up, in this case, not Greece but Egypt: a canal, the Canopus, in Egypt, that was a tributary of the Nile. And we know that you could travel from Alexandria to a small town called Canopus by means of this canal. And that is what is meant to be conjured up here.



The city of Canopus had in it a temple to the Egyptian god, Serapis, S-e-r-a-p-i-s, Serapis, who was the healing god, and people came from all around the world to be healed at the Temple of Serapis. It was also well known as a place with a wonderful amusement park, and we think that although Hadrian seems to have gone there, in part, to go to the Sanctuary of Serapis, he also appears to have gone there because it was also an amusement park, and this is where we get into the personal love triangle of Hadrian.



Hadrian was married to a woman by the name of Sabina; a very beautiful woman, but she does look kind of dour in this portrait on the right hand side of the screen. So perhaps we don't blame him for taking up with what must have been the most beautiful boy in all of antiquity, a youth by the name of Antinous, A-n-t-i-n-o-u-s, Antinous, whom Hadrian met on his travels in Asia Minor, smitten with the boy, and they became constant companions thereafter. But unfortunately Antinous, while still very young, died by drowning, where else but the Nile, in Egypt, also on these travels. They went to Canopus together, by the way, to the amusement park, but poor Antinous died by drowning in the Nile.



No one knows exactly what happened. Was it an accident? Some say that he may have given his life to save Hadrian's. We don't really know. That's never been sorted out as to exactly what happened to this wonderful and beautiful young man. But he died by drowning in the Nile, which made the Nile a particularly poignant spot for Hadrian, who appears to have recreated it here at his villa. He also went on to found--this is one of the reasons this has inspired so many design-your-own Roman cities projects; not only the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous, and this love triangle with Sabina, but also because Hadrian went around the Empire and founded one Antinoopolis after another; there were tons of Antinoopolises all around Rome [the Roman Empire].



And he put up statues of Antinous in every possible guise, of every possible god: the major Roman gods and some of the--and all the minor Roman gods as well. And there are lots of statues of Antinous. This is another one that was found at the villa, not at this pool, although it might have been, given that the inspiration was Egypt. This shows him in Egyptian guise with the Egyptian headdress and covering all that wonderful curly hair, for which he was so well known. But nonetheless, Antinous as a pharaoh, from Hadrian's Villa.



Back to the Canopus, you see the pool. You see it has columns on one side. These columns had sculpture interspersed. And here Greece comes back to the fore, because many of these statues here were also based on ancient Greek prototypes. So we see this interesting eclecticism here: a pool based on Egypt, with some Egyptianizing statuary, but also interspersed with Greek statues, based on famous Greek prototypes. Most important to us, from the architectural standpoint, the straight lintel and the arcuated lintel, used here for the Canopus. We saw that in Second Style Roman wall painting. We're beginning to see it now in built architecture. It becomes a particular favorite of Hadrian's, and we're going to see it elsewhere in the Roman provinces, under Hadrian.



The influence again of Egypt, and also in this case also of Rome: two river gods that seem to have decorated the Canopus, this one leaning on a figure of a sphinx, so this is clearly the Nile River. This one leaning on the she-wolf, suckling Romulus and Remus; clearly the Tiber. So once again, very eclectic sculptural program. The caryatids were there too, lining one side of the pool of the Canopus. You see them over here, now in the museum -- extremely well preserved, based on the original fifth century B.C. caryatids on the Acropolis. So Hadrian's philhellenism coming to the fore again. You'll remember, Augustus copied these same caryatids for his forum, reduced scale. Hadrian's are in full length, full scale, same scale, as those in Greece, and the major difference between Hadrian's caryatids, and Augustus', Augustus', like the Erechtheion, with the original Porch of the Maidens, is in a public building. In the case of Hadrian, a private villa -- using these caryatids at a private villa. Here you see them lining one side of the Canopus, flanked on either side by satyrs, the same kinds of fellows we saw in the Dionysiac mystery paintings.



And then, just so that we don't forget Egypt, this wonderful representation of a statue of a crocodile that was surely placed in the center of the pool, peeping out of the water, just so that we make sure we remember it's the Nile. And I can trace my whole professional career sitting on this crocodile because every time I'm there, including even now, I pose on that crocodile. But I do it in part because I think it's fun, but also to encourage--there are two pictures that I really like students to send me when they travel to Italy. One is of them sitting on the crocodile at Hadrian's Villa, and another is them on the stepping stones at Pompeii. So I hope if you do go, that you will do that. My favorite one--and I can't find it unfortunately, because this was pre-digital--was a student who sent me himself on this, with his shades on. But then he had put a cigarette in the mouth of the crocodile, unlit cigarette--it was really a cool picture; I've got to find that some day.



The plan of the Canopus, over here, shows us what we've looked at: the straight and arcuated lintel here; the crocodile on this side; the caryatids on that side; and then over here, at the end, the Temple of Serapis, because they were trying to recreate again this canal that led from Alexandria to Canopus, and at the end of course, the Temple of Serapis, the healing god, that was located at Canopus. But you can see as well as I, by looking at the plan, this curved structure over here, which we'll see is made out of concrete. But this is no Egyptian building, this is a very modern Roman-looking building, and I show it to you here, on the end of the canal. This is called the so-called Serapeum, or the Temple of Serapis, and you can see it has one of Hadrian's pumpkin domes. It is very likely that it was designed by him, by Hadrian, and we see it made out of concrete. We can see it has niches. It actually served as a fountain, with very deep niches, from which there would have emanated a water display. And then you can see a concrete dome, up above, with those segmented, flat and concave, alternating flat and concave segments that look like a gourd or a pumpkin dome, probably designed by Hadrian himself. Here's a closer view showing you the same.



Baths, there are two baths at Hadrian's Villa. One of them--I show you only the Large Baths here, of Hadrian's Villa, which dates to the early phase of 125 to 133. I'm not going to say too much about these. I'm not going to show you the plan. But just to make the point that the villa has, not one, but two baths, and they are gargantuan. Look at the size of this. Look at the tourists here in relationship to the so-called Large Baths. This is a private bathing establishment, but it shows you that Hadrian has learned well from Trajan. If Trajan's Forum was the mother of all forums, this is the mother of all private bath buildings that we see at Hadrian's Villa.



And we also see the expert way in which these architects used concrete construction. It's extraordinary. Look at these vaults, vaults that are springing, just as they did in Hadrian's [correction: Trajan's] market hall, in the Markets in Rome, springing from--groin vaults that spring from a bracket, rather than from a column or a pilaster. And look at the way in which they've been able to open up this wall, dematerialize the wall with very large windows: very sophisticated use of concrete construction. Here a detail of the groin vaults springing from the bracket, with the stucco decoration that you can also see.



Very quickly I also want to show you the so-called Piazza d'Oro, or the Golden Plaza, which dates also to the early phase of the Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli, 125 to 133. You can see just by looking at its plan that it's interesting. It was used as an audience hall when Hadrian greeted important visitors at the villa. If you look at the entrance vestibule, it's octagonal, just like the octagonal room of Rabirius, with a pumpkin vault, then a great open rectangular space, fairly traditional, surrounded by columns. And then over here, the audience hall or aula, a-u-l-a, itself. This is an amazing structure, and what makes the aula particularly interesting and important is like the Pantheon it combines traditional and innovative architecture; it combines concrete construction with traditional vocabulary of Greek architecture, namely columns. There is an annular vault over here. You can see that the walls of this structure undulate, but this undulation is particularly interesting because the walls are not made out of concrete; we'll see that the walls are made out of columns.



Here I show you a cutaway, axonometric view of the aula, where you can see these undulating walls, making a kind of cruciform shape, but you can see that they are supported by columns. So again this fascinating bringing together of the traditional vocabulary of Greek architecture, namely columns, with a concrete pumpkin dome on top: use of innovative, of the traditional vocabulary of architecture in an innovative way. One might even call this an example of the so-called baroque trend in Roman antiquity, which we'll be talking about increasingly, and I want you to be aware that it happe

Professor Kleiner focuses on Ostia, the port of Rome, characterized by its multi-storied residential buildings and its widespread use of brick-faced concrete. She begins with the city's public face--the Forum, Capitolium, Theater, and Piazzale delle Corporazioni. The Piazzale, set behind the Theater, was the location of various shipping companies with black-and-white mosaics advertising their business. Professor Kleiner examines the Baths of Neptune and the Insula of Diana, a brick apartment building with four floors that housed a number of Ostia's working families. The Insula of Diana and other similar structures, including warehouses like the Horrea Epagathiana, demonstrate a fundamental feature of second-century Ostia: the appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of brick facing. Since the time of Nero, brick was customarily covered with stucco and paint, but these Ostian buildings are faced with exposed brick, the color, texture, and design of which make it attractive in its own right. The lecture ends with a survey of several single family dwellings in Ostia, including the fourth-century House of Cupid and Psyche, notable for the pastel-colored marble revetment on its walls and floors and for a charming statue of the legendary lovers.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, p. 56



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 141-155

Transcript



March 26, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning, all. The title of today's lecture is, "The Roman Way of Life and Death at Ostia, the Port of Rome." On Tuesday we spoke about architecture under the emperor Hadrian, the extraordinary emperor Hadrian. We talked about the buildings that he commissioned, and some of which he also had a hand in designing since, as we mentioned, he was an amateur architect himself. We spoke about that Greek import, the Temple of Venus and Roma, and also about the two major commissions during his principate, the Pantheon in Rome and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.



The main takeaway point vis-à-vis both of these buildings--and you see them once again now on the screen, at left and right--is that Hadrian followed the lead of Trajan before him. What Trajan had done, and Apollodorus of Damascus had done, in the Forum of Trajan and in the Markets of Trajan, and that is to combine, in one building complex, both the traditional and the innovative strands of Roman architecture. The traditional that goes back to Greek and Etruscan architecture and is marked by the traditional elements, the traditional vocabulary of architecture, namely columns and walls and the roofs that they support; and then more innovative Roman architecture, which is predicated on concrete construction, faced with a variety of materials, from stone to what we'll see today as the ascendance of brick as a facing, which began, as you'll recall, after the fire in A.D. 64 in Rome.



Again, looking at these two buildings as examples of what Hadrian, he and his architects, tried to do. The Pantheon, you'll recall on the left, has a traditional porch, a porch that looks very much like a typical Greek, Etruscan or Roman temple, but then a revolutionary body, when you walk inside the building, a revolutionary cylindrical drum and hemispherical dome. And then with regard to Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, I show you a view of the Canopus, and you'll recall that the Canopus makes use of columnar architecture. There are columns that border one end of the pool, although they are columns with a twist because you can see they support a straight and an arcuated lintel, which we saw in Second Style Roman wall painting, in painting, and then eventually it begins to infiltrate built architecture, comes to the fore under Hadrian. So that's a playing around with those lintels in a way you wouldn't have seen in Greek and Etruscan architecture, but still relies, in the main, on the traditional vocabulary of architecture. But then you'll recall, on the other end of the pool, a building that was meant to conjure up the Serapeum in the Temple of Serapis in Canopus, in Egypt, but that was made out of concrete construction and that had a segmented dome, a kind of pumpkin dome that we believe that Hadrian designed himself. So this extraordinary combination of traditional and innovative Roman architecture; that we see the hallmark of Hadrianic architecture, and a gift that he gave to the future evolution of architecture.



The other major contribution of the Hadrianic period, that Hadrian himself had less to do with because it was already bubbling up after the fire in A.D. 64, is the move that we're going to see today toward multi-storied housing. We saw that begin already at the last gasp of Pompeii and Herculaneum. You'll remember after the earthquake of 62, and before the eruption of Vesuvius, the Pompeians and those who lived in Herculaneum began to build, began to add additional stories to their residential structures, and that meant for the most part a second story being added to their residential structures, but they never went beyond that.



What we see beginning to happen, especially under Hadrian, is an increased taste for multi-storied buildings, multi-storied domiciles, but multi-storied residences that had more than two stories, even up to as many as five stories: essentially apartment houses. And our best example for such apartment houses are in the city of Ostia, the port city of Rome, and it's therefore to the city of Ostia that we are going to turn to today. And, in fact, we'll spend the entire lecture on the city of Ostia, because like Pompeii and Herculaneum before it, especially like Pompeii, we have an extraordinary array of not only private domiciles, but also public architecture from the city of Ostia that gives us an outstanding sense of what this city looked like in antiquity.



I show you a plan of Ostia in its heyday. You'll remember that the city was actually founded very early on. At the very beginning of the semester, we looked at the town plan of Ostia, which dated to the mid-fourth century B.C., around 350 B.C. And you'll recall--and I'll remind you of this plan in a moment--you'll recall that it was founded as--it was actually Rome's first colony, although it was a colony in Italy obviously, not outside the mainland, but its first colony in Italy, or anywhere for that matter. And it was founded, as so many of these first colonies were, as a military camp. It was laid out as a castrum, as you'll recall. And that castrum, one can see in the very center--I'm going to show you a better view of this from Ward-Perkins in a moment--but you can see that kernel of the castrum plan right here in the center of this plan.



But what this plan shows you is the way in which the city grew over time. Again, it began in the Republic, it continued to be developed during the Republic. It was under Augustus that some new buildings, some public buildings were added to the locale, including the Theater, and we're going to look at the Theater today. And then ports were added, as you'll remember--and I'll review that momentarily--ports were added at Portus, by Claudius and also by Trajan. And it was after the Port of Trajan that the city really began to take off in terms of its commercial activity, and much of the building that we see in the city, as it looks still today, belongs to the Hadrianic period and into the time of the successors of Hadrian, the so-called Antonine emperors, whose architecture we'll also be studying this semester.



While this plan is on the screen, let me just point out the location of Rome--the arrow points this way--the so-called Via Ostiense, the route, the street that leads from Rome to Ostia; the Via Ostiense. And actually the city road becomes the town--the country road; the country thoroughfare becomes the city street, the main city street, the decumanus of the city of Ostia. You can also see in this plan the location of a place called Isola Sacra, up there, which we will see was the main cemetery for Ostia. Yes, there are tombs outside the city walls, also elsewhere in the city, but our most- best-preserved tombs are from this area called Isola Sacra; and I'll show that to you also today. And here you can see the Tiber River, the Tevere, the Tiber River wending its way from Rome to Ostia. And it is of course along the Tiber that we'll see warehouses were located, and where the ships went back and forth to export or import material, products from Rome to Ostia and back again.



Again, we talked about the building of ports at Ostia. We talked especially about the port that Claudius commissioned, at Portus, and I remind you of it on the back of a Neronian coin, a coin of Nero; obverse with Nero's portrait, reverse representing that Claudian port. And we see it there. You'll remember it had curved breakwaters, which you can see in that coin depiction, and a river god at the bottom; boats in the center, as well as the lighthouse. We see all of that on the coin. And you'll remember that the breakwaters were made up of columns that partook of that rusticated masonry that Claudius so favored.



Down here, a painting that I've shown you before, that is on the walls of the Vatican in Rome, the Vatican Museums in Rome, where you can see Claudius' port, with its curved breakwaters and its lighthouse over here. And then the port that was added by Trajan during his reign, a multi-sided additional port right here. And it was again the construction of that particular port that really brought commerce even more--this area had been used since the mid-fourth century B.C., but it begins to really take off; there's a real efflorescence during this period. And it is therefore not surprising that with commerce booming there was more need for residential architecture, for those who lived there, for the traders and so on and so forth who lived there, and we see this, the building of not only civic buildings but especially of private domiciles begins to move very rapidly apace. The city becomes more crowded and there becomes this need to build up vertically, as well as horizontally; and we'll see that development today.



Tourists who go to Rome really miss the boat by not going out to Ostia in larger numbers, because most tourists don't tend to take the trip out to Ostia. But it's well worth it, and it's very easy to get to. It only takes about 25 minutes to a half an hour on a suburban train, to get from Rome to Ostia. So it's a not-to-be-missed experience. And I show you one of these trains in the upper left that takes you very easily from Rome to the site of Ostia. There are a number of stations in Ostia. One of them is Ostia Centro, the downtown of Ostia, which you see in that view in the upper left. And the other is Lido di Ostia, which means "the beach," and I show you a view of Lido di Ostia down here. Now looking at that nice view of the ocean--I know you've all been, you're back from spring break, but still it's nice to reminisce about what some of you may have been doing during spring break and see this wonderful view of the scene. It looks very enticing, but I can tell you that it's not, once you get there. It's very polluted. This is not one of the great beaches of the world. So don't be seduced by Lido di Ostia.



Stay on the train and make your way to the site called Scavi di Ostia, which is the excavations of Ostia, the archaeological excavations, where you can see, as you saw, as one sees in Pompeii, an ancient Roman city, extremely well preserved. And you see a glimpse of it over here, and you can tell even just from this glimpse that we are dealing here with a city that is not unlike Pompeii. It has streets and sidewalks, and it has buildings along the side of either of those. But there is one main difference between this and what we saw at Pompeii--and you can see it very well in this image--and that is that these houses, that are along the street, look different than those did in Pompeii in that they are made out of concrete, faced with brick: a very different kind of appearance, and one that is quintessentially Ostian and makes this city well worth a visit. In fact, if we think of Pompeii as the quintessential first-century A.D. Roman city, we should think of the city of Ostia as the quintessential second-century A.D. city, the best example that we have of what a second century, a Hadrianic and Antonine city, would have looked like, and that is what makes it so important to us.



Here I remind you again of the original plan that we looked at, the plan from the mid-fourth century B.C., 350 B.C., from Ward-Perkins, that shows you the original castrum of the first colony: this rectangular space, very regular, with its own wall surrounding the city, with the cardo, the north-south street, and the decumanus, the east-west street, intersecting exactly at the center of that city. And then at that intersection, as was Roman practice, the placement of the forum of the city, a great open rectangular space with a temple pushed up against the back wall, in this case a Temple of Jupiter, a Capitolium, dominating the space in front of it, and then other buildings around it, as you can see.



Although there's a striking difference between this forum and the forum that we saw at Pompeii, because you'll remember at Pompeii the various major buildings, the Basilica, the Temple of Apollo, and so on, sort of radiating out from the central core of the forum. We don't see that here. We see the buildings sort of placed separately, from that main forum space. But in every other respect very similar to the general plan of these early Roman cities [correction: forums]. What's also useful about this particular plan is the fact that it shows you the way, as time went by and as the city grew, it shows you the way in which the cardo and the decumanus were extended, and then the other buildings of the city were added here and there: a number of baths; lots of private residences. This is a particularly important building here at 15 and 16, which we'll look at today: 15 is the Theater and 16 is the so-called Piazza of the Corporations, the Piazzale delle Corporazioni, which is very significant, and we'll look at that soon.



If you go and visit the city of Ostia today, and enter at the ticket booth, what you see almost immediately is again a polygonal masonry street, looking very much like Pompeii. But once again there are no stepping stones in Ostia, unlike Pompeii -- the plot thickens there in terms of why we see those in Pompeii and don't seem to see them anywhere else. You walk along that polygonal masonry street pavement and you see both the remains up here in the upper left [correction: right] of the original Republican city wall, and it should bring back memories of opus quadratum, or ashlar masonry, that we saw at the beginning of the semester. You can see it's consistent with the age in which it was built in the Republic.



But then over here, as you make your way along on one of the main streets, you see what is characteristic of Ostia as a whole, and that is concrete construction, brick-faced concrete construction, both for the residences and also for the public buildings, and also for the religious structures, namely the temples in this city. The reason for this, of course--it takes us back to the Neronian period, the great fire of 64, when it was realized -- you'll remember the Subura, which was located back beyond the precinct walls of the Forum of Augustus, the area where the working poor of Rome lived, primarily in rickety apartment houses that were made out of wood; multi-storied houses. Those were actually multi-storied, but they were always going up in flames, and there was a recognition after the great destruction of the fire of 64 that the Romans needed to fireproof their buildings, and they recognized the fact that brick is better at protecting the structure from fire than stone is, and stone can burn, and they actually began to--as we know, we talked about this before--they began to build their houses and many of their civic structures out of concrete faced with brick. And we see that development especially well here in Ostia.



And Ostia is extremely important for us also because many comparable buildings that were put up in the city of Rome itself no longer survive. The same apartment houses that we're going to see at Ostia did exist in Rome. We have some remains of them. There's a very prominent one at the base of the Capitoline Hill, to the left of the hill as you climb up that hill. But we have very little evidence for this in Rome, and so we have to rely on Ostia to give us the best picture of apartment building in Rome, in Roman architecture in the second century A.D.



Here is a spectacular view of Ostia as it looks today, from the air, and we are obviously looking down on the forum, on the great open rectangular space of the forum, with columns around it. We are looking also at the Capitolium, at the Temple of Jupiter, which is a very large structure, as you can see here, made out of concrete, faced with brick. It is a typical Roman temple, unlike Hadrian's Temple of Venus and Roma, because we can see that it has a façade orientation; it has a single staircase; it has a deep porch, freestanding columns in that porch. So a typical Roman structure and--it's a typical Roman temple. And then you can also see its vast scale. There are a couple of people standing here who look miniscule in relationship to this building, and only part of the building, in fact the full height of the building, is not even preserved here. So it was even larger still than what you see. The reason for its size is twofold: one, because we have already seen that this taste for larger and larger buildings has really taken off. We saw it in Hadrian's [correction: Trajan's] Forum in Rome. We saw it in Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill. We saw it in Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, and in the Pantheon, the largest span, the largest dome ever built. So this taste for largeness, grandiosity in architecture, has really taken off. So it's not surprising to see this Capitolium, which was built in the Hadrianic period, specifically 120 A.D., also being large in scale.



But there's a second and perhaps even more important reason, and that is in a city in which all of the--most of the houses are what are called insulae--i-n-s-u-l-a in the singular; a-e in the plural--insulae, multi-storied apartment buildings, often of as many as five stories. If you want your Capitolium to stand out in that city, and be seen up above those apartment houses, you've got to build it very high. And that is undoubtedly the reason that they--one of the two reasons, the more important reason--that they have built this temple so large, and especially so tall, so that you could see the Temple of Jupiter from everywhere in the city of Ostia. Here's a view of the Temple as it looks today in isolation, again, only part of its height preserved, but enough for us to get a very good sense of its concrete construction, brick facing here, and as I've already described, the single staircase, the columns in the porch and so on.



I mentioned already that it was under Augustus that a theater and an entertainment district was added to the city of Ostia, and that building, you see the remains of it here, along one of the major streets of the city of Ostia. It was renovated in around 200 A.D.; that is, in the early part of the third century A.D., so considerably later. It was expanded to be able to hold 2,500 spectators at that particular point, and much of the concrete and brick-faced construction belongs to that renovation. One can't imagine a building quite like this in the age of Augustus. So what you're seeing here is primarily the restored view, the restored version of this building. But what you can see, that does at least link it back to the Augustan period, is the fact that the design of the façade is very similar to the design of the Theater of Marcellus in Rome, with the arches, and in this case pilasters between them -- that same general scheme that we saw for theater and for amphitheater architecture, used here. The main difference, of course, is the fact that we have concrete construction with brick facing, rather than concrete construction with stone facing, travertine in the case of the Theater of Marcellus.



I haven't yet shown you a Roman latrine, but today is the day for the Roman latrine. But you have to imagine, of course, that in any major public building, like a theater, where you're going to have a lot of people there at the same time, you have to provide a public latrine. And when I say a public latrine, I really mean a public latrine. There was no privacy, as you can see, in this latrine whatsoever. What it is composed of, as you can see, is a bench that lines the walls, with a series of holes in it, and then just one single drain that encircles the building. So this gives you an idea of where you had to go, if you needed to go, during intermission, if you were attending the Theater in Ostia.



One of the most important buildings at Ostia is connected to this Theater. I'm showing you now the plan of the Theater, which corresponds to theaters that we've looked at throughout this semester; a typical Roman plan. It has a semi-circular orchestra. It has a stage building or scaenae frons here. It has a semicircular cavea, the seats, which are placed on top of, of course in this case, a concrete foundation. This, like other Roman theaters, is an urban phenomenon. There was no hill to build this on, so the Romans had to build--the Ostians had to build their own hill out of concrete, and then support the cavea on top of that. But the cavea is made of stone seats; they used stone for the seats, as is traditional in Roman theater architecture.



But we see that this Theater is appended to a porticus. Now we've seen a porticus with these theaters before; it was in fact characteristic of theater design. And if you think back to the Theater in Pompeii, for example, you'll remember that that porticus, which had little shops all around it, or small cubicles all around it, was used as a place where you could go during intermission to relax, to walk around, to buy a playbill, to pick up a souvenir T-shirt or whatever the equivalent was in those days: a souvenir of your experience that evening at the theater. And so we see that same general scheme here, this whole idea of this open rectangular space, with some columns, and then with these little cubicles all along. But in this case it was not meant to be a place for souvenirs or a place to store props.



But instead what we see is something quite fascinating, given the fact that the city of Ostia was primarily a commercial city, a place where items were exported and imported. Because it was a major port or harbor city, what this was used for instead--hence its name the Piazzale delle Corporazioni--is a series of businesses that were--the import/export business essentially is what these spaces were used for. And I'll show you. Actually some of them are quite well preserved and I can show you indeed what they looked like.



Then in the center something we also don't see in the Pompeii Theater, a small temple in the center, a temple that corresponds to Roman temples that we've looked at thus far: its rectangular shape; its flat side and back walls; some columns in the deep porch; a single staircase; façade emphasis, as you can see here; relatively small in scale, as these kinds of things go. And it has been speculated by the main excavator of this site that it was used as a--that it was dedicated to some god whose name we don't know; we don't know which god or goddess this was dedicated to. But the excavator has speculated that it was probably some god that had something to do with commerce, and the blessing of commerce, and that probably some trade guild, one of the trade guilds that had its businesses set up here, may have been the commissioners, may have paid for, indeed commissioned this particular temple. And I think that's as good a theory as any, and may well be the case.



This is a view--we're standing at the top of the cavea, looking down over that cavea. We can see the cunei or wedge-shaped sections of seats. We can see the stone that has been used for those seats. We can see the semicircular orchestra, the scalloped face of the stage, and then one can imagine the scaenae frons, with its forest of columns behind; that part is not well preserved. And there also would have been--I'll show you a restored view a little bit later where you'll see that there was a much higher wall in between this and the Piazzale that lay beyond. The wall is no longer there, so we can see very well through these columns, the small temple that was put up by that trade guild, to some god of commerce. And then we can also see these cubicles all along the way, that were used as these import and export emporia.



This is a view of the temple as it looks today. We can see that single staircase, fairly narrow staircase here; the façade orientation; a couple of the columns, including a Corinthian column, that are still preserved from that small structure. And then here a very useful view showing us again these interesting spaces, rectangular spaces along here, fronted in each case by columns. We'll see that those columns are made out of cement, faced with brick -- so shades of the Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli. We haven't seen this before, I mean, since then. And that was a very unusual view. Here we're seeing something that actually becomes more common in the second century, making concrete columns and then facing them with brick.



I'd like to show you a few views of these import/export businesses, as I've called them; one of them here, where we can see that the architecture itself, the walls and the columns are only partially preserved. You have to imagine that in antiquity they went up higher than this. But what is well preserved are the mosaics on the floor of each of these, or many of these spaces. And you can see they're all done in black-and-white mosaic, just the two colors. You can see the interest that the Ostians had in geometric shapes. They have inside these very abstract, inside the shop here, these abstract patterns, although they've made an attempt to vary them. But then in the front, something very interesting, that we see throughout, is the use of sea imagery. Because again they were in the import and export business, they were busy sending ships back and forth, from Italy to other parts of the Roman world by sea, and so it's almost all sea imagery. Here we see two heraldic dolphins--dolphins are particularly popular in these scenes--facing one another, as a kind of advertisement or shop sign for this particular enterprise.



Here's another one, where you can see--I like this dolphin in particular; he's nicely preserved and he has a wonderful serpentine tail, with a lot of flourish at the end here, as you can see. And then inside an image of a boat; you can see it's partially preserved. What's wonderful about this example is it shows us that although these are fairly simple in design, and are meant essentially as advertisements for the shop, the artist and the patron have taken real care to think about what you're going to see when you're standing where. So that they have oriented these so that when you're facing the shop and deciding whether you're going to pick this one--there's 61 of these, by the way, around the perimeter of this structure, so you had a lot of choice, in terms of which enterprise you were going to, where you were going to go to. If you wanted to ship something from Ostia somewhere else, or receive a delivery, you had a lot of choices. Although I don't doubt some of them specialized in different parts of the world, shipping to Egypt or shipping to Asia Minor.



But you can see here the dolphin. When you're standing, deciding whether you want to go in, the dolphin, you face the dolphin. Once you're inside, and standing and talking to the owner, if you turn around and look back, you're going to see the boat head on. So they've really--they've orchestrated this in such a--they've paid real attention; it's not done willy-nilly, they've paid attention to what you're going to see where, when you are entering and inside these spaces.



Here's another one, not only dolphins, dolphins, dolphins, more dolphins and more dolphins, but you also see in this case a lighthouse, which could either be a representation of their local lighthouse, or some lighthouse somewhere else that this particular place ships to. And then the last one, which is the one on your Monument List, with two boats. So again, how does one ship things from Ostia elsewhere? By boat, and so they tend to represent boats. So you've kind of seen it all; dolphins, boats and lighthouses tend to be the items that are chosen for these so-called advertisements. But this one is very useful too because you can see the shapes and the colors of the tesserae that are used here.



And although these are very effective, you can see that this is not the Alexander Mosaic; these are not done with that kind of skill. They use only black and white, the simplest possible scheme, no colors, and you don't get the sense, as you do with something like the Alexander Mosaic, when you step back from it, it could almost be a painting, it's done that well, with the cast shadows and the crumpling figures so well presented. Here it's something quite different, more abstract, and the stones are not as fine. You can see they haven't paid as much attention to getting them perfectly shaped. But nonetheless it's very effective, and it really does--it does what it intended to do.



One of the sad things--it's great to see, and if you go out to Ostia, make a special point of seeing these and taking pictures. Because I've been looking at these for many years, and every time I'm there it seems that there are fewer tesserae there--these are the originals--there are fewer tesserae than there were before. I'm not saying that people take them, although I think people do take them, but just that over time, by tourists walking on them extensively, they get loose and they get spread around the site, and they haven't done as good a job as I think they should at Ostia, in keeping these mosaics together.



Here's a restored view of the whole complex, where I think you can see that, although the Theater and the Piazzale are connected to one another, and are part of the same scheme, and are a development, a further development in evolution, that is particularly appropriate for this commercial city of Ostia, that comes out of the orbit of that earlier theater and porticus complex at Pompeii. We can see that although they're part of that same complex, they are distinct from one another. If you look at the Theater and the cavea up above, with the original wall of the scaenae frons preserved--we're looking at it from the back--you can see that that was very high. So only if you were way up at the top of the cavea would you really get a sense of what lay beyond, and once you got into the Piazzale over here, with its temple, and with its various shops, you were in another world, a commercial world. Also interesting is the fact that although they're open to the sky today, in antiquity there was a covered colonnade, as you can see here, that would have covered those shops, and you would have had to go in between the columns and back along the passageway in order to check out what the options were.



The city of Ostia, like all Roman cities that we've talked about--Rome, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and so on--all obviously had a selection of bath establishments. Ostia was no exception. There are a number of baths preserved, from the Roman city of Ostia, this being one of them, the so-called Baths of Neptune, that dates to 139 A.D.; the Baths of Neptune, so called because of the spectacular mosaic, black-and-white mosaic, of Neptune, on the floor. I'll show it to you in a moment, but go into it in more detail a bit later in the lecture. If we look at the plan of the Baths of Neptune in Ostia, I wondered if any of you can tell me whether this is a plan that corresponds to the earlier bath buildings at Pompeii--the Stabian Baths or the Forum Baths--or conforms more closely to the imperial bath type that we saw in Rome, from the time of Titus, let's say the Baths of Titus and Trajan. Any thoughts? You grimaced, but maybe I'll ask you. Do you have a--pick on you.



Student: The earlier one.



Professor Diana Kleiner: The earlier one, absolutely. And why, why do you say that?



Student: Because the central open area and the palaestra, and then the series of bath rooms.



Professor Diana Kleiner: Excellent, excellent, that's exactly right. We see the palaestra on one side, with the natatio, or the piscina, that usually accompanied it, over here. And then on the other side, all aligned in a row, the typical bath, the bathing block, including the apodyterium, the tepidarium, the caldarium and the frigidarium; although the frigidarium is not a round alcoved structure at all -- so in that sense perhaps influenced by some of what came in between those early baths at Pompeii and the imperial baths in Rome. But, and of course also note here the shops that line the front of it, which is also characteristic of the Stabian Baths and the Forum Baths at Pompeii.



So they could have chosen the other, but obviously felt that this was much more appropriate to this commercial town, to use the smaller, more intimate bath type here than the imperial baths that had been developed in Rome from the first century A.D. on. Just a glimpse of the black-and-white mosaic that gives this bath its name, the Baths of Neptune; you see Neptune here. But you can also see the way in which every room in the bath--which was made out of concrete, faced with brick, as you can also tell from this view--every room was covered with these black-and-white mosaics. Ostia is the land of the black-and-white mosaic. I'll return to that in a moment.



Perhaps most importantly, of anything that I show you today, are the apartment houses of Ostia, and it's to those that I'd like now to turn. What you're looking at on the screen is a model of what one of these apartment houses would have looked like. This one is the so-called Insula, i-n-s-u-l-a, of Serapis, the Insula of Serapis. And we're looking at it in a model that is in that museum of casts that I've referred to a number of times this semester, at a place, in a part of Rome called EUR, E-U-R, that area that was built up in the Fascist period by Mussolini in the 1930s. This model is in that museum, and it gives us as good an idea as anything I could show you of what one of these apartment houses looked like in its heyday, in the time of Hadrian.



The word insula, I should mention, it can be used in two ways. An insula either refers to a multi-storied apartment house, or it refers to a block of houses in a city like Ostia. It's used, for whatever reason, it was used interchangeably to refer to either a block or to an individual house. So pay attention to that when you read about an insula or insulae. Again, this one dates to the second century A.D., the Insula of Serapis. And it basically was like a modern condominium, and often more than one of these insulae were next, were clearly next to one another, but more than one sometimes shared a common bath. So they would sometimes build a bath building that would be used by those who lived in those two apartment houses.



Now what's characteristic of this, especially as we think about it in relationship to early domus architecture, that we saw at Pompeii, those single-family dwellings, is the need in this teeming commercial city to accommodate a very large population in a small amount of space -- people on the whole who could not afford single-family dwellings, who needed to be housed in these apartment buildings. They build up vertically, and, as you can see, they go up to as many as five stories, and we see that the Insula of Serapis was indeed a five-storied structure. It is made out of concrete. It is faced with brick.



And what is particularly interesting about the brick facing here--and this is going to be our first example of this, at Ostia--is the fact at some point the Romans realized that brick was really attractive in its own right, and it didn't need to be stuccoed over anymore. If you think back to the Domus Aurea, even in the Domus Aurea, the building was made out of--the palace was made out of concrete faced with brick, but the façade was gilded, and inside, you'll remember, Fabullus was commissioned to cover the entire interior of the structure with stucco, and then paint it. So you would have had no sense, when you were standing in the Palace of Nero, in Nero's day, that it was a brick-faced concrete structure.



But somewhere along the way, and it comes to the fore in the second century A.D., they realized: "Hey, this brick is actually pretty attractive in its own right. It has texture. We can vary the color; we can use a reddish brick, we can use a slightly yellowish brick. We can add some stucco, to make some decorative effects. This looks awesome." And we think some innovative architects got the idea, innovative designers, to "let's leave it, let's not stucco it over, let's let it speak for itself." And that was a very wise decision, because as you'll see today, the buildings that we have remaining from Ostia, that were unadulterated brick exteriors, without stucco, are absolutely magnificent, and they became, the designers became real experts at rendering it in an extraordinary way. I think you can get a sense of that even in this model. So exposed brickwork here.



You see these arches are made of bricks that are kind of wedge shaped and look like the sort of thing we saw earlier in stone. Those wedge-shaped sections of stone that we saw, for example, in the Falerii Novi Gate, we see that sort of thing here. It may have been used, just as it was in the Pantheon. You'll remember how they used them during the building process to keep the concrete from settling before it dried, but they realized afterwards that these could be positioned in a way that made them very attractive in their own right ultimately. We can also see that they have added moldings, usually with stucco, added moldings that make the building more attractive, sometimes even little pediments, as you can see over some of the windows over here. So they come up with strategies to make this brick look even more attractive than it was on its own.



Note also the shops in the first story. Some of these are shops, some of these are actually staircases that lead you to the uppermost stories. And once again, it's clear that the Romans have become so adept at using concrete that they are able to open up these walls. The openings are larger than they had been even before, and so they become very good at dematerializing the wall in a way that becomes increasingly sophisticated over time.



The most famous house at Ostia is in a sense mine, because it's called the Casa di Diana, the House of Diana, at Ostia. And we see a view of it here, as it looks today. It was a multi-storied apartment building, a multi-storied insula. Only two of those stories are preserved now. I'll show you a restored view of what the original looked like momentarily. But we see it here, as it looks today: concrete faced with brick, exposed brick, brick enjoyed in its own right. Very large openings that lead into--they're either entranceways into the structure, or lead to staircases, or open up onto shops. We can see here in actuality the same sort of thing we saw in the model from EUR, and that is the use not only of exposed brick, but also of moldings that are added, either in brick sometimes, or also sometimes in stucco, of the nice overhangs that they have created above the second-story windows, up there.



We also see a lot of Italian school children in Ostia, and Pompeii also, but particularly Ostia because of its proximity to Rome, and all the schools that they have in the city of Rome; lots of kids always out in groups, and they always seem to have T-shirts of the same color. So you'll see one red school and one yellow school and one blue school; it's a lot of fun. And every one of them has their--it's so funny to me, they have their cell phones and they're all clicking, clicking, clicking, as they walk through these buildings. I'm not sure they're looking at anything, but they're definitely clicking, to record the fact that they were at Ostia; perhaps that's for student papers, I don't know.



But here a detail of the Insula of Diana, looking through one of these entranceways into the rest of the structure. And I'll bet you're as struck as I am in looking at this, that with regard to vista, the interesting panorama and vista. It doesn't matter whether you're building out of rubble or stone or opus incertum or concrete faced with brick, there is that aesthetic, that Roman aesthetic, of building things in such a way that wherever you're standing in that structure you're going to be looking from one part of the building to another, and you're going to be struck by the wonderful scenes that you see within that building and from that building, outside of that structure.



Here's the restored view of the Insula of Diana, where you can see that originally it was a four-storied structure. It's a cutaway and an axonometric view: four-storied structure. And this particular restored view is also extremely helpful because it shows us that these houses did not have the peristyle courts, or the hortus that we know from the domus italica or the Hellenized domus. There was no space for that in this commercial city. There is no emphasis on the greenery and the wonderful fountains and statuary that we saw in Pompeii. And keep in mind, of course, that Pompeii, in Campania, was essentially a resort town; a very different kind of feel than Ostia, this teeming commercial center.



So what they replaced those with here, in order to get more light into the structure, is a kind of a light well; and you see that light well up here, where there are also windows on multiple stories. And, in fact, I would imagine that those were the choicest apartments to have, because they would have been less noisy than what you can imagine an apartment along the street must have been, with all the activity going in and out of the thermopolia and the other shops down below; the cart traffic and so on. So again I imagine the light well apartment would have been highly desirable.



Speaking of thermopolia, we have them at Ostia, as we have them at Pompeii, quite a number of them. And I show you the best preserved, which happens to be in Diana's House, and I show it to you here, the Thermopolium of the Casa di Diana at Ostia. You can see that right at the entranceway they have put a black-and-white mosaic. You see inside just what we saw at--just exactly the same thing that we saw at Pompeii, one of these counters that would have had recesses in it. So you have to imagine, just the same as we saw there, a kind of fast food emporium, where you would take a peek at what looked good for the day, make your choice. If you go inside the thermopolium of Diana, you see hanging on the wall a painting, which it seems likely may have served as a kind of shop sign that might have been hung outside the building to advertise what you could get in this particular thermopolium.



And if we look at what's depicted here, it's a still life of objects, and we see what seems to be a pomegranate on the right, hanging on a nail, on the wall. In the center--I don't know if you can see it from where you sit, but in the center a block that supports what looks like a drinking cup that has little round things floating in it, lentils or chickpeas or something like that. And then at the far left there's a plate that also is on a block, a plate that has a carrot and some other vegetables. So this may have been a vegetarian, I guess this was a vegetarian restaurant in Pompeii; one of the healthier places one could go, if one wanted a snack--in Ostia, excuse me.



If you go to Ostia, by the way, you really do want to set aside a day to do that, because by the time you take the half an hour ride out there, get there--there's a lot to see. And it used to be, if you'd go there for a day, which I've done many, many times, there was absolutely nowhere to eat. So you had to remember to bring your--and nowhere to get a bottle of water, so you'd have to remember to bring your bottle of water, and maybe a snack. But they have rectified that in recent years; the last few years they've finally put up the Caffetteria degli Scavi, which loosely translated is the Excavation Café, the Cafeteria of the Excavations at Ostia. And it's actually a wonderful place. I have to say it's very modern. It has a wonderful deck with tables and the ubiquitous Italian white umbrella where one--and the food is actually, for a cafeteria, ain't bad; Italian pasta is always hard to make bad, it's always good.



And then inside, I thought you'd be amused to see, when they decided on the décor for the interior of the cafeteria, with its simple tables and chairs, they put brick on the wall, and they then hung up these wonderful versions of the Piazzale delle Corporazioni black-and-white mosaics. So again, very--Italians are really, they do build Ferraris after all, they are very good at design and aesthetic, and pay a great deal of attention to that, and consequently always make one's surroundings pleasant.



Warehouses. This was a commercial port. We talked about the fact that in commercial ports one needs warehouses. We began the semester with a warehouse, in fact, the Porticus Aemilia in Rome, along the banks of the Tiber. And I remind you of that here. Here's the Tiber, a model of the Tiber, with the Porticus Aemilia. You'll remember that was made out of concrete. It was one of the earliest examples of concrete construction in the Republic in Rome: a series of barrel vaults linked to one another, on three tiers, as you'll recall, with axial and lateral spatial relations inside that structure.



Ostia needed its own warehouses as well. It had them in the Republic already, but it began to add to them in the second century A.D. And it's fascinating to see what happens when you build a warehouse out of concrete faced with brick. You get an extraordinary structure that looks very much like an insula. If I had put this up and said: "What is this?" And you said: "It's an insula," you would sort of be on the mark, because it looks exactly like an insula; but it is a warehouse. And this is the most famous warehouse in Ostia, the so-called Horrea--because the word horrea, h-o-r-r-e-a, is warehouse in Latin--the Horrea Epagathiana, which you have on your Monument List, which dates to 145 to 150 A.D. This is the entrance to the Horrea Epagathiana.



It is again made out of concrete, faced with brick; exposed brickwork, brickwork enjoyed in its own right, for its own aesthetic here. We can see that it is like the apartment houses in that it is multi-storied, with the large entranceways, or entranceways into the structure, down below, and then the smaller windows up above. They have monumentalized the entrance, the main entrance, to the structure, by giving it columns supporting a pediment. Very grand, in fact, and we haven't--it's interesting to see that even with this brick-faced concrete architecture, the Romans have not lost their interest in Hellenizing works of art and using touches of ancient Greece to monumentalize and to make more cultured, in a sense, the entranceway into this structure. So we see these columns, engaged columns, supporting a pediment above, capitals on those columns, as you can see here.



All of this done in concrete faced with brick. And you can see here, this is an outstanding example of the way in which they have used brick to their advantage. They have recognized that you can vary the color; you can have a reddish brick; you can have a yellowish brick. So here they've used red brick to face the column shaft, and then a yellow brick for the capital. So there's a distinction between the shaft and the capital. And they have even used the most expensive material, marble, for the inscription plaque, where they identify this building at the Horrea Epagathiana, and then the pediment above.



And you can see, if you look at the pediment decoration and if you look at the volutes of the capitals, you will see they have used a small amount of stucco to enable them to create the spirals of the volutes, for example, and some of the more delicate decorative work in the pediment above. Another subtlety, another nice subtlety; it just shows you the amount of effort and time and money that went into this commission. Also this very nice pilaster that is placed right next to the column, which makes a wonderful transition from the column, the roundness of the column, to the squareness of the pilaster, to the shape of the doorway. The aesthetics very much on the mind of this particular designer, as well as the vistas; again, this idea of looking through one space, seeing another opening and wondering where that opening is going--all of that very, very carefully designed by the architect.



Here's another view head on of this elaborate doorway, leading into the Horrea Epagathiana, announcing with the inscription exactly where you are and what this building was used for in antiquity. A detail of the pediment, where we can see the inscription. We can also see the capitals, the use of stucco work here, and the very elaborate work that they have done to decorate the pediment above. Just a few more details of the columns, where you can see even better this capital, and the way in which they have used brick. They have used brick even for the acanthus leaves. You can see that there are acanthus leaves here. This is actually an example, one of the few we've seen, of the composite capital, with the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian, and the volutes of the Ionic. We saw it on the Arch of Titus in Rome. But here we see that they've used brick, and then only at the uppermost part, where the leaf has to curve over, do they add the stucco.



And this is just a warehouse, and yet a tremendous amount of effort has gone into making it an extraordinarily beautiful building. And it shows again that they are absolutely going over the top, in terms of their being enamored of what they can do with brick facing; that they are now able to expose. Once they can expose it, they're much more willing to put the effort into it, to make it really attractive. And if you go into the courtyard of the Horrea Epagathiana--and by the way, behind, within these areas here, we have annular vaulting--you can see these niches that have been placed here. They don't really need these niches in this courtyard of this warehouse. What did they use these niches for? Well perhaps they put little statuettes of gods that those who worked here favored and protected their daily toil here in the Horrea Epagathiana. But look at the attention that they've paid to these niches, that have no other purpose than to be attractive, and possibly again to hold these statuettes. But you can see here again, with this combination of stucco work for the pilasters and the capitals, and brickwork; brickwork creating these interestingly shaped lozenges and triangles, to create--shows an interest again in geometric form and the contrast of one geometric form to another, just as we saw in black-and-white mosaic, capitalized on by these designers.



Now I don't want to leave you with the impression that because brick is now exposed and enjoyed in its own right, that there are no walls that were stuccoed and painted in Ostia. That would be a misconception, because there are still painted walls in Ostia. On the insides of some of these buildings they still opted to stucco over the wall and to paint it. And I want to show you just one glorious example: the Insula of the Painted Vaults, which dates to 150 to 200, is one that has one of our best preserved ceilings, walls and ceilings anywhere in a Roman house--you can see how well preserved it is here--and it is what we call the spoked-wheel effect, because the ceiling decoration does look like a spoked wheel.



We can also see this division; in fact as you look at it, I think you'll be as struck as I am by the fact that as we look at this spoked wheel, we really get the sense that we're looking at one of Hadrian's pumpkin domes in paint. Because you can see the segmented dome effect here, and also, in a sense, the octagonal effect that one also gets from this structure, as well as the effect of the ribs of a groin vault, as you can see well here. But it's a painted version of a pumpkin dome, and it's not surprising to see that Hadrian's pumpkin domes took off in this way. I also just want to mention to you that while there's a fair amount of what we call post-Pompeian painting, Roman painting after A.D. 79, almost all of it is an exploitation of the Fourth Style of Roman painting, as we know it from Pompeii. There's actually not as much invention as one would expect, after 79, in Roman painting.



I want to show you very briefly the Insula of the Muses; the Insula of the Muses in Ostia, which dates to around A.D. 130, because this is one of the few single family dwellings that we see in the second century in Ostia. You can see, if you look at the plan, that it is arranged not around an atrium but around a peristyle court, here; although there aren't columns, there are these piers, as you can see also in plan. But just as we saw in the late first-century A.D. houses in Herculaneum, from between the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius, the triclinium has become the most important room in the house. You enter into it here. You have a vestibule, you have this court, and then you have, on axis, the triclinium of the house. But what makes this particular house most distinctive is the fact that every single floor is covered with mosaic. So, as I said to you before, the black-and-white mosaic reigned supreme in the city of Ostia, and it's clear that everyone who could afford it decorated every room of their house with mosaic.



And although this doesn't come from this particular house, this comes from the House of Apuleius in Ostia. It's not on your Monument List, you don't have to remember it, but I just wanted to show it to you, because it's a marvelous example of what can be done--I wish it were a little more in focus--but it's a marvelous example of what could be done, and was done, using black-and-white mosaic in Ostia; only black and white tesserae, with a Medusa head in the center. And then if you--this is one of those examples, illusionistic examples, that as you look at it and focus on it, it's hard to tell exactly what's in the foreground, what's in the background. It's got that like an op art effect that those of you who know Op Art of the 1960s--and I show you an example of it, a painting from the Blaze series by the Op artist Bridget Riley of the 1960s. I've mentioned so many times in the course of this semester that there isn't anything that the Romans didn't do before anybody else, and this is, and Op Art is an example of that. So we do see Op Art in Ostia, and we see it obviously also much later in more contemporary painting.



Another bath structure in Ostia, this one the Baths of the Seven Wise Men or the Seven Sages; dates to A.D. 130. I show it to you only to show you this one circular room, and not because it's a bath building, but rather because it has a wonderful mosaic on the floor; again, a circular structure, with a circular mosaic, once again done in black and white. And if you look at this, you can see that what we have represented here--I'll show you a detail in a moment--is a flowering acanthus plant that has intertwined within its leaves hunters and the hunted, hunted animals and their hunters, in combat, as you can see here. And here's a detail where you can see once again done entirely in black-and-white mosaic: the hunters, the animals, very carefully depicted, interspersed among these flowering acanthus plants; very effectively done.



This is another view of the Baths of Neptune, in Ostia, which we looked at before, dates to 139 A.D. And this is a good view because it shows you not only the brick-faced concrete construction of these structures, but also the mosaics themselves, and how every single room of this bath was covered with black-and-white mosaic. The pièce de résistance, the finest mosaic in the complex, is this one, and it's the one from which the bath gets it name, the Baths of Neptune, because we see Neptune himself in the center of this scene. It's not surprising that the god of the sea was chosen as an appropriate subject for a bath building. We see him here with his trident--that's how we know it's him--being carried along by four horses. He's holding the reins of those horses. His mantle is billowing up behind him. One expects to see a chariot here; one thinks of this as Neptune in a chariot, but it's not Neptune in a chariot. You can see that these horses, by the way, aren't fully horses but the front part is a horse and the rest is a sea creature, and you can see that the legs of Neptune are interwoven with the tail of the sea creature; he's in fact using the tails of those sea creatures almost like skates, as he makes his way along this--or water skis, I guess is a better way of putting it; water skis, as he makes his way from right to left, across the white background.



One of the interesting things about this mosaic is you see the tension in the minds and work of this artist, on the one hand making these very abstract black shapes against a white background, but at the same time paying a lot of attention to the actual musculature, to what the chest of the god Poseidon would have looked like, as you look at it; there's very pronounced musculature that's carefully done here by the artist. Here are our friends the dolphins frolicking, dolphins with cupids on their back, some fairly--other floating figures, a female figure on the back of another sea creature, all of this going on, on the floor of the Baths of Neptune.



But what's particularly interesting, I think, is the same sort of thing that we saw in the Piazzale delle Corporazioni, and that is that the artist has designed this in such a way that it doesn't matter which part of the room you're standing in. Wherever you are standing, you can look onto the floor, from where you are standing, and see at least some of the figures head on; whether you're standing here, whether you're standing here, whether you're standing up there or to the right, you are always seeing some, not all but some, of the figures head on. So again this is not--this is done with great care, and orchestrated to fit the space in which it was located. Here a detail of the mosaic that we just looked at, showing Neptune and his horses and sea creatures.



The most important development that happens at Ostia, with regard to residential architecture, later in its history, is we do begin to see the re-emergence of the domus, already in the second century and then even more so in the third and fourth centuries A.D. And I want to show you quickly two examples of that, because they tell us a good deal about late residential architecture in Ostia, and also by association in Rome. This is the Domus of Fortuna Annonaria, an axonometric view of that house. It dates to the late second century A.D., but was remodeled significantly in the fourth century A.D., and I think we really need to think of it as more a fourth-century house than as a second-century house. And, by the way, Ostia was still thriving in the third century. By the year 400 A.D., it was abandoned, but in the third century still a thriving--and early fourth century--still a thriving city.



We see this house here. It's an axonometric view from Ward-Perkins. The most important features, besides the fact that it's a single-story dwelling, single-family dwelling, is the fact that it has an open court here, with a pool; that it has the triclinium as the most important room of the house; so that continues on in residential architecture. But there's a particular taste for apses in these late Roman buildings. You can see that this one has an apse, not so unlike the apse that we saw in Domitian's Palatine Palace on the Palatine Hill. It is finally starting to catch on, among others. We see that you go into that room through three arches, on columns. And this idea of supporting a triple arch on columns is also a very popular motif in domestic architecture in later antiquity.



And look also at the fact that on the left-hand side of the triclinium there is a fountain. So the incorporation of a fountain; a pool court here, a fountain there, an apsed triclinium, and then views through triple arches, supported by columns, all characteristic features of late Roman domestic architecture. This is a view obviously, through the columns, supporting that triple arch, toward the fountain on the left and toward the apse in the center of the structure. And you can see the remains of marble revetment, real marble revetment, that was used both on the floor, for the pavement, and also on the walls.



The other house I want to show you briefly is the Domus of Cupid and Psyche, the more famous of the two. This dates, without any question, to late antiquity, to around A.D. 300. The House of Cupid and Psyche, we see it first in plan, and you can see it's very simple. An entranceway here, a long corridor, a series of cubicula on one side of that corridor. There may have been a second story on a small part of the house. You can see the st

Professor Kleiner discusses the increasing size of Roman architecture in the second and third centuries A.D. as an example of a "bigger is better" philosophy. She begins with an overview of tomb architecture, a genre that, in Rome as in Ostia, embraced the aesthetic of exposed brick as a facing for the exteriors of buildings. Interiors of second-century tombs, Professor Kleiner reveals, encompass two primary groups -- those that are decorated with painted stucco and those embellished primarily with architectural elements. After a discussion of the Temple of the Divine Antoninus Pius and Faustina and its post-antique afterlife as the Church of S. Lorenzo in Miranda, Professor Kleiner introduces the Severan dynasty as it ushers in the third century. She focuses first on the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, the earliest surviving triple-bayed arch in Rome. She next presents the so-called Septizodium, a lively baroque-style façade for Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill. The lecture concludes with the colossal Baths of Caracalla, which awed the public by their size and by a decorative program that assimilated the emperor Caracalla to the hero Hercules.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 19-21 (historical background), 21, 121 (Septizodium), 75-76 (Arch of Septimius Severus), 107-108 (Temple of Antoninus and Faustina), 319-328 (Baths of Caracalla), 340 (Tomb of Annia Regilla)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 124-139

Transcript



March 31, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning. From the time of Julius Caesar, we have seen the rulers of Rome brag about building buildings that were bigger than any others in the world. You'll remember Caesar referred to his Temple of Mars in that way, that he was building the largest Temple of Mars in the world. And we also saw the same for Domitian, with his palace on the Palatine Hill; for Trajan with his enormous forum; for Hadrian, building the greatest--largest dome that had been built up until that time and, as we discussed, still the largest diameter dome in the city of Rome today; and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, just as a selection of examples. We are going to see today that if bigger was better, biggest is best, and in the case of the emperor Caracalla, an emperor who was a megalomaniac, in the tradition of Nero and Domitian, that he built the largest imperial bath structure to date. And we're going to be looking at that bath structure today, and we're going to see it as really a colossal and fascinating building, in all kinds of ways. But before I get to that--in fact, we'll end with that bath structure today--before I get to that, I would like to look with you at architecture in Rome, in the second and third centuries A.D., and we'll see that architecture is quite varied in terms of whether it's private, it's civic, it's also funerary.



I want to begin though by just reminding you of what we talked about last time. We looked at the city of Ostia, and we looked at the city of Ostia, the port of Rome, in its entirety; once again, its public buildings, its civic structures, its commercial enterprises. And we also went, at the very end of the lecture, out to Isola Sacra, where the tombs of those who lived in Ostia were located. And I show you a couple of those again now on the screen; these brick-faced tombs, these tombs that are made of concrete, at Isola Sacra, that were put up for the professionals, for the traders, the commercial merchants and so on that lived in the city of Ostia. They were made of brick-faced concrete construction. They had barrel vaults or groin vaults inside.



And you can see also that they were faced with brick, and they were faced with brick, as we discussed, that was exposed; the idea of brick being attractive in its own right, a fabulously beautiful facing, that they take advantage of in the second century A.D., and decide not to stucco it over, as you can see so well here. The doorways into those tombs, surrounded by travertine jambs and lintels, the inscription in the center, the small slit windows, and then a pediment at the top. We saw, when we looked at funerary architecture in the age of Augustus, for example, that is was very varied; very varied. Tombs in the shape of pyramids, in the shape of circular tombs. Tombs that made reference to bakeries, like the Tomb of the Baker Eurysaces. There is still a certain amount of variety in tomb architecture in the second century A.D., but they tend to hone in on one type in particular, and that type is the so-called house tomb type; which is exactly what we see here, a tomb that is rectangular in shape, for the most part, boxlike, and does resemble, very closely, a house; this close relationship that we've talked about so many times this semester between houses of the living and houses of the dead. So we looked at those last time.



And where I want to begin today is just to demonstrate to you that these same kinds of house tombs that we see in Ostia and Isola Sacra, in the second century A.D., we also see in Rome. And in some cases they are commissioned by individuals of comparable social status, to those in Ostia, but sometimes they are commissioned by the most elite. And I'd like to begin with an example of a similar tomb commissioned by the most elite. This is the so-called Tomb of Annia Regilla, in Rome. It was put up on the famous via Appia, or the Appian Way. It dates to around A.D. 161. In this case we know who the commissioner was, and I can show you what he looked like as well. You see him here, on the right-hand side of the screen. He was a man by the name of Herodes Atticus; I've put his name on the Monument List for you, Herodes Atticus. Herodes Atticus was actually a Greek. He was Athenian, from the Greek part of the Empire. He lived in Athens, for the most part, and he commissioned a very famous music hall, an odeon, which still survives. You can see it over here. It's without its roof today, but it was originally one of these roofed music halls, an odeon. It is located on the slope of the Acropolis in Athens; the Acropolis that of course we know primarily for its great architectural feats of the fifth century B.C. in Greece.



This is the Roman building, put up by Herodes in the second century, and we see it on the slope of the Acropolis, very well preserved. In modern times its greatest fame is the fact that Yanni performed his "Live at the Acropolis" concert at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. And even if you don't like Yanni, it's actually quite an interesting concert to view--and one can view it in video and so on--because it does take such wonderful advantage of this extraordinary ancient structure, as Yanni presents his music. At any rate, at one point Herodes Atticus, who had a lot of connections, not only in Athens but around the Empire, at one point, through those connections, he gets himself appointed a senator in Rome, and in order to take up that position he needs to leave Athens behind and go spend some time in Rome, and he and his wife, Annia Regilla, set up house in Rome. Annia Regilla, unfortunately, dies in Rome, and he needs to bury her, and he decides to bury her in Rome, instead of in Athens, and he builds for her a tomb on the Appian Way, on the Via Appia, in around 161 A.D.; that's the date that we believe she died.



And we see a view of that tomb here. What we're looking at--and you probably recognize this already because we've looked at a number of models from this museum of casts in Rome, the Museo della Civiltà Romana, in EUR in Rome. And I show you two views of this model of the Tomb of Annia Regilla; one that we see from the front and another that we see from, if we're facing the monument, the left side of the tomb. And these are extremely helpful, because they give us a very good sense of what we are dealing with here. It is clear that we are dealing with a tomb type that is not that different from what we saw in Ostia; although this looks more like a temple than it looks like a house.



And you can see that right off. It looks exactly like a typical Roman temple. We see that it is on a high podium; it has a deep porch; it has freestanding columns in that porch; it has a single staircase on the front of the structure; has a façade orientation; then an entranceway into the structure. It also has freestanding columns that support a pediment. So if I were to show you this, and not identify it and say to you: "What kind of a building is this?" I'm sure you would have said it was a temple; and you would've been right in the sense that it looks most like a temple. But it is a tomb in the form of a temple, as you can well see here. Looking on the side of the monument, you can also see those same features that I've just described. And while we are looking at this view--because I'm not going to bring it back--I want to point out one detail that will loom large as we look further at this structure.



You will see on the left side of the tomb that the architect has created, has kind of scalloped out the side on either side, creating niches, tall niches on the side, and placed columns into that space; which is a very unusual thing to do. It's not true on the other side of the monument, only on this side of the structure. Why has the architect done that? I think it might have something to do with the siting, perhaps how you viewed it from the street. Maybe it was skewed in such a way that you would see not only the façade but also the side, and he wanted to emphasize the columns on that particular side of the structure. But it may also have just had to do with a quirk, with a particular interest that the architect or the patron had in doing something different than any other tomb, and I want to return to that point in a moment.



But most significant of all is that in terms of the building technique, the use of concrete faced with exposed brick, this is exactly what we saw in Ostia. And you can see that just as in Ostia, they have taken that brick as far as it can go, in terms of its aesthetic value, by respecting the texture of the brick, playing that texture off, playing color, different colored bricks, a reddish brick against a more yellowish colored brick, playing those off against one another, and then adding certain very highly decorative details like a meander pattern, that we're going to see in a moment, and decoration around the windows of the tomb, done in stucco. The columns, however, are marble; the columns are marble, and in that sense again something somewhat different than what we saw at Ostia.



This is a view of the tomb as it looks today. The porch is not well preserved, and I can't show you any of that. But I can show you the rest of the structure, and you can see it quite well in this particular view. And again, you see that it is indeed well preserved. Concrete construction, faced with brick, the brick left exposed, respected and enjoyed, in its own right. What I've already described: the playing off of one color of brick against another; this meander pattern done in stucco; the stucco decoration, very elaborate decoration, as we're going to see, around the windows; tall podium, we see that here as well. An extraordinary structure.



And what's interesting I think to note, at least culturally and in terms of social status, is the fact that although this structure was put up for one of the most wealthy men in--or the wife of one of the most wealthy men in Rome at this particular time, the general aesthetic is very similar to what we saw for professional people in the city of Ostia: that is, a concrete tomb, in the form of a house, or a temple in this case, that has as its facing brick, and a respect for that brick in its own right.



Here are a couple of details. I show you once again a detail of the warehouse or the Horrea Epagathiana at Ostia that we looked at, and also a detail of the Tomb of Annia Regilla in Rome. And I think you can see here what I mean. Again, the different coloration of brick, the yellowish brick, the reddish brick, played off one against the other; the use of stucco decoration, in this case for the volutes of the composite capitals. In this case--and in fact you'll remember I pointed out what was interesting about these capitals at the warehouse was that they were--that the brick was used to make up the main body of the capital. And this is not one of them, but I also showed you one where you could see the way in which that brick formed the actual acanthus leaves of the capital, and then the volutes added in stucco. We see the same thing at the Tomb of Annia Regilla. We see those--and here I think you can see it well -- the brick used to create the lower part of the acanthus leaves, and then stucco added for the curving part, and for some of the additional decoration, the flower and so on up above. And so we see--and here again very elaborate decoration around the windows, which we also saw at the warehouse in Ostia.



Two more details of the Tomb of Annia Regilla. Here you see what I was talking about before, the way the architect has scooped out two areas on the left side of the tomb, and placed the columns inside of those, which is a unique--I don't know of any other example of this in Roman architecture, and it underscores, once again, that when it came to tomb architecture, that the patron could pretty much do whatever he wanted, as long as the architect could build it. It could be quite idiosyncratic as a form of architecture. And we see not only has he scooped out these niches in which to place the columns, but if you look at those columns very carefully, and at the bases of those columns, you will see that they are not round. They are multi-sided, and the bases are also multi-sided. So doing something very unique in the context of this particular tomb of Annia Regilla.



So two main points. One, that there is clearly an aesthetic that is used for tomb architecture, concrete faced with brick that is used in the uppermost levels of Roman society, and then further down in Roman society, not only in Rome but also in Ostia. But at the same time individuality, eccentricity is valued in tomb architecture, allowed in tomb architecture in a way that perhaps it isn't in other forms of Roman architecture, and we see it taken to its limit in this particular building. Just a few more details. We see a niche from the Tomb of Annia Regilla. We also see here both the meander pattern and this very elaborate decoration around the windows; a frame around the windows and then a projecting element up above, with these great spiral volutes on either side; very similar to the same sort of thing that was happening at Ostia.



I remind you of the niche in the courtyard of the Horrea Epagathiana, the warehouses at Ostia, where you see the same sort of thing: these pilasters added in stucco, the brickwork creating triangles and lozenges, as you can see here. Same idea over here, in the Tomb of Annia Regilla. And if you look very closely at the pediment that is located above the niche, from the tomb in Rome, you see the projecting entablatures; you see where the capitals would have been. There would also have been probably columns added here, on either side of the niche, making it look much more similar to here. But look closely at the pediment. You will see that there is projecting entablature above each column, but then in the center the triangular pediment is cut back, and that playing around with the traditional vocabulary of architecture is something that I've noted is going to be a part of what we call the baroque trend in Roman architecture. I'm going to devote an entire lecture to the baroque trend in Roman architecture, around the Empire, not just in Rome, but mostly in the provinces. And we'll see that same sort of thing, which creates a kind of in-and-out lively movement to the façade that is part of that approach.



The tomb itself again. And just to point out, interestingly enough, a couple of female figures with capitals on the top of their head, or what look maybe more like vases on the top of their head, but looking very much like caryatids, like the caryatids that we saw from the Erectheion in Athens, fifth century B.C., from the Forum of Augustus and from Hadrian's Villa around the Serapeum. They are not duplicates of those in Athens, like the other two are, but they do seem to make reference to them. They're a bit more casual. When I look at this pair, they always look to me like they're kind of standing at a cocktail party together and conversing with one another, using the usual gestures that Italians are so famous for. We see them doing that sort of thing here. But they do seem to have that same pedigree, going back to the whole idea of the caryatids.



And I only mention it to you, they were found right near this tomb, and so it has been speculated, although it is by no means certain, that they might have belonged to the tomb. They might have been located in front of the tomb, or have been part of some kind of forecourt or fore space to that tomb. It's pure conjecture, but it would be interesting if it were the case. Because remember Herodes Atticus comes from Athens. We see that the tomb is a thoroughly Roman tomb of the second century A.D. But it would be interesting to think that he might have added some touches that might have made some reference for him, and also especially for his wife whose tomb it was, to the Athens of his birth.



With regard to tomb interiors in the second century A.D. in Rome, there are two major types, and I want to treat both of those today. One of them is a type that we've seen before, and that is where you stucco over the interior of the tomb; you stucco it over, and then you add additional stucco, in relief, to form the decoration, and then you paint it. That's one type. And the second type, which might also use that for the vault; but for the walls, the second type is to use instead architectural members--columns, pediments and the like--to enliven the wall and to create a much more sculptural effect. Both of these types are used in Rome, in the second century A.D. in tomb architecture. And I want to show you examples of both of them today.



The first, type 1, with stucco, painted stucco, we see in the so-called Tomb of the Valerii; the Tomb of the Valerii which dates to around A.D. 159, and is located on the Via Latina in Rome. We haven't looked at the Via Latina before, but it is one of Rome's main streets, that had along it cemeteries, and there are a fair number of concrete tombs, faced with brick, that are preserved, very well preserved on the Via Latina today. And what makes them particularly special is the interiors are almost pristine. It's quite extraordinary to go into these and see how well they have stood the test of time.



The Tomb of the Valerii, you see the lunette and the vault of the interior of that tomb right here. And as you look at the acanthus leaves growing up in the lunette, all done in stucco relief, and the barrel vault with its individual compartments, round and square compartments, with floating figures inside, you should certainly be reminded of things we've already seen before. When one looks at the acanthus leaves, one can't help but think back to the delicate leaves of the Ara Pacis, the delicate acanthus leaves of the Ara Pacis Augustae, which you see on the left-hand side of the screen. And I'm sure you are as reminded as I am, looking at this vault, by other things that we have seen earlier this semester.



What's this over here? The Domus Aurea; it's one of the vaults of the Domus Aurea. Third style; done, we believe, by Fabullus himself. And you'll recall, very delicate, very light floral motifs; compartments, in this case rectangular, with floating sea creatures in the center. We see exactly the same sort of thing here, although done in stucco instead of paint. But this was painted originally in antiquity, and we see these floating, these Nereids on the back of sea creatures inside, floating inside these. And we think the message here, of course, is of the soul of the deceased being carried to the Iles of the Blessed, by these sea creatures. So very much stucco decoration, second century A.D., but very dependent on Third Style Roman wall painting and third style stucco decoration of earlier dates.



The Tomb of the Pancratii, in Rome, which dates to 169, also on the Via Latina, has similarly well-preserved stucco decoration, also painted; and I'll show you a color view in a moment, for you to get a sense of that coloration. But here you get an idea of the scheme of the wall: very, very elaborate; stuccoed over; stuccoed, much of the stucco is done in relief. You can see it here. If the stucco decoration of the Tomb of the Valerii made reference to the Third Style, I think the inspiration here was Fourth Style Roman wall painting and stucco decoration. Because although you continue to see floating mythological figures in these rectangular or triangular compartments, if you look very closely, especially in this zone here, you will also see these architectural cages, done in stucco, very similar to the architectural cages that we saw at the top of Fourth Style Roman wall design. So this taking its cue from Fourth Style Roman wall painting. And I have mentioned to you a couple of times already this term that, in fact, most post-Pompeian painting, and stucco decoration, post-79 A.D., does seem to be inspired by the third style, but even more so by the fourth style of Roman wall painting, and we see that very well here, with this stucco decorating the lunettes and also the vaulting.



Here's a view in color of the interior of the Tomb of the Pancratii, where you can see the same sort of scheme that I've already described, but with the color. And you can also see that we are dealing here with a groin-vaulted interior. And, what's interesting, is that sometimes the walls have small niches for urns and the so-called arcosolia--I've mentioned those to you before--that were used for the placement of bodies, once inhumation became as popular, indeed even more popular, than cremation. But we also sometimes see the sarcophagi themselves, the freestanding coffins located in these tombs, as we see here. And it's interesting to keep in mind that all of the money and time that was expended on this interior decoration--keep in mind that very few people entered into these tombs. When you looked at a tomb, you saw primarily its exterior. Some family members, on special occasions, might go inside, but it was relatively rare. So all of this, all of this done, in fact, to give the deceased a pleasant home in perpetuity, and to help them on their journey to the Isles of the Blessed.



This structure also has sea creatures depicted in it. So travel is clearly also alluded to. And scholars who have worked on this particular monument, in particular, have noted that they think it has to do with one of these secret mystery religions, in this case the Orphic, O-r-p-h-i-c, the Orphic religion that was practiced in secret initially and then eventually came up above ground. Two more details of the Pancratii ceilings, in stucco. These, I think, give you a particularly good sense of the way in which they were built up almost as reliefs, in some parts of these scenes -- this figure here, for example. Some of the rest was painted. We see heraldic leopards over here, on either side of a vase. The shell in the niche also done in stucco and raised in a very sculptural way, and then the whole painted in a variety of attractive maroons and blues and greens.



The most interesting tomb, from my point of view actually, is a tomb that is located, a Roman tomb of the second century that is located beneath the Vatican today. And I show you a view again of the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, designed by Michelangelo himself. Another view over here showing also Michelangelo's dome, but showing below it the so-called Baldacchino that was put up by the famous seventeenth-century Italian architect, Borromini, Francesco Borromini [correction: Gian Lorenzo Bernini], the Cathedral of St. Peter's. And any of you who've been there will agree with me on this, it's one of the great wonders of the world; there's no question it is. If you want to talk about bigger is better, or biggest is best, this is a truly colossal building, as any of you who have been there know.



But it does give me occasion to mention, as I've mentioned a couple of times already this term, that one of the really great things to do when you visit Rome is to climb things, is to climb. If you're so lucky to climb the Column of Trajan, or the Pantheon, up to the dome--those you have to get special permission to do. But what you don't need special permission to do, and is one of the great climbs in Rome, is to go up St. Peter's. And you can go up St. Peter's either on the outside of the building, to various levels from which you can see some of the greatest views of Rome, including back over central Rome, ancient Rome, all the buildings that we've been talking about. You can see the dome of the Pantheon from the top of St. Peter's. You can see the Victor Emmanuel Monument, tall and proud, from the dome of St. Peter's. But you can also climb up to the dome, from the inside, which is another extraordinary experience. You can go almost--not quite but almost--to the apex of Michelangelo's dome, walk around a corridor there, and look down on Bernini's Baldacchino. So for those of you who are going to Rome anytime soon, or in the future, it's a not to be missed experience to climb the Cathedral of St. Peter's, on the outside, and also on the inside.



I bring you to St. Peter's because one can also go down underneath St. Peter's. And that's another very interesting experience, to go down in the depths, beneath St. Peter's and get a really great sense of the centuries of civilization that have been piled one on top of another, from ancient Rome, or from the time of Romulus, indeed all the way up to today. And in order to see the Tomb of the Caetennii, which is the tomb that I want to turn to now, you do have to go down underneath St. Peter's. You have to--this is something you can't just walk it. You can climb St. Peter's any day of the week, but if you want to go underneath St. Peter's, you have to make special arrangements. You have to get special tickets to do that. And now one can do that online; you can plan that online and you can get tickets to go to the so-called Vatican cemeteries underneath. And they don't have them--they have a small number of hours, on a variety of days. So it is something one needs to plan for well in advance. But you can do it.



You go to the left of the Baldacchino, you go down, and you go down century upon century. You see primarily the tombs of the popes, the crypts with the tombs of the popes. And I show you Pope Boniface here, just to give you an idea of what some of these look like, lying in eternity here on the top of his sarcophagus, or a sculptured portrait of him on the top of his sarcophagus. But if you go all the way down, all the way down--and most tourists don't do this--but if you go all the way to the bottom, what you end up with is one of Rome's great tomb streets. And this tomb street was out in the light of day, of course, in antiquity, like all the other tomb streets, but because of the passage of time, because other buildings that were built on top, primarily the Cathedral of St. Peter's, and just the rising ground level over time, it now is subterranean. But when you--it's amazing. You go down, you walk along it, it is like you are--it's a dark street, but nonetheless--I wouldn't want to record in that street. But you go down under. It's a dark street but it is--you feel like you are walking along a major tomb street in Rome; and indeed you are. And I show you a plan of it here, so that you can see. It is very much like walking along the tomb street in Isola Sacra. You see at your left and right these concrete, brick-faced tombs, that look very much like the Tomb of Annia Regilla, or the ones that we saw in Isola Sacra: typical house tombs of the second century A.D.



One of the tombs that is located down there has long been thought by scholars, and believers, to be the Tomb of St. Peter. No one has been able to prove this incontrovertibly, but there is some interesting evidence, both pro and con. And it has been thought--and you know Peter's famous statement, Upon this rock I shall build this church, namely the Church of St. Peter's. We believe that when Constantine, the last pagan emperor--and we're going to talk about him in the last lecture this semester--when Constantine built the first basilica, Christian basilica on this site, the basilica that we refer to as Old St. Peter's, that obviously predated New St. Peter's, we think he may have built it on that very rock and on that very tomb of St. Peter. And that's what this restored view shows you here.



If you walk along though and look at these tombs, for the most part they look like typical Roman tombs from the second century: brick-faced concrete construction, with interesting decoration inside. And I show you just the most famous mosaic that is located down there, which you see is a figure in a chariot. We think it's a representation of the Sun God Sol or Helios, in the chariot, because you can see the rayed crown. But some believe it is a representation of Christ as Helios. And I show it to you only because it is the single most famous mosaic down there, and one of the most famous mosaics in Rome, but also because it heralds what we're going to begin to see happening, especially in the last lecture, and that is this transition from paganism to Christianity in Rome--Constantine being the last pagan, first Christian emperor--and this interesting way in which pagan imagery elides into Christian imagery, both in terms of figural decoration, but also in terms of architecture.



I can't, because it's so poorly lighted down there, I can't show you a good picture of the tombs beneath St. Peter's. But I can show you another set of tombs beneath a--that are very well lighted and can be photographed better--beneath a columbarium, an underground--a catacomb actually, an underground burial area that was used by the early Christians in Rome. And you see it's called--you don't have to worry about this--it's called the Church of San Sebastiano, and these tombs are underneath that. But I show them to you here, just to give you a sense of what that tomb street looked like, underneath the Vatican, or looks like underneath the Vatican, with the concrete brick-faced tombs, looking very similar to those we saw at Isola Sacra. The same travertine door jambs, inscriptions, slit windows. And if you look through the entranceway of this one, you will see it's barrel vaulted, and it has a scheme that is very similar to the stucco decoration of the Tomb of the Valerii, with these circles done in raised stucco and with the floating figures in between them. And this is exactly what it looks like beneath the Vatican.



I can show you some views of the interiors of some of the Vatican tombs, because those have lights in them; they're better lighted. You can see them here. We see this interesting combination, that we also saw at Isola Sacra, of the smaller niches that are used for urns, and the larger arcosolia that are used for the placement of bodies. And then you can see, in this view on the right, the way in which they have closed off those arcosolia by placing marble plaques on them that either have inscriptions or sometimes figural scenes, and then again here a freestanding sarcophagi on these interiors as well.



This is an axonometric view from Ward-Perkins of the Tomb of the Caetennii. It dates to 160 A.D., in the Vatican Cemetery in Rome. And I think you can see here both the brick-faced concrete construction, the way in which the windows have similar stucco decoration to what we saw on the Tomb of Annia Regilla, on the Via Appia in Rome. But most interesting for us is the way in which the interior is treated, because this is my type 2. Here we will see some stucco, but you will see here that the walls are enlivened in a different way. They are enlivened through architectonic means, through the use of columns, through the use of niches, through the use of pediments, triangular pediments, but also broken triangular pediments. Here you see a pediment that has been split apart, a triangular pediment split apart to show what is inside.



This is the same scheme that we saw in Second Style Roman wall painting, way back when; this whole idea of taking the traditional vocabulary of architecture and dealing with it in a very different way than had been done before -- breaking the rules so to speak. We see that happening here. But the main thing is that we're looking at this designer using architectural members to create the visual interest of the walls of the structure. You can also see in this axonometric view this combination of small niches for cinerary urns, and then these larger arcosolia for the bodies. So cremation and inhumation still going on hand in hand, during the second century A.D.



This is a spectacular view of the interior of the Tomb of the Caetennii, and here you can really see what I mean. Yes, there is some stucco. If you look at the vaults you will see that those--this is again a groin vault that has been stuccoed over, and it had the same kind of compartments and painted decoration, relief decoration, that we saw in the Tomb of the Pancratii. But you can see that most of the effects have been done through architectural means. If you look carefully you will see that there is a black-and-white mosaic on the floor; not so different from what we see in Ostia. There are niches on the walls, these niches used for cinerary urns; arcosolia down here for the bodies. And there are stuccoed decoration and the use of the shells that you can see here.



But if you look very carefully at the combination of sort of maroon and cherry red walls, you will see the remains of the architectural members that served to enliven this space. Look up here; you will see that there was a triangular pediment over the central niche. You can see parts of the broken triangular pediments on either side. You can see the remains of capitals, and beneath those would have been the projecting columns that we saw in the axonometric view in Ward-Perkins. So this again the second type, where the walls are enlivened with architectural members, and those architectural members, when intact, would have created a scheme in which you had progression, recession, progression, recession, all along the wall -- this in and out scheme that we're going to see becomes the hallmark of what I'm going to term here this semester the baroque element in Roman antiquity, in Roman architecture.



All of these buildings were being put up during the reign of Hadrian's successor. Hadrian had died in 138 A.D., and he was succeeded by a man by the name of Antoninus Pius, whose portrait you see here on the upper right. Antoninus Pius again was--he reigned for a quite long time. He reigned between 138 and 161 A.D. It was a period of extraordinary peace. He, like Hadrian, was a peace loving man, and he was able to maintain that peace exceedingly well, and Rome really thrived under his emperorship. He's also interesting because he seems to have had more of a love relationship with his wife than any other Roman emperor that I can think of, a relationship that was so strong that when his wife died--he became emperor--here's his wife, Faustina the Elder. He became emperor in 138, but she died already in 141, and as I mentioned he stayed emperor until 161; so he was emperor for twenty more years after her death. He never forgot her. He stayed completely enamored of her. He never remarried. We don't even have any rumors that he had any concubines or anything like that. He seems to have stayed completely true to her.



And what's interesting is that when the two of them died, their successors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, put up a monument to them. And it's not on your Monument List and I'm not holding you responsible for it, but I just want to show it to you, because it will illuminate a monument that I am going to show you in a moment. This base, which served as the base for a porphyry column, that was located on top, represents a scene in which we see Antoninus Pius and his wife, Faustina the Elder, being carried to heaven on the back of a male personification. We see Roma, in the bottom right, and she is saluting them; she is bearing witness to what is a representation of their joint divinization. The two of them, Faustina the Elder, divinized at her death in 141; Antoninus Pius divinized at his death in 161. And yet we see them being carried to heaven as if their divinizations happened exactly at the same time. This is obviously a fiction. It is a conflation of time. It is a fiction of which the Romans were particularly adept in their sculptural representations. But I show it to you here because it has some bearing on a temple that I now want to talk about.



This is the so-called Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina the Elder. It is a temple that Antoninus Pius put up in honor of his wife in 141, to her as a diva, after she was divinized. But at his own death, twenty years later, in 161, his successors--again, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus--rededicated it to the two of them, to the divine Antoninus Pius and to the divine Faustina. It is quite well preserved today, and it is important for two main reasons. It is important because it is our best surviving temple that was put up to an emperor and an empress. It wasn't the only one, but it's the best surviving example of that. And it is another example of the way in which antiquities are reused over time, in other contexts and at later times, and how that reuse sometimes helps to preserve them.



What I show you now on the screen is a coin, on the upper left, representing Faustina the Elder on the obverse of the coin, on the left, her portrait, and it refers to her as "Diva Faustina." So it is a coin that Antoninus Pius struck after her death and after her divinization. And we see on the back the temple that Antoninus Pius originally made, in her honor. Over here we see a series of drawings, that come from the Ward-Perkins textbook, that show once again a depiction of that original temple on the coin, and with a legend that says aeternitas, for eternity, because now she is a diva for eternity. And then a restored view, over here, of what the temple would've looked like after it was rededicated to Antoninus and Faustina, in 161. And then over here, the Baroque building that was built into it, in the seventeenth century A.D., when it was turned into the Church of San Lorenzo in Miranda, and I've put the name San Lorenzo in Miranda on your Monument List.



If we look at the view of it, as it was after it was re-dedicated to Antoninus Pius and Faustina, we will see a typical Roman temple. All the features that we have described so very often in the course of this semester--the deep porch; the freestanding columns in the porch; the very tall podium; the single staircase; the façade emphasis--we see all of that here. A very conventional Roman temple, with sculpture in the pediment and decoration on the eaves of the temple as well. What we see on the bottom left is what happened to this temple in the seventeenth century. Part of it was preserved--maybe more of it was preserved, we're not absolutely sure--but at least part of it was preserved. The walls, the sidewalls, and also the columns and the front of the--well the sidewalls primarily, and the columns, and the lintel over here that has the inscription that dedicates the temple to Antoninus Pius and Faustina.



But what you see behind it is the Baroque façade rising up, a Baroque façade that has buttresses--and I'm going to show it to you in actuality in a moment--that has buttresses on either side, that has this wonderful split, arcuated pediment--a split, arcuated pediment that would've been impossible to conceive, I believe, without these architects, Baroque architects of seventeenth century, looking back to the baroque element in Roman antiquity. The cross is added in the center, of course. But there's one major difference between this building and this building. Does anyone see what that is, besides the addition of the Baroque façade?



Student: Podium.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: What? A little louder.



Student: The podium.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The podium, exactly. The podium is not there. The podium is not there. The staircase is not there. Why is that?



Student: I don't know if it's because like the land is filling.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Yes.



Student: [Inaudible]



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Yes, the ground level has risen, so that at the time that they decide to turn the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina into San Lorenzo in Miranda--this is where the ground level is. There's no podium anymore. The podium is completely underground, as are part of the columns; we see only the part of the--so they put the door at the bottom, what is the bottom at that particular time. Now let me show you the building today. It's very well preserved. So you see what I mean by the best-preserved monument to--the best-preserved temple to an emperor and an empress in Rome: extremely well preserved. You see its location is in the Roman Forum, with the backdrop of the Imperial Fora behind it: the Forum of Augustus, the Forum of Trajan. In the Roman Forum. So prime real estate for this temple, when Antoninus Pius decides to build it to his wife.



We see here the original podium, the original staircase, the original columns: grey granite columns, white marble capitals. We see the original lintel with the inscription still preserved: To Divine Antoninus Pius, to Divine Faustina. We see the original tufa walls of the side. We see the lintel on this side that also has a frieze that is preserved from antiquity. And then we see, growing up behind it, the seventeenth-century Baroque church, with its buttresses and with its broken arcuated pediment. And if you look very carefully, you will see this was ground level, in the seventeenth century. This is the seventeenth-century door. This is the ancient door down here. I'll show you a couple of views where you can see that even more clearly. Here's another view showing you those grey granite columns, the white capitals, the seventeenth-century door. And then down here the ancient door, which shows you more dramatically than anything else I've been able to show you this semester, this change in ground level.



And two more views that I took that show you the same here, the seventeenth-century door. So you have to think of all of this underground in the seventeenth century, and then only in more modern times was the temple excavated, temple and church excavated down to their original level. Here's another view showing you again the seventeenth-century doorway, the earlier doorway, the staircase. A little baby down here, which I was happy to have for scale. It gives you a sense once again of how--and that makes it even more dramatic, because--I don't know if it's a he or a she; she, she, sitting there, that she--it makes it even more dramatic to demonstrate to you again, since this is a lecture on bigger is better, that this Temple to Antoninus and Faustina was also very, very--also is very, very large in scale.



When Antoninus Pius died, in 161, he was succeeded by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus; Marcus Aurelius, one of the most famous of the Roman emperors, the great stoic philosopher, and you see him in a portrait here. You see Lucius Verus on the left-hand side. The two of them were co-emperors between 161 and 169. Lucius Verus died in battle in 169. Marcus Aurelius continued on alone, until the year 180 A.D. So he too had a very long reign. Marcus spent most of his reign, however, on the front. During the period that he was emperor, the barbarians were literally at the gates. There was concern that they were going to, in fact, overrun the city completely, overrun the Empire completely, and he had to spend most of his reign on the frontiers, and he did, beating back those barbarians. For that reason, there was very little architectural construction. Even though he had a very long reign, there was very little architectural construction during the time of Marcus Aurelius, because of the time that he had to spend in war.



He was succeeded by his son, Commodus, whose portrait you see down here; Commodus in the line, also in the megalomaniacal line of Nero and Domitian: a man who saw himself as a god on earth, who saw himself as the Greek hero Hercules. He called himself Hercules Romanus. And we see him in his most famous and most fabulous--this is about one of the best portraits preserved from ancient Rome. It's in the Capitoline Museums today, and you see him masquerading here as Hercules, with the lion's skin around his head, holding the club, holding the apples of the Hesperides, demonstrating that he has completed that last labor, just as Hercules had done, and is going to become a god in the manner of Hercules.



He used to parade around in Rome openly in this way, and actually struck coins showing himself as Hercules Romanus, just to give you a sense of how extreme it was. And he was always challenging people to hand-to-hand combat. And, in fact, he eventually got his comeuppance because although he himself also reigned for quite awhile, between 180 and 192--so he lasted for twelve years--but nonetheless even his closest advisors eventually turned against him and plotted behind his back and arranged for one of the most famous gladiators of the day, Narcissus, interestingly called Narcissus, to take up Commodus' offer to fight anybody who wanted to fight him in the Colosseum.



And, of course, he thought that being emperor protected him, and that he, like Nero, who fixed the Olympic Games in his favor, that Commodus would also never lose in a contest like this, because he was by definition emperor. But his advisors turned against him, let Narcissus loose, and Commodus was slain by Narcissus in the Colosseum. But he did--I do want to just mention, and only in passing--Commodus did put up a column to his father, Marcus Aurelius, that is based very closely on the Column of Trajan in Rome. I'm not going to go into it with you today, because the architectural complex in which it was originally found no longer survives. But I just wanted you to be aware that the Column of Trajan was succeeded by the Column of Marcus Aurelius.



I want to however turn, for the rest of the lecture, to a new dynasty that came to the fore after the end of the so-called Antonine emperors. When Commodus died, there were no more Antonines to succeed him, and Rome once again fell into a civil war, and there were rivals warring with one another for supreme power. And the man who came to the fore was a man by the name of Pertinax, P-e-r-t-i-n-a-x. But he had other rivals, and one of them was the man who eventually really came out on top, and his name was Lucius Septimius Severus. Lucius Septimius Severus was within that year, between 92 [correction: 192] and 93 [correction: 193], able to get rid of not only Pertinax but other rivals, and become supreme ruler of Rome.



And because he, like Vespasian before him, had two sons to succeed him, Caracalla and Geta, he was able to set up a new dynasty, the so-called Severan, what we call the Severan, S-e-v-e-r-a-n, the Severan dynasty in Rome. The Severan dynasty in Rome, extremely important, because Septimius Severus commissioned some important structures, both public structures and private; he was an interesting emperor because he combined an interest in the two. And then his son, Caracalla, who epitomizes, as I began today, the whole bigger is better, or biggest is best philosophy, in life and in architecture.



I want to show you first, just to introduce you to these two patrons, this wonderful painted tondo that is preserved from Rome. It was found--excuse me, not in Rome but in Egypt, and is now in a museum in Berlin. But it is important because it is our only surviving painting of an emperor, and not only an emperor but an emperor and his whole family, his wife and his children; the only surviving painting of an emperor today. But there were obviously many of these in antiquity. It's a fascinating painting. We see Septimius Severus with his grey hair and beard, and his wonderful jeweled crown. We see his wife, Julia Domna, who--and by the way, I neglected to mention, but one of the interesting things about Septimius Severus' biography is the fact that he was born not in Rome, and not in Spain, as Trajan and Hadrian had been, but rather in North Africa, in a place called Leptis Magna, L-e-p-t-i-s, new word, M-a-g-n-a, in Leptis Magna, born in North Africa.



He hooked up with a woman from Syria, whose name was Julia Domna. She was the daughter of an important priest in Syria called Bassianus. She was famous in Rome for her wigs; she used to wear wigs, and you can see her wearing one of her wigs in this wonderful painted portrait. She also clearly liked jewelry, because you can see her with these fabulous triple pearl earrings and a wonderful pearl necklace here also, looking very vibrant in this portrait. And then the two of them with their sons; their elder son, Caracalla over her, and their younger son, or what remains of him, Geta, on the left.



Geta and Caracalla succeeded their father together, as co-rulers. But Caracalla, very jealous of his brother, who was much more popular with the Roman populace than Caracalla himself was. And Caracalla eventually had his brother murdered, and after his brother was murdered, he convinced--that is, Caracalla--convinced the Roman Senate to issue a damnatio memoriae, or a damnation of the memory of Geta, and an attempt was made to eradicate Geta from history by eradicating him from art. And you can see that he was snuffed out; his face was removed on this. But then it was left to stand, to show the power that Caracalla had to destroy his brother, as you can see here. This gives you a glimpse into the mind and psyche of Caracalla.



I want to show you first though two buildings; before we look at the Baths of Caracalla, I do want to show you two buildings of Septimius Severus: a public building first, the so-called Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, and then an extension to the Palatine Palace. The Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum dates to A.D. 203, and it commemorates the Parthian victory of Septimius Severus. Septimius Severus, I already mentioned to you, came to power in a civil war. So like Augustus, and like Vespasian before him, he needed to gain legitimacy by having an important foreign victory, and he does this by looking East, as Augustus had done before him, looking to Parthia, and does war with Parthia, and in fact has an important victory, and celebrates that important victory in this triumphal arch that is put up in his honor in 203 A.D., in once again the choicest spot of real estate in Rome, the Forum Romanum, the Roman Forum.



I show you a Google Earth view over here. We've seen this one before, so you've undoubtedly got this one memorized by now, this Google Earth image of the Roman Forum as it looks today, with the Colosseum up there, with the Via dei Fori Imperiali, Imperial Fora, over here, the Circus Maximus, the Palatine Hill, the Campidoglio, Capitoline Hill as redesigned by Michelangelo, the wedding cake of Victor Emmanuel here, between the Campidoglio and the Colosseum. We see, of course, the remains of the ancient Roman Forum -- much lower ground level than the modern ground level. You'll recall the location of the Temple of Venus and Roma, just underneath the Colosseum. The Arch of Titus on the Velia. And you should remember also that we talked, way in the beginning of the term, about two arches, two successive arches, built in honor of Augustus: first his Actian victory, victory in Actium, and then his victory over the Parthians, which is over here. And then if we look very close--it's a little hard to see when I'm up this close--but we look very closely, we will see the location--I think it's roughly around here--of the Arch of Septimius Severus.



We can see it better in this plan of the Roman Forum as it developed between the third and seventh centuries A.D. We see the Tabularium at the top, which means we're close to the Capitoline Hill. We see two basilicas that were put up in the Republican period. We see a temple that we did not study, that was put up in honor of the divine Julius Caesar, by Augustus. We see the Speaker's Platform. We see the Senate House, which I will show you in a later lecture. And over here we see the location of what was originally the Actian Arch of Augustus, and then the Parthian Arch of Augustus. And remember that the Parthian Arch of Augustus had a triple opening. And then if you look at the rest of the plan, you will see the location of the Arch of Septimius Severus, over there, diagonally across, in dialogue, with the Parthian Arch of Augustus.



Was this coincidence? Absolutely not. This was clearly very carefully orchestrated by Septimius Severus and his advisors to build his Parthian Arch in dialogue with the Parthian Arch of Augustus. With regard to its form, it also made reference to the Augustan arch. I show you here the Arch of Septimius Severus as it looks today. It is our first example that we've seen this semester of a Roman arch with a triple arcuated opening: a large arcuated opening in the center, flanked by two smaller, lower arcuated entrances. We have not seen that before -- first surviving example in Rome. We remember, if we think back to the arches we have explored, from the time of Augustus on, you'll remember that they are single-bayed arches. Augustus' Actian arch, the Arch of Titus, and even the second-century Arch of Trajan at Benevento.



But, as I've already said today, if we look back to the coin--the arch no longer exists--but we look back to a coin depiction of the Parthian Arch of Augustus, it had three openings: a central arcuated opening and then two rectangular openings, trabeated openings, with pediments on either side, flanking it. So this is not--the Parthian arch of Augustus is not a triple arcuated arch, but it is a three opening arch. And I think there is no question that those three openings are being alluded to in the Severan arch, and being transformed into something that was new, which was the idea of the triple-arcuated bay.



Or maybe it wasn't so new, because there's an arch--the arch that you see down here--in the south of France, at Orange -- and we'll look at this arch when we make our journey to the south of France; in an upcoming lecture we will look at this arch. And it's a triple-bayed arch, just like the Arch of Septimius Severus. It's covered with sculpture, just like the Arch of Septimius Severus. So for a while there were scholars who dated this to the time of Septimius Severus, although put up in the provinces. But recent scholarship, more recent scholarship, has demonstrated--scholars have looked at the piles of arms and armor on here, and identified it as piles of arms and armor that had to do with battles that took place in the south of France, or what is now the south of France, in the age of Augustus. There's also an inscription referring to a specific historical figure who lived during the time, the late period of Augustus, and into the time of Tiberius.



So it seems very likely that this is not a Severan arch but a Tiberian arch. And I show it to you here only because while we usually--and this may be helpful to some of you who are doing paper topics or city plans in the provinces--we usually think of ideas flowing from the center to the periphery. But here we seem to have an idea that comes to the fore first in the periphery, and then ends up ultimately in the center; although, of course, there are lots of missing pieces to the ancient puzzle. There are lots of monuments that have not come down to us. So it is not inconceivable that a triple-bayed arch was built in Rome earlier, but we just have no evidence for it.



I want to show you the arch itself very quickly, because it's mainly a work of sculpture. But just to show you the three bays. Victories in the spandles; river gods down here; inscription at the top. You'll have to imagine the great bronze quadriga of the emperor at the apex. Decorated bases down here. But most interesting are the panels that we see, four panels that we see, two on either side of the arch. And I show you a detail, a very good detail, of one of them here; although it's weathered, you can see it quite well. You can see that this panel, instead of having full-length figures standing on a single ground line, as we saw, for example, in the frieze of the Ara Pacis, we see figures on a number of tiers here, small figures on a number of tiers. It should remind you of the scenes on the Column of Trajan, those spiral, the spiral frieze, with the individual figures telling the story of war, and in this case the Parthian War of Septimius Severus.



And so what I think happened here--my theory, and there are others who've said the same--is that what happened here is that the designer of this got the idea to take excerpts, in a sense, from the Columns of Trajan, or the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and put them in panel format, on this monument. I don't know whether--you can think to yourselves whether you think this is successful or not. I think it probably was not deemed to be particularly successful, because it is the only arch design of its type. No one picked up afterwards and imitated this particular idea. The bases down below representing Romans, bringing back Parthian prisoners.



I want to speak very briefly also about Septimius Severus' extension of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill. He extended it to the south. He lived there, just like every emperor since Domitian. He extended it on the southern side--that's the side nearest the forum--and he added a façade to it, a very elaborate façade that does not survive. It doesn't survive because we know it was torn down in 1588 to 1589 by one of the popes, because the pope wanted to use it in his own papal building; wanted to use the building materials in his own papal building. But fortunately the artist, Marten van Heemskerck, the Renaissance artist--and I've put his name on the Monument List for you--Marten van Heemskerck drew some of it while it was being dismantled. And you see a piece of it over here in the Marten Van Heemskerck drawing.



There's also the plan of the structure, also preserved on the Forma Urbis, and we can see that marble plan of Rome from the Severan period. If we take both of those--that evidence together, we can reconstruct it quite effectively. We can see that it was a façade that looked very much like a theater, with wings on either side, with apses here, three large apses, and columns inside those apses, with other elements that have columns in three tiers: looking very much like a theater stage set, all done in marble. It might have been also a fountain. There might have been a basin down here with a water display. All of this serving as a new façade for Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill.



It's important because it's another example of this use of progression, recession, progression, recession, across the façade, to give an in-and-out, undulating movement, using the traditional vocabulary of architecture in a way that is striking and in a way that again heralds this new baroque style in Roman architecture. I also mention, just as the last point about this monument, that we also--the reason it's called the Septizodium or the Septizonium--and you see that name on the Monument List for you--the reason it's referred to as the Septizodium is because it was thought to honor the--or to commemorate the seven planets, which is not surprising in the orbits of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna, because we know that Julia Domna was an avid follower of astrological signs, used to predict what was going to happen in her husband's reign, through those signs, and this is likely a nod to her particular astrological interests.



In the nine or ten minutes that remain, I want to end today with this extraordinary imperial bath structure that was designed at the behest of the emperor Caracalla. When Septimius Severus died in 211, he was succeeded by Caracalla and by Geta. I've already told you what Caracalla did to get rid of Geta, and Caracalla became sole emperor in 212 A.D., and remained emperor until his death in 217 A.D. And one of his major commissions was this imperial bath structure. He wanted to ape his father, because we know that Septimius Severus had also built a major public bath in Rome, the Thermae Septimianae. They do not survive. We have very little knowledge of them, so there isn't anything that I can show you or tell you about them. But we know he built it. So like father like son. He wanted to outdo his father--this is like Bush One, Bush Two--wanted to outdo his father, and to build an even larger bathing establishment. And he does it here, in Rome, a bathing establishment called the Baths of Caracalla, or the Thermae Antoninianae.



Baths of Caracalla: dates to 212 to 216 A.D. Any of you who have seen it will agree with me this is one--if we had, if Trajan's Forum was the mother of all forums, this is certainly the mother of all imperial bath structures. This is quite something. Fortunately, much of it survives, mainly the concrete shell, a concrete shell of itself. But we can see the outlines here in this Google Earth image, which shows you not only the bathing block, but also part of the precinct that surrounded it. Because we shall see, if we look at a plan of the Baths of Caracalla--which you see here in the bottom left--this is a detail of just the bathing block, and if we compare the general plan with the plan of the Baths of Trajan in Rome, we will see that the Baths of Trajan, which were very large in their own day, have been exceeded here in terms of size, but are very much in the same general format. By that I mean a la

Professor Kleiner discusses two Roman cities in North Africa: Timgad and Leptis Magna. Timgad was created as an entirely new colony for Roman army veterans by Trajan in A.D. 100, and designed all at once as an ideal castrum plan. Leptis Magna, conversely, grew more gradually from its Carthaginian roots, experiencing significant Roman development under Augustus and Hadrian. Septimius Severus, the first Roman emperor from North Africa, was born at Leptis and his hometown was renovated in connection with his historic visit to the city. This large-scale program of architectural expansion features the Severan Forum and Basilica and the nearby Arch of Septimius Severus, a tetrapylon or four-sided arch located at the crossing of two major streets. The lecture culminates with the unique Hunting Baths, a late second or early third-century structure built for a group of entrepreneurs who supplied exotic animals to Rome's amphitheaters. Its intimate vaulted spaces are revealed on the outside of the building and silhouetted picturesquely against the sea, suggesting that the bath's owners knew how to innovate through concrete architecture and how to enjoy life.



Reading assignment:

Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 370-413

Transcript



April 2, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning. The title of today's lecture is "Hometown Boy, Honoring an Emperor's Roots in Roman North Africa." And who was that hometown boy? We met him before; we met him in the last lecture. His name was Lucius Septimius Severus, and he was emperor of Rome between 193 and 211 A.D. And we saw him in this extraordinary round painting, on wood, that comes from Egypt and is now in the museum in Berlin, that depicts Lucius Septimius Severus with his family. You see Septimius Severus on the right-hand side of the screen. You see his wife, Julia Domna, on the left, with her famous wig and pearls, and then, down below, their two sons, Caracalla, over here on the right, and Geta, whose face has been erased because of the damnatio memoriae that was voted him by the Senate at his death.



We learned that Julia Domna came from Syria. She was the daughter of a priest by the name of Bassianus, and Septimius Severus came from North Africa. He was the third Roman emperor to be from somewhere other than Italy. You'll recall that Trajan and Hadrian came from Spain, Septimius Severus from North Africa. And after he ascended to the throne, and after he began his reign, and with all the interesting things that he initiated as emperor, he was honored by his hometown, as hometown boys often are, and the city of Leptis Magna was renovated quite significantly during his reign. And it's to that renovation, and to the history of Leptis Magna in general, and its architecture, that I want to turn today.



Before I do that, however, it's important for us to get a sense of this part of the world; this part of the world before the Romans took over. And any of you who are working on term papers that are on works of architecture in the provinces, or are designing a Roman city in anywhere other than Italy, have definitely found out that in order to analyze those, in order to think about them and figure out what's happening, you have to not only look at what's going on in the center of the Empire--that is, in Rome--and what may have been sent from the center out to the periphery, but you also have to understand what was going on in the local area in which that building was built; the local culture, the civilizations that preceded the Roman civilization. And what's fascinating about provincial Roman architecture is the way in which those two things come together, that is, what comes from Rome to the frontiers, but also the indigenous culture that mixes with what comes from Rome, to make something unique, in the case of each of these provinces.



So it's absolutely critical for us to understand the area that we're looking at, and in this case Roman North Africa. Before the Romans got to the northern part of Africa, it was an area that was overseen primarily by Carthage; there was a very significant Carthaginian period in this part of the world. The language was neo-Punic and Berber, before it was Latin, and neo-Punic stays on, even when Latin becomes important here. The Greeks did have some impact, but they didn't have as strong a foothold in this particular part of the world as they did elsewhere. And then eventually the area is colonized by Rome and begins to be--and Roman colonies begin to be built here, all over the northern part of Africa.



I show you here a map of the Western Empire, where we see not only places that we've already studied--Rome and Ostia and Pompeii--but also down here the continent of Africa; you see it here. And the cities that we're going to be talking about--there were lots of Roman cities in this part of the world, but the two that we're going to be focusing on today are the city of Timgad, which you see over here, and then the city of Leptis Magna. And please note while the map is on the screen that Leptis Magna is right on the coast; in fact it was an extremely important sea port, which is one of the reasons that it grew to the size and significance that it did have in ancient times. Timgad, a little bit further into the mainland of North Africa. And you can also see, of course, the relationship--when you think of Leptis Magna as a port, you can see the relationship, the easy relationship in a sense, that it had to other major ports in Roman times, specifically Ostia, and how easy it clearly was to send things from one place to another; which again led to the efflorescence of Leptis Magna.



Now the reason I've chosen these particular cities--we're going to be talking primarily about Leptis today--but the reason that I've also chosen to look at Timgad is because they make a very interesting contrast to one another. Both of them have extraordinarily well-preserved Roman remains. But they're interesting to play off against one another because the city of Leptis Magna--and this is extremely important in analyzing it--the city of Leptis Magna had a longer Roman history. It was already--it too had a Carthaginian period, but most important, in this regard, was the fact that the Romans began to build there already in the first century B.C., as we shall see. It was built up under Augustus, then under Hadrian; renovated under Septimius Severus. So there're not only the local structures and buildings and customs and so on to contend with, but also earlier Roman architecture, by the time we get to the time of Septimius Severus.



In the case of Timgad, the city was built entirely from scratch. There was nothing on the site when Trajan founded the city as a Roman colony in 100 A.D., and it was at that time that the Romans laid out their ideal plan. And what we're looking at here is a view from the air of Timgad, as it would have looked after it was laid out by Trajan in 100, as it continues to look today. We are looking down from the air, and we see here one of the best examples that I have been able to show you this semester of the way in which the Romans, when they are left to their own devices, when there are no earlier structures that they need to contend with, no earlier customs on the site, no earlier temples and the like that they need to contend with, this is what they do when they build their ideal Roman city.



And you can see it is exactly as we described it in the mid-fourth century B.C. at Ostia; that is, a castrum plan. It's laid out like a military camp -- very regular, either rectangular or square, as you see it here. It is surrounded by city walls. It has the two main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, exactly in the center of the city, intersecting with one another at the center of the city, and then right at that intersection, as was customary for Roman town planning of this castrum type, they have placed the forum right at the intersection of those two, and you can see it here also from the air. The forum has a great open rectangular space. It has a basilica. It has a temple on one short end. I'm not going to show you that forum in any--I'm not going to show it to you at all, except for what you see here, but it is similar to others that we've seen. We can also see from the air the theater of the city of Timgad, also taking its customary shape, and in this case again very close to the forum.



But as you look at the rest of this from the air, you can see again not only is it a regular- is the whole city a regular shape, but it has been laid out within the city in very regular insulae or blocks, with the streets very straight, as again the Romans were wont to do. The city of Timgad, by the way, is located in the high plains of what is Algeria today, just for you to get your bearings in terms of the modern location of this city. What I hope you can also see, from this view from the air, if you look very, very closely at the individual streets, and especially this one right here, you will see--perhaps it's clearest over here--you will see that one of the ways in which this however differs from a town like Ostia and the way Ostia was laid out, is although the general layout is comparable, the city streets are lined with columns. We've talked about the fact that colonnaded streets--we never see colonnaded streets in Rome or in Italy, but we do see them quite extensively in the provinces. This is an area that is part of the western provinces, but we see them also even more extensively in the eastern provinces. So you see this colonnaded, this very dramatic colonnaded street.



And I can show you a detail of one of the colonnaded streets of the city of Timgad, as it looks today, and you can see the effect that putting those columns, the punctuation points of those columns, along the way, which actually adds to--makes the vista that one sees from one part of the street to another very, very interesting indeed; as those columns, in a sense, march toward the arch that you see at the end here. I'm going to show you that arch, just as the one example of a monument in the city of Leptis Magna [correction: Timgad]. It's very well preserved. It's usually called the Arch of Trajan, because Trajan was the one to have founded this particular city, but it is almost certainly not an Arch of Trajan, since we believe it was put up in the late second century A.D. But we still call it the Arch of Trajan, because that's its conventional name.



And I can show you a detail of that arch, as it looks today, on the screen. And I think it's interesting to compare it to another, in this case early third-century arch, the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, put up to Septimius' Parthian victories in the eastern part of the Empire, that we looked at last time. And I think you'll see immediately why I've chosen to pair those two, not only because they are roughly comparable in date, but because both of them have a triple bay, triple bays: a central, a very central large arcuated bay, two smaller arcuated bays, one on either side. And since the building that you see here we believe dates to the late second century A.D., and this building is not until the early third century A.D., 203 A.D. to be precise, it is another example--I mentioned this last time; I talked about the fact that the arch in the Roman Forum, the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, is our first preserved Roman arch with a triple arcuated bay, in Rome, but that there was an earlier example that I showed you in the south of France, at a place called Orange, in what is now Provence, where we seem to have a Tiberian arch -- a Tiberian arch that is also tripled bayed.



So I raised the point with you that while we usually think of ideas flowing from the center to the periphery, this may be an instance where certain ideas are developed first in the provinces, and then make their way to Rome. Or it is also possible that there may have been triple-arcuated arches in Rome that no longer survive today, that we don't know about, that might have been earlier than the early third century. But the fact that here we have another example, in one of the provinces--a completely different part of the world, but the western provinces nonetheless--we have another example of a triple-arcuated bay arch that was put up prior to the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum. So it just makes us think even more so that this idea was floating around the Empire earlier, clearly, than the time of Septimius Severus, and makes it more possible that the idea may have begun in the provinces rather than in Rome itself.



The other major difference between this arch and the Arch of Septimius Severus, in the Roman Forum--well there are two. But the main one is that it relies, for the most part, for its effects, for its visual effects, on its architectonic elements: on its columns, on its niches, on its pediments. The Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome, yes, has projecting columns and the like, but it relies for its effects largely on the figural sculpture that decorates it; that decorates the panels over each of the smaller bays, the frieze, and so on and so forth. That is not true here. This may have had some sculpture. It probably had a quadriga group or a group of statues on the attic. It probably had a statue or two in these niches. But it has no relief sculpture, no figural relief sculpture at all, and relies instead, as I said, on the architectural elements to enliven the surface and to make it an interesting billboard for whoever this was put up to commemorate. We see, for example, these large Corinthian columns on tall bases; the bases are not decorated. And we also see, if we look very carefully, that there were smaller columns. There are capitals still preserved on either side of the niches. So there were smaller columns here as well; an interesting contrast between the larger columns and the smaller columns.



And then if you look very closely at the pediment above, you see that it is an arcuated pediment. Sometimes these are referred to as segmental, s-e-g-m-e-n-t-a-l, segmental or arcuated pediments. And you can see that it is not only an arcuated pediment, but it's a broken arcuated pediment. The bottom is not complete; it's broken on either side. We've seen an increasing taste for these broken triangular or segmental pediments in Roman architecture, this willingness to break the rules of traditional columnar architecture. We see that here. So again, it is--the surface is enlivened through architectural means entirely, which is an interesting phenomenon for this part of the world. You can also see, I think, that the stone that is used here is a local limestone, a wonderful tan color that goes very well with the desert area in which this finds itself. So local stone used in the so-called Arch of Titus [correction: Trajan] in the city of Timgad.



I talked about the sand, and there's a lot of sand in this part of the world--this is essentially desert--and we see it especially around the city of Leptis Magna. If Timgad is in modern Algeria, Leptis Magna is in modern Libya, Colonel Gaddafi country. And it is an amazing site. A few words about the history of Leptis Magna prior to the birth of Septimius Severus. It too--well it was, as I mentioned, a port city. It was a Phoenician port actually initially. Then it came under the sway of Carthage, of the Carthaginians. It had some interactions with Greece, but again, just as this area as a whole in this part of Africa that Leptis Magna is located in, was known as Tripolitania. And so we see the Carthaginians holding sway. We see some interactions with Greece, but again it doesn't take as significant a foothold here as it did in other parts of the Roman world. And then Rome takes over Leptis Magna and makes it a colony, makes the area a colony; Tripolitania is a colony.



And it begins to be built up, as I mentioned to you before, already in the Late Republic and into the Augustan period. We'll see that there was significant Augustan architecture there that still survives. It was then that architecture was added to by Hadrian, or during the period of Hadrian, during the time, during the reign of Hadrian when there was continued interest in Leptis Magna. And then it was built up and renovated significantly under Septimius Severus; so in the early third century A.D. It continued to thrive throughout the third century, into the fourth century A.D. But in the fifth century A.D. it was attacked; a significant attack by the Vandal tribes. It was devastated actually during that period. But it had a brief renaissance under the Byzantines. A Byzantine wall was added to the city, as well as a church, during that period. In Medieval and Modern times though it was essentially abandoned, and it became a place where treasure hunters did not hesitate to go and take stone and works of sculpture away with them.



But fortunately, because of these sands, because these sands shifted over time, with the winds, with the sirocco and so on, they eventually did their job by covering over a good part of the city, which was actually fortunate because it meant that everything that hadn't already been looted by those treasure hunters was at that point preserved. It stayed covered, for the most part, until around World War II. At that time, in the twentieth century, Tripolitania was essentially a protectorate of Italy. And in, right at the time of World War II, and right after World War II, Italian archaeologists went in and excavated the site, and revealed it in the way that we can experience it, if we visit Leptis Magna today.



And if we visit Leptis Magna today, we're going to see sights like this. What I'm showing you is a view from the air of the forum that was put in the time of Septimius Severus, the so-called Severan Forum of Leptis Magna. And you can see that this is another one of these "bigger is better" buildings. It's extraordinarily large. And you can see that it is not in the best of conditions, that much of it has fallen down. We see extensive fragments of columns and entablatures and arcades and so on and so forth, strewn around the structure today. But there's enough there that we can get a quite good sense, as we shall see, of what these buildings looked like in antiquity. If one goes to the sculpture depot, on the site, one can also see a host of sculpture; despite the looting, one can also see a host of sculpture that still survives.



In fact, it's interesting, right in the center here we see a portrait of--who is it? Sorry to put you on the spot, but having taken Roman--it's Augustus. Good, excellent. It's the emperor Augustus, right there in the center, which proves, or which tends to make it likely, to support the point that this was an area that was built up under Augustus, and decorated with Augustan sculpture. We see a host of statues--men, women, fragments of body parts, including hands and arms, as you can see over here--at the depot. And this again gives us some general sense of how heavily decorated this town was in its heyday, with sculpture of the imperial family surely, and local magistrates, as well as gods and goddesses.



This is a plan of Leptis Magna as it would have looked in the ancient period. If we look at it here, we will see, number one that it is--you can tell very well from this that it was a port city, and that a port was built. You're seeing the Mediterranean. Then you're seeing a tributary of that river. And you can see, right below that river, you can see a sort of roughly circular area that was the port of Leptis Magna, not so different from the Port of Claudius, for example, at Portus. And then you see the rest of the city as it was laid out from the first century B.C. until, or through, the time of Septimius Severus. And if you look very carefully you will see a host of buildings. The one that's right in the uppermost part there, closest to the harbor, is the Old Forum. It's not on your Monument List, but I'm going to show it to you briefly.



If you go down from that, to the left, you will see the theater--that's easy to pick out--the theater that was put up during the reign of Augustus. And, to the right of the theater, you see two circles there, that is the marketplace that was also put up during the age of Augustus. Down here, you see a very large bath, in the imperial bath type that was built during the reign of Hadrian. And then right above, to the right of the bath, you see the forum, as it was laid out--the forum, the basilica and the temple, as they were laid out during the reign of Septimius Severus. And then down here, to the left of the Hadrianic Baths, there was an arch put up on one of the streets; an arch put up also to Septimius Severus, which we will look at together today.



I want to begin with the Augustan remains. I'm going to show you two Augustan buildings from Leptis Magna. The first is the markets, and the second will be the theater; and they're very interesting in all kinds of ways. You see a restored view of what the market would have looked like in the Augustan period. This is a restored view that comes from your textbook, from the Ward-Perkins. We know that the building dated precisely to 8 B.C., that is, in the reign of Augustus, 8 B.C. How do we know that? Because there is an inscription on the building that interestingly enough is written in both Latin and then has a neo-Punic translation. So this is a nod, still in the Augustan age, to the Carthaginian segment of the population, who still continue to live there, even with the Roman advent. So 8 B.C.



And as we look at this, we know, in fact, what was built in 8 B.C. was only part of this. It was the two pavilions, the two market pavilions that you see in the center here. This scheme of having a round or roundish structure, either one or two pavilions in the center of an open courtyard, is actually not special to Leptis Magna. We know this type in Italy. There are examples still preserved, for example, in Campania. I showed you one, although we didn't discuss it in the plan of the Forum of Pompeii, for example. But so this is not--this is an idea that probably made its way from--may have made its way from Italy to Leptis Magna in the age of Augustus. We see it here, these two pavilions.



But if we look at these pavilions carefully, we see some interesting features. We see that the central element is indeed circular. There's a circular wall here, that has in it arcuated windows and doorways, that pierce it and open it up. Then around it though, interestingly enough, we see that the staircase, the way in which the columns are arranged, and the roof, make up an octagon, make up an octagon, in the case of both of these pavilions. Now that is very, very interesting, when we talk about what happens first and where, in Rome itself, Campania, central Italy, or in the provinces. Because in this particular instance we are seeing an octagon extremely early. This is 8 B.C., the age of Augustus. We don't see the octagon used in Rome until the age of Nero -- until the Domus Transitoria, sort of, and then fully blown in the Domus Aurea, in the octagonal room of the Domus Aurea. So is this a formulation that begins first in the provinces, and ends up in Rome, or are again there some missing links? Were there octagons earlier in Rome that have no longer survived? It's an interesting and almost certainly unanswerable question, unless something new is excavated that changes the picture. So for now it looks as if we see an octagon earlier in the provinces than we see it in Rome.



While the pavilions--and the pavilions were indeed these market pavilions. And by the way I should mention that there were no permanent markets here. There were temporary stalls that would've been set up daily between the columns, around the pavilions and the columns in the portico. The open portico was not done in 8 B.C., it was not done in the age of Augustus, but was added under Tiberius, Augustus' successor, between 31 and 37 A.D., as is indicated on your Monument List. And there is a difference in the materials that were used here. And the materials, interestingly enough--and this is very important for our understanding of the evolution of architecture and Leptis Magna--during this period, the age of Augustus, local stone was used entirely. They used a local sandstone and limestone--I'll show it to you in a moment--for these pavilions. And then when Tiberius added, or when the outer area, the portico was added, in the age of Tiberius, the columns were made out of a grey stone, but a grey stone that was also local.



So only local stone used here. No concrete used in this building. This is an entirely stone building, put up in the Augustan period in Leptis Magna. One of the pavilions, very well preserved, as you can see here. And you can see that we are dealing again with a very attractive local sandstone or limestone that is used for the structure, for the central pavilions entirely. And then you can see the contrast between the coloration of that and the grey columns, also local stone that are used for the surrounding portico. If we look at this pavilion, we can see both the central round element that I've already described, with its arcuated windows and doorways, on a tall base. We can also see the columns that surround it; and you can tell very well that these are Ionic columns. Some of them are columns; some of them are, in a sense, piers. They're wider, and those wider ones are at the corners. And it's interesting to see how the architects have gotten around the fact that they have to turn the corners in this octagon by making these wider and making them splay out on either side. You can also see some stone benches in between some, but not all, of the columns here.



Let me go back for a second, just to show you also that while the columns of the pavilions, or the macella--by the way, that's the word in Latin, m-a-c-e-l-l-a, or macellum, m-a-c-e-l-l-u-m, in the singular--the columns, the capitals of the surrounding portico were Corinthian, as opposed to the Ionic ones that are used for the earlier market pavilions. Here's another detail; this is the one that's on your Monument List. And although it's in black and white, doesn't give you a sense of the coloration of the stone, it's useful because you can see one of these piers that turns a corner better here, and you can also see that there are striations that make up the flutes of the pilasters that are located in between these arcuated openings on the central element. This is another view that shows you the less preserved second pavilion. You can see here again the color of the stone. You can see the way in which the piers turn the corner here, and get a sense of the remains, a further sense of the remains of the Augustan marketplace from this view.



The other Augustan building, as I mentioned, was the Theater of Leptis Magna, and this theater again also put up in the age of Augustus. It dates specifically to A.D. 1 to 2; so a very early Roman theater, and a quite well-preserved Roman theater. And we should think of it in connection to the other Augustan Roman theaters that we saw, for example, the Theater of Marcellus, in Rome. This one, as we'll see, better preserved in some of its aspects than the Theater of Marcellus in Rome. If we look at the plan we see some interesting features. We see first of all that it corresponds extremely well to the theaters that we've seen thus far this semester; in that sense it's a conventional building. I should mention that it is not built on a hillside, in the Greek manner, but is built on a hill of concrete.



We're going to see that very little concrete is used in Leptis Magna, is used in Roman North Africa in general, where the work is primarily of stone, the buildings are made primarily out of stone. Very little concrete. But they did use it here to create a hill, a manmade artificial hill, out of concrete, on which they could rest the seats of the theater, or the cavea of the theater. The seats themselves are done in local stone. And we can also see the other features of the typical Roman theater: the semicircular orchestra; the semicircular cavea; the division of the cavea into these cunei or wedge-shaped sections. We can also see that the stage building--we know quite a bit about the stage building because it's extremely well preserved in a way that the Theater of Marcellus, of course, is not. We see that it was made up of these three very large niches here, that have columns screening the inside, following the curvature, in fact, of those niches. And you can also see there are architectural elements in the center here that seem to project into that space. And this pretty early, this is A.D. 1 to 2.



So it does give us some sense--when we talked about painting and we talked about the fact that we see things in Roman painting of the Second Style--in particular, 60 B.C., 50 B.C.--that we don't see in built architecture, and I mentioned at that time it's conceivable that they are based on lost theatrical sets that were made out of wood. But a building like this, where we do have local stone used for this forest of columns that we see inside these niches--and I'll show it to you, because it's well preserved, in a moment--we get a sense of the kind of thing that may have existed, that may have had some impact on some of the paintings that we saw of the Second Style in places like Pompeii and elsewhere.



This is also interesting, because if you look--it's hard, you can't really see it in plan--but if you look at the very top of the cavea, the top of the cavea, in the center, was the location of a temple. And that temple was put up to Ceres, the goddess Ceres, C-e-r-e-s, the goddess Ceres; Ceres Augusta, so the Augustan version of Ceres. And that was at the very top, and that makes this temple a type of temple that we have not talked about this semester, and that is what is called a theater temple; a theater that has a temple as an integral part of it. This is not a new idea to Leptis Magna. We know, for example, in Rome that the Republican general Pompey built such a theater in Rome, a temple theater, a theater that had a temple at the apex of the cavea. It is not preserved, although there is enough evidence and fragments and so on for us to get a quite good sense of what it looked like, and it was one of these. So again, ideas that seem to have been developed in Rome first are making their way, in this case, to Leptis Magna.



Notice that the theater [correction: temple] at the apex is aligned with another theater [correction: temple] that's located down here, a large, possibly a larger one. And this one seems to have been put up to the divine Augustus, or to a number of divi, and again purposefully aligned with the temple at the top. Here's something very interesting. We see the porticus in the back; this porticus that we saw, for example, at the theater in Pompeii, the early theater in Pompeii, 80 to 70 B.C., as you'll remember. We see it here, and you can see that it is not as regular as the porticus in Pompeii. And the reason for that is likely because of the preexisting buildings on this site.



And this is where we see a significant difference with the planning of Timgad. Timgad, again the Romans could just lay this out any way they wanted, because nothing was there and they chose this ideal castrum plan; and the theater and so on, very, very regular. Here they have to contend with earlier structures. They have to design their building keeping those in mind. They certainly don't want to destroy temples, for example, or shrines of the locals. That would not be good politics, so they don't. And they have to build their building with that in mind; and so we see some very unusual shapes here. It's not what they would have done if they could have done differently, but they had to do it, given the reality of the situation.



This is a view of the Theater of Augustus at Leptis Magna, as it looks today. You can see once again that the stone of choice is local stone, local limestone and sandstone, for the columns, as well as for the cavea; but again the cavea rests on a concrete foundation. And we can see again what I described before: the three great niches, as well as these square elements, with columns, that project into our space, that give a very interesting scenic view of columnar architecture, that again gives us an idea of perhaps some of those temporary structures in wood, that would've had a significant impact on Second Style Roman wall painting.



This is interesting. This is an extremely well-preserved inscription that comes from the Theater of Leptis Magna, and is still preserved. And we can see here, as in the Market of Augustus that is in Latin, but also translated into neo-Punic, below. And I thought you might be interested in hearing what it says. And it says, and I quote--and I'll do that in English: "When the father of the fatherland, Caesar Augustus, son of the deified Caesar"--namely Julius Caesar; so this is again one of the ways we know that this is an Augustan building--"was pontifex maximus"--that is, Chief Priest of Rome, because state and religion very closely allied in the Roman period, and Augustus was at one point both Chief Priest of Rome, as well as imperator or emperor--when Augustus was "pontifex maximus, vested with the tribunician power for the twenty-fourth time, being consul for the thirteenth time, a man by the name of Annobal Rufus, the adorner of his country--so he must have commissioned not only this but other buildings as well--the adorner of his country and lover of concord, priest, suffete, prefect of the sacred objects, the son of Himilco Tapapius, took care to build this at his own expense, and dedicated it."



So here we see a good example of the sort of thing that we see often in the provinces; that is, buildings put up in honor of the emperors, during the period in which they reigned, but put up by major local benefactors, who have significant funds at their disposal, who want to do the same sort of thing that anyone who wants to put their name on a building at Yale, preserve their name for posterity, their generosity, their benefaction, for posterity; and at the same time do good by providing the kind of amenities that cities need, like theaters and baths and the like.



I mentioned already that building continued apace during the time of the emperor Hadrian, and the main building that was added to Leptis Magna, during the Hadrianic period, was a very large bath structure; the second largest bath structure preserved in Roman North Africa. And we see it in plan here: the building [bathing] block on the right, and then a view, a fuller view, of the entire bath complex at the left. It dates to A.D. 126 to A.D. 127. Just looking quickly at the plan over here, you can see not only the bathing block, same as we see on the right, but also the palaestra of the structure. And the palaestra of the structure should strike you as very different from any other palaestra that we've seen thus far this semester. It's almost shaped like a hippodrome, although it doesn't have the hairpin shape with one curved and one straight end, but two curved ends. In fact, it might remind you, more than a hippodrome, of the Basilica Ulpia in the Forum of Trajan, with its two curved ends, one on either side, and columns running around the center, and then two radiating apses, up here on the right--on the uppermost part, excuse me.



So a very unusually shaped palaestra. We've never seen a palaestra like this before. But perhaps even more interesting than the shape of the structure is the way it's off axis with the rest of the building. Right? It's off axis; it's not lined up axially and symmetrically with the rest of the building. The reason for that is almost certainly the same as we saw with the porticus in the theater, the Augustan theater, and that is something else must have stood on the site that forced them to design this in such a way that it was off center with the rest of the structure. But it actually made it--it makes it more interesting, in a sense, architecturally.



With regard to the bathing block, that is very conventional. You can pick out all the rooms that we've become so accustomed to naming in Roman bath architecture. This is an example of the imperial bath type that we've seen developed in Rome from the time of Titus, up through Trajan; the Baths of Titus and the Baths of Trajan, the imperial bath type, where we have the main bathing rooms placed in a row, in the center of the structure, axially related to one another. What do we see at the top, with the columns around it, or the bases and then columns above, is the what? Natatio, the natatio. The frigidarium, tepidarium, caldarium; caldarium here with its radiating niches, as you can see. So natatio, frigidarium, tepidarium, caldarium, all in succession, and then the other rooms symmetrically arranged around them; duplicated, mirror images of one another on either side. In this plan it doesn't show the frigidarium as if it were triple-groin vaulted, but most who've studied this believe that it was.



And I'll show you a view of that in a moment. Before I get to that, a view into the remains of the Baths of Hadrian today. And we see with the Baths of Hadrian a very major change in terms of building stone in the city of Leptis Magna. And that is, while up to this point they were using entirely local stone, all of a sudden, in the time of Hadrian--and it's not surprising, I suppose, with Hadrian and his era being a time of international travel and the like, internationalism--we see the beginning to import marbles from all over the world for the buildings of Leptis Magna, this being the prime example. We have building stone in this building--we have some local stone in this building, but we also have marble from Greece, marble from Asia Minor, and even marble from Italy, used in the Baths of Hadrian at Leptis Magna, making it a very quite magnificent building, to say the least. So this is a very significant change in the way they are thinking about the building materials used for the structures of Leptis.



Here is a restored view of what scholars -- some scholars at least -- believe the frigidarium of the Baths of Hadrian looked like; very similar to what we imagine that the frigidaria of baths in Rome looked like, of the imperial type. Think of the later Baths of Caracalla that we looked at last time, with the same triple groin vaulted scheme, supported by engaged columns on either side, and then very heavily decorated. It could be that those who have thought about this have been too influenced by spaces like the frigidaria in the Baths of Caracalla. Because to do this--we know that very little concrete was used in Leptis Magna to do this kind of building at this kind of scale. To vault this kind of room, at this kind of scale, you would need to use concrete construction.



So there are two possibilities here. Either they did use it in this building, and used it very well to create a space that was quite comparable to what was being put up in Rome, or it may have been vaulted somewhat differently. But those who've studied this with some, who are very knowledgeable about this kind of thing, seem to believe that this was a groin-vaulted building. Now groin vaults can be done out of material other than concrete. We saw some vaulting in Pompeii--not groin vaults but regular vaults--in Pompeii that were made out of wood. But to do it at this scale would be near impossible, and one has to imagine that concrete would have been used. So that's controversial and we don't know for sure exactly how this building was vaulted.



Septimius Severus follows the lead of Hadrian, or of those benefactors of Leptis Magna building buildings in the Hadrianic period, by continuing to have the buildings of his renovated hometown sheathed in imported marbles. And in fact it could be said, if Septimius Severus were to boast, as Augustus had before him, that he had transformed the city of Leptis Magna -- instead of saying, as Augustus did, that he found Rome a city of brick and left Rome a city of marble, Septimius Severus might have said he found Leptis Magna a city of local limestone and left Leptis Magna a city of imported marble. Because from this time forth all of the buildings that we see in the Severan city of Leptis Magna are made out of imported marble.



I'm going to show you a series of these, and I'm going to begin first--oh excuse me--begin first with the so-called fountain or nymphaeum of the city of Leptis Magna, which does indeed date to the Severan period. Before I show you that though, I should mention that we know that Septimius Severus traveled back to Leptis, once he was emperor of Rome. He was involved in, you'll remember, that war in Parthia, so he couldn't do it right away. But after the great Parthian victory--and you'll remember the arch in Rome, the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum was put up to celebrate that Parthian victory in 203. And in precisely that same year, 203 A.D., Septimius appears to have made his way, along with his wife, Julia Domna, and his family, to the city of Leptis Magna: hometown boy comes back to great parades and the like, for sure.



And it also jumpstarted a major building renovation, as I've mentioned, and although we think that the Arch of Septimius Severus, in Leptis--and I'll show it to you today--was put up to honor Septimius on his visit to Leptis Magna, and probably stood in 203 when he arrived--we date it to 203--the other buildings were begun at about that time, and then some of them were completed by his son, Caracalla, after his death. One of the buildings that belongs to the Severan city is this fountain or nymphaeum, that you find on your Monument List; the nymphaeum in Leptis Magna, that we believe dates to A.D. 211. You see it here in plan, and you can see it's located next to what? What's this over here?



Student: The palaestra.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The palaestra--excellent, that coffee did you good--that palaestra over here, with its projecting convexity here. And we see on the other side the nymphaeum or fountain. And you can see how very carefully orchestrated it was in terms of making cities, building cities, building urban areas. The architects have paid a great deal of attention to exactly where they're siting this fountain, and its relationship to these other buildings, by playing off concavities against convexities and so on. We can see that the plan of the nymphaeum shows it to be a structure that had one large central niche, which we're going to see had--or one central apse, or a niche--that had in it a series of smaller niches for statuary; probably images of the emperor and the imperial family, as well as important local magistrates, as well as gods and goddesses. In front of it there was what would be the basin where the water went. Water would have flowed out of the center, or out of those niches in between the statuary, into the basin below. And you can see the way it's been kind of splayed off, to either side, to give it an interesting shape, and to make it seem very welcoming.



Now why did a city like Leptis Magna need a fountain of this magnitude? Well yes it did supply water; it was helpful in that regard. But I think it was much more than that. I think it was viewed as a kind of showpiece for the city. There came a time when every city worth its salt needed to have a showpiece like this, an ostentatious fountain. Leptis was no exception, and so they build such an ostentatious fountain in the Severan period, in Leptis Magna.



Here's a view of part of it, as it looks today--it's actually decently well preserved--and we can see the great niche, or part of the great niche here, with its great apse here, with its smaller niches for statuary, as I've described. We can also see that we are dealing here, with regard to the walls, with local sandstone or limestone being used for the wall construction. But all of the columns--and you can see a columnar scheme here on two stories, very similar to the sort of thing that we saw in the theater: a display of columns, and they go into the niches as well, as you can see here, in two tiers. These are made out of marble that is brought in from Asia Minor: Asia Minor marble, so imported marble. And we do believe that the stone carvers who were used to carving this kind of marble, in Asia Minor, were brought in with them to do the carving on the spot. So one of these examples of the use of imported marble in buildings that were put up in Severan Leptis Magna.



I mentioned that I would show you just in passing the Old Forum of Leptis Magna, before we look at the Severan Forum, just so that you know. It's not on your Monument List, you're not responsible for it, although it is in Ward-Perkins and you can read about it there. But I show it to you to make a couple of very important points. One, that there was an earlier forum on this site. It was begun in the Late Republic, and continued into the Augustan period. It was laid out very close to the port, which makes a lot of sense. And you can see that like other fora we've seen, it had a great open rectangular space. It had a basilica down here, very similar in shape and plan to basilicas we've seen, like the one at Pompeii. But it's interesting both because again it is not exactly square or rectangular in shape; it has one side that is different from that, that's on the diagonal, and this indicates to us once again that likely there were some remains on the site that had to be taken into consideration when this structure was designed. But otherwise it has a colonnade around it.



It has, in this case, three temples on one end, which is different from what we usually see in Rome, but not unheard of. I didn't show you an example, but we do know of triple temples in architectural spaces, complexes in Rome, fairly early on, already in the Republic. But we see three of them here, and they're very instructive. One's the North Temple; we don't know to whom that was dedicated. The other is a Temple of Roma and Augustus, which one sees in most Augustan cities. And then over here a Temple of Liber Pater. Who was Liber Pater? Well Liber Pater was a god who was very important to this particular part of the world. So this interesting coming together of Roman gods, local gods, are another indication that we are dealing here with a Roman society that is being laid on top of an earlier society, and that the cultures, religion, architectural practices and so on, of them, merged together to make a very interesting mélange, and we see that again extremely well in this Old Forum.



The Old Forum was replaced by the New Forum, the new Severan Forum, in the age of Septimius Severus. And that is the single most important building still surviving in the city of--building complex in the city of Leptis Magna. And I show you once again that view, from the air, of the forum, the Severan Forum, that we believe dates to 216 A.D.; in fact completed by Caracalla in 216 A.D. And now that you know a bit more about Leptis Magna and building practice there, I think you'll see something that you probably didn't notice before, when you looked at this image; when we looked at it earlier. And that is if you look at the actual remains of the columnar architecture, for example, from this forum, you will see, very quickly, that we are dealing not with local limestone but with imported marble. If you look at this marble, in the foreground in particular, you can see that it has a pink tint to it. That pink tint tells us that it is granite, pink granite that we know was quarried in Egypt. So we are seeing marbles being brought from all over the world, to be used in the construction of these Severan structures.



A plan of the Severan Forum in Leptis Magna shows it to be a very interesting structure indeed; one that is based on earlier models in Rome, especially the Forum of Trajan, but one that departs from it in all kinds of interesting ways. It's also interesting to us not only because it tells us what--or it shows us what was being built in Severan Leptis Magna, but it also gives us some indication of what an emperor like Septimius Severus might have built in Rome, if he had built a forum in Rome. You'll remember that I told the last great imperial forum in Rome was the Forum of Trajan, and that there was no other forum built later than that. But what if--you know, the what if--what if Septimius Severus had built a forum and basilica in Rome, what would it have looked like? Well maybe it would've looked something like this, at least in plan, but almost certainly not in building materials.



As we look at it here, we see that it is conventional in that--it's very large in scale, by the way--it's conventional in that it has one great open rectangular space, surrounded by columns, with a temple put up against one of the short walls--in fact pushed up against one of the short walls--dominating the space in front of it. If we look quickly at the plan of the temple, we will see it's fairly conventional also: plain back wall; single cella, in this case; freestanding columns in the porch; deep porch; single staircase; façade orientation. So very much in keeping with what we've seen throughout the course of this semester. You'll notice also on this side of the structure, the southern side of the structure, a series of shops or tabernae. We've seen that in forum design before. Think of the Forum of Julius Caesar where they were placed in exactly that same position.



We see over here the basilica of the structure. I'm not going to describe its plan for the moment; we'll return to it a little bit later. But what's interesting about it here is the way in which it is splayed off. It is not axially related exactly to the forum proper. It moves off in a slightly different direction. Would the Romans have done this if they didn't have to? Certainly not. They probably again had to contend with some sort of earlier building on the site, which forced them to do this. But they've done something quite extraordinary, as you can see here. They wanted to make sure that when you were standing in the forum, and looking toward the basilica, that you wouldn't realize that that basilica was not on axis with the forum. And so they've done something extraordinarily ingenious. And what they've done is to create this series, this wedge-shaped series of shops that forms the transition between the forum and the basilica, that's narrow on one end and is wider on the other end.



And when you stand and look at it, from the inside--and I'll show you an image in a moment--it looks like it is completely straight; which it is, in the front, but you can't tell what lies behind. So when you're standing there, you do get the sense, and as you move from the forum, into this apsed area here, through columns, into the columns of the basilica--which you can do--you don't realize that the basilica is really off axis with the rest of the building. So some ingenious work here on the part of the designers of the Severan Forum.



I'll come back to the basilica again momentarily. But for the moment, just to stick with the forum proper, we are looking here at one of the entranceways into that forum. And you can see, even in black and white, that we're dealing with local sandstone or limestone for the walls, but with imported marble for the doorways and for the pilasters. And if you look very carefully, you will see that these are capitals that are unlike any capitals we've seen thus far this semester, and underscore again this interesting merging of influences, not only from Rome but elsewhere in the Roman Empire. We see these striated capitals on the pilasters up above that are very similar to the sorts of things we see in Egypt. And then if we look at these capitals down below--and we see these capitals used extensively in the forum; I'll show you other examples momentarily--you will see that what we are dealing with here are the Roman acanthus leaves at the bottom, but growing out of those Roman acanthus leaves are lotus leaves -- lotus leaves that come from Egypt, lotus leaves that were used in Egyptian capitals.



So this interesting merging of Roman culture, Egyptian culture, for this structure in Roman North Africa. This is a view of the shops, of that wedge-shaped section of shops. We're standing in the forum, looking back toward the basilica, about to go from one to the other. And you can see that they are in a straight line and that you would not be able to tell, as you were standing in front of them, that the forum was not axially related to the basilica next door. We can also see some remains of statuary, columns preserved in their entirety, as well as capitals of the same type that I just showed you, the combination of lotus leaves and acanthus leaves.



The Temple. The temple in this, the temple here is the one that you see here. It is a restored view. It is from Ward-Perkins. It is a temple that was put up by Caracalla. It's the temple at the back wall that we looked at in plan just before. It was put up by Caracalla to honor his parents as divi; Septimius Severus and Julia Domna. It's interesting in a variety of ways. It's interesting because it is surrounded by an arcade; columns supporting arcuations. We've seen an interest in this sort of thing starting to come to the fore at this time. We saw it in late domestic architecture in Ostia. Think of the House of Cupid and Psyche, for example, of the early fourth century. So placing these arcades on columns, with Medusa heads in between them, is something that comes to the fore at this time.



We see that the temple is placed on a very, very tall podium, nineteen feet tall. Why? To raise it up over the walls, so that you could see it from a distance. It's like when they raised the Capitolium in Ostia also up high so that it could compete with the apartment houses; the same general idea here. Local limestone for the walls, imported marble for the columns. The staircase is interesting. It's a single staircase, but you can see it is pyramidal in shape. I don't want to push the Egyptian thing too far, but it's conceivable that it might have been designed under Egyptian influence. And if you look at the column bases, we know that they were depicted with images of the battle between gods and giants, a very important theme in Greek art.



So we see once again what's so interesting about some of these provincial cities; this coming together of influences from all over the world, from Greece, from Carthage, from Egypt, and also of course from Rome. Here's a view of the arcades, the Medusa's heads very deeply carved, as you can see here; characteristic also of the decorative work of the Severan period. The plan, once again, that shows us the basilica, central nave, side aisles, apses on either side, looking very much like the Basilica Ulpia of Trajan in Rome, probably influenced by that. Look also, there's a wall here--you can walk into the wall at several points--and there are columns decorating that wall, columns that just project into our space. They have no structural purpose whatsoever. The in-and-out undulation of the wall, through the traditional vocabulary of architecture, another sign that we're moving toward what I've called a baroque phase in Roman antiquity.



This is an amazing view, from the air, of the remains of the forum and also of the basilica. The basilica is better preserved than the forum. The basilica--and you can see how beautifully this is sited, right near the sea. Again, we're dealing with a port here, a port city here. You can see the apses. You can see the preserved columns. You can see the wedge-shaped section of shops here. And you can see again that the basilica has many of its columns better preserved than those in the forum. We see them here. We can get a much better sense of what the basilica looked like in antiquity; in fact, this is much better preserved than the Basilica Ulpia in Rome. And we see the difference in the materials: the pink granite from Egypt, used here as well; the Corinthian, in this case, Corinthian capitals rather than the lotus leaf capitals; sandstone for the walls. So this combination of local stone and especially imported marbles for this structure.



Here's a restored view of the interior, where we can see it was two-storied originally, just like the Basilica Ulpia in Rome. Like the Basilica Ulpia in Rome, a flat ceiling with a coffered ceiling, as you can see above. And we can also see the niches have coffering in them. Very interesting decoration. Use of columns on two tiers; no structural purpose whatsoever, decorative only, projecting into our space, creating that in-and-out, undulating movement. And then a very unusual motif, architectural motif, in the center. I show you here the south apse, where we can see the pink granite, once again preserved; Ionic capitals in this particular case for that niche; and then these very heavily decorated pilasters, on either side. And in the center of the niche, these very tall columns--this is very interesting because it seems to have had no purpose whatsoever than just to stand there and look good--two colossal columns on tall bases, with Corinthian capitals, and then a lintel on top of those, and then griffins, and then another lintel on the top.



What was the purpose of this? Did it have some kind of religious purpose? Well this is a civic structure, so unlikely. It's just a decoration, among other decorations, but using architectural elements in toto. The piers are very, very interesting. They're eaten away, dematerialized by their sculpture; as you can see here, light and dark accentuated. And if you look at the details of them, you will see that one of them, or a couple of them, have scenes of the Twelve Labors of Hercules. Remember, this was a building that was completed by Caracalla. Is it a stretch to say that Caracalla might have wanted to have Herculean imagery here, as he did in the Baths of Caracalla, or the benefactor who helped build this might have had that in mind as well, to make that connection? It might be far-fetched, but certainly something worth thinking about. And two more details of that decoration here.



I want to mention just in passing the Arch of Septimius Severus. It's more a work of sculpture than it is of architecture, and it has a lot of figural scenes that are interesting for their iconography. But I just want to make passing reference to it, because it is the one building that I mentioned that we do believe was put up in 203, and ready for Septimius' visit to the city. It also is interesting because it was made at the same time as the arch in Rome, the Parthian Arch in Rome, 203 A.D., and also celebrates Septimius Severus' victories over the Parthians. That's exactly what it celebrates, and those scenes are alluded to in the figural sculpture.



But it is very different from the arch in Rome, because it is a tetrapylon. I mentioned the tetrapylon when we went over the paper topics; the four-sided arch, the purpose of which is to span two streets that cross at that--that intersect at that particular point, so that traffic can go through the arch, going both ways. It's really quite ingenious, and we see the tetrapylon does not take off in Rome, but is very popular in the provinces, and we see it here. We also see as we look at this structure, and it has been--by the way, it had fallen down completely but has been re-erected, although the sculpture on it is casts, and the original sculpture in the museum. But we do see here something very interesting, and that is that they have used the broken triangular pediment here. You can see the way the pediment is broken apart, and used only in part here, which is something we do not see in Roman arch design.



Here's a view of it from the side, where you can get a sense of the drama of those broken triangular pediments, as well as the way in which this structure was completely covered with sculpture, and you can see some of that sculpture also dematerializing the arch, in a way very similar to the piers that we saw also in the basilica. And I just show you quickly two details of the figural sculpture that we see there honoring Septimius Severus and his two sons in a triumphal chariot, at the top. And then down here below, Septimius shaking hands with his elder son, Caracalla, as if giving him power. Geta stands in the center; Geta's still alive and not erased on this monument here, and Geta's standing here. And then this wonderful image of Julia Domna, with her fabulous wig, standing next to them and looking on. But look at this figure here. Who is this? Hercules with his club, standing right behind the shoulder of Caracalla. So once again this very close association between Caracalla and his alter ego.



I want to end today with my favorite building in Leptis Magna -- in fact, one of my favorite buildings from the entire semester, because it's so unique. This is the so-called Hunting Baths at Leptis Magna. They date to the late second to early third century A.D. I show you an axonometric view from Ward-Perkins. They're very well preserved, and I'll show them to you in a moment. This bath is interesting in all kinds of ways, but it's interesting primarily because it's a private bath, not a public bath; we've looked at so many public baths this semester. What do I mean by a private bath? Not one individual. I suppose one could call Hadrian's baths in his villa private, in that they were for his private villa.



But here a private bath within a city, a private bath, not for a single individual but a group of individuals, a guild of men, whose profession we believe it was to collect animals, wild animals, in the wilds of Africa, and send them to Italy; that was their business, send them--to feed, in a sense, the amphitheaters of Rome and the rest of Italy. That was their job. They probably made quite a fortune doing that. And they got together and built for themselves this wonderful bath, which you're going to see right near the sea, where they could kick back and relax and hang out with each other. And what a place it was. And what's interesting about it is although we have seen that concrete was not used extensively in Leptis Magna, it is used for

Professor Kleiner features the baroque phenomenon in Roman architecture, in which the traditional vocabulary of architecture, consisting of columns and other conventional architectural elements, is manipulated to enliven building façades and inject them with dynamic motion. This baroque trend is often conspicuously ornamental and began to be deployed on the walls of forums and tombs in Italy already in the late first century A.D. But baroque architecture in Roman antiquity was foremost in the Greek East where high-quality marble and expert marble carvers made it the architectural mode of choice. At Petra in Jordan, tomb chambers were cut into cliffs and elaborate façades carved out of the living rock. The cities of Miletus and Ephesus in Asia Minor were adorned with gates and fountains and libraries and stage buildings that consisted of multi-storied columnar screens. The lecture culminates with the Sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus, a massive temple complex at Baalbek in Lebanon, with Temples of Jupiter and Bacchus in enormous scale and with extreme embellishment, and the Temple of Venus with an undulating lintel that foreshadows the curvilinear flourishes of Francesco Borromini's S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in seventeenth-century Rome.



Reading assignment:

Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 171-172, 296-299, 314-322, 328-334

Transcript



April 7, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everybody. Today I am going to--well actually let me step back for a second. I have been mentioning to you, in the last several weeks I've been mentioning to you, more than once, the fact that we are--we have been beginning to see what I've described as the baroque element in Roman architecture, the baroque element in Roman architecture. And I want to concentrate on that particular aspect of Roman architecture today, which is why I've called the lecture "Baroque Extravaganzas." I want to make--at the beginning, at the outset, I want to make a few points.



I want to highlight what I see as the three major features of baroque architecture in the Roman period. The first of these is that those buildings that are baroque, or at least the architects and patrons who designed buildings that we think of today as Baroque, or we might define as Baroque buildings, they used the traditional vocabulary of architecture; they used the traditional vocabulary of architecture. And by that I mean the traditional vocabulary of Greek and Etruscan architecture, for the most part. I'm speaking now of columns, I'm speaking of pediments, and I'm also speaking of lintels and entablatures and the like. They use all of that traditional vocabulary, but they use it in a very different way. That's number one.



Number two is that ancient Roman baroque buildings tend to be decorated in a very ornate fashion -- almost too ornate. In fact, we'll see that these buildings are covered with decoration, so much so that they seem to dematerialize some of the architectural elements, including those ones that make up that traditional vocabulary of architecture. The third, and in some respects the most important, is the fact that they use these traditional elements of architecture to--they use them in a way to enliven the surface, to create motion, to create a sense of undulation. And that in and out, the in-and-out projection and recession that I've mentioned on a few occasions, we see that interjected into these works of architecture of the so-called baroque style. So keep those three characteristics in mind, as we look at a host of buildings today.



I also want to mention that we'll focus primarily today on the eastern part of the Empire, where we see a particularly large number of these baroque buildings, in large part because there was a strong tradition in that part of the world for using that traditional vocabulary of architecture, because of the very strong impact of Greece and of Greek architecture, and of access to high quality marble, from that part of the world, which of course is needed for columns and the like. So we'll focus on the eastern part of the Empire.



I also want to make the point that when one thinks about Baroque architecture, in general, one thinks not of Roman antiquity, but rather of the seventeenth century in Italy. One thinks, in particular, of two master architects, two great architectural giants, who were on the world stage at that particular time. And that is Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and also Francesco Borromini, Francesco Borromini; Bernini and Borromini, who were themselves rivals, architectural rivals; put up buildings in fact that are often in dialogue with one another. I think in particular of the Piazza Navona, where we have Bernini's Four Rivers Fountain, and Borromini's Church of Sant'Agnese there in Agone, and the way in which they were set up to speak to one another.



I don't know if any of you--I'm sure many of you know the Four Rivers Fountain, where one of the rivers has his hand up, like this, to protect himself. And the implication is he needs to protect himself; he's facing Bernini's building, he's facing--excuse me, he's facing Borromini's church, and he needs to protect himself; that is, Bernini's river needs to protect himself from Borromini's church, the implication being that if he doesn't--he needs to hold up his hand because Borromini's church is going to collapse, because it's so poorly executed. So this very interesting dialogue between the two men. And again we think of that primarily when we think of Baroque.



And just a couple of examples. I show here--and I'll show you a number of them in the course of the lecture today, especially Borromini's work--but I wanted to focus right at the moment on St. Peter's, San Pietro. You see it here, St. Peter's as designed--the dome is designed, as we've discussed before, by Michelangelo. The façade design by Carlo Maderno, also a seventeenth-century architect. But most interesting are the embracing oval arms of Bernini's colonnade. And you can see that so well in the view on the upper left, the embracing arms of that colonnade, and all the motion and the in-and-out movement that we find both on the façade and in the embracing arms is characteristic of seventeenth-century Baroque architecture.



But I want to maintain today, as I've maintained in the course of the semester, that the Romans, there wasn't anything that the Romans didn't do first, and that it is Roman baroque architecture, as we're going to define it today, that had a huge impact on architects like Borromini and Bernini. And I remind you of a couple of instances of that. Think back; the whole idea of using hemicycles, curves in architecture is begun by the Romans, of course, in such buildings as the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, where you see one of the hemicycles up there. And you'll remember that from our discussion of the paper topics, that in Gerasa there was an oval piazza or oval forum, well before the oval colonnade of Bernini. So again, what I'm going to try to demonstrate today is how important this baroque architecture in Roman antiquity is, not only in its own right, but also as a model and a spur to the architects of the seventeenth century in Italy.



We have touched upon the beginnings of Roman baroque architecture--incipient, we might call it incipient Roman baroque architecture--in a few instances. And I just want to remind you of those today. Think back to Second Style Roman wall painting. I remind you of the Room of the Masks in the House of Augustus, where you see this theatrical façade, done in paint, that represents columns with projecting elements or lintels on either side, and then a kind of a pediment up above. We saw our first explorations of this kind of thing in painting, already in 60 to 50 B.C., and then in this case in the '30s to 20 B.C. And we maintained at that point that there was probably a direct relationship between theatrical architecture and these kinds of paintings. But we don't have much in the way of preserved, built architecture at that time that partakes of some of these characteristics. But we think it's possible that there may have been, as I mentioned then, some wooden, some scaenae frons, with these kinds of effects done in wood, that no longer survive today.



You'll remember also that we looked at the Forum Transitorium in Rome: the forum first of Domitian and then completed by Nerva. And I show you a detail of that again. And this is when we really begin to see, in built architecture, this move toward what we're defining today as the baroque in Roman architecture. And you can see that what we have here are the traditional, the traditional vocabulary of architecture: columns, in this case Corinthian columns, with projecting entablatures on top, creating a system of receding and progressing bays across the surface, which created a kind of undulating movement across the sides of the forum. And then you'll remember also, if you look at the frieze, that the frieze continues along the sides of the columns as well, and then in a relief of Minerva, up on top. It's not quite--I wouldn't call it overly ornate quite yet, but it is ornate. And you'll remember that during the Flavian period, for example, there was a lot of interest in ornate decoration. So we're beginning to see some exploration of this kind of thing.



And then it comes full-blown, in the early third century A.D., the Septizodium, the façade that was designed for Septimius Severus to add to the Palatine Palace, that had been built by Domitian; this incredible façade that is more show than anything else. We think it may also have served as a fountain, as I mentioned, very much looking like a theater set, with three very large niches, columns on the curve, and then a series of columns, placed in three tiers, with wings on either side, and we have a sense that this too was quite decorative. So all of those elements: the use of the traditional language of architecture, columns, lintels and so on; an interest in a very decorative surface; and then above all this interjection of motion into the structure--projecting bay, receding bay, projecting bay, receding bay--all using the traditional language of architecture, the traditional vocabulary of architecture, namely columns and the like.



Then I also showed you the tomb, the second-century Tomb of the Caetennii, under the Vatican in Rome. And we looked at this axonometric view in Ward-Perkins showing the brick-faced concrete façade, with the exposed brick that was popular at that time. But we focused in on the interior of the structure, where I mentioned that through architectonic means the architects had embellished this surface and created interesting motion in that surface. And you see here this same idea of split--as we see in the paintings of the Second Style, a triangular pediment has been split apart to reveal another triangular pediment inside, with a niche, as you can see, and the rest of the wall embellished with columns. So once again this sense of in-and-out movement, across the sides of that wall--walls. And here you see a view of it as it looks today. The columns and so on are no longer there, but you can reconstruct them in your mind's eye, underneath these capitals, and get a very good sense of this articulation; what we might call a kind of baroque articulation of the walls.



I mentioned already that most of our best examples of Roman, ancient Roman baroque architecture can be found in the eastern part of the Empire. And I'd like to concentrate on those today; although we'll look--we won't look at those exclusively. I do have a couple of examples from the West as well. I'm going to actually start in the West, at a place called Santa Maria Capua Vetere. And I show it to you on the map here. It is close to all the sites in Campania that we've been talking about this semester. You see Pompeii and Herculaneum and Oplontis and Baia, for example, and Benevento. And over here Naples. And you can see the proximity of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, to all of those that we've already covered.



And in Santa Maria Capua Vetere has been found an extremely well-preserved Roman tomb, and you see it here in the center of the screen -- a Roman tomb that dates to the late first century A.D. It is very clear that it is made of concrete construction, and that it is faced with opus incertum work, which you can see here very clearly. But you can also see that some brick has been used, around the niches, and as a molding, both for these cylinders and for the tholos above. This has confused scholars. They don't know when to date this; also because of these so-called baroque characteristics where you see this undulating façade, with the use of--well they're not really columns, they're more like cylinders, and in that sense similar to the cylinders that we saw in the Tomb of the Baker, these cylinders.



But the undulating façade, the use of architectural elements, the interest in decoration, and the cylinders, have confused scholars, as I said, and they have been betwixt and between when to date this thing. And some have said that it dates at the time of such buildings as the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, because of the opus incertum. Others have said because of the use of brick here--which we actually think in this case was stuccoed over--that it might be later second century A.D. But this is actually more like the tile brick that we saw in Pompeii, rather than the kind of brick that we see in Ostia. So I favor the first-century date, late first-century A.D. date. But we have to think of it as very prescient of what is to come, experimenting, as did some of those other buildings that I just showed you--the Forum Transitorium, for example--with the sort of thing that is going to become particularly popular in the second and third centuries A.D.



Now I juxtapose this tomb--and by the way, this tomb, the nickname of this tomb, as you can see from your Monument List, is "La Conocchia." La Conocchia means "the distaff," and a distaff is used in spinning and weaving, a spinning thread primarily. And it looks like an ancient distaff. So that's how it got its nickname, La Conocchia. Whether that means that that was intended by the designers, and that this was a tomb of perhaps a woman who was--or a man working in a factory who spun thread. I think that's very far-fetched, I think it's highly unlikely, but I just throw it out there. But that is what its nickname is. But you can see by the juxtaposition of it with the Tomb of the Baker on the right, and with the Monument of the Julii in Saint Rémy, in the south of France--which we haven't looked at, but which we will look at in a lecture next week on Roman architecture in the south of France, primarily--you will see that it makes reference to both of these.



Both of these are earlier. This is, as you know, Augustan; the one on the left is from the late--the time of Julius Caesar. And you can see that it takes elements--I'm not saying it looked at these in particular, but just that these kinds of elements were already in the air when this building was built, in the late first century A.D. The great cylinders of the Tomb of Eurysaces. But it is more similar actually to this one, because the Julii Monument, and also La Conocchia, are examples of what we call the tower-tomb type. The tower-tomb type is taller than it is wide. It has a series of stories, in this case a plain story, then a central story, with the cylinders, and then the tholos at the top. And we see the same sort of thing in the Julii Monument: stepped base, socle here with sculptural decoration, a quadrifrons, and then a tholos at the very apex.



But it's interesting to see the differences between the two, because what we see in this monument again is much more what we would call baroque, in the sense that we have the undulating façade, we have the use of what looked like, in a general way, the traditional vocabulary of architecture, with these cylinders, with the niches, with the pediments. But look at the way the tholos is treated. When you look at the tholos in the Julii Monument, you see that it really does look like a shrine, and it has statues inside, like a shrine would. This one has blind windows, as you can see. You can't see into it; there's nothing inside. So they're treating the tholos more as a decorative motif than they are treating it as something that has the purpose of holding some either religious items or statues or honorific statues, as it does in this particular case.



Another view of La Conocchia, a detail which I think shows you what I mean about motion being introduced into monuments like this. In this case we are dealing with concrete, and that is somewhat different, the use of concrete to create undulation, than the use of the traditional vocabulary of architecture. But here we see a combination: the concrete wall, faced with the opus incertum, the great cylinders on the edge, and then the aedicula here, with the pediment and the niche below. And you can also see very well the cylinders that are located between the blind windows, as well as this combination of opus incertum work, and also the tile brick that is used to represent the moldings and the like.



I want to compare the central zone of La Conocchia with a seventeenth-century Baroque building in Rome. This is Francesco Borromini's Sant'Ivo in Rome, taken from an angle that accentuates the curvature of the façade, and the contrast between the concavity of that curvature and the convexity of the outside of the dome, that you see up above -- the same sort of thing here. So once again architects of the seventeenth century very much inspired by these kinds of motifs that survived from Roman antiquity.



On the left-hand side of the screen--you'll all remember this; this is the elliptical fountain from the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill that was located--that he could see, through his window, out of the triclinium, when he dined. And you'll remember here also in this case made out of concrete construction, designed by Rabirius. You see the elliptical wall and the convexity of that elliptical wall; the central element also convex, but with these interesting concavities, scallops, that Rabirius has created, through concrete faced with brick around the structure. So in that case--all I'm trying to do here is show you that you can create similar effects, either in concrete or through columnar architecture. But what separates revolutionary concrete architecture, as we've discussed it today, and baroque architecture, as I'm going to define it this morning, is that in baroque architecture they're relying on the traditional--not on concrete--but on the traditional vocabulary of architecture--namely, of course, columns, pediments and the like--to create their effects.



A place where it all comes together you'll recall is at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. We're looking here at the Piazza d'Oro, a plan of the Piazza d' Oro: the octagonal vestibule, the great open rectangular space that you can see here, and then the aula or the audience hall on the far right. And you'll remember the aula had these wonderful undulating walls. But what separated the aula from other undulating walls that we had seen earlier is that it was not done with concrete, but was done with columns. You'll remember the columns were placed in such a way that they followed the curved shape, and then they supported a concrete dome. So this wonderful combination of the use of traditional language of architecture, along an undulating form, and then with concrete at the top. So we can see already in the Hadrianic period further exploration of this kind of thing.



I also want to show you a very interesting painting, painted room, and this is in the House of the Labyrinth at Pompeii. It's early in date; it dates to 50 B.C. But it's an extraordinary room. It's the atrium of the house. And we talked about several different kinds of atria. We talked about the atrium that had no columns at all, and we talked about the tetrastyle atrium which had four columns around the central basin. What you see here are a host of columns surrounding that central basin. And when you have a number of columns like this, more than four, we call it a Corinthian atrium -- a Corinthian atrium with lots of columns.



And what you can see the artist and patron have done here is to orchestrate the relationship of those real columns with the fictive architecture that is painted on the wall, and to play them up in such a way that as you're standing in the room you are looking through the real columns to see this view that lies behind of a tholos which you can view through the broken triangular pediments. I show it to you for a couple of reasons: one, just to remind you that we saw this kind of thing in painting very early on: this is again 50 B.C., in the Republic still. As we see, the architects taking the traditional vocabulary of architecture and playing with it, breaking it up, opening it and revealing something that lies behind, in this case the tholos.



But look also at the way in which the tholos looks like it's in the distance. You get the sense that you are looking through an opening in the wall, a window in which you can see that tholos. It seems to lie behind the broken triangular pediment. The pediment has been broken open to allow you to see a vista that lies behind, and you get the sense, as you look at this painting, that the tholos is surrounded by a peristyle, and that there's also some greenery and so on out there. And then to accentuate this idea of the view through the wall, they have then added the columns here, so that you're looking through real columns, to fictive columns, to broken triangular pediment, to the tholos that lies behind. You'll see the relevance of this when we look at some additional monuments.



I want to move--I want to now go now east to look at some of the most spectacular examples that survive of what we are calling baroque architecture in Roman antiquity today. And I want to begin in a site that is in modern Jordan. I'm showing you a map of the Eastern Roman Empire, and we see the site in question, Petra, or some say Petra: you can call it either one, Petra or Petra. You see Petra over here, which is in Jordan today. And you can see its relationship to the Red Sea, to Egypt, to Alexandria, to Judaea, modern Israel, and to some of these other sites -- one, in fact, a couple of others that we'll look at, Baalbek, today, and the site of Gerasa, which is where that oval pizza or forum comes from. Here's another map of Petra, just to show you where it is located today, within Jordan, its relationship to Amman, and to the ancient site of Gerasa -- as you can see up at the bottom, fairly close to the Israeli border, as you can see, as well as to Aqaba down below.



Just to get you in the mood for Petra, we are walking here. There are incredible cliffs here, as well as desert, incredible cliffs, and we're walking here through what is known as the Siq in Petra. And I want to mention that this is one of those interesting provinces where in order to understand the architecture that was built during the Roman period, you have to have a sense of the local customs, of what happened here before, the buildings that were built prior to the Roman period. And we know that the so-called Nabataeans--n-a-b-a-t, nabat, n-a-b-a-t, Nabataeans, a-e-a-n-s, Nabataeans--lived here, inhabited this part of the world, before the Romans got there. And we know that the Nabataeans built architecture, and that they built architecture primarily out of the stone of the cliffs, and also out of mud.



And one can imagine the kinds of things that you see here, the rock-cut tombs, already begun during the Nabataean period. And it's interesting, if you look very closely at some of the detailed decoration here, you can see something that any of you who wrote your paper on the Temple of Bel at Palmyra remember, the sort of stepped, the stepped motif decoration. We see the same sort of thing here. But just important for you to know that the Nabataeans were building with stone and with mud before the Roman period, and so when the Romans came in and began to build their own architecture, obviously the impact of what had been built there earlier had made an impression on them.



They too decided to build their tombs out of the living rock of Petra, and they are among the most spectacular and unusual tombs that survive from the Roman period. And I want to show two of them to you today: the so-called Deir, D-e-i-r, and the so-called Khazne, K-h-a-z-n-e. We will look at both of them, with the Deir first. And if you look at the Deir, and the way in which it has been created by carving it out of the living rock, you should not only be impressed, but you should say to yourself, "Wow, this is Roman facadism at its greatest," at its most obvious as well. This is really Roman facadism, because all there is is the façade, there's nothing else. The tomb itself is located inside the rock. The tomb chambers are inside the rock. They didn't do anything to them except hollow them out -- nothing much else there. They've concentrated all of their efforts on the façade, which seems to grow out of the rock, almost as if by nature.



And if you look at this tomb, the Deir, you should also be struck immediately by the way in which what the Romans have created here is a version in built architecture of what we saw already in 60 to 50 B.C. in Second Style Roman wall painting. It is exactly the same kind of thing: this idea of breaking a triangular pediment open to reveal a tholos that lies inside, in this case on a second story. We see all of the elements that I've already mentioned, or most of the other elements that I've already mentioned. We see here, in this façade, the use of the traditional vocabulary of architecture: the columns, the entablature above, and pediments and so on down here, triangular pediments down here. We see all of those, but used in a way that the Greeks would never have done. And we see less in this one. I'll show you better examples of this interest in over ornamentation.



There is ornamentation here, but it's actually fairly simple. So this one doesn't partake of that, as much as others that I can show you. But it does definitely, by using the traditional vocabulary of architecture; the surface is enlivened by creating elements that project. Look at these columns on either side, with their projecting entablatures, standing alone--or more pilasters than columns in this case--standing alone, projecting--a receding bay, a projecting bay, a receding bay, a projecting bay--instilling motion across this surface, by means of the traditional vocabulary of architecture, again in this case on two levels.



Here's another view of the façade of the Deir, on the left-hand side of the screen, and you can see the material used is obviously the rock itself. This has been literally carved out of the living rock, so that it's obviously the same stone and the same color as the rock that still serves as its backdrop. And then over here, the House of the Labyrinth again, just to show you again the close resemblance of this sort of thing in the mid-second century A.D., in what is now Jordan, to Second Style Roman wall painting. And I show you again the tholos within the broken triangular pediment. But the main difference between the two--and here is where we do get into this whole concept of decoration and even over decoration--the main difference between the two is when you're standing again in the House of the Labyrinth, looking through the actual columns, toward the painting, and you see that the triangular pediment has been broken to reveal the tholos, as I mentioned before, you still have a sense of space and you still have a sense of reality.



Even though the pediment has been broken, you seem to be--you are looking at a tholos, and you're meant to think that that tholos lies inside a peristyle court, or a garden, that is outside the house, that you're seeing through a window. So you read the tholos, or at least I read the tholos, as further back than the broken triangular pediment. That is entirely different here. Yes, there's a tholos; yes, there's a broken triangular pediment. But the tholos has been turned into a decorative motif, among many. It is a tholos, yes, but it doesn't look like a working tholos, so to speak. You can see that it has a niche in the center of it, just like the other bays have niches that probably held a statue. But you don't have a sense that there is any space in there. It is a decoration on the surface, on the façade, of this structure, just like all the other decorations. And that is a major difference between the way in which the tholos is used in the Deir and the tholos is used in typical Second Style Roman wall painting.



You may also have noticed some of the decoration; and I'm going to show you some details now, so that we can look at those together. Here you get a very good sense of the color of the stone, of the rocks, of Petra. But you also see here a capital that is unlike any capital that we have seen before. And this is where we see the influence of the Nabataeans. The Nabataeans were building buildings that had capitals that looked this, sort of interesting undulating capitals, but very plain: plain with a concave side and then a kind of knob in the center, as you can see here. These are Nabataean capitals, and in this mid-second century A.D. tomb you can see that they are looking, they're clearly looking at models from Rome. They are clearly looking at the kinds of paintings that I have already reminded you of, but at the same time--or let's say drawings made from those paintings that are circulated, or the architects may have access to. But they are combined with local elements, in this case the Nabataean capitals.



And then if you look at this detail over here, you will see that they've used a kind of triglyph and metope system, with the panels and then the triple striated bands that we saw was characteristic of Greek Doric architecture; that's used here. But look at what's in the metope. We don't see anything like this in Greek or Roman architecture; the metopes, in fact, in Greek architecture are usually filled with figural scenes, figural panels. But here we see these large disks, and a disk in each one of these square panels. These are Nabataean disks. They are used in earlier Nabataean architecture. So once again this very interesting and very fruitful coming together of Nabataean elements and of Roman elements in this extraordinary tomb of the mid-second century.



And then I show you, on the left-hand side of the screen, the finial that caps the tholos. And a fellow sitting over here, at the base of the finial, is very helpful to us because he gives us a sense of human scale. This is this man; he's small compared to the finial. So you can imagine how small he is in relationship to the tomb as a whole. So once again bigger is better reigns supreme in Jordan, as it did in Rome, where we can see that the Romans are building very large in the second century. If we look at this finial here, this decoration at the apex, we see that they have used one of these Nabataean capitals again here, and that that supports a kind of fat vase on the top, with a top on it. And that, you see that sort of thing in Roman art; you see it sometimes in Second Style Roman wall paintings. It's probably a Greco-Roman motif that has been combined with the Nabataean capital here. And you can also see, from looking at this, as well as the tomb as a whole, that the architect is really treating these buildings almost more as sculpture than as architecture, molding them in a way that a sculptor might. And that's not so different from what we saw Rabirius, for example, doing in his octagonal room and in the fountain at the Palace on the Palatine Hill.



Here again Borromini, Francesco Borromini's Sant'Ivo, the uppermost part of that, just to show you again the kind--these are by no means exact; there's no exact relationship between these two at all, and this one has different features than that. But just to show you that it's this kind of thing that unquestionably inspires architects like Borromini in the seventeenth century in Italy to create the kind of lanterns and so on that they do for the churches that they design. Here's another interesting comparison. This is a wonderful view of the Deir in Petra, which shows you I guess best of all the way in which it is carved out of and still embedded into the rock of Petra itself; magnificent. And I compare it here too to another Borromini church. This is the famous Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, better known as San Carlino, the Little San Carlo, San Carlino, as you see here.



And you see what Borromini has done. He has the undulating façade--he's using the traditional vocabulary of architecture, just like these architects are, these nameless architects are: the columns and the entablatures and the pediments, and so on and so forth. He's using all of those here. He even has a tholos in the second--in the upper story, right there. And he is also very taken with the whole idea of an actual undulating wall, as you can see also in this view. But he is doing the same sort of thing that we see architects doing here, and I don't think there's any question that the sort of building that we see on the right, the Deir, had impact on architects in the seventeenth century. We know that some of them traveled to this part of the world. We know that drawings were made, that books were made, that these were brought back, these were seen by people in Rome in the seventeenth century--and of course they had local things to see as well in Italy--and that they were influenced by what they saw.



The other rock-cut tomb, the other very impressive--there are many of them in Petra; I'm only showing you two out of a fairly nice variety. But I want to show you the other most famous one, the Khazne in Petra. It also dates to the mid-second century A.D. Once again carved out of the living rock. Once again pure facadism; this is nothing more than a façade. You can see how in this case--once again two-storied--a very similar scheme to what we saw at the Deir--two-storied, with a temple front down below and a tholos above, that is revealed by the splitting of the triangular pediment, as you can see well. Once again the tholos definitely treated as a decorative motif. Yes, in this case it has a statue on a base, but a statue on a base that is not a real statue on a base, but a statue on a base that is carved onto the stone. So once again we get a sense that this is a decorative motif rather than an actual statue standing in the tholos, and the same for the items on the bases on either side. You can see the triangular pediment very well. You can see the way it has been split aside to reveal the tholos. You can see down below a real temple front, in this case.



This one is much closer to its Roman prototypes, in the sense that even the decorative motifs are Roman. Unlike in the Deir, where we saw the Nabataean capitals and the disks, here we see actual versions of the Corinthian order used; the Corinthian order used here. This looks very much like a real temple front, with an actual pediment; sculptural decoration, a frieze as well. We're beginning to see, in this one, not only the use of the traditional vocabulary of architecture, and not only the enlivening of the surface using that traditional vocabulary of architecture through these--in such a way that it creates motion--projection, recession, projection, recession--but we also are seeing here, in a way that we did not in the Deir, this interest in excess ornamentation: ornamenting every surface that you possibly can, with sculptural friezes, with pedimental sculpture, with statuary carved into the stone in all of the niches. But then again, a much closer relationship to earlier Roman precedence by the temple front, by the use of the Corinthian order. But this one too, a very similar finial at the top of the tholos, but using a kind of Corinthian capital, with one of those vases on top; vases, by the way, that we often see in Second Style Roman wall painting.



Once again, one could come up with a lot of comparisons for the Khazne with monuments, with seventeenth-century Baroque buildings in Rome. This may not be the best, but it's one of my favorites and I decided to show it in this context. But it's the Church of Santa Maria--it's right near the Piazza Navona--Santa Maria della Pace, designed by Pietro da Cortona. Same sort of idea; you know, the temple front down below. Yes, this is a different kind of temple front, because it's a round temple and not one with a pediment. But the same general idea of having a temple front below, and then a second story above, all of this enlivened with traditional vocabulary of architecture--columns, columns, pilasters, a window in the niche, right up there a very interesting segmental pediment inside a triangular pediment. Just to show you that this kind of experimentation that we see in seventeenth-century Baroque architecture, mostly in church building but also in palaces, is so clearly inspired, let's say, by the baroque architecture of Roman antiquity. A couple more details here. Here's a wonderful view from down below showing you the tholos of the Khazne at Petra, and comparing it to, once again, some of the confections of Baroque architects in Rome, of the seventeenth century, namely Sant'Ivo again, with its curved façade and wonderful eight-sided dome, and some of the interior decoration also of Sant'Ivo above.



Staying on the--staying in the Eastern Empire, I want to go now to ancient Asia Minor, to two sites on the coast, on the western coast of what is now Turkey, Ephesus and Miletus, Ephesus and Miletus. And I want to begin in Ephesus, to show you one building there of considerable interest I think, in terms of its relationships to Rome. It is the Temple of Hadrian, so called, that dates to around 120 to 130 A.D. in Ephesus. We know Hadrian visited Ephesus. We know that those who lived there wanted to honor him by building a temple to him. It is actually more a shrine than a temple. This is not a bigger is better; this is actually a fairly small structure, as I said, more a shrine than it is a temple. It's a kind of street side temple. You're walking along the street and then there, all of a sudden, it is.



But what's interesting about it is the fact that it makes use of the arcuated lintel, as you can see here, straight and curved, just as we saw it used at the Canopus at Hadrian's Villa. So a motif that we see in Italy, being used also in Asia Minor for another Hadrianic building -- so it's becoming associated, in the minds of designers, with Hadrian himself. So traditional vocabulary of architecture, but used in a different way, by using the straight and arcuated lintel together.



This is a very good example of this interest in over-ornamentation. Every single square inch is used by the architects to decorate: as you can see, the architrave and also the lintel in the back and the pilasters in the back, all of them decorated to the point where the decoration almost dematerializes the architectural members. Another detail where I think you can see that particularly well, here on the right, this dematerialization of the architectural members through sculpture.



And you'll remember this same approach in the Severan Basilica in Leptis Magna. This is a detail of the piers that we believe were added during the time of Caracalla -- so around 216 A.D. Obviously much later in date, but we see already here this interest in this sort of thing, that's going to culminate at places like Leptis. And also just to make the point that this same use of the straight and arcuated lintel, that we see in Hadrianic architecture, turns up also in seventeenth-century Baroque Rome. I show you the interior of San Carlino here, where you can see again the straight and arcuated lintels combined. So clearly seventeenth-century Baroque architects looking back at Roman examples.



I want to show you briefly a gate at Miletus, also, as you saw, in ancient Asia Minor. It's the gate to the South Agora or marketplace of Miletus, and it dates to around A.D. 160. It is no longer in Miletus. It was moved some years ago, as antiquities sometimes are, from its country of origin to Germany. It now can be seen in the museum in Berlin. They also have a great model in Berlin that shows you the relationship of the gate to the rest of the Roman city; and you can see the gate way up there. An incredible showpiece for the city, this gate that allowed one to enter into the South Agora.



I show it to you as reconstructed in the museum in Berlin. It is quite an impressive piece. You can see here, it is that, it is a gate, and it shows that you could apply these baroque façades to just about any kind of architecture. You see that the gate has a triple opening down below, three blind windows on top. It is made entirely out of stone. It uses the traditional vocabulary of architecture: columns and capitals. You can see the capitals in this case are--seem to be composite capitals.



And it is very much the theater, the theater scaenae frons idea, with a series of projecting elements on top of two columns, with wings on either side, also projecting. Down below, the lintels are straight, but up above they have combined full triangular pediments in the wings, with a broken triangular pediment in the center. And the broken triangular pediment in the center is particularly interesting, because you can see the two sides, left and right, up above. But you can also see that they've included the center of the pediment, but in a plane that is further back. So you get this kind of zigzag motif, where you begin--the pediment begins in the front zone and then zigzags to the back zone, which injects even further, even a greater motion, into the overall scheme. Once again we see the projection, the recession, projection, recession, all using the traditional vocabulary of architecture.



It's interesting to compare this to a much earlier gate in Greece. I show you the Propylaia, the gateway to the Athenian Acropolis, fifth century B.C., where you can see it's all function. They've used the Doric order here, and the columns support the roof above; triglyphs and metopes. The whole idea--it's very beautiful--but the whole idea is to use these columns functionally. Very different in this gate in Miletus, in the second century A.D., where you can see that the columns are no longer used for structural purposes, but mainly to decorate and to enliven and to add motion to the structure in a way that is entirely out of keeping with these important Greek precedents. Here you see a detail: some tourists looking at this and other things, in the museum in Berlin, which gives you again a sense of the colossal scale of this structure. Here you can see also very well the composite capitals, as well as once again this interest in an almost overly decorative surface that is so characteristic of baroque architecture.



A number of you embarked on the Library of Celsus as your paper topic; so I'm sure you know everything there is to know about that. But I want to show it to you quickly, in the context of this lecture, because it's an important monument for all of you to be aware of. Lest you think that it has always looked the way it looks now, I show you a view that was taken, well by now twenty-five years ago or so, before the building was re-erected, which it has been since then. The building--this is what the Library of Celsus looked like twenty-five or so years ago. But fortunately, even though everything had fallen down, it was all there, as you can see. There were fragments strewn everywhere: hundreds and hundreds of fragments strewn around the site, and enough fragments so that basically the building was there. And what they eventually decided to do was use those fragments to re-erect it, which took a number of years. And the results have been truly spectacular.



I show you a view of Ephesus as it looks today, looking back toward the re-erected Library of Celsus, and then a better view here, where you can see what all of those pieces, the giant jigsaw puzzle that all of those pieces ultimately made. You can see here this incredible façade of the Library of Celsus in Ephesus. And you can see the scheme is the same as I've just showed you in the South Agora Market Gate at Miletus, in this case two tiers. The bottom tier is very similar to what we saw there, just two columns supporting a straight entablature above. And then in the second story, the addition of more decorative elements, with segmental, two segmental pediments flanking a rectangular one in the center, with separate individual columns at either end, like we saw in the Deir, with supporting projecting entablature.



Once again using the traditional vocabulary of architecture to create motion across the surface: projection, recession, projection, recession. But here, one very interesting feature is that if you look at the second story and the placement of those second story elements on top of those below, you can see that the ones at the top are not directly above the ones at the bottom, as we saw in the market gate, but they straddle the space below, which is very interesting. So instead of having the two columns, with a pediment above, right above this, you can see the columns with the pediment above are right above the space, so they're straddling the spaces. Which, if you look at it for awhile, you'll see adds an additional sense of motion to the surface of this structure. I think you can also see from this general view the interest in ornamentation. You can see that perhaps much better here, in these details.



Here's a detail of one of the niches. Some of the statues are still preserved, with the names of the figures in Greek down below. You can see the way in which they have essentially dematerialized the piers by decorating them so extensively. And this wonderful view up, where you can see the variegated marble that is used here. You can see the coffered ceiling. You can see the deep undercutting of the capitals, and the entablature, and how overly ornamental it actually is. And you can also see that in the uppermost part actually what they've created here, in this particular building, is something that looks very much, I think, like the architectural cages at the upper tier of the Fourth Style. And I remind you of a detail of one of those, from that fragment from Herculaneum that shows the same sort of coffered ceiling and elements, as well as the split triangular pediment, that we see also in built architecture in the second century A.D. in Ephesus.



The inside of the structure looked like this. This is from Ward-Perkins, showing you one main niche; a couple of other tiers with columns, much simpler inside, as you can see. The niches had shelves, and this is where the scrolls were kept, in the library. And here a niche, beneath which was a place for the last resting place of Celsus. I mentioned this to you when we talked about the paper topics, that Celsus wanted--he built this library as a benefaction to his city, to benefit the citizenry obviously of the city, as well as to have a building to put his name on. But he liked it so much, and it meant so much to him, that he decided to make it his own tomb. He was buried in his library, beneath that central niche; you see it in plan here, the location of that central niche--so as he could be in the midst of this extraordinary building that he built, in perpetuity.



Another showpiece done in this same ancient Roman baroque style is the one that you see here, in a restored view, from the Ward-Perkins textbook. It dates to the early second century A.D. It's a nymphaeum, or a fountain, located at Miletus in Turkey. We see it here. And it was also an extraordinary structure. It was much more ostentatious than it needed to be; it could get the job done with a lot less. Its purpose was to serve as a fountain. You've got the basin down below. You could do this with a single story certainly. But they built up three stories in this particular place. They've been as ostentatious as they possibly can. They've spent as much money as they possibly can. Because I think it was a form of one-upsmanship from one city to the next; you know, I have a better fountain than you've got, or I've got a more ornate fountain than you've got, was the whole idea; our city is doing particular well, because you can see what prosperity has wrought by this amazing fountain that we've been able to build for the benefaction of the people of the city of Miletus.



And you can see that the scheme is the same. It looks back certainly to the theatrical architecture, to the Second Style painting and Fourth Style painting that we've talked about here. The same general idea, with the first story a series of double columns with straight entablatures above; in the second story the addition of pediments, in this case triangular pediments combined with these interesting scroll motifs over some of the pairs of columns. And then in the uppermost story, triangular pediments once again, niches behind them and between them, with statuary, as you can also see, and then pilasters, decorative pilasters on the wall. This one also has wings, but you can see that the wings are even more elaborate than the wings we've seen in any of the other structures, and they, in fact, have pediments that face in toward the central part of the structure and toward the fountain proper. Ward-Perkins has added a few figures here that give you a sense once again of the enormity of the scale of this amazing fountain in the city of Miletus.



I mentioned that although I was going to concentrate today on baroque architecture in the eastern part of the Empire, I would show at least one example from the West, and I show that to you here. It takes us back to North Africa, to a place called Sabratha, which is located in between Timgad and Leptis Magna, that we looked at last time. Here's the site of Sabratha, and you can see that it too is located on the sea. An extraordinary theater was built there, and it's another example of the way in which these baroque façades could be used for a whole host of buildings; it could be used for theaters and for temples and for fountains and for libraries and so on and so forth. But theater architecture it was particularly appropriate for, because we've seen, from the very beginning of Rome, that these kinds of ornate columnar schemes were used quite frequently in theatrical architecture.



We are looking at the exterior of the Theater at Sabratha, which you can see from your Monument List dates to around A.D. 200. It has been re-erected. Much of it had fallen down, but once again there was quite a bit of--the stone was there, and so they re-erected the façade. You can see that it, like pretty much everything we've looked at today, was made out of local stone. And you can also see two tiers. And you can see that although it's made out of local stone, it is very similar to the sort of thing we saw much earlier in Rome itself. Think of the Theater of Marcellus. Think of the Colosseum: the scheme of arches with pilasters or columns in between them, engaged into the wall, as you can see so well here.



If you look at the view on the left, you will see however that the stage building of the Theater at Sabratha is particularly well preserved, and I want to show you two views, two spectacular views, this one in particular, which shows you what this structure looked like in antiquity and what it looks like now. And it is another one of these extraordinary baroque façades, again so typical for theatrical architecture. We see the three great niches, as we often do--think of the plan of the Augustan Theater at Leptis Magna, for example--three great niches, these columnar elements on either side, in three stories, no straddling here, they are just on top one another, as you can see well, but a series of four instead of the usual two. But then within the niches they've also created these elements, in this case with two columns that project; they're inside the niche, they're contained inside the niche, but they project in front of the niche, adding even more enlivenment to the structure.



Look down below also. We rarely have the bottom of the stage preserved, but we have it preserved here, and preserved extremely well. The bottom of the stage has been scalloped. It has projecting elements, with columns. And the whole thing is decorated with sculpture -- so many figures that those figures seem to almost dematerialize the stone. A crowd of figures, not just a few figures that you can read very well, but a whole host, crowds of figures, that show again this interest in over-decoration in these baroque buildings. Here's another view, not quite as clear, but I think a very good one, that also gives you a very good sense, not only of the stage decoration, but of the scale of the structure, because we've got a few tourists standing here, which show you that once again bigger is better is clearly the rallying call of the day. Here's a detail of some of that decoration: gods and goddesses and the like. We see the Three Graces here, for example. But you can see the way they are crowded in, to give one a sense of a kind of excess ornamentation, which was obviously very popular during this period.



The last set of buildings that I want to show you are in many respects the most interesting of all, and this is a group of buildings that are part of a complex in what is now Lebanon, the city of Baalbek. The so- called Sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, which was constructed over a 200-year period, from the mid-first century A.D. to the mid-third century A.D. The location of Baalbek is right over here, as I said, in modern Lebanon. And the remains are incredible, the remains are incredible. Every so often there's, you know, often fighting. This is the Bekaa Valley, so there's often fighting that breaks out in this particular part of the world, and one worries about these monuments, but so far they seem to have withstood some of the difficulties that that area has experienced in recent years. And you see some of them here in the--it's nicely silhouetted against the landscape.



But this gives you a better idea of what the complex looked like in antiquity, and I show it to you here. Again, it was built over a series of years. But let's just talk about it as a whole, and then I'll break down the chronology for you. It had a grand entranceway, with a single staircase; façade orientation, with an arcuated lintel here, contained within a pediment. Then, interestingly enough, you went from that entranceway into a hexagonal court, open to the sky. From the hexagonal court, into this great open rectangular space, surrounded by columns. A very large altar right here, to Jupiter, because the main temple in this complex was the Temple to Jupiter, and you see it also in the restored view at the back. So the Altar to Jupiter, the Temple to Jupiter.



If you look at the Temple to Jupiter, you will see it's very similar to the temples that we've been looking at over the course of the semester: very tall podium, single staircase, façade orientation, deep porch, freestanding columns in that porch, and the like. And you can also see that there is another temple right outside the walls of this one. This is the so-called Temple of Bacchus, which is one of the three that was part of this complex, that also seems to have had its own little courtyard. And then down here, out of the picture, a round Temple to Venus that we're also going to look at. This is a restored view of the same, showing you the entranceway, the hexagonal court, the large Temple to Jupiter, the smaller Temple to Bacchus, and the forecourt that it too would have had, as well as this much less elaborate entranceway into the Temple of Bacchus.



This is perhaps the most spectacular view I've shown you all semester of anything; this is really an awesome photograph, I think, taken from the air. Needless to say, I can't lay credit to this, since it was taken from the air. But you see it here, and it is an amazing, amazing photograph, that really gives you a better sense than anything else might of the current remains, where you can see the entrance gate. You can see that the staircase is a shadow of what it once was; it was once much wider. You can see the hexagonal court from above. You can see the open rectangular space. You can see the bare remains of the altar. And you can see the Temple of Jupiter, which has its podium, not much of its staircase, and only six columns still surviving. But the Temple of Bacchus outside the walls, much better preserved, and gives us a very good sense of these temples as a whole.



A plan over here, showing the same: the entrance court, the hexagonal entranceway, the open rectangular space, at A the Temple of Jupiter, B, the Temple of Bacchus. And here an engraving showing the entranceway, with this arcuated lintel, just as we saw popular in the Hadrianic period, and the pediment. Now the chronology is that the Temple of Jupiter was built first, in the mid-first century A.D. That's way back, that's like the time of Claudius and Nero: mid-first century A.D. Then in the second century there were other additions, and it was in the third century that the propylon and the hexagonal court--the second century actually was the open rectangular space was added in the second century, and then in the third century they added the hexagonal court and the entranceway. So moving from the back toward the front.



These are the six columns that are preserved of the Temple of Jupiter, at Baalbek. They are incredibly--the whole structure is incredibly large. This is the biggest building we've seen thus far. We know there were ten columns in the front, nineteen on the sides. They're again made out of honey colored local limestone; I think, as you can see so well in both of these views. In this case the podium was 44 feet tall, 44 feet tall. The podium at the Temple of the Divi, at the Forum at Leptis Magna, was 19 feet tall, and we thought that was big. This is 44 feet tall, and the columns were 65 feet tall. And remember those columns that Sulla stole from Greece, 55 feet tall, for the Temple of Jupiter OMC, these are ten--are much taller than that. So it gives you some sense of the incredible scale of this structure.



Here's a plan of the Temple of Bacchus, the second temple that I want to show you, that dates to the mid-second century A.D. We see it here. You can get a very good sense of its structure, and you can see the way in which it combines typical Roman with Greek features: single staircase, façade orientation, deep porch, freestanding columns in the porch, single cella. But it has a peripteral colonnade, as one finds in Greek architecture. But it doesn't have a peripteral staircase, as I'll show in a moment; it has rather a high podium.



Here you see it. It is very well preserved. You can see the columns encircling the whole building. But you can see there is no staircase circling the whole building, but a very high podium. A few people here for scale. This is a big building, and this building is much smaller than the Temple of Jupiter. These buildings are so big that someone, I guess tongue in cheek, wrote an article at one point suggesting that this could not have been built by human beings, Romans or otherwise, and was definitely built by Martians who came down in a spaceship and built it and then left, but left us with something quite extraordinary, if that was indeed the case.



Once again overly decorative, overly decorative. If you look at--we could look at a whole host of details, but if you look at them you will see extraordinary things. We're looking up in one of the vaults, and you can see how it's been nearly pretty much eaten away by this excessive decoration. The same here with this wonderful Medusa head in the center. No inch is left undecorated by these architects. This is one of the best-preserved interiors of a Roman temple that we have, the Temple of Bacchus. We are looking through the doorway. If you look at the jambs of the doorway, you will see how decorated they are, and again the way in which they have been dematerialized through that ornamentation.



Looking into the interior--and I can show you a better view here--you get a very good sense of what this structure looked like in antiquity: the truly colossal Corinthian columns, in this particular case, the niches on two stories, with arcuated pediments and with triangular pediments up above--the extraordinary scale of this highly decorative interior. And I can show you a restored view of what we think this looked like in antiquity. At first glance it doesn't look so different from the sort of Basilica Ulpia idea in Rome, with the flat ceiling, the coffered ceiling, the giant columns and so on. But, of course, it has no aisles, since it's--I mean, it does, I'm sorry, it does [not] have aisles here. But you can see the arcuations; you can see the pediments, with the sculpture inside. You can see the Corinthian capitals. And you can see no clerestory here.



But you can see a very interesting feature at the end. The focus of everyone who came into this temple was the so-called adyton, a-d-y-t-o-n, adyton, which is a kind of shrine in which the cult statue of Bacchus would have been presented. You can see it well here. And you can see the use of the broken triangular pediment, but one that is very similar to that market gate in that the central element, with its triangle, still preserved, but preserved in a plane that is further back -- so that kind of zigzag motion that we see here. The great archivolt underneath, the paired columns on either side, the shrine in the center. A very elaborate motif, done in the style that we have described as b

Professor Kleiner discusses the rebirth of Athens under the Romans especially during the reigns of the two philhellenic emperors, Augustus and Hadrian. While some have dismissed the architecture of Roman Athens as derivative of its Classical and Hellenistic Greek past, Professor Kleiner demonstrates that the high quality of Greek marble and Greek stone carvers made these buildings consequential. In addition some structures provide evidence for the frequent and creative exchange of architectural ideas and motifs between Greece and Rome in Roman times. After a brief introduction to the history of the city of Athens, Professor Kleiner presents the monuments erected by Augustus and Agrippa on the Acropolis and in the Greek and Roman Agoras, for example the Odeion of Agrippa. Following with Hadrian's building program, she features an aqueduct and reservoir façade, the Library of Hadrian, and the vast Temple of Olympian Zeus, a project begun over six hundred years earlier. Professor Kleiner concludes the lecture with the Monument of Philopappos, a Trajanic tomb on the Mouseion Hill built for a man deprived of the kingship of Commagene by the Romans, but who made the best of the situation by becoming a suffect consul in Rome and then moving to Athens, where he died and was memorialized by his sister Balbilla.



Reading assignment:

Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 263-272

Transcript



April 9, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everybody. We have talked in the course of this semester many times about the Hellenization of Roman architecture, about the impact that Greek architecture had on Roman architecture. And we've talked in particular about the two philhellenic emperors, Augustus and also Hadrian, and the kinds of monuments they commissioned during their reign that were so clearly based on those in ancient Athens -- Athens, especially of the Classical period, the cradle of civilization, and where scholars often speak of as the birth of democracy. I want to turn full circle, go full circle here and return to the whole question of Athens, by looking at Athens itself, because Athens also became a Roman colony. And you won't be surprised to hear that it was built up under primarily two Roman emperors, namely Augustus and Hadrian, just as one would expect, the two major philhellenic Roman emperors.



I show you a spectacular view of Athens as it looks today. And you can see here that the city of Athens--and some of its antiquities extremely well preserved--is a city that is located -- it's actually a city that's located in plains [on a plain], surrounded by mountains. And it also has three major hills, as I think you can see from this extraordinary image. One of those hills, of course, is the famous Acropolis. And I think, by the way, if one were to make--I don't how many of you have been to Athens, but if one were to make a list of the ten places that one really must see, at some point during their lives, and experience, Athens is certainly one of them, mainly for the Acropolis, which you see in the center of this image here. That's one of the major hills. The other two are Mount Lycabettus, which you see in the uppermost part; that's actually the highest hill of Athens. And then there's another one called the Mouseion Hill, which we're going to actually talk about today, because there's an important monument there -- the Mouseion Hill or the Hill of the Muses. It's located off this image, right where I'm standing here.



And those three hills, as you can see, rise up in the city of Athens. And it's not surprising--and the rest of it surrounded essentially by a city that was constructed primarily after World War II, mainly residential houses of six, five, six stories, residences that are mostly white in color, as I think you can see here. But the Acropolis rising up in the center in an amazing way. The city of Athens we know was founded in the Neolithic period; it was founded in the Neolithic period. So it goes way back, in the same way that Rome does. And it's not surprising to see them founding the city of Athens on one of those hills. And which hill do they pick? They pick the hill that's the flattest, which makes it easiest to build on, and that is the rock of the Acropolis itself. So they put their religious structures on the Acropolis, and then over time the city begins to grow up around the rock of the Acropolis.



Now this is very interesting because if you think back to Rome and its beginnings, you'll recall that Rome too was founded on a hill, because hills can be most readily fortified. So Rome was founded, you'll recall, essentially on two hills, on the Palatine Hill, by Romulus, where he established residences, but also on the Capitoline Hill where they built the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus -- so that being the religious center of the city. We see the same sort of thing happening here: the city growing up on the Acropolis, and then we'll see that the meeting and marketplace is down below, in a valley, below the Acropolis, in the same way that the Roman Forum, or what became the Roman Forum, was in the valley beneath the Palatine Hill, and also the Capitoline Hill in Rome. So very similar beginnings for Greece, as also for Rome.



As you all know, Athens thrived particularly, Greece in general thrived particularly in the fifth century B.C., under Pericles, and continued to thrive into the Hellenistic period. But it was in 86 B.C. that Sulla, the Roman general Sulla, sacked Athens, sacked Athens, made Athens a Roman colony, and in fact destroyed the walls of the city of Athens. So that obviously a very major point in the history of Athens. When scholars talk about architecture that was put up by the Romans in Athens, during Roman times, they talk about it as being primarily uninspired and rather derivative. And you'll find this in your textbook. Ward-Perkins talks about how derivative Roman architecture in Greece is, of its earlier counterparts, that is, from Classical and Hellenistic Athens. And I think he has a point, and it's something that we should all think about as a group, whether we think that the buildings that we look at today are, for the most part, derivative from the Classical and Hellenistic past.



But I think to say only that is to miss the point in part, because what we are also going to see, as we look at these buildings today, is that the extraordinary marbles that come from this part of the world, Greek marbles--and we'll talk about a number of them today--the quality of those is so high that it's hard to imagine any building made out of these, not spectacular, just for the materials alone. And also because the artists and the architects, and the artisans who are responsible for carving this marble, had been carving it for centuries, and consequently they were particularly skilled at carving marble. And so what they produced has great beauty, as I think you'll see today. So those two, again a very important point, I believe, about the quality of these works of art. And we're also going to see works of architecture. We're also going to see that at least two of them, in my opinion, are really distinctive structures; different than anything we've seen before. And I think that you'll find they're quite innovative in their own way. And we will look at, as I said, both of those today.



The city of Athens began to be excavated by archaeologists in the 1930s [correction: 1830s], and those excavations, which were scientific, very careful scientific excavations, those excavations, combined with information that we have from a writer of the Greco-Roman past, a man by the name of Pausanias, P-a-u-s-a-n-i-a-s, Pausanias, who was a Greek of the second century A.D., who traveled around Greece and described everything that he saw, and he created, in essence, a guidebook to the great Greek and Roman antiquities. The combination of his descriptions, from the second century, firsthand descriptions of the monuments that stood in the second century, along with the scientific excavations of the 1930s [1830s] and since, allow us to get an excellent sense of what, not only what, as we look at the remains today, not only of what was there, is there now, and was there once upon a time, but what these buildings actually were; their identities and what their function was in Athens, either in Greek or in Roman times. And we will use the information provided by both of those today to allow us to reconstruct the city, the Roman city in particular.



Now the building-- as you can see from the view of the Acropolis, there are a number of Greek structures on the top of the Acropolis, and I'll show them to you later. These include the great Greek entryway of the fifth century B.C., the so-called Propylaia; the famous Parthenon of course; the small Temple of Athena Nike; and also the Erechtheion, which is the only building we've really discussed in any detail in the course of this semester. A fifth century B.C. building--you see it here in an extraordinary view, now on the screen--the Erechtheion, which we believe was built sometime between about 421 and 406 B.C., And the reason that it's important is not only because it's an incredible example of fifth-century Greek architecture, but also because of the buildings up on the Acropolis it is the one that seems to have captured the imagination of Augustus, and also Hadrian, when both of them visited the city of Athens, but also of the Romans as a whole. And you'll remember the reason for that is essentially the Porch of the Maidens, which you can see so well in this view -- the Porch of the Maidens that exerted a very strong impact on Augustus and Hadrian.



Before I talk a little bit more about the Porch of the Maidens though, just something about the rest of the construction. You can see as you look at the columns that they are of the Ionic order, a particularly attractive and elegant version of the Ionic order, with the Ionic capitals, with their very attractive volutes. You can also see the materials that are used here. What you can't see is what's used for the foundations. That material is called poros, p-o-r-o-s, poros, used for the foundations of the Erechtheion and also many other of the buildings that we'll look at today. And then most importantly, most of the building, the walls and the columns, are made out of pentelic marble, p-e-n-t-e-l-i-c, pentelic marble, which is from Mount Pentelikon in Greece and is the marble that is used most often for buildings in Athens, both in Greek times and also in Roman times, as we shall see today. And it's characterized by being gleaming white, really blindingly white, as one looks at it in the very bright Greek sun against the blue sky.



With regard to the caryatid porch, the Porch of the Maidens, the very famous Porch of the Maidens, you'll recall that both Augustus and Hadrian visited Athens. They both saw this monument. The Erechtheion had fallen into disrepair by the age of Augustus, and Augustus was so admiring of this porch that he made the decision to have his own architects and artisans come to Athens to repair the porch. And they not only repaired the maidens, themselves, but also replaced one. One was in such bad shape--I think it was the one in the back right--it was in such bad shape that they restored that one entirely. When they were there, looking at those maidens, restoring them, they were so taken by them that they made plaster casts of those, and they brought them back to Rome. And you'll recall that they were used in Rome as the models for maidens that were put up.



Here's a view, of course, of those on the Acropolis, from the front. They made reduced scale copies for the Forum of Augustus in Rome, the second story of the Forum of Augustus, as you'll recall. And then down here you'll be reminded of the caryatids, also based on those of the Erechtheion: in this case to scale, same scale as those in Athens, used to line the Canopus of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. So both emperors, again Augustus and Hadrian, very admiring of these works of art, and wanted copies of them for, in Augustus' case a public structure in Rome, in Hadrian's case a private villa at Tivoli.



And we even believe that Herodes Atticus, in the tomb that he made for Annia Regilla in Rome, that brick tomb, the second century A.D. on the Via Appia, there were two female figures that were found near, excavated near that tomb, and it has been suggested that they too may belong to that tomb. And while they are variations rather than copies, you can see that they too owe their origins to the caryatids. So this building, the Erechtheion, cast a spell on Augustus and Hadrian, and was widely imitated in Rome. What we're going to see today is that this building continued to have a very strong impact also on the buildings that these same emperors, Augustus and Hadrian, put up in Athens itself.



Before we look at Athens, I want to take a very short trip to another city, the city of Eleusis, E-l-e-u-s-i-s, the city of Eleusis in Greece, because I want to make one more point about the caryatids and about the important exchange that we believe was going on between Rome and Athens, already in the late Caesarian period and into the age of Augustus. Augustus is sending his architects, but we think they are going back and forth, and that there is an important exchange of building techniques, as well as architectural ideas, that is happening between Rome and Greece in the age of Augustus.



Eleusis--and you see what it looks like today--is a hilly town that is located not too far from Athens. And it was particularly popular in the Greek period because--or particularly important in the Geek period--because it had a sanctuary of the goddess Demeter, the goddess Demeter. And the goddess Demeter, surrounding her was this very important mystery religion, the so-called Eleusinian Mysteries, after Eleusis, Eleusinian Mysteries, that took place here. And people came from far and wide to partake of those Eleusinian Mysteries, and so the city was built up in Classical and Hellenistic Greek times. It also remained important in the time of Caesar and into the time of Augustus, and actually into the first and second centuries A.D., and over time decisions were made to add to the Sanctuary of Demeter, by the Roman emperors and generals, and also--and using, of course the service of their own architects from Rome, but working in concert with those in Greece.



And one of the decisions that they made was to provide the Sanctuary of Demeter with two additional gateways: an inner gateway and an outer gateway. The outer gateway, which is the larger of the two, was put up in the second century A.D. by the Antonine emperors. But the earlier one, the inner or smaller gateway, was put up already in 50 B.C., so the late Republican period, put up in 50 B.C. And there are some remains of it, enough that we can come up with quite good reconstructions of what it looked like. And I want to show you those fairly quickly in passing, just because they underscore this important connection that is going on between Rome and Greece, in this period.



We see one side--this gateway actually has two sides--and we see one side of it here, with columns and a quite traditional pediment above. The triglyphs and metopes that you see here have representations of sheaves of wheat and what are called cistae, c-i-s-t-a-e, which are baskets, both of which have to do with the Eleusinian Mysteries and the worship of Demeter. But what's most interesting for us--and it may be a little hard for you to make this out in this reconstruction--but what's interesting for us are the capitals, because the capitals are examples of the so-called zoomorphic capitals that we've seen before -- capitals in which the upper parts of the bodies of animals take the place of the spirals and grow out of the acanthus leaves. And I can show you one preserved example from Eleusis over here, on the left-hand side of the screen, made out of pentelic marble. We see it here, and you can see the acanthus leaves, and you can see a part of the upper part of a bull that is growing out of--a bull protome that is growing out of the acanthus leaves. That should remind you of something we saw much earlier in the semester. Does anyone remember where this capital comes from? I know you all know.



Student: Forum Transitorium.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Not the Forum Transitorium, no. The Forum of Augustus; the Forum of Augustus had these capitals, some of these capitals, that included pegasi growing out of the acanthus leaves. So this suggests to us, this whole idea of having animals growing out of acanthus leaves, roughly--not exactly at the same time but roughly in the same period, Caesarian period into the Augustan period--suggests that ideas were floating back and forth between Athens and Rome, in the time of Caesar and in the time of Augustus.



Now if we look at the other side of the gate, we see something that would seem to confirm that even more, and that is on the other side caryatids replace the columns with their zoomorphic capitals. These are not; as you can clearly see--you see how they have their hands up--they are not based exactly on those of the Erechtheion porch. They are variations of that, but they are caryatids nonetheless, holding the capitals on top of their heads. So we are seeing here, even as Greece becomes Roman in the Caesarian period, and into the age of Augustus, even as Greece becomes Roman--well it already does, as I mentioned to you before when Sulla sacks it in 86 B.C.; so in 50 it's already a Roman colony--and so we can see these ideas that are going back and forth, between Rome and Greece, during this important period. And we see the power of the caryatids, even in Greece itself, as they are imitated there as well.



From this point on, for the rest of the lecture, I do want to concentrate on Athens. And I want to begin again with the Acropolis. This is actually a very interesting Google Earth image of the Acropolis where you can see--as it looks today--but where you can see superimposed on the current--on the present remains, 3D versions of the ancient buildings. And we can see the ones that I've already mentioned. As you enter, over here, you see the Greek Propylaia, of the fifth century B.C., the entrance gate. You see the Parthenon, which is the largest building, a Doric building, on top of the Acropolis. And then to its left you see the Erechtheion. And in the back the remains of a museum; I mean, not the remains, a museum, that is in part underground, which is why it looks so flat, that houses the original caryatids and a lot of other sculpture. The ones that you see on the porch today are copies of those originals that are in the museum, as well as other sculpture that was found on the Acropolis.



And you can also see here the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, which I have mentioned to you, where the Yanni concert took place, on the slope of the Acropolis here. And then you can also see a theater--you see the theater in this corner right here--which is interesting because we believe it dates to the Neronian period, which is interesting because you'll remember that Nero competed in the Olympic Games and that he came to Greece to compete in the Olympic Games. So it's not surprising, even though we don't think of him as one of the great philhellenic emperors, it's not surprising to see that there was some construction in Greece during the Neronian period.



I want to turn to what's interesting actually about what the Romans do in the age of Augustus, when Augustus goes up here himself, sends his architects to repair the porch, is a decision is made to build a little shrine to Augustus and to Rome: a Temple to Augustus and Roma. And they decide to put it in the back left corner of the Parthenon. And you can barely see it there, but it's a small round building at the uppermost part of the Parthenon, between that and the museum--and I'm going to show it to you in detail in a moment--and they build that from scratch. But they also take a pillar that is located right at the beginning, or right in front of the Propylaia that was put up in Hellenistic times, and they transform that into a Roman monument. And it's those two, to those two that I want to turn first.



This is Google Earth again. You can see the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, in these 3D versions. Can you see just that little, that round circle, right next to the edge of the Parthenon? That is the Temple of Augustus and Roma. And the fact that it is so small I think is strikingly interesting, because it shows that although Augustus was willing to have a building put up to himself, and to Roma, on the Greek Acropolis, and so he wanted to make his presence known, he did it in a very modest and very respectful way, it seems to me. He could've built much larger than he did, and he opted not to do that, which tells us something about Augustus and perhaps his reverence for things Greek.



We are looking at two views of what survives of this small round shrine -- actually quite a bit. I mean, it's not standing any longer, but you can see parts of columns and parts of the curved entablature, curved architrave, and some of the other building elements very clearly here, including one of the capitals. Again it was a round structure. It had nine Ionic columns. It was made entirely out of stone, and it had a sloping stone roof. And this restored view shows us exactly what it looked like, as well as how small it was in relationship to the Parthenon, which absolutely dwarfs it in scale, as you can see in this restored view. Here, the small Temple of Augustus and Roma. It was built sometime after 27 B.C., and you see it here: Ionic capitals and then a sloping stone roof.



And if I show you the remains again, where you can see one of those Ionic capitals still preserved here, and we compare that Ionic capital to the Ionic capitals of the Erechtheion in Athens, on the Acropolis, we see the close resemblance between the two. And the reason for this almost certainly that because Augustus' architects were working on the Erechtheion, were restoring it, were repairing it, they were captivated, not just by the caryatids, but also by the rest of the structure: by the quality of the marble, by the attractiveness of the Ionic columns, with their spiral volutes at the top. And they not surprisingly used those as the model for the capitals that they carved for the small shrine of the Temple of Augustus and Roma.



But I think it also shows their reverence for things Greek, and their desire to establish a dialogue between the fifth century B.C. structure and the Roman structure built right after Augustus became emperor. I wanted to mention one other material that is used in the Erechtheion. We talked about the poros for the foundations, the pentelic marble for the walls and the columns. But if you look here you'll see the slight blue cast to the marble that is used for the frieze. That is so-called Eleusinian marble, from that part, from the Eleusis area of Greece: Eleusinian marble with this slightly blue cast, and that is used in the Erechtheion as well.



I mentioned that the Temple of Roma and Augustus was put up, was built from scratch; there was nothing there before and it was built anew during the Augustan period. But I also noted that there was another monument that we could call a Roman intervention to the Acropolis that was actually already there, but was transformed in Roman times. And I show it to you now. Here we are making our way, with all of these other tourists, up to the top of the rock of the Acropolis. We've climbed up the stairway, which is not at all--it's not particularly steep. We've made our way up. We're about to enter into the Greek Propylaia of the fifth century B.C. Note the Doric columns, the triglyphs and metopes, of fifth-century Greek architecture.



And we see next to it this pillar. It's a very interesting pillar. It's very prominent. It's the first thing you see when you enter the Acropolis. So whoever built this initially wanted to be noticed; that's for sure. And we know it was a Hellenistic king; a Hellenistic king by the name of Eumenes, E-u-m-e-n-e-s, Eumenes II, who was king of the Hellenistic Greek kingdom of Pergamon, P-e-r-g-a-m-u-m, or -o-n --whether you use the Greek [Latin] or the Latin [Greek] spelling--Pergamon, and he commissioned this monument in 178 B.C. to honor himself. And you can see that the purpose of the monument was to create this pillar upon which a statue of him would've been placed. And I show you the pillar once again here. And you can see its shape. It has a stepped base and it tapers at the top. And you have to imagine a statue of Eumenes II of Pergamon on the top of this monument, in the second century B.C.



And it was altered in the first century B.C. when Marcus Agrippa, the close childhood friend, confidant, right-hand man of Augustus, his son-in-law, in fact, decided to replace the statue of Eumenes with one of himself. So he transforms this Greek Hellenistic monument into an Augustan monument: an Augustan monument that honors Agrippa. And Agrippa, it's not surprising to see Agrippa honored in the East. He was involved in eastern military campaigns. And we'll also see that he not only--and I mentioned this earlier in the semester--he not only instituted a building program in Rome; he was responsible for the so-called Baths of Agrippa that bear his name--not much is preserved so I didn't show those to you--and also a Pantheon, the first Pantheon that I did mention, the Pantheon that Agrippa built, that's referred to in the inscription that Hadrian placed on the Pantheon: "Marcus Agrippa made this building," as you'll recall, the Pantheon that we know had a caryatid porch.



So Agrippa in Rome is also carrying the caryatid imagery into Rome in his building program. But he also instituted a building program in Athens, as we shall see. So it was not surprising to see him honored along with Augustus on the Acropolis, and actually in a way that was much more noticeable. To be hit by that statue of Agrippa as you climbed the Acropolis and went into the Propylaia must have been very striking indeed. This particular structure is made of a different kind of Greek marble called hymettian marble, h-y-m-e-t-t-i-a-n, from Mount Hymettus: hymettian marble. You can see a little bit of pentelic here, but much of it is hymettian marble. So the Romans using--the Greeks and the Romans using a variety of marbles, but a variety of marbles that come from Greece itself; we're not talking about imported marbles from elsewhere in the ancient world.



I mentioned already that below the Acropolis was the Greek Agora, or the meeting or marketplace. I show to you here a view from Google Earth of the Greek Agora, as it looks from the air today. You can see it is essentially an open rectangular space. It has colonnades on some of its sides; one set was re-erected. This is a structure, a covered colonnade, that comes from the Hellenistic period that was re-erected by American archaeologists who were responsible for excavating the agora. They re-erected it, in part, to use as a place to display works of art and for offices and so on. But there was more than one in Greek times. And this stoa is the counterpart to a Roman portico; a covered colonnade, but they called them stoas. So we look at the stoa here, from the Hellenistic period. There's a Classical Greek temple, the Hephaisteion over here. And in the center there is a building called the--a music hall, that was built by Marcus Agrippa, the so-called Odeion of Agrippa, that we know quite a bit about and that we're going to look at today.



But again what's particularly interesting, I think, is the fact that we see the Greeks building their religious structures on the Acropolis, and then down below the meeting and marketplace. And you can see the impact that this sort of thinking must have had on the Romans when they made their own decisions about building Roman forums. But there are distinct differences--and we've talked about them already this semester--between a Greek agora and a Roman forum. What Greek agoras do not have is that central, that focus of having a single temple on one end, dominating the space in front of it. And they're more square, whereas Roman forums, as we've discussed, are more rectangular in shape, with again the temple at the short end.



Any of you who've been to Athens know that the Agora is surrounded by an area of Athens called Plaka, P-l-a-k-a, Plaka, a great place--a fun place to go. It has been very gentrified in recent years and now has these wonderful pastel colored restaurants and shops, with the ubiquitous white umbrellas, just as you see them in other Mediterranean countries like Italy. I lived in Athens for two years in the 1970s, and Plaka did not look like that then. But it was an incredible place to go then, as it still is now, if you want to really get into the Greek spirit and dance on tables and break plates. You could definitely do that in the '70s; a little less ubiquitous today, but there are still places that one can find to sort of play Zorba the Greek in Plaka.



Here is another view, a panoramic view, showing once again the Agora, the Greek Agora of Athens, as it would have looked as it grew up from the Classical through the Hellenistic period. But the building in question for us is the one that is smack in the middle of the Greek temple and of the Hellenistic stoa over here, and that is this music hall, or Odeion of Agrippa, which was put up we believe in around 15 B.C. And it's to that structure that I want to turn now. And this building, this odeion, which Agrippa commissioned himself, is very important to us in large part because it demonstrates that ideas were not only flowing from Greece to Rome, as we've already both discussed today and in the past, but from Italy to Greece. And this is a prime example of that.



Because if we look at this axonometric view of the Odeion of Agrippa, as designed for Agrippa, in 15 B.C.--and this in Ward-Perkins--if we look at that, we will see that the plan of the Odeion of Agrippa is based very closely on an odeion that we've already seen this semester, the Odeion of Pompeii. You see it here from the air, next to the Theater of Pompeii. You'll remember that the Odeion of Pompeii dated to 80 to 70 B.C. It was quite early, built just after the Romans made Pompeii into a colony. And it is that exact plan that is used here. So clearly again an important exchange going on, of ideas, of architects, between Greece and Rome, in the Augustan period, and in this case using an Italian plan, a plan from Italy, as the basis for a structure in Greece.



We see that it follows in the main--it follows all the features of the Pompeian structure: the semi-circular orchestra; the cavea, divided into cunei; a stage front here; pilasters, tall pilasters, on some of the walls; an open stoa on this wall over here. You can see two sets of columns, an inner row and an outer row. We know that the spectators entered the structure through this porch when they were coming to a musical recital. And over here there was another entranceway that was used by the musicians and also by visiting dignitaries. This was a smaller entranceway that was made up of a small temple front, with a pediment and Doric columns here. And we can also see tall pilasters on the outside of this structure. And, of course, this building, as all odeia, was roofed in antiquity, for the acoustics, and the one in Pompeii was, of course, also roofed.



Another view, a cross-section of the Odeion of Agrippa--you can see it here--which shows you the same sort of thing: the tall pilasters on the outside of the structure; the entranceway through this stoa for the spectators; the other entranceway over here, the smaller entranceway into that part of the structure, all very well shown. And maybe, and this may even be better, this model of the Odeion of Agrippa, where we can see what it looked like from the outside. We're looking at the northern end, which is the end where we have that small entranceway, with the--very simple temple-like in appearance. We can see a series of columns engaged into the wall down here; then the very tall pilasters, with windows between them. A quite conventional building, but one again clearly basing--this is the most important point that one can make about it--clearly based on an earlier model in Italy.



The capitals are interesting. You remember the stoas, the two open colonnades that I showed you as one wall--one side of the building, the inner one and the outer one, the--I'm going to forget which way--the outer one, I believe--no, the outer one I think is the--there are two different orders. One of them is Corinthian, as you can see here. I think that's the outer, but I may have that backwards. One of them had Corinthian capitals, and you see those here, with the narrow--the elegant volutes growing out of--the elegant spirals growing out of the acanthus leaves. And the other is of this type; a type that we have seen before, but not frequently, where we have lotus leaves growing out of the acanthus leaves.



And that, of course, is a kind of capital that we mentioned is inspired by capitals in Egypt, and was used also much later, in much later times, at the Forum at Leptis Magna, the Severan Forum at Leptis Magna. So a type of capital that is characteristic of Egypt, that turns up here. So it's another example of the way in which these architects and patrons are looking at models from all over the world--not only the odeion in Pompeii, but also structures from Egypt--and combining those motifs in a very--in a new way, in a very fertile mix, as you can see.



With regard to the later history of the Odeion of Agrippa, over the years students sometimes have asked me--I haven't heard--gotten this question this semester yet--but students have asked me, or have said to me: "Professor Kleiner, you show us, in the course of this semester, all of these great works of Roman engineering and architecture--the Pantheon and the Colosseum and aqueducts and so on and so forth--and everything--you do tell us about fires, that fires sometimes destroy these works of art, or works of architecture are destroyed because other natural events, like events of nature like earthquakes and so on. But you never tell us about the buildings that failed. Were the Roman architects always successful, or did they build buildings sometimes that fell down?" And so I always use this as an example. Because yes, they sometimes did make mistakes and some of their buildings did collapse. And this is one of them, the Odeion of Agrippa.



After it was viewed and described by Pausanias, the roof collapsed; collapsed entirely. Now it had lasted quite awhile, from the time of Augustus to the time--to the second century of Pausanias, but nonetheless the roof collapsed entirely, and the roof had to be completely rebuilt. And at the same time the architects decided to modernize the northern end of the structure and to add a new portico to the building. They also changed its use, by the way, from an odeion to a general lecture hall, during that period.



So in 150 A.D. we see that the northern end is completely redone. And it's interesting to see what they decided to do. They replaced that very small, conservative, Doric entryway with something with a lot more pizzazz, as you can see: a series of male figures--these are male tritons, t-r-i-t-o-n-s, tritons, which are essentially male mermaids, male tritons; tritons that are essentially male mermaids--on these tall decorated bases, as you can see here. And their gestures are mirror images of one another, or reversed images of one another, which creates a certain liveliness to the façade, to the northern façade, that this building did not have before. And that happened again in the mid-second century A.D.



And interestingly enough, much of what survives today are those tritons. You can still see them on their bases here, on their tall bases, or part of them here. And you can see the relationship of the Odeion of Agrippa, in this very good image, to the Acropolis in Athens. You can see the Erechtheion peeping up over there. You can see the great pedestal that Agrippa would've had his statue on, right here. So I'm very tempted to say--in fact I will say--that I don't think that was lost on the designers, that when they chose this spot for the Odeion of Agrippa they had very much in mind that it would be in one of these interesting architectural dialogues with the pedestal that had the statue of Agrippa at the entranceway to the Acropolis.



I think that was certainly very carefully orchestrated, in the same way you'll remember Julius Caesar and his architects orchestrated a relationship between the Temple of Venus Genetrix and the Temple of Jupiter OMC on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Despite the fact that you see, when you visit the Agora, the Greek Agora today, and look at these statues, despite the fact that they are all that stands, there's a lot, you will see that there're lots of other remains on the ground, and with those remains and the excavations that were done by the American archaeologists in the 1930s, the reconstruction that we looked at, from Ward-Perkins, we believe is a very accurate reconstruction of what the Odeion of Agrippa looked like.



I want to look at the Roman Agora, because the Romans themselves added an agora to Athens. If they were going to have a Greek Agora, they were going to have a Roman Agora. We don't know if there was a practical need for it, but I guess Caesar and Augustus wanted to emblazon their name on an agora or a marketplace in Athens. It was put up again in Caesarian and--started in the Caesarian period, and completed by Augustus. It is right near the Greek Agora. We see a view of it here: a large open, rectangular [correction: square] space, with a colonnade around it; in this case stoas--we would call these stoas in the Greek context--with tabernae or shops at the uppermost part. An entranceway, an elaborate entranceway on the western end, and another entranceway on the eastern end. But as you can see it differs. It is done in the mode of a Greek marketplace, because it is more--well it's sort of in between a square and a rectangle here, but it's not as long as a Roman forum, and it does not have a temple on one short end. So it follows in the mode of Greek agoras, rather than Roman fora.



You can see, if you look at Google Earth, one can see the forum [correction: agora] today, the Roman--here's the Stoa of Attalos, in the Greek Agora. So you can see its proximity to this new Roman Agora that was added. We're looking at that open space here, with the colonnades. We're looking at the western entranceway, as well as the eastern entranceway up above, in this very helpful view. And this is a view I took from the Acropolis, looking down on the Roman Agora and showing the back of the western entranceway, which I'll show you from the front in a moment. And there you can see Plaka actually pre-gentrification. It gives you a sense of what--I mean, it was really crumbling, as you can see, some of the buildings that are surrounding it. But nonetheless it was fun. So here we go.



This is a view of the gate; it's called the Gate of Athena Archegetis, as you can see on your Monument List, that is the western gate into the Roman Agora. We see it here in two views. And you can see, when you look at this building, you can see what Ward-Perkins and others mean when they say that architecture in Athens, under the Romans, is derivative and uninspired. It's this kind of thing that I believe he's talking about. Because you can see how beholden it is to traditional Classical Greek architecture, in the way in which we see these great Doric columns, looking very similar to those of the Propylaia or the Parthenon. You see them here. You see the triglyphs and metopes. You see a triangular pediment. We never see, we never see the Greeks--at least the Greeks in the Roman period--breaking their pediments. They always have complete pediments, and in that sense, of course, a very conservative approach to architecture during this period.



We know that this, the gate, was begun by Caesar, completed by Augustus. And there's an inscription that tells us that. And we believe--although this is somewhat speculative--that there may have been a statue or portrait of the grandson of Augustus, son of Agrippa, Lucius Caesar, in the pediment -- Lucius Caesar having died in the year 2. Here's a view where we see the Roman Agora as it looks today: the open space; the columns around it. And you can also see this very curious building, that looks very well preserved, rising up on the eastern end, a building in the shape of an octagon. And here's another view of the eastern end, showing that octagonal building more clearly.



This is the so-called Horologion of Andronikos, or as it is nicknamed, the Tower of the Winds; the Tower of the Winds, which is easier to remember, the Tower of the Winds. It's very controversial in date. I date it here to the second half of the first century B.C., which is when I do believe that it dates. But there are others who think otherwise, and I'll tell you about that in a moment. Here's a view that I took from the Acropolis, showing the Tower of the Winds as it looks from up there, as well as a closer view of this amazing structure. Again, you can see how well preserved it is. You can see that it is indeed eight-sided. You can see one of the porches. There are two porches that had temple fronts with triangular pediments, columns below, on those two sides. There was also a staircase that surrounded the structure. What this was we believe is some kind of a clock tower, a very inventive clock tower.



And although again I think it was probably built in the Caesarian period, late Republic, John Camp, who's an expert on things Athenian, who wrote a book on the archaeology of Athens, who has been excavating the Greek Agora since the 1970s and is a true expert of architecture in this part of the world, he thinks the date is earlier than that. He dates it to 150 to 125 B.C., and he brings it into connection with the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, because of their great interest in the telling of time and the fact that they did have important connections with Athens during this period. I think he has a point; he could be right.



But I would add that connections with Egypt were very strong in the late Republic as well; I mean, keep in mind the affair between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. Keep in mind that we know that statues of Cleopatra and Mark Antony were put on the Acropolis. We know that there was a lot of interaction. Cleopatra herself came to Athens. So I don't think it's inconceivable that if one wants to connect this to things Egyptian, that one couldn't date it also to the Caesarian period. But whatever its date, it's fascinating in its own right, again because it's octagonal. We've talked about the fact that we don't have octagons in Rome until the time of Nero. But we do see them. You saw another example, also in Leptis Magna, the market there, of the Augustan period. It's interesting to see this form emerging--possibly under Ptolemaic influence, we're not sure--emerging in the provinces, before it seems to emerge in Rome itself, and this being another example.



Here's a view of the monument again, but also compared to an engraving done by Stuart and Revett, S-t-u-a-r-t and R-e-v-e-t-t, Stuart and Revett who made drawings of monuments that were in better shape in Athens, in the eighteenth century. And what this tells us, besides showing us what the porch looked like--and you can see it well here--it also shows us that there was a weathervane on the top that would have gone in the direction of the prevailing winds. And the reason that we call this the Tower of the Winds is not only because of that weathervane that once stood there, but also because of the depictions of male personifications of the winds on all eight sides of the structure. And those are extremely well preserved, as you can see here: a frieze of these male winds. And if you look carefully at the Stuart and Revett drawing, you also see that there was a sundial on all eight sides of the monument; so its purpose, needless to say, to tell time.



The capitals from those porches are these lotus leaves growing out of acanthus leaves. So another Egyptian touch here, this looking back to Egyptian-type capitals, using them here -- the same kind of capitals that we know had turned up much later at the Severan Forum in Leptis Magna. A detail of those winds; and here a better detail of at least one of them, to show you what they looked like close up. And each one of them has a different attribute, which has led scholars obviously to speculate about which particular wind, which of the cardinal points of the compass, which wind they were in actuality; we won't get into those arguments here, but there's been a lot of time spent by scholars on trying to sort that out.



What is also interesting is the interior of the building, which is also extremely well preserved. And you can see here, all in stone, the way in which the octagon becomes a dome. And it is done extremely well, and one--I mean, this goes way beyond any kind of stone dome that we see, either in Etruscan or Roman architecture in Italy. And it shows us--once again, it underscores, more than anything else I could show you, the talent of these particular architects who had been carving this Greek stone for centuries; the way in which they are able to make this transition from octagonal shape to regular dome here is extraordinary. They did not need concrete to create a great dome in this wonderful structure, the Horologion of Andronikos, or the Tower of the Winds, in Athens.



The other great philhellenic emperor was of course Hadrian. We know Hadrian came to Athens on three occasions, and we know the exact dates of his visits. The first visit, 124 to 125, Hadrian was in Athens. He came another time in 128, and he came a third time in 131 to 132. And all the buildings that I'm now going to show you date to, roughly, to the times of those three visits. The first one you see in an engraving here. This was an aqueduct. When Hadrian came to Athens for the first time in 124 to 125, he said, "We need to supply water to the people of Athens." And so he set his architects at work to build an aqueduct for Athens.



They created a reservoir on Mount Lycabettus, the highest mountain in Athens; a reservoir. And then on the side, one of the sides of the mountain, facing the city, they had--they built a kind of a structure, a kind of a bridge that in part carried that water into the city. It no longer survives--there are a couple of bases from it; that's it. But we do fortunately have engravings that were made when it was in better shape, when part of it still stood, and we see one of those engravings here. And what we can see right off, Ionic capitals: Ionic capitals clearly based on those of the Erechtheion. So the Erechtheion still a beacon for architects, still a monument to be emulated; emulated in the time of Hadrian, as it was under Augustus.



We see an inscription, and then we see something quite extraordinary. If we look very closely above the right-hand Ionic capital, we see the beginning of an arcuated lintel; straight lintel, the beginning of an arcuation. So what does that tell us? That tells us clearly--and here's a Stuart and Revett drawing of that element, when it was in better shape again; a straight lintel, an arcuated lintel, with an inscription mentioning Hadrian. That is the same kind of arcuated lintel that we saw at Tivoli, at the Canopus, that we saw in Ephesus at the Temple of Hadrian, in Ephesus, showing that this particular motif, this arcuated lintel, very much associated with Hadrian, says this is a Hadrianic building essentially, and used not just in Italy but elsewhere in the Roman world. So again these exchanges of ideas and motifs and artists and architects during the Hadrianic period, as was the case under Augustus.



Over here we're looking again from Google Earth at the Roman Agora. Next to it a Library of Hadrian, a library that bears Hadrian's name, that was also put up in Athens, during the Hadrianic period; specifically in 132 A.D., connected to the last visit that Hadrian made to Athens. We can see that it is a great--a large open rectangular space, with the library itself at the uppermost part, and then a façade that has projecting columns, and I'll show that to you better in a moment. Here's a view I took again from the Acropolis showing that open rectangular space, as it looks today. There's some later buildings built into it. And here we're looking at the back wall of the façade, which we'll see has projecting columns on it.



Here's a plan of the Library of Hadrian of 132 here on the right-hand side of the screen. And you should be struck immediately as you look at this plan, with its open rectangular space, with a pool here in the center, with the columns going all the way around, with an entranceway in the front, with projecting columns on that façade, with a series of niches that are alternating, segmental and rectangular, with again the library located in that uppermost part with other rooms forming a kind of wing on either side. This should remind you, without any question, of this. And what is this?



Student: The Forum of Peace.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The Forum Pacis, the Forum of Peace, or the Templum Pacis, of Vespasian, in Rome. So once again--and it is a near-clear duplicate. Even though this is a library and this is a temple or a forum--although we talked about the fact that we weren't absolutely sure how this was used; it may have been used as a kind of museum in Rome for the spoils and other works of art that Vespasian and the Flavians wanted to display. But once again we are looking--the influence does not flow only from Greece to Rome, but from Italy to Greece. And in this case they are also using, as a model for the Library of Hadrian, an important building type in Rome. They're using it, you know, perhaps in a different way, but nonetheless they are using almost that exact plan for this second-century building.



And I show you here a model of the Library of Hadrian in Athens where we see that it was planted with greenery. The library was located in the back. There was a fairly conventional entranceway, looking like a typical Greek temple. But then these columns that project in front of the wall; the statuary on top, looking very much like the Forum Transitorium, which you'll remember bordered the Forum Pacis in Rome, and that probably was also something that they were looking at. And here creating--this is as far as the Greeks go to creating one of these undulating walls with the projecting and receding elements. It's still fairly conservative, but nonetheless they've injected a little motion here, using the traditional vocabulary of architecture.



And here we see a view of the wall, of that façade; what survives of it today. The wall is made out of white pentelic marble, and the columns are made of a slightly--I don't know if you can see it from where you sit--but a slightly greenish tinged marble, that comes from a place in Greece called Karystos, K-a-r-y-s-t-o-s. So again this interest in varied marbles; varied marbles that come only from the very rich quarries that Greece has. They did not have to go anywhere else to get high quality marble and to get marble of a wide variety of colors.



I want to turn now to a structure that has one of the most complicated building histories of any building I've shown you in the course of this semester, and I'll run through that relatively quickly. This is the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the so-called Olympieion, that was put up, or that was dedicated, by Hadrian, in the year 131 to 132, on the occasion of his third visit to Athens. But it had again a very long building history. It goes back to the Archaic Greek period, when it was begun. It was begun by the so-called Peisistratids--I've put these words on your Monument List for you--the Peisistratids, who were Athenian tyrants. They began to build it in the Archaic period as a Doric temple.



The construction was stopped, however, at the end of the sixth century B.C., in 510. It was resumed in the Hellenistic period, in 174 B.C., when Antiochos Epiphanes--and his name is also on the Monument List--Antiochos Epiphanes, a king of Syria, decided to employ a Roman architect by the name of Cossutius--also on your Monument List--to finish the building; a Roman architect. That's interesting that we see a Greek Hellenistic ruler hiring a Roman architect; speaks to that exchange again that is going on. He, Cossutius, decides to use the Corinthian order; the Corinthian order. And he finishes it up to the architrave, the building up to the architrave. And when Antiochos dies in 164--that's where he's up to; that's where -- 164 they built the building up through the architrave using the Corinthian order.



Sulla sacks Athens in 86 B.C. And you'll remember what Sulla does. This is that very temple, with the 55-foot tall columns, that Sulla eyes and says, "I want those." And he brings several of those back to Rome, to be used in his renovation of the Temple of Jupiter OMC; those very columns. It was the introduction of those Corinthian columns and capitals to Rome that made that the most popular capital in Rome and in the Roman Empire, as we've seen. Augustus wanted to complete the structure. He did not do so, and it was left to Hadrian to finish it, and Hadrian finished it according to Cossutius' plan, in 131 to 132.



And what Hadrian did was put in this structure statues of himself and Zeus--Zeus, the Greek equivalent to Jupiter; statues of Hadrian in one part of the structure, to Zeus in the other part of the structure, and tons and tons, lots and lots of statues, additional statues of Hadrian outside the temple in the courtyard. And you see this temple here, as finished by Hadrian, as it would've looked in the Hadrianic period. You can see that like a typical Greek temple, as opposed to a Roman temple, it does not have a façade orientation. It has two entranceways, one with a statue of Hadrian, one with a statue of Zeus, and that it has columns that encircle the entire monument--a peripertal colonnade--as well as a staircase that goes all the way around. So a typical Greek temple; 131 to 132. It's the same time that we see the Temple of Venus and Roma going up in Rome; what I described as a Greek import. Hadrian is responsible for both. And so we see again this important interchange between the two, at this particular time.



A view of what survives of the Olympieion, its columns, its Corinthian columns--you can see the small people wandering around; so this is a very large structure--that I took from the Acropolis. Once again here's a wonderful Google Earth version of the Olympieon, this combination of what it looks like today, with sort of this 3D imaging that makes it look also like it looked in antiquity. Here you see some of the columns of the Olympieon, the ones that still survive. They are incredibly large and incredibly handsome. And I think, when you look at the high quality of the carving, you are struck, as I am, at why the Romans decided the Corinthian order was the order for them, when they saw these exact columns on the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus in Rome.



When Hadrian made his visit to Athens, the last visit to Athens, in the 130s, the city busily--benefactors busily got together to put up an arch that would be ready for Hadrian when he arrived. And that he could parade through, and that is the so-called Arch of Hadrian, which you see here, in a view of what it looks like today, and in a Stuart and Revett drawing on the right-hand side of the screen. Again, a quite conservative arch: a very simple, single arcuation in the center; pilasters done with Corinthian order; columns would have been added here; a second story, with a pediment. No split pediment here. We see a straight, conservative pediment here. And the Stuart and Revett drawing tells us that in antiquity there was a marble slab that was located in the center of that aedicula, in the second story.



And we know there were statues, the inscriptions tell us that there were statues on both sides of this. And the statues are very interesting, because on the side that faces the ancient Greek city there was a statue of Theseus, and an inscription that said This is Athens, the City of Theseus; and on the other side, of course, they put up--in order to pay obeisance, to honor Hadrian, and to try to extract favors from him undoubtedly, they put up a statue to Hadrian on the other side, and that inscription says This is the City of Hadrian, not the City of Theseus.



The last monument that I want to show you is a monument that is near and dear to my own heart, because in the two years that I lived in Athens, in the 1970s, I was working on a book on this particular monument. The monument doesn't date to the Augustan period and it doesn't date to the Hadrianic period, which makes it all the more interesting. It dates to the time of Trajan. And it has nothing to do with either of those two emperors, but with a man whose name is mouthful, and that is Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos. You don't have to remember all of that. I like to call him Uncle Phil. You can call him Uncle Phil; that's the easier way to refer to Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos.



Nonetheless, he was a very interesting man, and we know a lot about his bio. We know, for example, that he was the son of a king of Commagene, a Hellenistic kingdom in the eastern part of the Empire, in ancient Anatolia, what is now Turkey. He was a son of that king of Commagene, C-o-m-m-a-g-e-n-e, and his relatives had been kings for some time. But he was unfortunate; although he was slated to become king himself, he was unfortunate that Vespasian, the Roman emperor Vespasian, conquered Commagene, made it a Roman colony, deposed the kings and became ruler himself, in a sense. And so Philopappos, because of the Romans, never became king of Commagene.



He seems to have made the best of it by making his way to Rome, using his influence and his high station, as a deposed king, to finagle for himself a position as suffect consul in Rome. What was a suffect consul? A suffect consul was kind of a consul in waiting; by that I mean that if one of the regular consuls couldn't do his job, the suffect consul could be brought in as a substitute. So Philopappos could sort of stand and wait and hope that someone got sick and he could come in--or got, you know, was in war or involved in a military campaign, and then he would be called in to take his place. So he hangs around Rome for awhile, and then he eventually goes back, goes to Athens.



He moves to Athens, he's honored with all kinds of titles in Athens, and he eventually ends up being--dying in Athens and being buried in Athens. And a tomb gets put up in his honor between 114 and 116. And we know the precise date because of an inscription on the monument, the still surviving monument, that makes reference to some of Trajan's titles, titles that Trajan held between 114 and 116, but does not include titles that he got after that. So we know that it was put up between 114 and 116. And we're going to see that it features a frieze depicting Philopappos at the high point of his life: his processus consularis, his consular procession, when he was made a consul in Rome.



I show you a view from the air where you see once again the Acropolis, and the relationship of the Acropolis to the Mouseion Hill, the Hill of the Muses. Now what's most extraordinary is that there's only one ancient monument on the Mouseion Hill, and that is the Monument of Uncle Phil. We are standing on the Acropolis. I love this picture. I took this picture myself, and I'm very proud of it because it just happens to work, especially because these two guys happened to be standing there taking pictures of the Odeion of Herodes Atticus here. But we're standing here, we're looking back toward the Mouseion Hill. And you can see not quite at the apex but almost near the apex, the monument, the sole monument that stands on this hill, the Monument of Uncle Phil. How did he rate to be able to get this sole monument on one of the three major hills? You can see it--it's marble--you can see it popping up--pentelic marble--you can see it popping up almost near the apex of the hill.



If we look at this site plan, you will see that it is sited exactly--you see it here, on the top of the Hill of the Muses--sited exactly in relationship to the Acropolis, lined up with what building? The Erechtheion; the Erechtheion, this building that was so revered by the Romans. It's lined up exactly with it, at midpoint, between the Propylaia and the Parthenon, exactly on the Erechtheion. And this is the view--here we are standing right in front of Uncle Phil's monument, looking back at the Acropolis. Even if you don't want to go see Uncle Phil--which I hope you will; if you're in Athens visit him for me. I hope that you will, at the very least you want to stand there with your back to Phil's monument and look at the Acropolis. You get one of the best views of the Acropolis from the Mouseion Hill. You see it here, and your view is lined up exactly with the Erechtheion.



Now why is Uncle Phil buried on this hill? This is interesting, because if you think back to tomb architecture that we've looked at in the course of this semester, we didn't see people buried on hills. The Romans don't bury people on hills. They bury people on flat ground, outside the walls of the city, in their necropolises. Every tomb we've seen was on flat, essentially on flat land. Why is Uncle Phil buried in a tomb near the apex of a hill? Well as I was writing this book I looked back to his own ancestors, to people in this part of the world, to a group of dynasts in a place called Nemrud Dagh, also in Anatolia. And I show you one of their well-preserved tombs here, and you can see that the tomb is built not quite at the--not at the apex of

Professor Kleiner explores the architecture of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, focusing on sites in what are now North Italy, France, Spain, and Croatia. Her major objective is to characterize "Romanization," the way in which the Romans provide amenities to their new colonies while, at the same time, transforming them into miniature versions of the city of Rome. Professor Kleiner discusses the urban design of two Augustan towns before proceeding to an investigation of a variety of such established Roman building types as theaters, temples, and aqueducts. The well-preserved Theater at Orange, the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and the unparalleled aqueducts at Nîmes (the Pont-du-Gard) and Segovia are highlighted. The lecture concludes with an overview of imperial and private arches and tombs in the western provinces, among them the controversial three-bayed arch at Orange. The Trophy of Augustus at La Turbie serves as a touchstone for the Roman West, as it commemorates Augustus' subjugation of the Alpine tribes, clearing the way for Rome to create new cities with a distinctive Roman stamp.



Reading assignment:

Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 173-174, 214-246

Transcript



April 14, 2009



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: Good morning everybody. In the last couple of lectures we have looked at what happened when Rome took over civilizations that were older than Rome's own, and arguably even more advanced than Rome's own. And what happened, of course, was an interesting mix between the architecture and the architectural forms that the Romans brought with them, and what they found in these highly developed civilizations, and the interesting mix that came about because of that. But we've also taken a look at what happens when Rome went out and created cities essentially from scratch, built cities where there had been no cities before. And what happened as a result tended to be cities that looked very much in the Roman stamp.



And we're going to look at a number of those cities today, in the western provinces of the Empire, in fact, to see what happens again when Rome builds cities from scratch in that part of the world, and, as I mentioned already, the distinctive stamp, this distinctive Roman stamp that they had. But at the same time there is always some impact from the local civilization, and to mention in passing that, at least in the part of the world that we'll be concentrating on today, especially in Gaul, ancient Gaul, the Celtic tribes were foremost there, and we do see that some of the impact of those tribes makes itself felt, as well as tribes in other parts of this part of the ancient Roman world.



Just as a reminder, I want to show you again a couple of the monuments that we looked at last time, when we were talking about Greece and about Athens under the Romans. And I remind you, for example on the left-hand side of the screen, of this Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Olympieion in Athens, which was begun already in the Archaic period, the Greek Archaic period, continued to be built up--those, the patrons tried to complete it, in the course of the Hellenistic period into the Augustan period, and ultimately, as you'll remember, it was completed under the emperor Hadrian. So a building with a very long history and a very distinctive style. And when it was completed under Hadrian, of course, you'll recall that it looked entirely Greek -- very similar to what it would have been in the Hellenistic period. So those--again, the Greeks holding very tenaciously to their own plans, to their building materials, and indeed to the kinds of architects and artisans to carve them, that had been carving them for centuries.



We also took a look at the building on the right-hand side of the screen, which is the Horologion of Andronicus, or the Tower of the Winds. And you'll remember in this case that the civilization that had impact on it was another firmly entrenched civilization and that is that of Egypt. We talked about the fact that while the date of this monument is controversial--it might be second century B.C., it might be Caesarian, or even into the Augustan period--it's controversial, but we talked about the fact that even though the date is controversial, that the monument itself was built under very strong influence from Ptolemaic Egypt. The Ptolemaic Egyptians particularly intrigued, for example, by clocks--this was a water clock, as you'll remember--and by these abstruse, identifications of abstruse winds, male winds, that we see in the uppermost part. So again, the impact of two very high civilizations--the Greek civilization and the Egyptian civilization--on Roman architecture in the eastern part of the world.



Today we're going to go west, and we're going to look at Roman architecture in a variety of places, including--and some beautiful places--including the south of France: a series of cities--and I'll point those out to you in a moment--in the north of Italy. So the north of Italy, the south of France, into Spain, into what is now Spain. And then also we will dip into an area called Istria, which is the uppermost part of what is now Croatia, where a place by the name of Pola is located. So those western provinces will be the area that we're going to concentrate on today.



Now any of you who've traveled in this part of the world know that it is extraordinarily beautiful. And I show you just one example of that. When you go along the French Riviera, for example, you see places as sophisticated as Monte Carlo, with its yachts moored here, and of course with its glittering nightlife and its extremely famous casino, the Casino at Monte Carlo. There are also other wonderful cities to visit along here, modern cities, such that of Villefranche, which you see here, and its fabulous pastel colored houses, with boats that are not quite as magnificent as those at Monte Carlo, but nonetheless very picturesque, a wonderful place to visit. So it's not a hardship to have to travel and look at Roman antiquities in the south of France.



I want to begin though with northern Italy, with a city in the north of Italy, a city at a place called Aosta. It's the first on your Monument List for today. A city that was founded by the Romans in 24 B.C., in the time of Augustus. And therefore it won't surprise you to hear that its ancient Roman name was Augusta Praetoria: Augusta Praetoria, the modern city of Aosta. And it was the last colony that the Romans founded in Italy; the last colony. And it's interesting to see therefore that this last Roman colony in Italy takes almost exactly the shape of the first Roman colony in Italy. You'll remember the city of Ostia, which the Romans founded in 350 B.C., and the way in which it conformed to the typical castrum plan.



We see the same thing here. We see this typical castrum plan for Aosta: a rectangle, a regular rectangle, laid out according to Roman surveying practice. We see that the two major streets of the city, the cardo and the decumanus, meet in the center, and that at that intersection of those two main streets we see the location, as it should be, of the forum, most likely. You'll see a question mark there, so we're not absolutely sure, but we think that the forum was located there. If you look around at the rest of the city, it was very regularly laid out, with a series of buildings that we've become accustomed to seeing in a typical Roman city, when a typical Roman city is built from the basics. You see the baths here. You see a temple up there, with a cryptoporticus. You see a theater and you see an amphitheater.



This site, by the way, spectacularly located in the Italian Alps. It's at the intersection of two major trade routes, in the St. Bernard passes, as you can see from this plan that comes from Ward-Perkins. And what you can also see, that's typical of these cities that the Romans build from scratch around the western part of the Empire, is the fact that the city is ringed with walls, and that it has a series of gates, the openings of which you can also see in this excellent plan.



Now I can show you also from the city of Aosta a surviving Roman arch, one of those gateways in fact, from the city, that we know dates to the age of Augustus. So we give it a date, the same date, roughly 24 B.C. You see it here. You see, if you remember the arches that we've discussed from the Augustan period in the past, you'll note right off that this is very consistent with other Augustan arch design. By that I mean it has one single arcuated bay, in the center, flanked on either side by pedestals, wide pedestals that have a set of double columns on either side, as you can see here. The major difference between this and an arch that might have been put up in Rome at the same time, in the Augustan period, is the fact that it is made out of local stone, which is characteristic of so much of provincial Roman architecture, and will be the case for most of the buildings that we look at today. The attic is gone. There's a modern roof on top of the structure. The ancient attic is gone. But you can imagine that it would've had a fairly traditional attic, with an inscription at the apex and probably some kind of sculpture crowning the monument in antiquity.



Now there's one detail that has to do with the orders that are used here that is different from any other arch that we've seen before. And I wonder if any of you notice what that is. The columnar orders. They are what? Doric, Ionic or Corinthian?



Students: Corinthian.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Corinthian. Okay, everyone agrees they're Corinthian. You're absolutely correct. But what is strange about the fact--if you look above those Corinthian columns, what do you see that doesn't usually go with Corinthian columns?



Student: Oh, the triglyphs.



Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: The triglyphs and the metopes; the triglyphs and the metopes that tend to accompany the Doric order. So this is very interesting. We see this mixing of the orders here, the use of Corinthian columns but a Doric frieze with triglyphs and metopes. You'd never see that in Rome itself. But what it is, is an interesting playing around with the canonical orders that have been passed from Rome to this part of the world. This particular architect or patron, or the city itself, whoever was the patron of this particular monument, made the decision to go in a somewhat different route. So an interesting mixing of the orders -- an eccentric arch in that regard, but in every other conforming quite closely to what we would see in Rome, the city of Rome contemporaneously.



I want to go from Aosta, in the north of Italy, to the south of France, to Provence, to take a look at the original town plan of the city of Arles, the well-known city of Arles. And those of you who know it, or have been there, know it probably primarily as the city of Vincent van Gogh. It's in the city of Arles he spent a good deal of time. He went to this particular café so often that it has borne his name for some time, the Café Van Gogh. And you see another view of a lovely piazza in the city of--or plaza in the city of Arles. And then the famous painting of Van Gogh, the panting that he made of this particular café, that he used to spend so much time in, a café again, as you see here, that is still there, and where you can yourselves go and sip an aperitif or whatever.



This part, the city of Arles, a wonderful place to go. It has a very--I'm not going to show it to you in any detail, just a glimpse here of its famous amphitheater. It has a very well-preserved Roman amphitheater. And the fact that France is so close--as you can see in that map I showed you before--to Spain, has led to quite a bit of Spanish influence coming into this particular part of France. And this amphitheater is used today not only for other kinds of performances, but even for bullfights, as you see. This is actually a bullfight in Madrid, not in Arles, but nonetheless it's the sort of thing that has been performed even in the Amphitheater at Arles.



Here's the map again. Before I show you the city plan of Arles as it would've looked, I just wanted to remind you of these towns in relationship to one another. So we've come up from Rome. We've looked at Aosta in the north of Italy, in the Alps. We're making our way now into the south of France. And I wanted to point out the proximity of northern Italy with the south of France. Because we do believe that a lot of the impact of Rome was felt through the--on south of France, or what is now the south of France--was passed through the intermediary of the north of Italy; that there were certain kinds of architectural forms that were developed in the north of Italy that were transferred into the south of France, because of the proximity of one to the other.



We're going to be looking at Arles. We're going to be looking at Nîmes. We're going to look at a building in La Turbie. We'll be looking at Saint-Rémy, and at Orange, the great theater at Orange, as well as a temple at Vienne -- so all of those sites. We're going to dip into Spain. We're going to look at a famous, famous, spectacular aqueduct at Segovia, and a less spectacular but very well-preserved aqueduct at Tarragona. And then we're also going to make our way, as I mentioned before, into Istria, part of what was formerly Yugoslavia, to the site called Pola, that is now in, as you know, Croatia.



I want to begin with the city plan of Arles, as it would've looked in ancient times. And I show you here the city plan of--excuse me, not the city plan, I want to show you the forum, to give you a sense of what fora looked like in the western provinces during this period, especially in Gaul. I want to show you the forum plan of the city of Arles. And I show it to you here, with the modern streets superimposed on top of it. Because much of it is underground; you can't see too much of it today. But it has been explored underground enough where scholars have been able--archaeologists have been able to reconstruct the fact that it was a large open rectangular space, surrounded by columns, as we have seen is characteristic of all Roman forum design, from the Forum in Pompeii that we looked at at the very beginning of this semester.



And although you can't see it on this particular plan, there was also a temple on one short end, as well as a basilica that was part of this plan. And I think it's interesting to think back, especially as you review from what we've done from the midterm through the second midterm, it's interesting to think about basilican architecture, because it was usually a part of forums, and when it was a part of--and in what buildings, in what fora it was incorporated: think back to Pompeii, think to the Forum of Trajan in Rome. But think of the fact that both the Forums of Julius Caesar and the Forum of Augustus in Rome did not have basilicas as part of them. Here already in the Augustan period in--because that's when this dates--in the Augustan period we see a basilica incorporated into the forum plan, in what was ancient Gaul.



I mentioned that there's a well-preserved--there's a well-preserved cryptoporticus, an underground storage area, around the colonnade. And you see a view of it here: extremely well preserved. And it should remind you of those cryptoportici that we looked at very early in the semester at the sanctuaries that we explored: the sanctuaries, you know, at Tivoli and Hercules Victor; Hercules Victor at Tivoli and Jupiter Anxur at Terracina, for example; very similar with its barrel-vaulted corridors. This one was used for storage within the forum. So they would store salt and fuel and other items that they would need for daily use. But it also became eventually--and you can get an inkling of that from this view on the left--it eventually became a dump for architectural members that were no longer needed--as you can see here, columns and capitals--but also for sculpture. And one of the most famous portraits of the emperor Augustus was found in this cryptoporticus, dumped there at some later period, and it's now on display in the Archaeological Museum in Arles.



I want to turn now to the Theater at Orange, which is one of the most spectacular monuments that I'm going to show you today. And you see it in this extraordinary view from the air; a building that you can see from your Monument List was put up in the late first century B.C., early first century A.D., and it is really something special, not only in its own right, but also because of how well preserved it is. And you can see in this view not only the typical scheme that we have seen, we've become accustomed to, for Roman theater design: the semicircular orchestra; the semicircular cavea; the division into these wedge-shaped sections or cunei; the outer wall of the structure.



And you should be immediately struck by this outer wall of the structure, because the outer wall of the structure is better preserved than any other outer wall that we've seen in the course of this semester. It's preserved to its full height. It is very severe, but that severity would have been lessened in antiquity by the incorporation of a colonnade on the front of the structure. So this very important building, in that regard, because we again have this very well-preserved wall, which gives us a good sense of what these walls would've looked like in antiquity. And you have to imagine here again that alleviation of this severity by that portico.



You can also see here though something very interesting about this particular theater that makes it connected--although it's Roman in every way--that connects it also to earlier Greek theatrical architecture. Because you'll remember that the major difference between Roman theaters and Greek theaters was that Romans built their theaters on their own hill, made of concrete, but the Greeks built their theaters on actual natural hillsides. And if you look very carefully at this excellent view from the air, you will see the way in which this particular theater, at Orange, is actually built into a hillside. They happened to have a natural hillside perfect for this kind of construction, right where they wanted it to be. So they took advantage of that hillside and they placed--they supported the cavea of this structure by that hillside, as you can see extremely well.



The interior of the Theater at Orange is also extremely well preserved, as you can see here. You can see the stage. You can see the semicircular orchestra. You can see the stone seats of the cavea, and you can also see that the stage building--and because the wall, the outside retaining wall is so well preserved, you can also see that the interior of the wall still stands, obviously. And this wall had one giant niche in the center, with a projecting element also in the center, and then would've had three tiers of columns, one on top of one another. Most of those are unfortunately no longer there, but you can see one set of two pairs here--the lowest tier with two columns, the upper tier with two partial columns above that--which gives you some sense of what this would've looked like in antiquity.



Again we think the tiers, the columns, were on three stories. Remember the date of this, late-first century B.C. probably. And so this does post-date some of the 60 to 50 to 40 B.C. paintings that we looked at that show these kinds of multi-storied, scaenae frontes with columns. We speculated about the fact that some of those may have been based on actual theatrical architecture, but that it didn't survive from that early on, but it may have been made out of wood. But here we see a fairly early example, in the Augustan period, in the south of France, and it is very important in that regard.



I want to turn from theater architecture in the western provinces to temple architecture. And just as in Rome, and just as in every city that we've looked at, temple architecture was extremely important. The temples that I'm going to show you--and I'm going to show you two of them, one at Vienne, in France, and one at Nîmes, also in France--are among our best preserved Roman temples today. And it's important to keep in mind that both of them were part of complexes. They stand in isolation today, but in antiquity they were part of a complex -- probably some kind of forum or central space for that city.



This is the one at Vienne, which I show to you first, that dates to, probably to before A.D. 14. And it is a temple that was put up to Augustus and Roma. It may have been--the dedication may have been changed to Augustus and his wife Livia, at some point; we're not absolutely sure. But you see it here in a very good general view of what it looks like today. It's one of these buildings that has been preserved in large part because it has been used--for later purposes. It was used as a marketplace. It was used as a museum at one point. And that is what has helped to preserve it.



We see it again here, and it's interesting, I think, to compare it to the restored view of the Temple of Mars Ultor that was part of the Forum of Augustus in Rome, because the dates are roughly comparable to one another. And I think that you will see that it is a typical Roman temple, in fact, almost indistinguishable from what we would see in Rome at the same time. So here's an example again of what happens when you go--when the Romans go into a part of the world that isn't already inhabited by a very highly developed civilization, that they make buildings that look very similar to those that were put up contemporaneously in Rome. The Temple at Vienne is no exception.



If we look at this temple, we see it has the typical Greco-Roman plan with the tall podium, the deep porch, the freestanding columns in that porch. And we see that the order that is used here is the Corinthian order. Some of the temple is made out of local limestone. Some of it is made out of marble. But what we see here that's very interesting vis-à-vis what was happening at the same time in Rome is the cella. You can see that the cella is actually very shallow, much more shallow than the cella usually is; and you can see that quite well in this view over here. And that same shallow cella we find at the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome. The other similarity is the fact that at the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome we have freestanding columns--columns all the way up to the back here--and those columns--and there's space between those columns and the wall of the cella. And that creates a type of temple design that we refer to today as a temple with alae or wings; wings one on either side of the cella, formed by that space between the wall of the cella and the freestanding columns.



And we see exactly the same thing over here, this design of a temple with alae. There is no question that this temple in Vienne was built under the very strong influence of the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome -- all of those features--I mean, they wouldn't have come upon those features by accident; it is clearly being closely based one on the other. Here are two more views of the Temple of Augustus and Roma/Livia at Vienne, where we see all of the features that I've already shown you, but where you can see particularly well the shallow cella, the plain--the back wall here that has pilasters rather than columns. And then if you go around the back you will see it has a plain flat back, which was the case also for the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome.



A more famous temple, an even more famous temple, if that's possible, an even better preserved temple, is the one that you now see on the left-hand side of the screen, which is the famous Maison Carrée at Nîmes. It too, it too has been reused in ancient times as a museum and the like. It's still a small museum today, which is one of the main reasons that it is so well preserved. It is an extraordinary work of Roman architecture. I think it's interesting to compare it to the Temple of Portunus that we saw much earlier this semester. The major difference, of course, between the two, the materials that are used. This is local limestone with marble. This--well we won't remind ourselves, but tufa and travertine and so on and so forth, that we looked at earlier--this is an Ionic temple; this is a Corinthian temple. But once again it seems to be the Temple of Mars Ultor that was the main model for the Maison Carrée or the Square House at Nîmes.



And I show you another view of it here. Because you'll see, just like the Temple of Portunus, it has a pseudo-peripteral colonnade, and you can see that extremely well. Yes, the columns encircle the entire monument, including the back wall, but those columns are engaged or attached to the wall going all the way around. Here you can again see the opus quadratum blocks of this local limestone that's used for the walls, and then marble used for the columns and also for the capitals of this glorious and very well- preserved Roman temple.



And here some spectacular details of the capitals of the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and the frieze, and also the decoration up above. And what's interesting about these capitals, if you look at them in detail you will see that not only are they Corinthian, and we can see the spiral volutes growing out of the acanthus leaves down below, but if you compare these capitals to a capital, a preserved capital from the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome, you will see that not only are these based on these, but that they are so close, so close, that there is absolutely no question, I believe--well this was not suggested by me but by a scholar who studied these in great detail and determined and suggested, and all of us have believed it ever since--that these are not only based on those, but that the same workshop worked these capitals for the Maison Carrée as for the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome.



Now that works well chronologically, because you'll remember that the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome was dedicated in 2 B.C. This building, as you can see from your Monument List, was built in around A.D. 5. So there was perfect--it was perfect timing for those architects and artisans who had been successful at the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome, this major commission, allowed themselves, we believe, to be hired out to those in the south of France, to make the trip to Nîmes in order to build a temple in the model of the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome, at Nîmes; the result, the Maison Carrée. So this is--I've made this point in other lectures about the fact that there are certain times when we can document not only the exchange of architectural ideas but even the exchange of architects and artisans, going from one part of the Roman world to another, in search of commissions. And this is one of those times where we can document with certainty that artists working in the employ of the emperor himself, Augustus, made their way to the south of France to create this amazing temple from scratch. Once again, a temple very much in the model of the most famous temple of its day in Rome, and that is the Temple of Mars Ultor, in the Forum of Augustus.



One more detail. Here's the Mars Ultor capital again, and over here the capitals of the Maison Carrée. And I show you above the frieze, which is extremely well preserved, and you see this flowering acanthus plant, that should immediately remind you of contemporary decoration in Rome; think of the flowering acanthus plants of the Ara Pacis Augustae. So once again proof that there is a very close connection to what's going on in Rome at this time, and in the south of France.



Here's another spectacular view of the Maison Carrée, as it looks in its location today. In the center of a plaza, surrounded by the daily life of Nîmes, as you can see so well here -- still very much a part of daily life. And very interesting is the fact that if you look across the street, from the Maison Carrée, you see a building that was designed by the very famous and very talented British architect, Norman Foster. It's also a museum, and it's a play on the name of the Maison Carrée, it's called the Carrée d'Art. It's a museum that has modern art, and it mostly exhibits its permanent collections. But you can see--and I'm going to show you a detail in a moment to bring this point home--you can see that Norman Foster has really looked at, and studied, the Maison Carrée, and has created a modern version, a very modern version of the Maison Carrée.



If you look at the Maison Carrée and its deep porch and its high podium and its single staircase, this façade orientation, all the usual Roman elements, and look at this building, you will see that he too has created a kind of portico in the front. They're not actual columns, they're piers, but piers--and very slender and elegant piers--but piers nonetheless that are clearly being played off the columns of the Maison Carrée. And look at the way in which he has done the glass exterior. He has divided it into a series of panels that are clearly, I believe, reflecting--and I'm sure he knew he was doing this at the time--clearly reflecting the panels of the ashlar masonry of the walls of the actual Maison Carrée.



So this is very interesting. We see not only dialogue happening, you know, within Roman buildings themselves, in Rome itself and in various parts of the world, but this ongoing dialogue between ancient monuments and modern buildings in cities like Rome--the Ara Pacis in the Meier building is one example--but also in some of these other cities, like Nîmes in the south of France. And, by the way, you can go up -- there's a roof garden that you can go up to, on the top of this, of the Carrée d'Art, in order to see a spectacular view from above of the Maison Carrée.



Now one of the most important elements of the Romanization of the Empire was the fact that as the Romans went in and built these new cities, in East and also in West, they supplied it with amenities that weren't there before. And this was especially important in the western provinces where again the civilization had not been all that high, prior to this period. So the Romans come in and they build aqueducts with a vengeance in the western provinces, in the south of France, in Spain, in order to provide these towns with a water supply. And I want to show you a couple of examples of our best preserved and most spectacular Roman aqueducts anywhere in what was the ancient Roman Empire.



I want to begin with perhaps the--with certainly the most famous of these, the so-called Pont du Gard, also at Nîmes. And I show you first a map, which gives you a sense of what was going on here. The patron, by the way, of the Pont du Gard at Nîmes was none other than Marcus Agrippa: Marcus Agrippa whom we've talked about several times this semester, the close friend, confidant, right-hand man, son-in-law, hoped-for heir of Augustus, who we saw was building buildings in Rome. He built the baths that bear his name, the Baths of Agrippa, and he also built that first Pantheon, that first temple to all the gods, with its caryatid porch. We saw that he was active as a builder in Athens, where he built the Odeon of Agrippa, and where he was honored with a statue on top of a pier on the Acropolis in Athens.



He also was active in the south of France as a great builder, and it was here that he was responsible for commissioning an aqueduct that would bring water from thirty-one miles away, up in the mountains, down to the city of Nîmes. And this map gives you a very good sense of exactly how that was done. The source was up there, at the top, the top pink circle up here, made its way all the way down to the city of Nîmes here. Now the Romans were very clever about how they built aqueducts. They let gravity and the change in terrain essentially do the work for them. They placed terracotta pipes underground, for the most part, on sloping ground, and allowed the water to come from the hillsides or the mountains down into the city, just as they did here. On occasion they allowed those terracotta tubes to be carried by low walls.



But sometimes they got to a point where they had to cross a body of water, and that is exactly what happened here. The River Gard of the city of Nîmes, of the area of Nîmes, goes through--is located at this particular point, and so the aqueduct system had to cross the river. How did they do that? They couldn't tunnel it underground, they couldn't place it on a low wall, so what they did was build a bridge; they built a bridge to carry that water across the body of water. And the result of that is what you see here.



This is the famous Pont du Gard at Nîmes. This is the bridge that serves to carry the water across. They place the terracotta pipes in the aqueduct itself, and that water is carried across that aqueduct. Now what's particularly extraordinary about this monument, besides that feat of taking that water across the river, is the fact that it is--well if you look at the building technique, you can tell that it is made of ashlar masonry; ashlar masonry that is local stone, in this particular case, as we have seen is the case, for the most part, in architecture in the south of France, in the Roman period. But what is amazing about this particular aqueduct, besides this great engineering feat, is the fact that the architects have paid enormous attention to the exact measurements, not only of the arch itself, but of the arcuations.



And they have worked up all kinds of elaborate mathematical theorems in order to get to the point where they play these shapes, and the sizes of these shapes, well off against one another. The larger arcuations below are perfectly mathematically worked out, so that they work well with the smaller ones up above. And we see in a building like this, I think, something that is really impressive: not only a sign of Romanization--I mean this is--when you talk about Roman imperialism and the Romans taking over the world in ancient Roman times, one could think about that, in part, in a negative way. I mean, imperialism and taking over and creating an empire can be viewed negatively. But one of the positive things that the Romans brought, one of the many positive things that the Romans brought to these under-developed parts of the world, was what we call Romanization; bringing these amenities, bringing things like water to a city, so that it could live at a higher level than it was able to live before. But besides that, when you look at an aqueduct like the Pont du Gard at Nîmes, I think you'll agree that although we would call this a feat of Roman engineering, first and foremost, the Romans have been adept enough, both through paying attention to these mathematical considerations, but also to carving the stone, to making the stone really work aesthetically, that they have essentially, in this aqueduct, transformed engineering into architecture, into what we would define as architecture.



I want to show you two other aqueducts. The first--both of them in Spain--the first at Tarragona and the other one at Segovia. First a reminder of the fact that Spain, as you'll recall, was extremely important in the Roman period because two of Rome's emperors came from Spain; think of Trajan, who was born in Spain, and also Hadrian, whom we see here on the left. A map of Spain showing the locations of Italica, where Hadrian was born, but also the two sites that we're going to look at, Tarragona, Tárraco, which was located very close to Barcelona, near the sea, as you can see here, and then further inland Segovia; Segovia which is near Madrid, the city of Madrid. So very accessible; for any of you traveling Spain, these are sites that are extremely accessible, and especially Segovia, well worth looking at.



I just want to show you the aqueduct at Tarragona briefly. You can see it here on the screen, an aqueduct that dates to the Augustan period. And it's a handsome work of architecture. It has ashlar blocks, as you can see: local stone. But it doesn't have the finesse. I think you can see here now how great the Pont du Gard is, because it doesn't--it's attractive, it does the job, it's a great engineering feat--but it doesn't have the aesthetic values that the Pont du Gard does, with its arches that are the same size, on the lower story, and then in the upper story it doesn't have the appeal aesthetically, visually, that the Pont du Gard does; but it does its job.



However, the aqueduct at Segovia is quite another story. The aqueduct at Segovia is right up there with the Pont du Gard at Nîmes as one of the great works of Roman engineering and of Roman architecture. And what makes it all the more spectacular is how much of it is preserved. And I think you can see that extremely well here, in this amazing view of the aqueduct marching--making its way across the center of the city of modern Segovia, in this truly spectacular image.



As you can see from your Monument List, the date of the aqueduct at Segovia is very controversial. There are some people who think it's first century; there's some people who think it's second century. I think it is most likely to be second century, and probably put up during the time of Trajan, the emperor Trajan. But we're not sure about that. Whenever it was put up, it is an incredible example of aqueduct engineering and aqueduct architecture. And it does allow us to see a couple of things that we--it's very distinctive in its own right; it's beautiful, but beautiful in a very different way, as we see from the Pont du Gard. But it does allow us to look at a couple of other features of Roman aqueduct planning and design that I think are worth talking about.



I show you here another view of the aqueduct at Segovia, and you see here that it is for the most part a two-tiered aqueduct system. But what they've done here to vary it, and to make it much more interesting aesthetically than the aqueduct at Tarragona, is to make those two stories different in height. So the lower story is much higher, as you can see, with much more attenuated arches; and then the upper tier is lower, with much smaller arches. The other thing that they've done -- using local stone -- they have left the stone in a somewhat rougher state. It isn't quite as rough, perhaps, as Claudius' buildings--but left in a fairly rough state, which gives it a real sense, as you look at it, of the texture of that stone, of the materiality of that stone, in a way that makes this particular building extremely attractive and impressive. And you can see here--this view is also very helpful because you can see people standing below which gives you some sense of the very large scale of this particular aqueduct.



Here's another view. This is one of my favorite views of the aqueduct at Segovia, because I think here you can really get a sense of the coloration of the stone, of the texture of this slightly rough stone, and of the way, even in the architecture of aqueducts--again mainly, an aqueduct is built mainly for a practical purpose, to bring water from one part--one place to another place, to provide an amenity, as we've talked about it, a significant and important day-to-day amenity. But even with that, even though it is essentially a practical building, aesthetics are never far from the Romans' minds. And when this particular aqueduct was designed, not only did the designer have in mind the texture of the stone and the way in which the light of Spain, this particular part of Spain, hits that stone at any given time of day, but the whole concept of vista again.



When you wander along this particular aqueduct--because it goes on for quite awhile; you can do that, and you're not on top of a body of water as well. So you can walk along it down below and see what you see as you meander through it. And it is amazing aesthetically again how they have set up a series of views and vistas, from one part of this aqueduct to another. As you stand here and you look at it, making its way, almost marching its way--in fact, I like to think it's Trajanic because it's almost like Trajan's army marching through the city of Segovia, off to some military exploit in the far reaches, because--the way it marches through the city, as you can see here. But all of these wonderful views and vistas and panoramas that one can see, depending upon where one stands in the city, where one stands beneath the arches themselves, is really spectacular, and clearly was very much in the minds of the architect who designed this.



Here's another very good view where if you stand below the aqueduct and look up, this is the sort of view that you see, with the rough stones, even in the vaults of the arches themselves: an incredible work. And again, the fact that it is as well preserved as it is, is really something to be grateful for. Here's a very interesting view, because it also shows you what happens with aqueduct design when the terrain changes. So in the center of the city--in the views that we looked at just before--they were able to build, the ground level was low enough, that they were able to build the aqueduct in two stories, with that very high first story and then the lower second story. But what happens when the terrain shifts, when you go--because again they're taking advantage of a source that is located higher up, with the hope that gravity will do the work for them and allow that water to flow from that source, down into the city.



And that is exactly what they did here. The source is farther away and it's high. So the water has to be piped into this structure and make its way down from the hillside to the city. So you see the ground rising here, to go up that hill. And what happens is that they have to adjust the aqueduct according to the changing terrain. So if you look at this particular section, you will see that the bottom story is just an arch. The arch rests on the ground, so that they--because it has to be much shorter at this juncture than anywhere else. And you see the same--well you see it changing somewhat here, as it makes its way. But you see it rounding the corner, and the way they have had to make these adjustments, and made them so well, without losing the impressive aesthetic quality of this particular structure. Once again, a tribute to the fact that these Roman architects were not only great engineers but also, without any question, world-class architects.



There's an interesting monument that is located--you can see the aqueduct of Segovia in the back left there--there's an interesting monument that was put up to celebrate the bi-millennium of the aqueduct in Segovia. And it's interesting to see what they put at the top: the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus to underscore the close connections between ancient Roman Segovia and Rome.



Another very interesting building in France is the one that I show you now, which was a fountain. These aqueducts brought not only water for daily use but fed fountains. And I want to show you one fountain from Roman Gaul, from what is France today, the so-called Temple of Diana. It wasn't a temple, it was a fountain, as I mentioned, and it was built during the Hadrianic period, between 100 and 130.



What makes this fountain particularly interesting is if we just looked at this--if I asked you, if I put this up and said to you: "What do you think this was?" you would be unlikely to say a fountain; because you can see that this structure is in the form of a basilica. It's a barrel-vaulted central chamber, with side aisles that are also barrel-vaulted. You can see the barrel vault of this side aisle over here. You can see a barrel vault of the central space here. You can see that there are columns on tall bases. You can make out, over here, a triangular pediment on top of a niche. There were a series of niches along the wall, with alternating triangular and segmental pediments. But most interesting of all is the central space, the central barrel-vaulted space, with these barrel-vaulted side aisles, which is exactly the scheme of a typical basilica.



And it's another example of something I've shown you throughout the semester, that I've called the interchangeability of form; the way in which certain building types, in this case a basilica, built initially as a civic structure for the trying of law cases, becomes a plan that is used in other contexts; whether it's in residential architecture, as we've already seen, and in this case in the form of a fountain. So that's particularly interesting.



Also interesting is the fact that although this is a barrel-vaulted structure, it is made entirely out of local stone -- no concrete whatsoever in this particular part of France. No concrete, stone construction. It's a masterwork when you consider that this was all done out of stone, and done extremely well. Look how smooth the stones are. And look, the designers have even been talented enough to create ribs, with stone, in that stone barrel vault, for this amazing structure. And you should be reminded, when I talk about the interchangeability of form, of the underground basilica that we looked at way back when, in the time of Claudius, which was built underground, made out of concrete, faced with stucco, as you'll recall, but used for a secret sect, and in this case the use of this basilican structure for a fountain in Roman France.



Up to this point we have looked at monuments that were made possible by Rome's subjugation of this particular part of the world; the subjugation we know of at least forty-four Alpine tribes. And so while all of these buildings that I've shown you come because of that subjugation and subsequent Romanization of the area, there is one monument, spectacularly sited, that actually celebrates, honors, that very subjugation, and it's to that that I now want to turn. It is, as I mentioned spectacularly sited, along the French Riviera, not far from Nice, not far from Monte Carlo. You see it here.



It is the Trophy of Augustus, the Tropaeum Augusti, as you'll see on your Monument List, that is located in a town called La Turbie and you can see it rising up in the midst of modern La Turbie here. It dates, we believe, to 7 to 6 B.C., and thus in the age of Augustus, and celebrates, quite specifically, Augustus'--and the inscription tells us this--Augustus' subjugation of forty-four Alpine tribes in this particular part of the world: a monument put up to honor that victory of Augustus. So essentially a trophy monument.



You can see that it is only partially preserved. And I show you here a view of it down the street, the modern street, as it looks today, where you can see it rising up over that street. And if you look very carefully, you will see that the stone that the structure is made out of is very similar--in fact exactly the same--as the stone used for the local houses. Now this is very interesting, because what--the monument did not look--even though it's only partially preserved today, even less of it was preserved earlier on, and it was in the 1930s that an American patron decided that he wanted to reconstruct, as best that could be done, the Trophy Monument at La Turbie. Because there was recognition that the monument at La Turbie had served as a quarry, essentially for the local inhabitants, and that over the years they had been taking the stone from the Victory Monument of Augustus, and using it--that's why it's the same stone--using it in their houses. And this American wanted to rectify it, so he donated the funds that enabled them to tear down, to demolish, thirty-two houses, and come up with 3000 fragments from the Victory Monument, the trophy at La Turbie, and reconstruct it as best as they could from those fragments. And that's what you see there now.



Here's a view of it as it looks today, as well as a model. And what you can see from both of these is not only the inscription and the trophy in relief, on this side, that mentions the forty-four Alpine tribes, but the monument itself. And this model makes it very clear what the general form was: a round structure, with columns encircling it, on a base, and then the whole thing placed on a very large--a tall pedestal, with a pyramidal element at the top, and a crowing statue at the very apex. This scheme of placing a rotunda on top of a tall base is something that we have seen as characteristic of funerary architecture, from the age of Augustus. Think of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, for example. And it is that scheme that is used here. So another example of this interchangeability of form -- that a form that was used for mausoleum architecture now used for a trophy monument, of the same time, but in a different part of the world.



The model also shows you that there were niches around the central circular structure. Those had in them portraits of Augustus' lieutenants, who helped him placate this particular part of the world. And then at the top of the stepped pyramidal structure, a portrait, a bronze statue of the emperor Augustus himself. Here's a detail of the Victory Monument at La Turbie, with all of those stones from those thirty-two demolished houses reused here to reconstruct it. There is concrete used here, but it's a Gallo-Roman form of concrete. You'll see in Ward-Perkins that he refers to this work as petit appareil, p-e-t-i-t a-p-p-a-r-e-i-l, petit appareil, which is essentially a Gallo-Roman version of concrete construction, with stone facing, little work, little pieces of stone, that are very similar to opus incertum, but different enough and distinctively French enough to be called petit appareil.



The victories, Augustus' victories and pacification of this part of the world also led to the construction of arches. And I want to turn to a couple of those now. The Arch at St. Rêmy, also in the south of France. You see it here. It dates to around 20 B.C., and it probably served as both an arch in honor of these victories that Augustus celebrated here, but also as a gateway into the city. It's very simple. It looks very much like we've come to know Augustan arches are, with a single arcuated bay in the center, columns, in this case, on two separate bases, fluted columns. The capitals are not preserved, so we don't know if they were Corinthian, but they were probably Corinthian. A very elaborate archivolt, as you can see here, with the coffering extremely well preserved.



And then if you look very closely at the decoration, you see a couple of figures standing on either side. These are actually--they're headless now--but they're actually figures of captives; of captives, of local captives, to make reference again to the fact that this was military, a military operation, that allowed Augustus to take over, to subjugate these forty-four Alpine tribes, and others in this particular area, and that that subjugation is referred to here by the representation of those captured barbarians.



A much more important and more interesting arch is this one. It's an arch that is located in Orange--back to Orange--also in the south of France. The date of this monument is very controversial, and I think by looking at the general view, and also a detail, you can see why. It is a triple-bayed arch, with a large central arch, two smaller ones on either side, with columns on tall bases, Corinthian columns in between them. You can see that the central element, with its pediment, projects into the viewer's space. You can also see that every inch of space is completely covered with decoration--figural decoration, piles of arms and armor from the enemy--so much so that it tends to dematerialize the arch.



These are all characteristics of later Roman architecture--think the Arch of Septimius Severus, which I'll show you again in a moment--which has led some scholars to date this as late as A.D. 200 or A.D. 203, 204, at the same time as the Arch of Septimius Severus. And it was long thought to be that also because no one could concede that this idea of the triple-bayed arch could turn up in let's say Augustan or Tiberian France, Gaul, before it turned up in Rome. So getting back to that issue I've raised on several occasions about center and periphery. Does everything flow from the center, or are forms sometimes developed in the periphery and then make their way back into the center, is an age-old and very interesting question to ask. But I think you can see the reasons why scholars, some scholars, have dated this to the Severan period.



Here's a view--and I'll say more about that in a moment--a view here, another view showing an engraving, giving you a sense of the kind of sculptural decoration that would've been placed at the top: the omnipresent figure in the chariot, four-horse, or in the case--four-horse, I think, in this case, chariot. And then figures of captured barbarians, as well as trophies on the apex. Here's our comparison with the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum. And I think you can see the close association between the two: the triple bay, the profusion of decoration that we see in the arch on the left-hand side as well.



Here's a detail of the attic, which shows you an interesting battle scene where the figures are very heavily outlined, as you can see here, which is unusual. Scholars have suggested, and I think correctly, that the reason for that is that these artists, in this part of Gaul, were probably working from copy books, or copy scrolls I guess I should say: drawings of battle scenes, typical Greco-Roman battle scenes, that they could use--Hellenistic battle scenes perhaps, or early Roman battle scenes--that they copied. And these were drawings, and consequently they copied them quite exactly, by showing the outlines around the figures. It's a speculation, but I think it's an interesting speculation, in this very frenzied battle scene from the uppermost part.



With regard to the date of this monument though, the plot thickens. Oh, one other detail. If you look at the side of the arch, you see an arcuated element inside. You can barely see the triangular pediment, but there's an arcuation inside an unbroken, a complete triangular pediment. So that scheme of placing the arcuation also tends to be a late feature. However, scholars who've spent a lot of time looking at the sculptural decoration of this monument, at the piles of arms and armor that one finds there--which, by the way, includes piles of arms and armor from a naval victory, which is interesting, as well as piles of arms and armor from victories on land, which has made some scholars speculate that this refers to a kind of generic victory, to victory on land and sea, by whomever this honored.



But very interesting is the fact that there is one armament that is inscribed with the name Sacrovir, S-a-c-r-o-v-i-r, Sacrovir. Sacrovir we know was someone who was living and active in the time of Tiberius. He led a revolt in this part of Gaul, in A.D. 21, against the local Roman governor and his excessive taxes. And it has been speculated that that Sacrovir, who is mentioned here, is that very same Sacrovir, and that it is very conceivable therefore that this arch was put up in the time of Tiberius. I've given you a date of A.D. 25. I believe that myself, although it does defy imagination, to a certain extent, to think of an arch, with all of these features that I've described today, as early in the south of France as A.D. 25. But it's something for you to think about in terms of our whole question of the relationship between center and periphery.



I want to show you the last group relatively quickly, just to dip into Istria, as I said I would, to the uppermost part of what is today Croatia, to look at one more arch, in a different part of the Roman world, but during the same period, the end of the first century B.C., an arch at Pola. I show you the location here of Pola, or Pula, at the very uppermost part of Croatia, very close, exactly at, I mean it's just--when I went there once, you literally, you go across the border and there you are, the Italian border, you're in Pola. And you see the rest of Croatia here, with the other great site of Split, which we'll look at next time, and of course the famous city of Dubrovnik at the base.



You see the arch extremely well preserved. Another typical Augustan arch: single bayed, two columns, Corinthian order, on a shared base. If you look at the attic, the attic is interesting. Local stone once again. Look at the attic, you'll see bases that are inscribed at the top, and those bases are very helpful in terms of telling us something quite extraordinary, and that is that this arch was put up by a woman. We know her name: Salvia Postuma, Salvia Postuma, Sa-l-v-i-a P-o-s-t-u-m-a. Salvia Postuma, who put this monument up to three male members of her family, who were involved in military operations at this particular time, died, and then were honored by this monument. I show you a reconstruction of what the uppermost part probably looked like when there were statues of those three male members of the family, possibly in their military costumes, although we don't know for sure, at the apex of the structure.



Here's a detail of it also over here, where you see victories in the spandrels; you see the Corinthian capitals; you see cupids carrying garlands; all the kind of decoration. You see some acanthus leaves, very much like those in the Ara Pacis: all the kinds of decoration that have been transported from Rome to be used, in this case, in the north of former Yugoslavia for this arch. We see the Corinthian capitals here. We see the victories here. We see the cupids with the garlands over there. We see a chariot scene here. The chariot scene is an interesting reference to the race of life, a reference to victory in athletic competition, as well as victory over--you see the bucrania there also; clearly another touch of Rome, of the Ara Pacis.



But this interesting--we've seen this throughout the semester, the close correlation in the minds of the Romans between victory in battle, victory in athletic competition, victory in the hunt, and also victory over death. And all of that comes together well in the arch here. If you look up into the vault, it's very well preserved. In the center a representation of an eagle, with a serpent, holding a serpent; this is probably a reference to death and rebirth. And remember, this is Augustan in date, so it predates the vault of the Arch of Titus in Rome. But this whole idea of placing in the vault a scene of death and rebirth, leads ultimately, I think, to that divinization scene of Titus.



I want to take you very quickly to show you an important tower tomb in the city of St. Rêmy--we're back in the south of France--St. Rêmy, the ancient Glanum, G-l-a-n-u-m; ancient Glanum, which was a very highly developed town, also in the Greek period. So here we see some overlay. We have local Celtic custom. The Greeks infiltrated here, then the Romans; all of that piled one on top of another, to make a very distinctive city. You can also see from the remains, there are extensive remains at Glanum, more than most of these ancient French towns, where you can see baths and temples and parts of houses and peristyles and so on, quite well preserved.



I show you here, for example, some honorific bases and altars. And over here a hypocaust from one of the baths, looking very much like a hypocaust we would see in Pompeii of like date. I also want to mention, in case any of you are making your way to the south of France anytime soon, it is located, the city of Glanum, located very close to the wonderful town of Les Baux; in fact, Glanum is in the shadow of Les Baux, that lies in the mountains on the top. A fabulous place to just--nothing to do with Roman antiquity but just a great place to wander, as you can see here, and every one of the caves, and there are a lot of them, have places for wine tasting. So it's a fun place to go.



Here are the two monuments. We saw the arch already. This is the tower tomb. These are referred to by the locals as Les Antiques, Les Antiques; the arch--the antiquities--the arch and the tower tomb. And the fact that they are in close proximity; I mentioned the arch may well have been a city gate. The Romans always buried their dead outside the city gate. City gate, cemetery right outside. Extremely well preserved. Tower tomb, tower tomb because it's taller than it is wide.



This area of France is particularly famous because of Vincent van Gogh, one again. Van Gogh spent his last years in an insane asylum, as many of you may know, in St. Rêmy. This insane asylum--which you can see; this is a Van Gogh painting of that asylum in which he spent those last days--is located exactly across the street from Les Antiques. So if you make the pilgrimage there, I hope you'll make the pilgrimage not only to see Van Gogh, but I hope that you're aficionados now of--in fact, I hope that you go to see Les Antiques and then also go to see the asylum of Van Gogh.



Here's the monument of the Julii, a tower tomb that was put up in St. Rêmy in 30 to 20 B.C., so the cusp, the late-Caesarian into the Augustan period. And we think the Julii represented here are in fact veterans of Julius Caesar's army, who have taken his name. Julius Caesar, all of his great military exploits in Gaul, referred to here by his veterans who have taken his name and have settled here on land that they were given in reward for their good work. Again it's a tower tomb; taller than it is wide; a stepped base; a socle with sculptural figural frieze; a quadrifrons up here; Corinthian columns; and then at the very apex a tholos that has two statues inside that tholos.



This is pretty much the best-preserved Roman tomb that we have. Everything is intact here. We believe--remember I mentioned way at the beginning that we think that a lot of these Roman ideas came to the south of France via North Italy, and we think this was indeed the case. In North Italy we know they

Professor Kleiner characterizes third-century Rome as an "architectural wasteland" due to the rapid change of emperors, continuous civil war, and a crumbling economy. There was no time to build and the only major architectural commission was a new defensive wall. The crisis came to an end with the rise of Diocletian, who created a new form of government called the Tetrarchy, or four-man rule, with two leaders in the East and two in the West. Diocletian and his colleagues instituted a major public and private building campaign in Rome and the provinces, which reflected the Empire's renewed stability. Professor Kleiner begins with Diocletian's commissions in Rome--a five-column monument dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the formation of the Tetrarchy, the restoration of the Curia or Senate House, and the monumental Baths of Diocletian. She then presents Diocletian's Palace at Split, designed as a military camp and including the emperor's octagonal mausoleum, followed by an overview of the palaces and villas of other tetrarchs in Greece and Sicily. Professor Kleiner concludes with the villa on the Via Appia in Rome belonging to Maxentius, son of a tetrarch, and the main rival of another tetrarch's son, Constantine the Great.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 21-23 (historical background), 12, 23, 59 (Aurelian Walls), 70-72 (Curia), 83-84 (Decennial Monument), 352-354 (Baths of Diocletian), 333-334 (Porta Appia), 336-340 (Villa and Tomb of Maxentius, 340 (Tor de'Schiavi)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 415-426, 441-466

Transcript



April 16, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everybody. In the one hundred years between A.D. 98 and A.D. 192, Rome had five emperors: Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus -- six if we count Lucius Verus, who was co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius for several years. In the fifty years following the death of the last of the Severan emperors, a young man by the name of Alexander Severus, who died in 235 A.D., Rome had twenty acknowledged emperors, and many more pretenders to imperial power. Rarely did anyone hold onto power for more than a few years, and some of them lasted only a matter of months.



I like to think of the emperors as changing as quickly as the seasons, in the third century A.D. Any wrong move led to assassination and replacement, not by the Senate, but by the provincial armies, by the provincial armies. Civil wars were extremely commonplace in the third century A.D., and it was a very bad time for the Roman emperors, who could literally be stabbed in the back at any moment; and many of them were. The Roman frontiers were in danger, the economy was in shambles, and the vast bureaucracy was also suffering significantly in the third century A.D., largely because of a lack of central control. In view of this chaotic situation, there was very little time to build buildings, which is obviously what's significant to us, in the context of this course.



In many ways I think one can describe, vis-à-vis architecture, the third century A.D. as essentially a wasteland, an architectural wasteland. There were no forums in the third century A.D. There were no basilicas and there were no baths. We will see that the major project in the third century A.D. was not unexpectedly, given this situation, a major defensive wall. That was the main architectural commission in the third century A.D., and it's with that wall that I want to begin today, the so-called Aurelian Walls.



Before I do, I just want to give you a glimpse of two of those twenty acknowledged emperors who made their way through the third century A.D.: the boy emperor, Gordian III, on the left-hand side of the screen, and the more mature emperor, Pupienus, who was co-emperor with a man by the name of Balbinus, for a very short time. And, in fact, just to give you a sense of the flavor of the third century, both of them [Pupienus and Balbinus] were dragged from the palace, not too long after they had ascended to imperial power, murdered and their bodies tossed in the Tiber River. If you look at these two portraits, one of the boy emperor and one of the more mature emperor, even though many, many years separate them in chronological age, I think you will see, if you look at the way in which these portraitists represented their eyes, in the likenesses of these two individuals, in these official portraits of Gordion and of Pupienus, I think you'll see, if you look at those eyes, that those eyes reveal the concern that these emperors had for the state of the Empire during the third century A.D.: a concern that was extremely warranted, obviously.



So again I want to begin with the only significant architectural project in the third century A.D. in Rome, and that is this great defensive wall system called the Aurelian Walls. The Aurelian Walls were built for two main reasons: one, because the earlier walls, the so-called Servian Walls, which we studied at the very beginning of the semester, which date to the Republic--378 B.C. is when they were dedicated; so way, way back in the beginning of our discussion of Roman architecture--you'll remember that those Servian Walls--and I can show it to you with this plan here of the walls during ancient Roman times--the Servian Walls encircled just the Seven Hills of Rome. So this central area here, where we see the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Caelian, the Quirinal Hill, that was the location of that original Servian Wall.



As the city grew, as the population grew, as more people were brought back to Rome, through the various wars and through the enslavement of large numbers of people, the city grew significantly in size. And so by this time, by the third century, the Servian Wall was essentially useless to protect Rome from those barbarians that were literally at the gates at this particular point in Roman history, so they needed to build that wall to protect the city. But the other reason was because of what was going on, on the frontiers, because Rome was more in danger than it had ever been before. Because of the kind of political and economic situation in Rome that I've just described, there was a need for further stability and the need to build this second set of walls: again, the so-called Aurelian Walls.



And this plan shows you how much further out they went than the Servian Walls, all the way to the Tiber River. It didn't encompass the area across the Tiber, where Hadrian's tomb, Hadrian's mausoleum, the Castel Sant'Angelo is located, but for the most part it did cover the main of the city. And you can see, it went far enough out that it even encompassed some of the major city roads, or the beginnings of some of those major city roads.



A view of the Aurelian Walls itself, very well preserved, here on the right-hand side of the screen, and a comparison of them with the Servian Walls, on the left. With regard to the Aurelian Walls, they are named for the emperor Aurelian, who was emperor of Rome between 270 and 275 A.D. We believe that Aurelian began the walls, either in 270 or 271. They were not finished by his death in 275, and they were completed by his successor, a man by the name of Probus, P-r-o-b-u-s; Probus completed the Aurelian Walls, and dedicated them right after Aurelian's death, in 275 A.D. The Aurelian Walls had a twelve-mile circuit around the city of Rome. They were originally 25 and one half feet tall, and there were eighteen major gateways in the Aurelian Walls; eighteen major gateways. I think you can see from this view on the right-hand side of the screen that the building materials were concrete faced with brick -- brick-faced concrete. You see that very clearly here.



And, of course, it's important to keep in mind that that is different than what the original Republican walls were made out of. Those were made out of cut-stone, ashlar blocks. You see them here in this section of the Servian Walls, that I show you once again, blocks that are laid in the scheme of headers and stretchers, that we talked about at the very beginning of the semester, when we discussed early Roman wall building, both in Rome and in the early colonies. And here again the Aurelian Walls, with their up-to-date concrete faced with brick. But it's a sign of the times that scholars who have examined these bricks have determined that they were not all new bricks, that many of them were re-used bricks from earlier periods, from the previous century in particular. And the reason for that probably has to do with the fact that again because there was so little architectural activity during this period there was simply no need to make bricks in large numbers, and when they needed them for this particular project, they reached back and used some that had been lying around of earlier manufacture. So I think again that underscores the incertitude of this particular period of time.



Here's another very good view of the Aurelian Walls, as they look today, brick-faced concrete construction once again. And what's impressive about the Aurelian Walls is how much of them are preserved. When I showed you the Servian Walls, we could only look at bits and pieces of those walls, preserved in different parts of Rome, especially near the Rome train station. But in the case of the Aurelian Walls, we have a very large extent of those walls still preserved today, which is a tribute to how well they were built, that they have stood the test of time. And, in fact, when one visits Rome, when you come into Rome from Leonardo da Vinci Airport, the first things that you see of the city are the walls. You go through those walls and it announces to you, of course, that you are in fact about to enter the city of Rome.



I mentioned that the Aurelian Walls had eighteen gateways. Some of them are still preserved, and I want to show you one of them here, just to give you a sense of what these gateways were like. This is the so-called Porta Appia. It also dates to the same time as the walls, 275 A.D.; called the Porta Appia because it is at the exact location of the Via Appia, or the Appian Way in Rome. The gate--I'm going to show you how the gate looked in the time, in 275, and then how it was altered somewhat later. You can see from the Monument List that although it was built originally in 275, it was restored by two Byzantine emperors by the name of Honorius and Arcadius, so this is in the post-Roman period, and they did that in A.D. 401 to 402. And the gate, as you see it today, extremely well preserved, is the gate of the restoration of the fifth century A.D.; whereas this view, this restored view from Ward-Perkins, shows you what the gate would've looked like in 275. In 275 it had two arcuated entranceways, as you can see well here. It had rounded towers, rounded towers. It had small windows with arcuations at the top, as you can also see, curvature at the top. And then Ward-Perkins believes--there's some controversy about this--but he believes it was already crenulated in the third century A.D.



If you compare that to the gate as restored by Honorius and Arcadius, you can see that they have removed one of the entranceways. There's a single arcuated entranceway now in the center of the gate, and they have also encased the rounded towers in these square blocks, as you can see here, they've left the uppermost part rounded but not the bottom part. So they have changed it somewhat, but I think it still gives you, again, a very good sense of what this gate, and many of the other gates that were part of this very important defensive wall system, built in the third century, looked like.



What we see happening toward the end of the third century A.D. is the return of a centralized, of a strong, centralized government to Rome and to the Roman Empire, after the bloody third century A.D. and its numerous fly-by-night emperors, as I call them here. And the vehicle of this return of a stable government was the foundation of what we call the Tetrarchy; the Tetrarchy, which means literally four-man rule. The Tetrarchy was the brainchild of a man by the name of Diocletian. Diocletian was a Dalmatian; not a dog, but somebody who came from ancient Dalmatia, now Croatia, from Dalmatia.



He was an imperial bodyguard who rose to great heights and eventually became emperor of Rome. He began his own rise to power in 283 A.D.; 283 A.D. But it was in 293, after ten years into trying to go it alone, that he realized that the Roman Empire had become much too vast for one man to be able to govern it alone, and he came up with this extraordinary idea to have four-man rule. We've seen co-emperors before, we've seen two-man rule--there was two-man rule initially with Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Versus, for example--but we have never before seen a four-man rule. But he felt that the Empire was sprawling enough that it really needed emperors in four different locations to enable the Empire to be governed and to enable stability to be returned. And that was the concept of the Tetrarchy, which again he founded in 293.



By founding the Tetrarchy, he made himself the main emperor, the Augustus, but the Augustus in the eastern part of the Empire, and I'm sure he chose that because of his own roots in Dalmatia, in again what is now Croatia. He chose a man by the name of Galerius to be his Caesar, to be his second-in-command, in the eastern part of the Empire. He selected Maximian, Maximian to be Augustus in the West, and then Constantius Chlorus to be the Caesar in the West: Constantius Chlorus, more well known as the father of Constantine the Great than he is as a Tetrarch, but he again, Constantius Chlorus, was the designated Caesar in the West.



Order was restored through the vehicle of the Tetrarchy. And what that means for us, in this course on Roman Architecture, is that stability returned, stability that enabled major architectural commissions to once again be done, both in Rome and also around the provinces, and particularly in the provinces that these individuals made their capitals, in a sense, and where they lived, and where we'll see they built their own palaces. So when we speak of tetrarchic architecture, I think we have to keep in mind that we are talking not just about the renovation of Rome--I mean, Rome itself, the renaissance, let's call it that instead of renovation; the renaissance of Rome, Rome's rebirth under the Tetrarchy and under Diocletian--but we are also talking about architecture, as we'll see, that was put up in the provinces, also under the aegis of the Tetrarchs.



I want to just show you what the Tetrarchs looked like, and their portraiture is also illustrative of what their major architectural agenda was. We see a coin portrait on the left-hand side of the screen of Diocletian, that gives his title, Augustus, as you can see here: a typical Roman coin profile portrait that shows him with a closely cropped military hairstyle and beard. But the much more--and he is represented this way in his coins, you know, from 283, the first decade from 283 to about 293.



But the image that becomes the image of the Tetrarchs as a whole is the sort of thing that you see here. We begin to see, with the formation of the Tetrarchy, representations of them as a group. It's sort of a one for all and all for one concept, that they are shown in mutual support, holding each other, in fact embracing each other, in mutual support as they try to re-stabilize the government. This is a wonderful group portrait of the four Tetrarchs. It's done in this reddish-purplish stone that comes from Egypt called porphyry, p-o-r-p-h-y-r-y, and a stone that we'll see used extensively in this period. This portrait is carved out of that.



We don't--we have thoughts about where it might have come from, perhaps even Constantinople. But it ended up in Venice, and any of you who make your way to San Marco in Venice--it's not immediately obvious where it is, but if you stand in front of San Marco, facing it, and go off a bit to the right, you will see this incredible porphyry group, hugging one corner of the building over here. And again you can see them--it's done--what's interesting to us, I think, is the fact that it's done in a very geometric abstract style. It doesn't look realistic. They are done--their proportions are stumpy and their bodies, their military costumes and their faces seem almost more like--and the hats that they wear, these Pannonian caps--seem almost more like geometric shapes than they seem like real clothing and the like. And that is part and parcel of a certain aesthetic that we see developing, this interest in geometric and abstract forms, that we see in portraiture. But we also see, which is important for us today, we see that in architecture as well, that interest.



And I think--and perhaps it's going too far, but I don't think so--I think that the taste for that particular formulation has to do in part with this, the fact that they believe they have returned, or they're trying to return stability to the government, so they choose these very solid, geometric, abstract forms to represent their images -- be they portraiture or be they, as we'll see, monumental works of architecture.



Perhaps it's not surprising to see that when Diocletian begins to put up monumental architecture in Rome, he chooses first public monuments, public monuments that are going to be seen and that are going to speak to this return of stability to Rome, and he chooses to put them in as visible place as he possibly can. And what's the most visible place in the city of Rome but the Roman Forum, the great Forum Romanum. So we see Diocletian commissioning a monument to put up in the Roman Forum. That monument is referred to by a variety of names.



We usually call it--and I've indicated this for you on the Monument List--we usually call it, the preferred name for it is the Decennial Monument, the Decennial Monument. But it is also sometimes called the Five Column Monument, and it is sometimes called the Tetrarchic Monument. It's called the Tetrarchic Monument because it honors the four Tetrarchs. It's called the Five Column Monument because it's made up, as we'll see, of five columns. And it's called the Decennial Monument because it honors the decennalia, the ten-year rule of the Tetrarchy; the Tetrarchy founded in 293, the monument is put up in 303, so ten years of rule.



And it also honored the twentieth anniversary, the vicennalia, v-i-c-e-n-n-a-l-i-a, the vicennalia, of Diocletian, because Diocletian had become emperor in 283. So he's lasted twenty years--which is extraordinary considering some emperors of the third century only lasted a matter of months--he's lasted twenty years, and his Tetrarchy has lasted ten years. And it's time for a celebration, and he puts up a major monument in the Roman Forum.



Let me show you via this map first, this plan of the Roman Forum as it would've looked between the third century and the seventh century A.D. We see a number of buildings that we have looked at together before. We can see in the uppermost part the Tabularium, the Temple of Vespasian. We see the Arch of Septimius Severus up here. We see some buildings we did not talk about; for example, the Temple of the Divine Julius Caesar, and a couple of basilicas that were put here in the late Republic and into--and finished in the Augustan period.



The two buildings that we're going to look at today are the Senate House, or the Curia Julia, but also at the Rostra, or what's behind the Rostra. You see the Rostra there, right in the center; that's the dais from which major speeches were made. If you look right behind the Rostra, you will see four columns on a curve, and then another column right behind them. That is the so-called Five Column Monument, of the Tetrarchy, that we see there, right behind the Rostra.



Now here we're looking at a Google Earth image, from the same vantage point, that shows us again the Colosseum, the Victor Emmanuel Monument, the Capitoline Hill, the Palatine Hill, the Circus Maximus. Here the Forum in the center. And we can locate the Five Column Monument by--let me see, here we have the Curia, here we have the Arch of Septimius Severus, and then right next to the Arch of Septimius Severus, essentially to the left of it, was the location of the Five Column Monument, right behind the Rostra. Now the problem is that all we have left of this so-called Five Column Monument is a single base, one base of one of the columns.



And you can see that base on display, right in front of, on a base, right--on a base, on a different base made out of brick, as you see here--the base of that one column, right in front of the Arch of Septimius Severus, dwarfed by the Arch of Septimius Severus. In fact, I'm always on the lookout when I'm in that part of the Forum to see if anybody looks at the column base, and nobody ever does, they're so taken both with the Arch of Septimius Severus, with the Baroque church that lies behind and with the Curia or Senate House that we're all going to look at today, that they don't happen to notice this.



But that is all that survives. So you might ask yourself, well then how in the world do we know there was a five column monument behind the Rostra, and that this is one of those columns? Because we have a depiction of it on the Arch of Constantine, which we'll be looking at on Tuesday, the early fourth-century A.D. arch. One of the scenes that shows Constantine himself, is located in the Roman Forum, and we see Constantine, now headless, with some of his attendants and other individuals, standing on the Rostra, making an address to the people. He's surrounded--this is very interesting, we'll talk about why next time--surrounded by seated portraits of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, identifiable by their portraits, and he's making an address. And if you look very carefully you will see behind him are five columns; five columns that have statues on top of them. That is the Five Column Monument that stood behind the Rostra.



So that, combined with that preserved base, gives us a very good sense of what that monument might have looked like. Now you may be asking yourself, "What is she talking about, five columns? There are only four Tetrarchs. Is she misspeaking here?" No, I'm speaking correctly, there were five columns, but one of those columns was put up to Jupiter, Jupiter: the head god, Jupiter who was the patron god of Diocletian. So we see Jupiter in one column on his own, back behind the others, and then the other four columns of the Tetrarchs, each with a base with sculptural figural decoration down below. The shaft was plain, and then a statue of each of the four Tetrarchs and a statue of Jupiter on the top. And we think that the column and statue of Jupiter were probably a little bit taller, as is indicated here, because he was after all a god, than the others.



And you can see the way it is located behind the Rostra, so that again if someone were speaking from the Rostra, this is exactly what you'd be seeing behind, just as we see in the Arch of Constantine. You also see its location, as it faces the Temple of Divine Julius Caesar--which is probably not a coincidence; we do see that Diocletian tried to link himself to Caesar and others, great leaders of the Roman past--and then this basilica completed by Augustus. This was a very carefully chosen location by Diocletian, to link himself, after this bloody third century, as I mentioned, to link himself with the great leaders of the Roman past.



I want to show you quickly, because this is again, of course, in architecture and not in sculpture, but I do want to show you just quickly the scenes on the base. Because I think one of the interesting detective work one can do is to try to figure out, since we have only one base, whose base was it, which of the four Tetrarchs, or was it Jupiter's base? And I've played that game myself, and I'll give you my idea, and you'll see whether you think it's a good one or not. We look at the scene at the top uppermost part – we're looking at the four sides of that sculptured base. At the top you see two victories, with a shield, and that shield has the word in the center, decennalia, decennalia: that's how we know it's dedicated to the decennial anniversary, ten-year rule, of the Tetrarchs. You can also see barbarians down below, so a reference to those who have been conquered.



And if you look very carefully, you'll see that the figures are outlined in the way that we saw them at Orange and also at St. Rémy. And then some of the items, including the arms and armor, are actually inscribed, carved, on the stone, directly on the stone. So this very interesting use of outlining here. Here I don't think the reason for it is the same. I don't think they're looking at copy books, but rather that there has been--there's now an interest in this kind of outlining for visual effect.



Up here we see a sacrifice of three animals being brought in for sacrifice, and the men with their axes who are going to slit their throats ultimately -- the sacrifice obviously in honor of this decennial celebration, this anniversary celebration, making reference to ten-year rule of the Tetrarchy. Here's a scene down here--unfortunately, in all of these scenes where we seem to have the emperor or emperors, the heads are no longer preserved. So here we have a sacrifice scene, also a sacrifice being made in honor of this decennial anniversary, but the emperor, represented here, who was sacrificing, whose base this probably was, his face is gone. But you can see he's accompanied by Roma, by the Senate, the personification of the Senate, by Mars, by Victory, who crowns him with a wreath, as you can see here. And this looks like a figure of Sol Helios, with the rayed crown. So a whole panoply of divinities by whom he is being honored and with whom he wants to associate himself.



This is the most important relief, I believe, in terms of speculating about whose base this might have been. We see four figures, four adult males, in the foreground, with togas, all of them headless unfortunately. But four of them--that's no coincidence, all four standing there. So while we see one of them--this is his base--one of them sacrificing here; I guess one could argue it's Diocletian as the head of the Tetrarchy, that would be another possibility. But the four of them represented here. But if you look very closely, one of them is accompanied by a child. So my speculation would be since one of them is accompanied by a child, and since it is Constantine who was thought most likely to be the one to eventually succeed the Tetrarchs, or become a Tetrarch himself, I would speculate--and this is pure speculation--that this may have been the base of Constantius Chlorus, of his father Constantius Chlorus, and that the clue there is Constantine.



Another building that Diocletian was interested in, in the Roman Forum, in terms of associating himself with Caesar and also with Augustus, was the Senate House. The Curia Julia it is called, the Curia Julia: because it was actually not built in the Diocletianic period, but built initially--begun by Caesar, begun by Julius Caesar to provide Rome with a Senate House in the Roman Forum -- begun by Caesar and completed by Augustus after Caesar's death. But the building was--and that's why it's named Curia Julia after the Julian family, that Caesar, and also Augustus, were a part of.



But that building, the Curia Julia, was destroyed, very seriously destroyed, in a fire in Rome in 283 A.D. And so what Diocletian does is he restores it between 284--he begins already in 284, well before the formation of the Tetrarchy, and he completes it in 305 A.D.; this restoration. It continues to be called the Curia Julia, but it is at this point a Diocletianic building, but one that clearly--where he instructed his designers to try to keep it as close to the original as possible.



Now what you're looking at here on the right-hand side of the screen is a coin that comes from the period of the emperor Augustus, and it purports to represent--I don't think there's any question that it represents, given its inscription and so on--the Senate House in Rome, as it would have looked as completed by Augustus, and he's in fact celebrating the completion of this monument, and associating himself, through this coin, with his divine adoptive father, Julius Caesar. If we look at the form--if we look at the exterior of this monument, as it is depicted on the coin, you will see that it is a regular square, the front of the building looks like a square, with a very large pediment at the top, although I think that was accentuated here, its size, in order to allow the die cutter to include the sculpture in the pediment, and also the sculpture decorating the eaves.



We see the doorway right here. We see there seems to be a triple window, up above the doorway. And if you look very carefully you will see that there seems to be a portico, a series of columns, that are there to relive the severity of the otherwise very geometrically ordered façade. So that's what we think it looked like in the time of Caesar, based on that coin. You see it over here in plan. This is a plan of the forum in Rome, in the Augustan period, 10 A.D. We see the buildings that were there at that time: the basilicas; the Temple of Divine Julius Caesar; the Rostra, but of course without the Five Column Monument; no Arch of Septimius Severus. But we do see the Curia. And you see it here in plan as a very plain, open, rectangular box, in a sense. So even in its Caesarian and Augustan beginnings, it seems to have been a very straightforward, matter-of-fact kind of a building.



This is a restored view of what we believe it looked like after the restoration by Diocletian. You won't be surprised to hear that the materials were different, that it's a building--in its restored version it was made out of concrete faced with brick, exposed brick. So very much a building of its own time. It would not have looked like that in the time of Caesar and Augustus. But they have, in every other way, they have kept to the underlying geometry of the form, to the use of the triple window with a curved top, as you can see here an arcuated top, a pediment up above. We don't know whether the second version had pedimental sculpture in it, or other decorative sculpture. The doorway down below. But the severity of the brick-faced, the exposed brick façade has been alleviated somewhat by the placement of marble revetment at the bottom part of the wall, behind a series of columns. So they have kept that portico, that set of columns, to relive the severity, but also to make this building look, as much as they could, like the original Caesarian and Augustan structure.



This is what the Curia looks like today. It is extremely well preserved, as you can see. Yes, it's lacking its marble revetment, and it's lacking its portico. But in every other way you can see very well exactly what this building looked like in the time of Diocletian: concrete faced with brick, with the very simple windows, and this very geometric, abstract ordering. Which again I believe--you know, I think the explanation for that is twofold: one, that they are trying to maintain the look of the original Julian building, but also because this is again the aesthetic of the time, this decision to make buildings in a very geometrically ordered, abstract way; I believe again to reflect the stability of their new government.



This building, the Curia Julia, owes its excellent condition to the fact that it, like so many buildings we've talked about this semester, was reused over time. We know that it was turned into a church already in the seventh century B.C.; that it was restored in the twelfth and in the sixteen century A.D.--did I say seventh century B.C.? If I did, I meant A.D.; seventh century A.D.; twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and then again in the seventeenth century. And it was in the seventeenth century that it, like so many other Roman structures, was transformed into a Baroque church by an architect by the name of Martino Longhi the Younger--I've put his name on the Monument List for you, Martino Longhi the Younger--and it was re-consecrated as San'Adriano, Saint Hadrian, al Foro Romano, San'Adriano al Foro Romano, Saint Hadrian in the Roman Forum was the church.



And when I say Baroque church, I mean a Baroque church. It was deconsecrated by Mussolini in the 1930s, Mussolini returning it to its original ancient form, as you can see over here. But this photograph shows the work that was being done in the '30s to dismantle this Baroque church into which the Curia had become. I mean, it's really hard to believe that this was the Curia in the seventeenth century, but that's exactly what it looked like, as well as in the early twentieth century. And you can see a bell-tower had been added, buttresses had been added to the structure, completely encasing the Curia in a Baroque church. And we see that being dismantled in this view over here.



And I have a view I can show you also of the interior. This was the interior in the seventeenth century; impossible to see that original simple box-like interior that was there in the time of Diocletian, and probably there in the time of Caesar and Augustus, so filled is it with the usual Baroque paraphernalia of elaborate stucco work and angels flying to the skies and these--not that we haven't seen this kind of thing in Roman architecture, we of course have. But you can see that the original shape of this particular building has been completely disguised by Martino Longhi the Younger as he redoes the Curia as a Baroque church.



This is--when they took all of that Baroque accretion off, this is what they ended up with. This is what the Curia looked like--probably very similar to this in the time of Caesar and Augustus--what it looked like under Diocletian, and what it again looks like today. You can see from this view this very simple, box-like shape for the interior of this structure: plain walls; a coffered, a flat coffered ceiling; the only light brought in by a series of very simple windows, with arcuated tops, allowing light into the system. And then down below--again the brick facing, the concrete and brick facing exposed--but with the down below probably some marble revetment on the wall down here. Very simple niches, arcuated and rectangular niches, but very, very simple ones.



And then here you see the benches, the stone benches, on which the senators would have sat when they were deliberating--or stood in front of, because they got up a lot and orated--but stood in front of when they delivered their speeches, or sat. And then down below the original marble revetted floor is still preserved. And I can show you two views here, in color, of that floor, to give you a sense--all done in marbles, marbles brought from different parts of the world. But the usual colors that the Romans liked for most of their marble pavements, a white or off-white, maroon, green and black, but very nicely done for this--very simple, very geometrically ordered, but very beautiful interior.



With regard to public architecture, Diocletian also built a major bath in Rome, following the lead of Caracalla and many emperors before him, to provide for the Roman people a place where they could go and enjoy themselves, as well as learn. Because you'll remember that by this time these major imperial bath structures--and this is one of those--placed the bathing block inside a much larger precinct, that included rooms around it that served as lecture halls and meeting halls and seminar rooms and places for Greek and Latin libraries and the like, and we see that same scheme being used here.



The baths were built between A.D. 298 and 306 by Diocletian in Rome. They're located near the train station today; so very close to those remaining fragments of the Servian Walls. And you see again that plan here. And you see that the outer precinct has one of these large hemicycles that may have been used for performances, as you can see, and that it is like the other imperial baths that we've looked at, with the central bathing rooms in the center, in axial relationship to one another, and in the usual sequence, and then with other rooms disposed around them on either side, in a symmetrical way.



We see at Number 4 the natatio or swimming pool. We see--which has a scalloped, the bottom side, as you see it here, is scalloped, the wall is. Number 3 is the frigidarium, the cold room of the baths, which had a triple groin vaulted ceiling. From there we go into the tepidarium; you see it here, a small circular structure with radiating arms that give it a cross shape. And then down below a very interesting caldarium, because we see that Diocletian and his architects have rejected the round caldarium, with the radiating alcoves, looking so much like the Pantheon, as we discussed, and almost as large, from the Baths of Caracalla. They've rejected that in favor of a more rectangular shape, that's more similar to the shape of the frigidarium, but with radiating apses that have a series of columns that allow views and vistas from one to the other.



This is another version of the same plan, from Ward-Perkins in this particular case that shows again the natatio, the frigidarium. Here you can see better the way in which the circle becomes a cross shape for the tepidarium; and then here the caldarium below, where you can also see better, I believe, the columns on those alcoves that allow views, both from inside out and outside in. And here still another one. This is the one that you have on your Monument List that shows you those spaces, once again from the other direction. The natatio, where you can see very well the scalloped wall; the frigidarium, where you can see the triple-groin vault; the tepidarium with its round shape and radiating arms; and then most importantly the caldarium with probably also triple groin vaulted, just like the frigidarium, but with radiating alcoves; and then all of these other rooms disposed among them symmetrically.



Now what's very interesting also, in terms of more architecture in later times, is the Baths of Diocletian were also reused, but in this case not for a single building but for a variety of buildings, including a major museum of antiquities, a planetarium, and also a church, the famous Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Saint Mary of the Angels. Now while this plan is still on the screen, I want to show you when the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli was redesigned--and one of the redesigners, by the way, was Michelangelo--when it was redesigned what they did was they took the alcove--from where we're standing the bottom alcove of the caldarium--they used that as the curved façade of their church. They used the tepidarium as the vestibule. They used the frigidarium as the main space of the church.



And also and they--and so that becomes the church, that main, the bottom part of the caldarium, the tepidarium, and the frigidarium become the church. And then some of these other spaces are used again for other kinds of buildings, including a planetarium. I call your attention especially to the ones at the upper right and the upper left, both of which are octagonal spaces, as you can see comparable to earlier octagonal spaces under Nero or under Domitian. And one of those rooms, this one to our right, but to the left when you're facing the entrance to the church today, is still very well preserved; and I'm going to show you that in a moment. First here's a view into the church, into the nave of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which again what you're looking at is the original frigidarium of the Baths of Diocletian. You can see all the things one usually sees in a frigidarium, and I show you a restored view of what we think the frigidarium of the Baths of Caracalla [correction: Diocletian] looked like in antiquity. And you can see there's a close resemblance between the two. The groin vaults are still preserved. We see original columns here, granite columns, with capitals--some of the capitals are ancient, some of them are not--and we see a lot of color, just as we would've seen in the original Baths of Diocletian.



One difference is that we see the groin vaults in the Santa Maria degli Angeli are white, and that is the work of Michelangelo. Michelangelo decided that he wanted something much plainer for the vaulting of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and it was he who stuccoed it over, and no one ever dared to change Michelangelo's work. But another architect by the name of Luigi Vanvitelli, V-a-n-v-i-t-e-l-l-i--love the name, Luigi Vanvitelli--was at work in the Santa Maria degli Angeli interior, in the eighteenth century; precisely in 1749. He came in to spruce up the decoration, and it was Vanvitelli who added to the original Roman granite columns, who added these mottled--you see these mottled pilasters; I'll show you a detail of them in a moment with their capitals--some new capitals to match the ancient Roman capitals. He added a lot of the stucco decoration that you see here now, and a lot of the altarpieces were put in, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, to make it the church that it needed to become.



But if I show you a detail of Vanvitelli's work, you can see--you know, as you stand in Santa Maria degli Angeli, one tries to figure out what's ancient and what is modern--but you can see here what seems to be a granite shaft, from an ancient column, with a new Corinthian capital, designed by Vanvitelli, that imitates those, the Roman ones that are there. But all of this mottled work, and all of the stucco decoration that you see over here, added by Vanvitelli in the eighteenth century. But you've seen enough Roman, ancient Roman architecture, especially of the baroque kind, to know that this sort of thing did exist in Roman times. And I think Vanvitelli has actually done a pretty good job of giving us a sense of what the figidarium of these baths would have looked like in the time of Diocletian.



Now here's the façade, and so you see exactly what I described before. This is one of the alcoves. You can see the concrete brick-faced alcove that they have--I mean, this is the simplest façade of any in Rome. There's nothing quite like this. But it's so typical of the Italians to take wonderful advantage of what there is. And so in this case they decided best to leave it as it is; it speaks for itself. They just use that alcove. They added a couple of doors, created a niche, slapped the name, Basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli, on the front, very simply, put a cross at the top, and this became the façade into the church, and it has remained this, to this day.



Here's another view of the Baths of Diocletian, as they look today. We're looking at the outside, where we can see the outside of the frigidarium, with its windows and its groin vaulting exposed on the outside. This is the tepidarium, and the roofing of the tepidarium. And over here you can see the curved façade that's--the part of the caldarium that survives uses the façade of the church.



And then as you stand here, if you go to the right, you can go and look at what one of those octagonal rooms looks like today. And what they've done, they've taken advantage--this is a spectacular space. This was just--we don't know exactly what purpose this served in the bath originally, but it's actually a space that's more similar to the caldarium of Caracalla's Baths than it is to anything else in the Baths of Diocletian. But you can see that they have taken advantage of this extraordinary octagonal shape, with radiating alcoves, going back to Nero's Domus Transitoria, Domus Aurea, to use as a place to display some of the greatest works of sculpture in the part of these baths that now serves as a museum.



One very interesting feature though that I want to point out to you, that will be important for something later we talk about today and for Tuesday's lecture, is the fact that you do see them using here windows in the lower part of the dome: windows, arcuated windows, to allow light into the system. We see this development in late antiquity where they move from providing light through the oculus to providing light through a series of windows. And again they're sophisticated enough in their use of concrete to be able to do that, and we see that's a trend.



Diocletian was as interested in private architecture as he was in public architecture. He was a man--you can tell a lot about him just from what I've told you. He was very organized and he planned ahead for his own abdication eventually, his own retirement, and he wanted to live ultimately back where his roots were, on the Croatian, on the Dalmatian Coast. And he built for himself a palace in a place called Split, in what is now Croatia. And I show you again the map of this part of the world. If you look at Pola, that we--I can't reach it from where I am, but if you look at Pola, where that is, and down the Dalmatian Coast, you'll see Split, right below that. Dubrovnik is at the base. This is actually a view I took of Dubrovnik, just to give you a sense of this part of the world. It's magnificently beautiful there, and one can imagine why Diocletian was drawn to return to his homeland for his palace.



So we are looking here at the plan of the Palace of Diocletian, which is extremely well preserved; this is from Ward-Perkins. And you should be immediately struck by this palace, because it--which dates, by the way, to 300 to 305 A.D. We see here something that I'm sure you've all noticed already, and that is that he has built this palace in the form of a Roman castrum; it's a Roman military camp. It is a little city; it's a city in its own right, in the form of a Roman military camp. Why did he do that? That's interesting. Well I think it had something to do with the fact that the structure was located on the sea, right on a promontory on the sea, and could easily have been attacked. And times were still--he was still--he had brought stability back, yes, but he was very aware of what had preceded him, in the third century, and desirous of protecting himself and his possessions in his palace, on the Dalmatian Coast, and so he builds it in the form of a castrum.



You can see all the elements of a typical Roman military camp, just as we saw in city building, urban planning, from the Republic on. It's rectangular in shape. It has walls. It has watchtowers; you can see they are alternately rectangular and octagonal watchtowers. It has entrances and exits. It has a cardo and a decumanus that cross at the intersection of the palace. You can see there are--the main gateway is on the northern side; the southern side faces the sea. As you walk from the northern entranceway, along the cardo and the decumanus, so to speak, of this palace, you will see that they are colonnaded, just as they usually are in the eastern part of the Empire, but not in the western part of the Empire. As you walk along from the entranceway, you enter into a public court over here, very elaborate, that's still preserved, with an arcuated lintel; I'm going to show you that in a moment. Then into this domed area here, with alcoves.



But note that on either side of this open space, with the arcuated lintel, which is called the peristyle of the villa, you can see on one side a small temple, which is a temple to Jupiter, the patron god of Diocletian, and on the other side a mausoleum, an octagonal tomb. Now that should strike you as very interesting and very unusual. We have not seen a tomb as part of palace architecture before. This is new, to late antiquity. This probably has to do in part with again Diocletian planning this as his place of retirement. He knew he was going to retire there, he knew he was going to die there, and he wanted to make sure that he supplied for himself a tomb--he was not going to be buried in one of these major mausolea in Rome; he wanted to be buried at home, and so he plans for this by building an octagonal--not a round, like Augustus and Hadrian--but an octagonal tomb, with a porch here in the villa.



And note that it is right across from the Temple of Jupiter; no coincidence there. Go through the domed room, domed space, into the private wing of the house. You see a room here with a basilican shape. We're not exactly sure what it was used for, but probably some kind of reception hall. And then here a series of interestingly shaped rooms, that was where the emperor's private quarters were located.



This is a restored view of what this fortressed palace would have looked like, when it was built in the fourth century. We see here all of the things I've already described: the outer walls; the watchtowers; the entranceway on the north; the colonnaded streets. You can see the octagonal tomb rising up over there, across from the Temple of Jupiter; and then down here the private area, the private wing. And you can see how the southern side faces the sea, and there seems to have been an arcuated lintel on that side. We've seen that that's grown in influence and importance since it was first used in the time of Hadrian.



This is the Porta Aurea, or the northern gate of the palace. You see it in a restored view from Ward-Perkins. Rectangular entranceway, lintel, window-like, with grates above; niches on either side, with arcuated pediments. But most interestingly is the upper tier where you see a series of columns on brackets that support arcades. This whole idea of arcades on columns began, as we know, later in antiquity, and continues to be important into the late third and early fourth centuries. We saw it at the Severan Forum at Leptis Magna, where you can see again columns, this arcaded colonnade here. We saw it in residential architecture at Ostia, late residential architecture. Think of the House of Fortuna Annonaria where we have those columns with arches above them that separate the fountain court from the triclinium. So I just wanted to make the point that we see it not only at Diocletian's Palace, but it's very common in late Roman residential and civic architecture as well.



This is a view of the peristyle as it looks today. We are walking--we've come from the North Gate, we're walking along, we're hitting the peristyle. We're going to be going from the peristyle into that domed area here. Imagine views through the columns of the peristyle--and some of those columns are still preserved, as you can see them, the original columns--views clearly of the Temple of Jupiter and of the Mausoleum of Diocletian on the other side. Arcuated lintel here inside a complete pediment. So that scheme also used as the major decoration of the peristyle in the Palace of Diocletian.



Here's a view of what the small Temple of Jupiter looks like. We're looking--it originally had a statue of Jupiter; now it has a statue of St. John the Baptist. But you can see the shape -- very much like the Curia, a box-like shape. Very simple, in this case not with a flat coffered ceiling, but with a barrel vaulted coffered ceiling. But again very simple, very geometric. And we can see that that barrel vault is exposed on the exterior. We can see the shape of the barrel vault from the outside, as well as from the inside.



Here a view of the octagonal tomb. The plan of that tomb: an octagon with colonnade around it; columns on the inside; radiating rectangular and curved niches. But a porch, the whole idea of the porch--not unlike the Pantheon, except that it's octagonal instead of round--porch on the front; deep porch; freestanding columns; façade orientation; single staircase. So this is very similar to things that we've seen earlier. And two quick views, one an engraving of what the mausoleum, the octagonal mausoleum would have looked like, with its--you can see it's faced with stone--with its entranceway façade and staircase. And here you can see it is very well preserved still today, in Split, where you see the surrounding columns. You can see the octagonal shape and the stonework, all still very well preserved, as is the interior.



The interior very ornate, with columns projecting from the walls, supporting these projecting entablatures, deeply drilled, dematerialized, in the baroque manner, with lots of sculptural decoration: representations of victory and death--victory over hunting and victory in war--and consequently this close association, as we've seen, among all of those. And then scenes of both, with a portrait of Diocletian and a portrait of his wife, Prisca, both of those being carried in these wreaths, up to the heavens, by flying cupids.



Here's another view, perhaps a better one that just gives you some of the sense of the over-decoration, over-ornamentation, the baroque effects of the interior of the tomb. So a very different feel to the Temple of Jupiter, than to the Tomb of Diocletian himself. Here he's gone all out and commissioned the most ornate possible decoration, with all the baroque effects that we've described, in two tiers, for the interior of his mausoleum.



I want to show you a succession of other palaces, each fairly quickly, other palaces that were built during this period, that may have been--well in some cases we know for sure, but in other cases we're not as sure whether they were in fact palaces for the Tetrarchs. This is the one that's the least certain. It's a palace in the western part of the Empire that we believe may have been the palace of Maximian, Augustus in the West. And in fact I should--yes, so let's look at that first. And that dates, as you can see from your Monument List, to sometime in the early fourth century A.D.



Now if you look at the plan of this quickly, you will see that it is very, very different in feel from--and in plan--from the Palace of Diocletian at Split. This may have something to do with the personality of Maximian, or whoever the commissioner was, but it may also have to do with the fact that this is not on the sea but in a remote town in south-central Sicily, which was much less likely to be under attack than the palace at Split. In fact, as you look at this, you must be reminded, I'm sure, of the Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli; it is very similar to that: a sprawling villa with a series of very interestingly shaped rooms, spread across the terrain, interacting with nature, just as they did at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. Very much a countryside villa, and I think Hadrian's Villa clearly the main model.



As we walk through this axonometric view, you see we enter on the western end. At 1 we see a horseshoe shaped vestibule, with columns all around this villa; just like Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, does have a lot of columns. We see those here. Then you make an abrupt right into this passageway here, at 2(a). Then into the peristyle court, with columns all the way around; a pool in the center, an interestingly shaped pool in the center; and then a series of living spaces, to either side. On 2(c) we see a transverse corridor, which is very important because it links various parts of the villa to one another, but it was also very decorated with mosaics, many of which are preserved; and I'll show you those in a moment.



2(d), with its niche at the end; probably a kind of audience hall; 3 is where the private compartment is for the emperor, and you can see that that too is fronted by a small horseshoe shaped area. Then over here, at 4, we see a tri-lobed dining room; the main dining room of the house with the triple lobes. And then down below a forecourt for that that is oval in shape. So some very interestingly shaped rooms, and where we see a combination of the interest in curvilinear shapes, just as in Hadrian's Villa, and in the use of columnar architecture; references to Classical Greece. Over here, at 5, we see several rooms, very interestingly shaped again, that make up the baths, the private baths of this particular place.



One can visit it still today. Parts of it are very well preserved. We're clearly looking at the peristyle court with the pool in the center of it, right here. And again it is particularly well known for its mosaics. We see a long corridor here, with those mosaics. They depict primarily scenes of hunting, and I show you a couple of those scenes here. And there's been some speculation that this was not Maximian's, that it may have belonged to somebody who, like those individuals who had the Hunting Baths at Leptis Magna, whose work it was to collect wild animals from Africa--Africa is very close to Sicily--collect them from Africa and send them, to supply them to amphitheaters around the world.



But even though most of these scenes are hunting scenes, the most famous mosaics from the Palace of Maximian, so-called, at Piazza Armerina in Sicily, are the so-called bikini girls, and I show you the bikini girls right here. And there's nothing like this mosaic anywhere else in Roman art. But you can see why they're called the bikini girls, and they are involved in all kinds of athletic activities. One of them has received a crown and a palm branch for her excellence. This one is twirling who knows what here. These two are playing--passing--playing ball. And over here we see a woman on the left with her five-pound weights, working out.



So, I mean, this is probably as close as we get to--one doesn't--this is very hard to interpret exactly what this means and what it's all about and why it's here. But perhaps we can see it as a kind of women's version to the mosaic that we saw in the Baths of Caracalla, with the famous athletes of the day; I mean, perhaps these were famous women athletes of the day, some of whom were good enough even to be awarded prizes. But the jury is out on exactly what these were and why they're there. But they're memorable, these inimitable bikini girls, and very, very famous -- along with the Alexander Mosaic, probably the most famous mosaic surviving from Roman antiquity.



Again I want to show you just very briefly, to give you an inkling of a couple of more palaces. One of these we know for sure is the Palace of Galerius in the northern part of Greece, the Palace of Galerius. Galerius, as you'll recall, was the Caesar in the eastern part of the Empire, to Diocletian. And I should mention--I think I neglected to mention--that Diocletian did, by the way, abdicate on the 1 of May in 305 A.D. He voluntarily stepped down, and when he voluntarily stepped down, two new--the Caesars were elevated to Augusti, and two new Caesars were chosen; two new Caesars were chosen. And Galerius became an Augustus, and he built for himself this extraordinary palace in northern Greece at Salonica.



And we can see from this plan--and I've given you the date of it, to 297 to 305 A.D.; I've given you a plan of it, and you should be, even though only part of it survives, you should be immediately reminded of palaces that we've already looked at, not just today but in the past. Think of Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill. There's a hippodrome here, just as Domitian's Palace had, although Domitian's Palace, it was used, as you'll recall, as a sunken garden. We're not sure how it was used here, but we think it may have actually been used as a circus here. Other rooms, including an octagonal one, with alcoves, looking sort of like what Rabirius designed, again for Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill.



But up above we see, just as Diocletian's Palace at Split, it includes a tomb. Galerius has also provided for himself and his afterlife by creating a round tomb. You see the uppermost part in this plan from Ward-Perkins. And then very interestingly, just like Diocletian's Palace at Split, you can see two major, what look like major roads, colonnaded roads, colonnaded streets, that intersect in the center, just like Diocletian's Palace. And then in the center of that, where they intersect, there's a four-sided arch that I'm going to show you in a moment, that's still preserved.



Here's a plan of the Tomb of Galerius, at his villa [palace], in this case round with radiating, rectangular alcoves. You see it here. It's actually very well preserved. Here's the interior, showing again, just as we saw in the Baths of--the octagonal room in the Baths of Diocletian, use of windows in the second tier, right at the base of the dome, rather than an oculus. And we see that also very well in plan. In fact, there were two sets of them, as you can see here. So they've abandoned the oculus in favor of these windows at the base of the dome. And then from the outside you can see that here they have used concrete faced with brick for the exterior of the structure, which was turned into a church--and you can see some mosaics from when it was turned into a church--and a minaret was also added at one other point in time.



Here's a spectacular view of the tomb as it looks today in Salonica. You can see it here; the exterior, as well as its relationship along what would have been one of those colonnaded streets, with the arch, which is in part preserved -- the so-called Arch of Galerius. You can also see from this view how similar modern Salonica is to modern Athens: same country, same World War, post-World War II construction; mostly residential houses of five, six, seven stories, white in color, with balconies, as you can see. Here's a view of the relationship of the tomb to the arch. These two colonnaded streets that intersect, and at that intersection the placement of the arch.



The arch was four-sided so the streets could go underneath it. But it was also triple-bayed, as you can see here: single, central large bay; two smaller bays on either side; and then the piers decorated with sculpture, that give us a report on the exploits, the military exploits of Galerius in the eastern part of the Empire. These were Galerius' wars, Galerius' victories that are depicted here. But we do believe that since it was one for all and all for one, that it honored the Tetrarchy as a whole as well, and that there were niches that

Professor Kleiner presents the architecture of Constantine the Great, the last pagan and first Christian emperor of Rome, who founded Constantinople as the "New Rome" in A.D. 324. She notes that Constantine began with commissions that were tied to the pagan past (the Baths of Constantine in Rome) but built others (the Aula Palatina at Trier) that looked to the Christian future. Professor Kleiner makes an impassioned case that some of the finest and most innovative Roman buildings date to the Constantinian period. The "Temple of Minerva Medica," a garden pavilion, for example, is decagonal in shape and the colossal Basilica Nova was inventively modeled on the frigidaria of Roman imperial bath complexes. In addition, the Arch of Constantine, a triple-bayed structure commemorating Constantine's victory over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, serves as a compendium of Constantine's accomplishments in the context of those of the "good emperors" of the second century A.D. In conclusion, Professor Kleiner asserts that the transfer of the Empire's capital from Rome to Constantinople diminished Rome's influence, at least temporarily, but not the impact of its architecture, which like the city of Rome itself, is eternal.



Reading assignment:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome, pp. 23-27 (historical background), 115-116 (Basilica of Maxentius-Constantine), 235, 236 (Baths of Constantine), 272-276 (Arch of Constantine), 357 (Temple of Minerva Medica)



Ward-Perkins, John B. Roman Imperial Architecture, pp. 426-439

Transcript



April 21, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everybody. This is the last lecture in Roman Architecture, and I think it's appropriate that I deliver this last lecture, which I call "Rome of Constantine and a New Rome," on Rome's birthday. Indeed, this is Rome's birthday today, April 21st, 2009. Rome was born, as you'll recall, on the 21st of April in 753 B.C., which means that Rome is 2762 years old today. And since birthdays are often celebrated with cake and ice cream, I should make good today on the promise that I made to you at the very beginning of the semester, which is that sometime in the course of this semester I would recommend four ice cream places to you, four gelaterias in Rome, to you. And I've only recommended two. I recommended Tre Scalini in Piazza Navona, and I recommended the Della Palma that is located near the Pantheon. So I haven't--there are two more to go.



And it seemed on Rome's birthday, this was the perfect thing to begin the lecture with, and that is to round the circle and make you aware of the two other best ice cream places in Rome. And I show you here, on the left-hand side of the screen, Giolitti, and on the right-hand side of the screen San Crispino. And note the birthday balloons, and that I'm enjoying myself very much on Rome's birthday, today. But just so that you know where these are. You know Rome so well by now that I think I can give you directions that are going to make sense to you. So you are in the core of ancient Rome. You've just been to visit the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. Maybe you've been up on the Capitoline Hill. You're exploring the Victor Emmanuel Monument, and so with your back to the Victor Emmanuel Monument, look straight ahead and you see the Corso, the so-called Corso, the street of the racecourses, or the racecourse, where the popes, by the way, used to race their horses.



You stand facing the Corso. You walk down the Corso. You're on your way, in this regard, toward the Piazza di Spagna, the Spanish Steps. But before you get to the Spanish Steps, you're going to notice one, the only department store in Rome, Rinascente--that's why it's a good landmark--Rinascente, on the right. You take a left and you're going to see the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which is a column we didn't look at this semester, but is based on the Column of Trajan. You take a look at the Column of Marcus Aurelius. You continue into the next piazza, which is the Piazza Montecitorio, with a great obelisk in the center and a government building and a couple of hotels. You stay on the right and you go down that next small street and you hit Giolitti, which in my opinion is the single best ice cream place in Rome. So if you're in Rome, not to be missed. It has the best fruit flavors in the city of Rome; in fact, anywhere in Italy that I know of.



And the second one that I mention to you is San Crispino. San Crispino is near the Trevi Fountain in Rome. So you're going to go to the Trevi Fountain in any case, and all you need to do when you're facing the Trevi Fountain is to go about two blocks away from the Trevi Fountain and you will hit San Crispino. It has a smaller selection of flavors, but everything is very, very good there. In fact, they've been such a success that they have expanded and opened another one near the Pantheon. So again, back to the Pantheon, down that small street--I already gave you the directions to Della Palma. You go beyond Della Palma, you take a left and you'll hit the second San Crispino. So very important to share this with you, again before the term is up, and in honor of Rome's birthday.



Also, of course, when you're at San Crispino, don't forget the Trevi Fountain. And you probably all know the tradition that when you go and visit the Trevi Fountain, which is always very crowded--this is actually a small crowd compared to what's usually there--after you've looked at it, and enjoyed it for its own sake and for architecture, obviously, of a much later period but I think one you can see is very closely based on a lot of things that we've been looking at this semester. After you've looked at it--and people usually do this right before they leave Rome; you go up to the fountain, bring a coin--it can be an American coin or an Italian coin or any coin for that matter--you stand in front of the Trevi Fountain, with your back to the Trevi Fountain, you take a coin, you throw it over your shoulder--got to make sure it goes into the water and not on the side--but throw it into the water, and that will ensure that you will get to return to Rome someday. So don't forget to do that as well.



We spoke in the last lecture about the Tetrarchy, about Diocletian and his formation of the Tetrarchy, and his attempt to bring stability back to Rome and to the Empire, and how successful he was indeed. We also talked about the fact that Diocletian and the other Tetrarchs were responsible for some important building projects, in fact, bringing architecture back to Rome in a way that it had been missing in the third century A.D. And I mentioned in particular that Diocletian was interested both in public and in private architecture. And I remind you of an example of public architecture that we looked at last time, on the top left, the so-called Five Column Monument, or Decennial Monument, or Tetrachic Monument, that Diocletian erected in the Roman Forum to honor himself and to honor his formation of the Tetrarchy, and his relationship to Jupiter. You'll remember the five columns: four with the Tetrarchs imaged on the top in the front, the one of Jupiter behind, that this was located behind the Rostra or the speaker's platform in the Roman Forum.



We also talked about the fact that Diocletian was interested again in private architecture, that he built a palace for himself, a place that he hoped to retire to, on the Dalmatian Coast where he was born, at a place called Split. And I remind you of it here, a restored view showing you what it looked like; that it was essentially a fortified camp, designed like a Roman castrum, with walls and towers and a very distinctive octagonal mausoleum that was located across from the Temple of Jupiter. So again his connecting himself to Jupiter, honoring Jupiter as he honors himself.



And I also showed you an example of the portraiture of the Tetrarchs. We talked about the all-for-one-and-one-for-all philosophy, how they stuck together, not only in life but in their portraits, and they depicted themselves, or they had themselves depicted as this foursome, in large part again to underscore the fact that all four of them were co-equal emperors, that all four of them--or almost co-equal emperors: you'll remember that there were Augusti and Caesars, so some had the slight upper hand, but for the most part they worked together. They're represented as a whole, and they're represented in a very similar way to one another. And we talked about the use of geometric forms, the abstraction, the solidity of these portraits that I suggested mirrors this new stability that Diocletian and the Tetrarchy have brought to Rome and to the Empire. And we saw that those same qualities, that interest in geometry, in abstraction, in solidity, were characteristic also of Tetrarchic architecture. And we're going to see some of those features continuing on in the buildings that we're going to be looking at today.



Diocletian stepped down, retired voluntarily, on the first of May in 305 A.D. And Maximian, his co-Augustus, stepped down as well, and the two Caesars were elevated to Augusti, and two new Caesars were chosen. But without the strong presence of Diocletian the Tetrarchy fell apart, and Rome and the Empire were once again plunged into civil war. The two main claimants for imperial power that came out of this civil war were Maxentius--Maxentius who was the son of Maximian--and Constantine--Constantine who eventually became Constantine the Great--Constantine who was the son of Constantius Chlorus. And these two men, Constantine and Maxentius, warred with one another for imperial power, and they went against one another in one of the most famous battles of all time: in fact, a battle that is as well known, if not even more well known, than the Battle of Actium, and this is the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge which took place in 312 A.D.



And it was at that epic-making battle that Constantine was victorious over Maxentius, that Constantine became sole emperor of Rome -- so a move away from the Tetrarchy and the placement of power in the hands of one man. Once again, Constantine becomes sole emperor of Rome. And it was at that same battle, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge--and one of the reasons that it's such an important battle in historical terms is the fact that it was at that Battle of the Milvian Bridge that Constantine was said to have seen the vision of the cross; the vision of the cross that helped him to be victorious, the vision of the cross that eventually led him to convert to Christianity, which he did on his deathbed. He was baptized a Christian on his deathbed. One of the most interesting things that we'll talk about today, and about the architecture under Constantine the Great, is that we will see, because he began as a pagan emperor and ended his life as a Christian emperor, he has in a sense one foot in the pagan past and the other foot in the Christian future, and we're going to see that reflected in the architecture that he commissioned, as we look at that today.



A few coins of Constantine which I think will help set the stage for this one foot in the past and one foot in the future, that is going to be the leitmotif of today's lecture. I show you on the left-hand side of the screen a coin of Constantine, when he first began his rise to power. It was probably struck in around 306 A.D. And it's an interesting coin, because if you remember--I didn't bring it back to show you--but if you remember the coin of Diocletian that I showed you, you'll recall that he was represented in a very similar fashion. It's the sort of bearded blockhead style, as I call it, for the Tetrarchy; a very cubic image, a short, military hairstyle, closely cropped, and a short beard that adheres very closely to the shape of the face, and the face masked itself with cubic geometric forms. So we see Constantine in his very early portrait trying to look like a Tetrarch, trying to look like his father, Constantius Chlorus, trying to look like Diocletian, trying to fit in, before he figures out the way that's going to enable him, in fact, to become emperor, sole emperor of Rome.



After he defeats Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, we see the greatest transformation in the history of Roman portraiture, in the history of self-imaging by emperors, by people in power, and that is this transformation that I can show you from this early coin of 306, to a coin that dates after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and that also represents Constantine. And what you see has happened here is Constantine has shaved off his beard, he has lost about twenty years of age, and he is shown with an entirely different hairstyle. Not the short military hairstyle that he wore because he wanted to liken himself to his father and to Diocletian, but an entirely new hairstyle, but one--for any of you who know your Roman portraiture or remember the portraits that I showed you fleetingly of Augustus and the Julio-Claudians--he is wearing a cap of hair that is very similar to--a fuller cap of hair, with comma-shaped locks over his forehead, growing long on the nape of his neck, that is characteristic of Augustus and also of Trajan.



He's in fact a neo-Augustus in this image, with a neo-Trajanic hairstyle. Why? Because he is--as sole emperor he has made the decision that he wants to now ally himself, not with the Tetrarchs, which are of the past at this point, but rather with the great emperors of the past: with Augustus, with Trajan, and as we'll see also with Hadrian and with Marcus Aurelius. And we can see that very important break here, and we'll see it also in architecture.



Another coin down here representing Constantine, with a bunch of pagan regalia. We see him, as so many of the earlier emperors of Rome, depicted along with a patron god, in this case the god Helios, the god of the sun. And you can see Constantine in the foreground, Helios in the background: Helios represented with a rayed crown--and that's why we know it's him--silhouetted right behind the emperor. The emperor is shown as warlike, with military costume, a spear, and then a shield over here. And if we look closely at the shield we'll see the depiction of someone in a chariot, led by four horses, coming--it's represented frontally; it's the solar chariot, the solar chariot of Helios. So a coin that is very much in the usual pagan tradition, where we see Constantine associating himself with the pagan past and with a pagan god, in this case Helios.



This coin, however, that was also made after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, shows us a very different Constantine. It's an interesting frontal portrait, which is rare on Roman coins. He is still shown as the warrior. He's in military costume. He's holding the reins of his horse, who's also depicted nicely in this portrait on this coin. If you look very closely at his shield, you will actually see that it still is decorated with a pagan symbol, with the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. But look up here. The scepter that he carries is not the usual scepter or spear that we see in pagan imagery, but a cross scepter, a cross scepter and--I don't know if you can see it from where you sit--he wears a medallion on the top of his very elaborate helmet, with plumage and so on, a medallion that has the Chi-Rho, C-h-i, dash, R-h-o, the Chi-Rho, which was the Christian monogram. So we see him in this image, not as the great pagan warrior, but as the new Christian crusader. So a very important change from paganism to Christianity, that as I mentioned already we will see also reflected in Constantine's architecture.



Constantine learned a lot though from the Tetrarchs, and one of the things that he continued on was to build great public architecture; public architecture for the benefit of the Roman populace at large. He follows the lead of Diocletian in this regard and adds another very large imperial bath to Rome; and I show you a plan of that imperial bath here. It bears his name, the Baths of Constantine, and dates to 320 A.D. It is located in Rome. It is located on the Quirinal Hill, the Quirinal Hill. And that should ring a bell for all of you, because you'll remember it was Trajan--Trajan, and remember Constantine is imaging himself as a neo-Augustus with a neo-Trajanic hairstyle--Trajan who built--who had much, a good part of the Quirinal Hill cut back to make way for his forum, and then placed his markets on part of what remained of the Quirinal Hill.



So the Quirinal Hill was associated in everybody's mind with Trajan. Constantine wanted to associate himself with Trajan. So when he decides where to place his new bath structure, he chooses the Quirinal Hill. This is not coincidental; it was very deliberative on his part. He builds it in a manner that is completely consistent with imperial bath architecture in Rome: the imperial bath type of architecture in Rome that we've already studied, from the time of Titus, up through the time of Diocletian. The baths on the Quirinal Hill are no longer preserved, but we fortunately have some drawings that were made by the famous architect Andrea Palladio, P-a-l-l-a-d-i-o, Andrea Palladio, who drew it when it was in better shape, and his drawings of the Baths of Constantine allow us to see exactly what these baths were like in their heyday.



And we can see, although Palladio's drawing concentrates on the bathing block, you can see that he also includes down here--and it's probably that this is all that remained of this particular part of the bath in Palladio's time--you can see he includes down here the great hemicycle that we've seen in so many of these baths, that are part of that precinct that surrounds the bath block. So this suggests to us, and I think very convincingly, that this bath, this bathing block, was also placed in one of these very large precincts that had all the seminar and lecture rooms and libraries around the perimeter of it, and that this was lined with seats and probably used for people to watch athletic contests, or perhaps even plays of other kinds.



The bathing block again we can see conforms extremely well to the other baths that we've looked at, to the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, for example, with a natatio, rectangular in shape, with a frigidarium that is also rectangular and has three--a triple groin vault, as you can see designated in Palladio's drawing, and down here--this is a re-interpretation, by the way, of Palladio's drawing from Ward-Perkins, this plan that you see on the screen now. A tepidarium over here that's somewhat more unusual in shape than we tend to see, where we have a series of lobes, four lobes in fact, that have been--that have expanded the space almost--well it's sort of a circle, trying to become an oval, I suppose--but you can see the way in which they have expanded, and we call that kind of space quadrilobate, quadrilobate, and we see that here.



And then we also see--this is most interesting -- how the caldarium is treated. Because as you've seen in the baths that we've looked at, the imperial baths that we've looked at, if there's any room that's different in each of these it's the caldarium. You'll recall that Diocletian had moved to a rectangular caldarium, with radiating alcoves. But Constantine and his architects move back to the circular caldarium that we saw in the Baths of Caracalla, uses the same sort of scheme here, with three radiating alcoves, all of those screened from the outer space with columns, and the rest of the structure, around these main rooms of the bathing block that are related to one another, axially we see the other rooms symmetrically disposed. One other important point to make about the caldarium is that we see that it too corresponds to a development that we've already begun to see in some of the other buildings that we looked at, especially in the last lecture, and that is this move away from the oculus for round-domed buildings. This round--this caldarium does not have an oculus, as so many caldaria did in the past; think back to the--well or so many bathing rooms did--think back to the frigidaria in Pompeii, for example, with their oculus. The oculus is no longer used here, and instead we see windows in the base of the dome that are very similar to the windows that we saw in a couple of Tetrarchic buildings. We're going to see it elsewhere today, and I'll reiterate that point then.



Constantine, like so many Roman emperors before him, did complete buildings that had been begun by his predecessors, and he did this for some of the Tetrarchs, including his father, not surprisingly, Constantius Chlorus. We know that Constantius Chlorus had chosen as his capital the city of Trier, the city of Trier, in what was Gaul but now is Germany. And I show you the location of Trier. This is a map showing the locations, as we've discussed so many times this term, of many of the--of all of the places that we've looked at in the Western Empire. And you can see the French cities that we looked at just last time, in Gaul, and then up there Trier, in what is now Germany, located near the modern city of Cologne. This was the chosen capital for Constantius Chlorus.



Even before Constantius Chlorus began to build a palace for himself at Trier, as the other Tetrarchs had done elsewhere in the Roman provinces, there was quite a bit of building activity going on with regard to one project in Trier, in the third century, and not surprisingly that too was a defensive wall. That part of the Empire was being attacked on a regular basis by Germanic tribes, by the Franks and by the Alemanni, were coming in, wreaking havoc in that part of the world, and a decision was taken, not surprisingly, in 275 and 276--because you'll remember that's exactly when the Aurelian Walls were dedicated in Rome, 275--to build a major wall in this part of the Empire as well. And we have some part of that wall still preserved, especially a gate in that wall called the Porta Nigra, which I show you here on the right-hand side of the screen. The Porta Nigra which, although the walls were begun in the 270s--so the walls date primarily in the third century--this particular gate was not added to the walls until the early fourth century A.D., during the time of Constantius Chlorus, and Constantine completes this gateway and those baths [correction: walls].



If we compare the gate at the Porta Nigra in Trier to the gate that we looked at from the Aurelian Walls, the so-called Porta Appia that does date to around 275--and you see it again in this restored view from Ward-Perkins, on the left-hand side of the screen--you will see the close resemblance of the Porta Nigra to the Porta Maggiore in Rome. By that I mean both of them have two arcuated entranceways; both of them have round towers, as you can see here; both of them have arcuated windows or blind windows, as you can see; in the case of the Porta Nigra they have columns between them, which is not the case in the Porta Appia.



The main difference between these two is that the Porta Appia in Rome you'll recall was made out of concrete faced with brick, the most contemporary building material, whereas you can clearly see by looking at the Porta Nigra that the Porta Nigra is made out of stone, out of cut stone construction -- extremely old-fashioned at this particular time. But I think it is very likely that they wanted, by choosing this for this particular part of the world--and it is--this cut stone construction is local stone--by choosing this, they wanted to reassert a relationship between the early fourth century A.D. and earlier Rome, and especially earlier Rome and imperial power, the very symbols of Roman power, buildings like the Theater of Marcellus, and especially the Colosseum in Rome; we've talked about that as the very icon of Rome, its ability to impress and to awe.



And I think they wanted to take advantage of that kind of awe inspiring rhetoric, you know, visual rhetoric that such a choice could make. And I think it's an example of the fact, just as Constantine reaches back to emperors like Trajan and Augustus, to associate himself with in his portraiture, I think that they had reason to look back to some of the great buildings of the Roman past, and to use that kind of visual imagery to reassert that Rome, despite the fact that they were being attacked by barbarians, all was well in Rome, or continued to be well in the capital, as well as on the frontiers, and this kind of image I think worked in that regard. Well one hopes that--well they thought it would work at any rate in that regard, even into the early fourth century A.D.



Here's another view, the same view, of the Porta Nigra. And I compare it also to a detail from the Porta Maggiore in Rome, which you'll recall was built by Claudius. There is an interesting resemblance between the two, and many scholars have called attention to that, because the stone of the Porta Nigra is not as smoothed over as the stone of the Colosseum or the Theater of Marcellus; it's left in a much more rough state, a rough state that reminds one of the rusticated masonry of Claudius' Porta Maggiore. But remember that in the case of the Porta Maggiore, there was a deliberate disjunction between the rusticated masonry and the finished masonry; the finished capitals and also the finished pediments above. And we talked about the fact that we believe that that has a lot to do with the particular personality and antiquarian interests of Claudius, who liked the intellectual exercise and idea of playing off one against the other. We don't see that same combination here. We don't see the rough and the finished, in the case of the Porta Nigra in Trier. And it has been suggested, and I think correctly so, that the reason that the Porta Nigra looks the way it does is not deliberate, the way the Porta Maggiore is, but rather because it really was unfinished; the blocks were never fully smoothed over. But it makes a very attractive appearance even still today, despite that.



So Constantine completed this gateway, but he also completed the palace that had been begun by his father; Constantius Chlorus had begun a palace in Trier. The palace had a very large and impressive bath building, as a piece of it, and it also had this building that is usually referred to today as the Aula Palatina or the Basilica -- the Aula Palatina or the Basilica. We're not exactly sure how it was used in the palace, but possibly in the same way that the basilica was in the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill, as a place where he could sit and try cases himself. It may have been used in the same fashion here. And I can show you it's extremely well preserved.



It dates to 300 to 310 A.D.; again, part of the Palace of Constantius Chlorus, completed by Constantine. We see a plan and a restored view from Ward-Perkins now on the screen. And if you look at the plan, you will see that in the main it follows the basilican plan that we've become so accustomed to: a great open rectangular space with an apse on one end, and with all attention drawn toward that apse. So in that sense again, one foot in the pagan past; it looks back to basilicas of an earlier date, be they the one in Domitian's Palace or the Forum of Trajan in Rome.



But there are some differences here. One of them is the fact that you can see that there are no columns inside the cella. That's interesting, and it is in keeping with the Tetrarchic aesthetic that we've already described, for the Curia, for example, with a box-like open space inside, without any columnar decoration at all. No columns in here; stark, geometric, abstract in the Tetrachic manner. But they have placed columns on the outside of the Basilica, in a kind of courtyard on either side, columns that you can see here, which is a very interesting and unusual and in fact unique approach.



You can also see there is a transverse corridor over here, and that--a transverse--a vestibule, a transverse vestibule, entrance vestibule, which is unusual and which we don't see in typical Roman basilican architecture. We call that a narthex, n-a-r-t-h-e-x, and this addition of the narthex here, the transverse vestibule, is interesting because it is going to become the basis for most church architecture, both from the time--basilican church architecture--in the time of Constantine, because Constantine does found Old--does build Old St. Peter's and other churches in Rome, and others follow suit. So again, one foot in the pagan past, one in the Christian future.



On the left-hand side of the screen, the restored view of the exterior, shows not only those low-lying columnar courtyards, but also that there were railings on two stories. It does show you as well--and the building is made out of solid brick--it does show you as well the rounded windows, the arched windows, which we have seen. The round topped windows which we have seen have become customary for Tetrarchic architecture, as well as the very interesting use of projecting elements, that are very simple -- they look almost like pilasters, but they're not pilasters, they're a simplified, abstract version of pilasters. So this paring down of the elements that is so consistent with the Tetrarchic ethos.



Here's a view of the Aula Palatina as it looks today. Again, it is extremely well preserved, as you can see, but it no longer has its outer courtyard and it no longer has its railings. But the rest is there. You can see these wonderful round-headed windows and how large they are. We've talked about the ability of architects to dematerialize the wall at this point in time, and the way in which they have opened it up with very large windows. And you can see what I was describing just before, these molded elements that project out into our space. They kind of look like they're made to conjure up pilasters, but they don't have any capitals and they don't have any bases; they're, in my mind, a kind of abstract version of a pilaster. And they're very effective, I think, in terms of the aesthetic appeal of this particular building.



While the Basilica at the Palace at Trier, the Palace of Constantius Chlorus at Trier, is so clearly based on earlier Roman basilican architecture, it looks to the future. And if we look around Rome in the years following the construction of buildings like the Aula Palatina, we see lots of early churches. I show you the church of Santa Sabina, S-a-b-i-n-a, Santa Sabina in Rome, which dates to 425 A.D., so the fifth century A.D. And I think you can see how similar it is to the Aula Palatina: the basilican form; the apse at the end; the very large round-topped windows that we see in the Basilica at Trier.



The interior of the Aula Palatina is also very well preserved. You see a view of it here. It has been transformed, not surprisingly, into a church in later times. It's a perfect space for that. And I think it's well worth comparing it to the interior of the Curia that we looked at last time, because again it shows a vision of the Tetrarchy -- a vision that is consistent from Rome to the provinces; this whole idea of paring things down to their basics, of creating a box-like shape, no columnar architecture whatsoever, a very sparsely decorated rectangular space with a flat ceiling and with round-headed windows. We see the same concept here. Here they've placed the round-headed windows on two stories, which has opened the building up even more and allowed light to flow into it; no columnar decoration whatsoever. The scheme of two rows of round-headed windows, in the niche as well, also opening it up, dematerializing it, allowing light to stream into the building in what is a very spiritual way, and again not at all surprising that it would be transformed in later times into a church.



Once again one foot in the pagan past, one in the Christian future. I show you a restored view--we've looked at it before--of the Basilica Ulpia in Rome, part of the Forum of Trajan. It's that kind of thing, that kind of basilican plan that lies behind the design of the Basilica at the Palace of Constantius Chlorus in Trier. But it also looks forward to others. I show you here the interior of Santa Sabina. This might not have been the best to choose, because you can see the columns have been reintroduced in the interior of Santa Sabina. But if you think those columns away and just look at the way in which the apse is designed, with the round-headed windows, the same round-headed windows in the upper story up here, I think that you can see how much it owes to buildings like the Aula Palatina.



The round dome building type, just like the basilican type, was to be very important in the Constantinian period, and also in later times. And I show you--I remind you of some of the important domed rooms that we've looked at in the course of this semester: at the frigidarium at the Stabian Baths of Pompeii; at the Temple of Mercury from the spa at Baia, the so-called Temple of Mercury; the octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea; and the dome of the Pantheon here on the far right. There is no more important form in Roman architecture than the domed room, very characteristic of the Romans, and a special gift that they passed on to posterity, as you well know. And this type of building continued to be explored in the Constantinian period.



I could show you several examples, but I've chosen to show you just one of those; and it's the one that you now see on the screen in plan, a plan from Ward-Perkins. This is the so-called "Temple of Minerva Medica" in Rome. It's not a temple at all. It dates to the early fourth century A.D. It's not a temple, but what it was, was a pavilion in a garden. We know that an emperor of the third century A.D. by the name of Gallienus, G-a-l-l-i-e-n-u-s, Gallienus, was responsible for building some imperial gardens in the third century A.D. -- so this was another project that did happen in the third century A.D., the building of some imperial gardens for the enjoyment of the emperors and of the imperial family. And it was in these gardens that were created in the third century that this pavilion was added, during the Constantinian period, in the early fourth century A.D. And I show you a plan of that temple, that so-called Temple of Minerva Medica, or this pavilion in the so-called Licinian, L-i-c-i-n-i-a-n, the Licinian Gardens, as commissioned by Gallienus, the Licinian Gardens. And we see it here.



And it's very interesting because although it clearly--it's a building made out of concrete, faced with brick--and although it clearly is based on some of the buildings that I just showed you-- the typical round structure with oculus, the frigidaria, the spa, the octagonal room, and the Pantheon--you can see that the architects of this period were still able to innovate, and have gone further by creating not a round building, although at first it looks round, or an octagonal building, but a decagonal building, a ten-sided building. And you can see ten--you can see radiating apses, nine, and then the entranceway over here. So ten-sided structure.



If you look very carefully at the plan you will notice though that the uppermost apse, the one that is located directly across from the entranceway, is a tiny bit larger than the others. So that gives the building a little bit--even though it's a round building--a little bit of a longitudinal axis, which is very interesting -- this incorporation of a longitudinal axis into a round structure. You can also see the way in which the radiating apses, the two on either side, left and right, are screened by columns, in a way that we've also become accustomed to. And I believe that those columns, yes I'm pretty sure, that those columns have a triple arcuation up above. So that--yes, you can see that in plan--a triple arcuation above that we've seen also is characteristic of late Roman architecture, not only in the private sphere, as this is, but also in the more public sphere.



But going back to that longitudinal axis, look also at the entrance vestibule. This is another one of these narthexes, this cross--this transverse vestibule, in this case with apses on either end, that is characteristic of these early fourth-century A.D. Roman, pagan Roman buildings, but is going to become a hallmark of Christian architecture, not only basilican architecture, that is churches in the form of basilicas, but small religious structures that are circular in general plan. So a very interesting plan in that regard, and a very innovative plan in the early fourth century A.D.



The building is still preserved. I can show it to you. I can show you the outside, as well as some details of the inside of the building, as you see here. It was made out of concrete, faced with brick, as I mentioned before. We are looking at the interior, up toward the dome. You can see something very interesting here, which is the addition of ribbed--of bricks to create ribs in the dome, to give it something of a sense of a segmented dome, which is a building technique that we see sometimes in late Roman architecture. And you can also see--although it looks like it has an oculus, that's just because most of the roof has fallen in; it did not have an oculus. Instead the lighting was provided through these round-headed windows that we see, very large round-headed windows at the base of the dome. So again this move away, in late antiquity, from the oculus to using these very large round-headed windows to light the interior of the building.



And this is a view of the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica as it looks today, from the outside, where you can see those same round-headed buildings [correction: windows], where you can see those same sort of piers, that are not so different from the ones that we saw at Trier, used rather than columns to decorate the structure. A large round-headed doorway down here. You can see the scale--this is a pretty big pavilion in a garden--you can see its scale in relationship to the cars that surround it. So continued innovation in round architecture under Constantine the Great, and a building type that is going to have a long history in the Medieval period, in the Byzantine period, and well beyond.



I show you just one example of the impact that it had on later church architecture. This is the Church of San Vitale, a very famous church in Ravenna, in Italy, that honors Justinian, the famous Justinian, and Theodora. It was built in the sixth century A.D. And I think you can see by looking at a view of the exterior plan, and also a view of the interior, how important architectural experiments under the Romans were for buildings like this: the massing of the outside; the geometry, the interest in geometry; simple forms; round-headed windows. So similar to the aesthetic that we saw in the Curia or in the Basilica at Trier. The plan above, in this case an octagon with a central area, with radiating alcoves; very similar to the sorts of things that we see, not just in the Domus Aurea, but also in the Temple of Minerva Medica. And you can see the narthex here, just as we saw it in the Temple of Minerva Medica. And you can see in this view of the interior, for example, the triple arches on top of the two columns -- all of these motifs taken over clearly from Roman architecture, ancient Roman architecture, and exploited in the Medieval and Byzantine periods.



The single most important building that I am going to show you today is the one that I want to turn to now. And this is the so-called Basilica Nova, or the Basilica of Maxentius-Constantine. I can't over-emphasize the significance of this incredible building. It is a building that demonstrates to us that Constantine not only completed commissions that had been begun by his father, such as the palace at Trier and the Porta Nigra, but also by other Tetrarchs, and in this case by his rival, Maxentius. We know that this building was begun by Maxentius, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Basilica of Maxentius-Constantine, or more easily the Basilica Nova. It was begun by Maxentius in 306 A.D. When Constantine was victorious over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he took it over and he completed it in his own name: so hence the Basilica of Maxentius-Constantine, or again more easily the Basilica Nova.



Now let me show you where it is, and by so doing it takes us back to a Google Earth image that we've looked at time and again in the course of this semester, and I suppose in the last lecture it's very appropriate to go back to this particular aerial view, to remind ourselves of everything we've covered in the center of Rome. Just reminding you, of course, the Circus Maximus up here, the Palatine Hill, originally, with the huts of Romulus and later with the Palace of Domitian. The Capitoline Hill over here, as redesigned by Michelangelo. The Wedding Cake of Victor Emmanuel down here. The Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Imperial Fora, with the Forum of Trajan.



The area that was built up by Diocletian, or one of the areas, was the area over here, which is where we see the Curia, which was restored by Diocletian, and also the Five Column Monument, are located on this side, closest to the Capitoline Hill. But Maxentius was particularly interested in the area, the uppermost area, closer to the Colosseum. If you look right under the Colosseum, you can see the remains of the Temple of Venus and Roma, which we looked at earlier in the semester -- a Temple of Venus and Roma that was the Greek import that Hadrian built and may have designed himself in Rome. And it was that--and I mentioned this at the time, but you may have forgotten by now--that at the time that the building burned down in a fire; remember that fire of 283 that destroyed the Curia also destroyed part of the Temple of Venus and Roma, and it was rebuilt by Maxentius, by Maxentius, by the Tetrarch Maxentius.



He rebuilt the Temple of Venus and Roma, and you'll recall the niche that is well preserved with his rebuilding. So it's not surprising to see him choosing the location right next door, right underneath the Temple of Venus and Roma for his Basilica Nova in Rome, when it begins to be built. And it still is preserved on that site today. I show you a panorama that includes the Basilica Nova, and you see it right here, and you can see how very large a building it is. And there are only essentially three barrel vaults, a small part of the building, still preserved. But it gives you a sense of its scale, when you compare it to some of the other structures here.



But you can see many that we've studied. You can see the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. You can see the Arch of Septimius Severus. You can see the Curia over here. You can see the Tabularium, and the Michelangelo palazzo that was built into that. You can see the Victor Emmanuel Monument over there. And you can see on this side the Arch of Titus, the remains of the Temple of Venus and Roma, and so on. So a very large building in the midst of an area that Maxentius was particularly interested in restoring.



Here's a view of the Basilica Nova as it looks today. It's taken from the side, the other side, with one's back to the Palatine Hill. And we can see here that it is a building made out of brick--out of concrete, excuse me, faced with brick. We can see that the artists are better than ever at dematerializing--the architects and designers--better than ever at dematerializing the wall. They have used very large, round-headed windows here, on two stories. There's more window than there's wall. That's how good they've become at manipulating the brick-faced concrete medium--you see it in this wall over here as well. And you see these three giant barrel vaults, with soaring vaults -- a very impressive work of architecture.



Let me show you a restored view of what the Basilica Nova would have looked like in its heyday, and then let me say a little bit more about what happens when Constantine takes over construction of this particular building. This restored view is very, very interesting because it shows us that although this building was used, without question, as a basilica--that was its purpose, a basilica--we see here that it is unlike any basilica that we have seen in the course of this semester. And I wonder as you look at this whether you can tell me if it's not--it's not built like a customary basilica; it doesn't look like the Basilica Ulpia in Rome. It doesn't look like the basilica at Trier. But it does look like what other kind of building, that we've seen time and again in the course of this semester?



Look at the vaulting, look at the barrel vaults on either side. Look at the shape of the windows in the upper tier. Look at the shape of the exterior of the building that is created by the choice of vaulting. What does this look like? If not a basilica? Someone said a market. Yes which--yes, who said bath structure? That's the answer. Which part of a typical Roman imperial bath does this look like? The frigidarium; the frigidarium, the frigidarium, the great large rectangular space, with a triple groin vaulted roof, with windows that are usually divided into three parts, on the uppermost part, and then buttressed by great barrel vaulted chambers.



This is a basilica that is built in the form of a frigidarium. That's an awfully creative thing to do. It shows us once again this interest in the interchangeability of form; that you can take a plan that was used for one kind of building and use it for another, as they have done so effectively here, using a frigidarium plan for a basilica, and capitalizing on that, to make it work in this environment as well. So some very creative minds I think at work in the time of Maxentius and in the time of Constantine. When the building was first designed for Maxentius, the idea was to have the entranceway on the eastern part of the building--the eastern part of the building, the part of the building that faces the Colosseum--and to enter into it that way, and to have the main apse be over here, on the western end of the structure, to give it a longitudinal focus, and the kind of focus one would have seen in a typical frigidarium, as well as in a typical basilica.



Constantine comes in, takes it over, and decides he wants to change the orientation. He wants the entranceway not to be closest to the Colosseum, but rather to the Roman Forum, and to the Sacred Way, and to the Velia, which is the part on which this was built, to the Arch of Titus. And he instructs his architects to change the orientation from an east-west orientation to a north-south orientation, and to place the entranceway on the Forum side, on the south. He also instructs them to put four columns here, and these columns are made out of porphyry, that purplish stone that's quarried in Egypt and that was used so extensively for Tetrarchic art, Tetrachic portraiture; we see that here.



Then he's very tempted to change the orientation of the niche; instead of to put his portrait, as Maxentius--Maxentius intended to put his portrait in this--his own portrait, that is, of Maxentius--in this apse. Constantine was probably tempted to put his own portrait in this apse over here, on the northern side, so that it would be the first thing that you saw when you came in. But he resisted that temptation and decided to leave--or to place a seated portrait of himself in this niche, leave it where Maxentius intended it. So you would have to enter the building and take an abrupt left to see that statue. But we think--we're not absolutely sure--we think he may also have put another statue of himself, in this case a standing statue, in this niche.



But as we'll see, there are lots of niches in the wall of the northern end, and we think that there were statues of all of his lieutenants; the lieutenants that had helped him win his great battle at the Milvian Bridge, that were located in this niche. And so he may have been shown there, surrounded by his most worthy and his most loyal lieutenants. And then another statue of him seated in the niche over here. So we see him--again the most important thing is he shifts the orientation.



Another restored view, which perhaps--in color--which perhaps gives you a better sense of the majesty of this particular building, in its time. The entrance, the Constantinian entranceway, through the porphyry columns, through the doorways, into the main body of the structure -- the same kind of marble pavements with maroon and green and white, that we've seen in so many other buildings, used here, marble revetment on the wall. You can get a sense of the groin vaults and the way in which they were probably also decorated, either with painting and stucco, or maybe even mosaic. The great coffered ceilings of the barrel vaults.



And look at the way in which they've created a lateral entrance, arched entranceways, in each of these piers, to create a greater flow of space, just as you would see in a typical frigidarium. And then again this opening up, this very impressive opening up of the walls, with these exceedingly large round-headed windows that allow again light to stream into the structure. A real tour de force of Roman architecture; in my opinion, one of the greatest buildings ever built by Roman architects.



Believe it or not, we have the portrait of Constantine still preserved, and I can show it to you, or least bits and pieces of it -- a fairly significant number of bits and pieces, including the head, which I show you here, which is now on view in the courtyard of the Conservatori Palace, one of the palaces on the Capitoline Hill that belongs to the Capitoline Museums. We see Constantine here, and you can see how similar he is to that transformed portrait that showed him as a neo-Augustus with a neo-Trajanic hairstyle: beardless, very clean shaven, very large eyes, but very much in the mode of the earlier emperors, Augustus and Trajan, rather than in the mode of the Tetrarchs. And yet a very abstract, geometric image, very much in keeping with Tetrarchic and Constantinian art, in that regard, and truly colossal in scale.



We have a lot of the body parts that are also preserved in that same courtyard, from this same statue, including the shin of the leg, from the knee down, the knee itself, and the way in which the knee is depicted tells us that the knee was bent, and that consequently this did indeed come from a seated statue of Constantine, that statue that would have been in that left-hand niche. We also see the famous hand from the statue, as well as part of an arm. And the arm is very impressive, because if you look at it carefully you will see that the musculature is very clearly delineated, and you can even see the veins of the arm showing through the skin, which shows you how adept artists still were during this time period.



These are right out in the courtyard of the Conservatori Palace. Everybody--there's no tourist, with a camera, who goes by here without taking a photograph in front of it; including yours truly. I've done that. I'm absolutely incapable--it's hard to say it--I'm totally incapable of going into this piazza and not taking a picture, either of whomever I'm with, or them of me, and I have tons of these from years and years of posing in front of this. It's a pretty good Mediterranean tan, I must say, on this side. But posing with these hands and feet and so on. This is my son, Alex, posing on the foot, as you can see here. So one can't--and you can only imagine. I imitate the exact gesture up there, in this image. But you can only imagine the kinds of photographs that are taken in front of that hand, as tourists have to do. You can find these actually if you go on Google Image, and you can find them quite readily out there. So if you do go--this is one of those other places that I hope if any of you travel there and inspiration so moves you, to take a picture of yourself and send it to me; I'd love to see it.



At any rate, if you put all of those pieces together--and there are actually two feet preserved, two feet; the shin; the knee; part of the chest, which we also have; that arm that I showed you, the hand, the infamous hand; and the head of Constantine. This is what you get: a seated statue, thirty feet tall--you've got a big building, you need a big statue--thirty feet tall, that sat in the main niche, that niche to the left as you entered into the Basilica of Maxentius-Constantine from the Roman Forum. Here's another picture of me, although you can barely see me. This was taken--it's amazing that I was able to take this picture at one point, with no one else in it, because the Forum is usually so crowded. But here I'm standing with my back to us, looking at the Basilica Nova. And you can see how vast the great barrel vaults of the Basilica Nova are.



There are scholars who argue that Roman architecture declined in late antiquity; and not only architecture but painting and sculpture as well. And one could make an argument, I believe, that Roman painting and sculpture did decline. I'm not saying I necessarily agree that they did, because art can sometimes change for reasons that have to do with trying to articulate a different message than you've tried to articulate before, and a new style may be more appropriate for that than the style that you've been using up to that point. So I think it's a very complex matter when you think about whether art declines or not.



But I will go so far as to say, without going into it in great detail, although I'll say a little bit more about it momentarily, when we look at the Arch of Constantine. But without saying whether I believe that Roman sculpture or painting declines, I want to say categorically that I do not believe that Roman architecture declines. And I think a building like this is a case in point. This, in my opinion, is again one of the greatest buildings. If you compare this to the Colosseum, if you compare this even to the sacred Pantheon, if you compare this to some of the bath buildings that we've talked about, as impressive as they are, I think this takes its place, the Basilica Nova takes its place among the most impressive works of architecture that were left to us by the Romans.



And I think you can see what I mean, just by looking at this image. Because to still be able to create these kinds of soaring vaults out of concrete, to face them with brick, to create windows that are large enough to essentially dematerialize the wall--and the building still stands, and still stands today--the soaring vaults, those soaring rib vaults, or groin vaults, that we see in the center of this space, to do that at this kind of scale is an incredible architectural feat. I don't think there's any way that one can say that architecture declines during this period, when one looks at a building like this. And also keep in mind how creative they've been, that at this point in time they've decided to create a basilica in the form of a frigidarium, from a typical imperial bath. That's a very creative thing to do, and I think it couldn't have happened were it not that architects--that creative juices were not continuing to flow for architects and artisans working on major projects like these in the time of Constantine the Great.



I want to turn from the Basilica Nova to the Arch of Constantine, which is the last ancient monument that I'm going to show you this semester. The Arch of Constantine was constructed by Constantine to celebrate his victory over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. We think it was begun in 312 A.D. and completed in 315 A.D. It is also possible, some scholars have suggested that it's conceivable, that Maxentius may have begun this too, in the same way that he began the Basilica Nova, and that Constantine took it over when he was victorious over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.



We don't know which is the case, whether it was begun by Maxentius and finished by Constantine, or whether Constantine began it himself. I'm more likely to favor the latter, that Constantine began it himself. But we do not know, and it's something that you should be aware of, that particular controversy. But it certainly dates to this time period, to roughly between 312 and 315 A.D. One of the reasons that we believe--I mean, one of the reasons, the incontrovertible reason that we know that the building was completed by Constantine is the inscription tells us it's a Constantinian building, but also there are friezes here that depict the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and other battles from that war, and show us, of course, Constantine victorious in those scenes.



It is a triple-bayed arch, very similar in that regard to the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, and I don't think there's any question that the general format of it is based on the Arch of Septimius Severus, in the Roman Forum. It too, like the Arch of Septimius Severus, is covered with sculpture, a veritable billboard advertising the achievements of Constantine in this important battle, and overall. But we see that of course instead of the panels, the excerpts as I described them, from the Columns of Trajan or Marcus Aurelius that we see on the Arch of Septimius Severus, we see a very different kind of sculptural decoration here. It does cover the entire arch, and it's interesting primarily because some of it is Constantinian.



The parts that are Constantinian, that were carved during the fourth century, are the spandrels with the victories; the spandrels with the river gods, very much like the Arch of Trajan at Benevento; the frieze that encircles all sides of the monument, you can see that frieze here; the pedestals of the columns were also carved in the Constantinian period; and there are two roundels, two round frames, on either short side of the Constantinian monument that were also done during the Constantinian period. But what's particularly interesting is the fact that all the rest of the sculpture was cobbled together from earlier monuments. And it won't surprise you to hear that they were the monuments of the emperor Trajan, the emperor Hadrian, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius -- all the men whom Constantine considered the great emperors of the second century A.D., the emperors of the second century A.D. with whom he most wanted to connect himself.



He inserts sculpture from their monuments into this monument. We don't know whether these were monuments that had fallen into disrepair and were lying in shambles around the city, or whether he actually deliberately took apart earlier monuments to extract from them the fragments that he wanted. Also very interesting is the fact that in all of these scenes, the scenes that are used from earlier monuments, he replaces the heads of Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius with his own portrait. So he in a sense becomes them in this arch.



Let me show you quickly a diagram, which will give you perhaps a better sense of all of this. The Trajanic, the material from the Trajanic period includes statues of Dacians that come from the Forum of Trajan in Rome, as well as from two panels--four panels in fact; two that are located on the central bay, on either side, and two that are located on the sides on the attic, in both cases. Hadrian, the roundels, eight of them on the two long sides of the arch, belong to some lost hunting monument of Hadrian. The panels, the vertical panels that you see in the attic, come from an arch, a lost Arch of Marcus Aurelius. And, as I've already described, the bases, the spandrels, and the frieze all belong to the Constantinian period.



I want to show you those very, very quickly. A panel on the left-hand side from the Forum of Trajan, representing Trajan returning to Rome after his victory over the Dacians. We think this was a pedestal, or a base, a podium, for the Temple of Divine Trajan that was at the end of the forum and built by Hadrian. We see a couple of the Dacians over here that come from the Forum of Trajan, the second story, in the main part of the forum. And then here these vertical panels that we believe come from a lost Arch of Marcus Aurelius.



Here we see part of the Constantinian frieze, with Constantine seated, now headless, in the center. Here we see the roundels from a lost hunting monument, we believe, of Hadrian. You can see a dead lion, for example, lying here. Hadrian has returned from the hunt, but the head of Hadrian re-carved as a head of Constantine. Another scene over here: a sacrifice to Hercules, who is floating in the uppermost part above. But again the main thing for us is just that this comes from--a Hadrianic monument is reused here so that Constantine can associate himself with these great emperors of the fourth century [correction: second century]. Another detail showing you the Dacians, from the Forum of Trajan, as well as these panels from this lost Arch of Marcus Aurelius, probably originally dating to the 170s to 180 A.D.



What you see here are the spandrels, with victories, and a victory in the base; victories triumphant over a barbarian, who kneels at her feet. And if you look at these scenes, if you look at these very carefully and you compare them to the little bit of Roman sculpture that we've looked at in the course of this semester--think of the Ara Pacis, for example--when you think back to that and you look at these figures, one could agree with the contention that this is not as good as it once was. If you look at this figure of the doughy season--the boy who's representing a season down here, or this figure of the victory, who is not depicted with the same finesse that we see the victory writing on the shield on the Column of Trajan, I think a case can be made that this is not as well rendered as it was once upon a time. You can see that in the river god; and you can definitely see it in this scene here.



This is a scene from the Constantinian frieze, depicting the siege of the city of Verona, very similar to that siege scene we saw in the Column of Trajan with the battering ram. And I think you can see, as you look at these figures, they are much more awkward in their motions. Look at these three over here, with the shields and the spears. They are exactly the same as if they were stamped out of a cookie cutter. You don't see the artist taking the t

Professor Kleiner presents the three options for the course's term paper, which fall into two main categories: a research paper or a project to design a Roman city. For the research paper, she suggests cities and monuments not covered or mentioned briefly in the lectures, which embody some of the themes and issues raised in the course. Such topics include, in the Eastern Empire, the Roman cities of Corinth and Gerasa (Jerash), the Library of Celsus at Ephesus, and the Temple of Bel and the tower tombs at Palmyra. In the West, possible subjects are the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum; funerary architecture in Pompeii; a Roman villa at Fishbourne; Roman baths at Bath; and the private houses at Vaison-la-Romaine. Students may also study a site or monument of their choice, provided that the topic is pre-approved by Professor Kleiner. The lecture concludes with an overview of the "Design a Roman City" option, in which students draw or generate plans and other representations of a hypothetical Roman city of 10,000 inhabitants, accompanied by a paper supporting their proposal.

Transcript



March 3, 2009



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning everybody. We will be returning the exams on Thursday. They're being graded now and we'll return them to you on Thursday. And I've always found, I've found in the past, that having--once we finish the midterm exam, and all of you have had a chance to go back over the material, mastered it, is the ideal time to begin to talk about a selection of a paper topic, a term paper topic. And I'm going to concentrate on that particular issue in today's class, the choice of a paper topic. Right before Spring Break is also a good time to begin thinking about this, because there are a lucky few of you in here who are actually going to Rome, for Spring Break, and there are others that are heading home to California, possibly near Malibu -- might have a chance to go to the Getty Museum, in Malibu, which is based on an important villa, ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum, as well as other travels that may give you some ideas about potential paper topics. And don't underestimate just the experience of architecture of any period, in terms of inspiring you, as you go to whatever city you're headed toward, or even whatever small town you're headed toward. Looking at what's around you can be a stimulation to making a selection on a paper topic. So I want to go over that with you today.



Also I'm going to show you some magnificent parts of the Roman Empire, as a prelude to what we'll be doing when we get back after Spring Break. And that is, although we'll spend--we'll do one lecture on Hadrian and the Pantheon, and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, and one on a colony in Italy, namely Ostia, the port of Rome. From that point on we'll make our way around the rest of the Roman Empire. We'll go to North Africa, we'll go to Jordan. We'll go to other parts of the Middle East. We'll go to France and Spain. So we'll be spending spring going around the Roman Empire to some extraordinary spots. And I think by introducing you to some of those today, vis-à-vis the paper topics, will get you in the mood, I hope, for that kind of whirlwind tour that we're going to take in the second half of this semester.



Now I'd like to spend the rest of the time again showing you some magnificent places, giving you a sense of the three options for the paper topics, and specific monuments and sites that I hope you'll consider as possibilities for your paper. And again, as I mentioned, it's also a good chance for us to begin to experience the provinces of the Roman Empire. Obviously I've chosen topics that are ones that for the most part--there's one or two exceptions--but for the most part are not topics that I'm going to be going over in class, to give you an opportunity to look into a part of the world that we may not cover in class, but also to be able to use what you have learned about Roman buildings in general to decipher buildings that you haven't yet seen before.



The first of these--well the first option; there are three options, as I mentioned before--and Option 1 is a straightforward research paper that is comparable, obviously, to research papers that you've done, not only in other Art History courses, but in other History courses and other--whatever courses, even science courses--a straight research paper in which you have a topic that you do a considerable amount of reading on, focused reading, on that particular topic, and I give you bibliography for all of these. And, by the way, all of these, pretty much all of these bibliographical sources are on reserve, in the Art and Architecture Library, for this course. With a group this size, obviously if a number of you choose the same topic, I don't want a situation and whoever--the early bird catches the worm--whoever gets the book out of Sterling has it and nobody else can get to it. So I have put the books on reserve for this course. I know that creates other challenges, because you can't take it home with you, but--and it means you do need to share--but it will mean that it will be there for you, in the library. In some instances there are second copies at the University. So again, in that sense, the early bird can catch the worm, if there is a second or third copy that can be checked out. So I do urge you, if you have a pretty good sense of what it is that you may want to work on, and want to pick up a book or two before you leave for Spring Break, the next couple of days would be the time to do that.



So the first topic--so under Research Paper, again a straightforward research paper in which you do some reading, you do some looking, you think about this monument; you think about its own special characteristics, as well as where it fits into in the evolution of Roman architecture. And one hopes, of course, that you'll do both synthetic -- once you've done your reading and your research, that you will present this work of architecture synthetically. But at the same time I hope that you will have a thesis, that there will be something that you will come up with on your own, a major point, a major focus, that you'll want to have and that you'll want to make. And that you'll want to use the paper toward arguing some thesis of your own--even though, for the most part, it will be a synthesis of what you read, what's understood--and a placement of it. Since you now know Rome itself particularly well, if you choose a topic of a building, or a group of buildings that are outside Rome, the relationship of what's going on, on the periphery, to what is going on in the center, and the relationship of center to periphery.



So the first topic I give you under Research Paper is the Roman city of Corinth, which is in Greece. This would be a good paper topic for the classicists among you; and I know there are some. Anyone who's into--who's fairly well steeped in Greek culture, as well as Roman culture and civilization, who might want to look back at a Greek city, a city that was already very built up under the Greeks, as early as the Archaic Period. This is a view, for example, of the Greek Archaic Temple at Corinth. So a Greek city, a very well developed Greek city, that is eventually taken over by the Romans, and the Romans remake it in the Roman manner. They add typical Roman buildings to it, create a kind of mini Rome, in Greece. But it's interesting to see the way in which those new buildings blend with those that were built there earlier.



I also mention here not only the Archaic Temple at Corinth, but also the so-called Isthmus at Corinth. You might remember, from our conversation about Julius Caesar and the architecture that he built, that Julius Caesar was the one who built a canal at the Isthmus of Corinth. And the canal that is still visible and used at Corinth today--which you see an excellent view of on the left-hand side of the screen--is essentially the same canal that was built initially, or begun initially, by Julius Caesar. So that gives you some sense of a Roman addition to the scene. And I show you just one other example. There are quite a number of buildings preserved from Corinth, Roman buildings. So one could do--for a paper like this, one could do an overview of the Roman city, all the pieces of the Roman city, how the urban fabric worked, or you could choose one or two buildings at Corinth, at Roman Corinth, to concentrate on.



I show you, for example, a view of the remains of the Roman Baths at Corinth. And what's interesting about these--and you can pick this out on your own already, just by looking at this one view--what's interesting about these is although they look back to Roman bath architecture, in Italy, you can see that this bath is made entirely of cut-stone construction, which is quite different from either the small baths we saw at Pompeii, the Stabian Baths or the Forum Baths, or the later imperial baths -- the Baths of Titus, for example, that we've already explored, where concrete construction was used. Here stone was used. Why was stone used? Because there was a very long tradition, already begun in Greece, from the Archaic Period through the Classical Period to the Hellenistic Period, of using stone for architecture. And the architects, in this particular part of the world, because stone was so readily available--and especially marble, but other kinds of stone as well--so readily available, and because the architects and designers in this part of the world were so skilled at carving stone, it was natural for them to use stone in their construction.



So we see that they are not seduced by concrete domes and the like--don't use concrete in their architecture, which you're going to see, not only today but in the future, is really an Italian phenomenon. Concrete is picked up very sparingly in the Roman provinces. Stone construction tends to be the norm, for the most part, and we see that at Corinth. So the whole question of building materials becomes very important. But one would ask oneself, if one looked at the Baths at Corinth for example, what is the plan like? How similar is it to the small baths that we saw at Pompeii? How similar is it to the imperial bath building, that we saw the symmetrical and axial--imperial bath building that we saw, for example, under Titus. What kinds of materials was it made of? What is the layout of rooms; the men's section, women's section? All the obvious questions that you would want to put to this particular structure.



Also in the eastern part of the Empire, the city of Ephesus, in what was ancient Asia Minor, modern Turkey, on the western coast of Turkey. An extraordinary place. It too had a very long history, not only historical and cultural and political, but also in terms of its architecture; built up already in the Greek period, just as Greece itself was. And one of the most famous temples at Ephesus was the Temple of Artemis, at Ephesus. And I show you a coin of that temple here. It was renowned worldwide, and pilgrims came from all over the Hellenistic and Roman world, to see it. And I show you a representation on this coin of what the Temple of Artemis, in Ephesus, looked like.



And you can see here that it had eight columns across the front. They were Ionic columns; at least at one point. It was rebuilt over a number of years and that got changed over time. But we see it here, with its Ionic columns, with its pedimental decoration, and with the columns spread out in the center, in order to reveal the cult statue of Artemis. And what a statue it was. I show it to you, a copy of it. A very well endowed Artemis, as you can see here, on the left-hand side of the screen. And there are tons and tons of copies of these, and this is one of those that gives us a very good sense of what this cult statue of Artemis, in this famous temple, looked like. And you can see that she's had a very long afterlife. It's very tempting to use her in all kinds of later ways. And as you can see in this wonderful view of the Villa d'Este, at Tivoli, in Italy--which is very close to Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli--a Renaissance area with lots of fountains and so on, and you can see how they've taken Artemis, or Diana of Ephesus, and made her into a fountain. So she comes up in all kinds of later contexts, as you can see.



With regard to the Roman city, the city of--the Roman city of Ephesus is extremely well preserved. It's one of the best preserved Roman cities today, up there with places like Pompeii and Herculaneum. But, as you can see from two buildings from Ephesus, it is very different from either Pompeii or Herculaneum. It is essentially a marble city, and it's another example of the fact that in Greece and in Asia Minor, marble construction and using the traditional language of architecture, as developed by the Greeks--columns and pediments and walls and the roofs that they support--remains the way of going about construction. And I show you here, for example, the very well-preserved Arch of Augustus at Ephesus, which gives you the sense of the kind of stone construction that was used for that.



And perhaps more interesting is the shrine that I show you--the shrine or the temple--that I show you here on the right, which is the Temple of Hadrian, the emperor Hadrian, at Ephesus, that was put up in honor of Hadrian. It's a very small temple, more a shrine. And what's interesting about it is again that it is made out of stone; think of this in relationship to the--we haven't looked at it, but I know it's a building you all know well--the Pantheon in Rome, which of course is one of the greatest concrete buildings the Romans produced, or is the greatest concrete building the Romans produced. If you compare that with its very large scale, with its concrete construction, to this, you get a very good sense of the difference between Rome and Ephesus, in the Hadrianic period. This is again a very small building. You can see it's made entirely of stone. It has columns, it has pilasters. It is very highly decorated; in fact, almost overly ornate, with that decoration almost dematerializing the architectural members.



And you can also see a motif that we have seen before in painting, but never before in built architecture, and that is a straight lintel, and then the arcuation of the lintel, and then the straight lintel again; and that is housed in a pediment, or least part of a pediment. We can't tell, but you can see on both sides the pediment begins to rise, but it's not completed. Now whether it's just broken off, or whether it was what we would call a partial or broken triangular pediment, we're not absolutely certain. My guess is it was a broken triangular pediment. So we have this arcuated lintel emerging from the broken triangular pediment. We're going to see that this motif of straight, arcuated lintel is very popular in the Hadrianic period, and even brought to Italy from these experiments in the East. But again we saw this in painting. We saw this in that painting that was on the midterm, Cubiculum 16, for example, already in paint. Now we see it in built architecture. But what we see in the eastern part of the Empire is the way in which architects used the traditional language of Greek architecture--columns, pediments, lintels--and do something entirely different with them. And it's very different from built architecture in Rome, of the same period.



Now the building that I recommend, if you want to work on Ephesus -- there are other possibilities, you could work on that Temple of Hadrian, for example--but the one that I think has the richest opportunities for an outstanding paper, and an interesting paper as well, and an interesting research adventure, is the Library of Celsus in Ephesus. You're students, you spend a lot of time, I hope, in libraries, and so you have a sense of Sterling and the way it works; if you're not always online, instead of going to the library these days, which is a temptation that even I fall into the trap of, on a fairly regular basis but--using the Internet instead of taking that extra step to get to the library. But I really urge you, it's very important for this topic. You will not find--for these papers, you will not find--you will find a lot of interesting things on the Internet, and I really do urge you to use it. But, at the same time, you will find that you really do need to go to the library and get out a variety of books to help you do a good job on this paper.



The Library of Celsus, because of your general interest in libraries and because of the fact that we haven't been able to talk, in this course, about libraries in the ancient world, the most famous of which, of course, was the library at Alexandria, upon which all other ancient libraries appear to have tried--appear to have measured themselves. But we see lots of libraries in Rome and around Italy and around the Empire; Greek and Latin libraries. Libraries that are either part of private villas sometimes--we'll see that at Hadrian's Villa, for example, or in fora, like Trajan's Forum, which we'll look at on Thursday. But also large enterprises that served a city, such as this one. This is the Library of Celsus, in Ephesus. It is called after Celsus, because Celsus--a man by the name of Celsus, C-e-l--s-u-s--was the patron of this particular library that bears his name. He was the benefactor who wanted to splash his own name on this library, the purpose of the library being a library for everybody who lived in Ephesus.



We see a plan--these are both from Ward-Perkins--a plan, and also a restored view, of the interior. In the plan you see its inside. It's a rectangular space with a niche, with columns in that niche; columns around the perimeter of the room; and then columns, as well as a staircase, on the front of the structure. In this restored view you get a better sense of what it would've looked like inside. You see that niche here. You can see now that it's a two-storied niche, with columns on two stories, and with a semi-dome with coffers, at the top. And then a series of tiers, with rectangular storage areas here, with shelves, where they placed those--remember, there were scrolls, not books. So they piled the scrolls on these shelves, and then each of these rectangular areas had a wooden door that would cover--would close and keep those scrolls protected, unless someone wanted to check them out, or consult them, or whatever. We see it also had a flat roof with a coffered ceiling.



Now what's also very interesting about this library, and essentially unique, is that Celsus not only wanted to give this as a benefaction to his city, for the public good, he decided he also wanted it to serve as his tomb. Now I've told you that people made strange choices vis-à-vis their last resting places, and Celsus decided that he wanted to be buried in his library. So he provided--beneath that central niche there was a burial chamber, and he was indeed buried in his library. So this is not only a library, it's also a tomb, which again makes it a particularly interesting topic, I believe. It had fallen, the building had fallen down, and about in the 1970s it was still on the ground, in bits and pieces. In more recent decades they have taken those pieces--there were tons of them, hundreds and hundreds of pieces--and the authorities, the archaeological authorities, have put this building back together. But they've put it back together with its own architectural members and so on.



And this is what you see today, if you go to Ephesus. It's an extraordinary structure. You can see that it's entirely made out of marble. This is the façade of the Library of Celsus; it's entirely made out of marble. We can see that it is two-tiered, with columns supporting straight lintels, down below, and then in the upper tier a combination of arched--of arcuated pediments and rectangular pediments up above, to give it some variety. And you'll also see something very interesting here, which is although the architect has used the traditional language of Greek architecture--columns and pediments and the like, which is very traditional, when you compare it to the sorts of concrete buildings going up Rome--but at the same time has injected motion into this façade, by having a series of projecting bays, receding bays, projecting bay, receding bay, creating a kind of undulating in-and-out effect, across the façade. And then has done something quite interesting, which is to place the columns in the second tier, not immediately above those in the lower tier, but straddling the spaces in between them, above the receding bays rather than the projecting bays, which injects still more motion into the upper part of the structure, in contrast to the lower part. And you can see also the--again marble construction here, variegated marble used for the columns; so very much a marble building. And marble, very high quality marble was more readily accessible in Greece and in Asia Minor than anywhere else in the Roman world.



This is another wonderful view. We're standing below, looking up from the first tier to the second tier of the Library of Celsus. And as you look at this, you probably are thinking: "Hey, architectural cages at the top of Fourth Style Roman wall painting." We've seen this before, but only in painting. We haven't seen anything like it. The closest we got is our look at the Forum Transitorium, or the Forum of Nerva, in Rome, where I showed you those columns that project out of the wall, and have projecting entablatures, and that kind of in-and-out effect. I said that was the first example in Rome of what we might call the "baroque" trend in Roman architecture, where this motion is injected into the façade. But we see this very naturally in Asia Minor, over and over again. We see it here. So an example of something in built architecture that we've seen earlier in painted architecture, and which is going to have--as we'll see, I have an entire lecture on the baroque architecture of Roman antiquity, where we look at a series of buildings around the provinces that all make use of traditional vocabulary, but use it in a very vibrant way, as you can see here.



And then there are, as you probably already noticed, statues that are placed in the niches on the façade; in this case of two women. The interesting question, for anyone working on it, who are these? Their names are given, or they have inscriptions down below, identification, in Greek. And you can also see, with these details, how elaborate these were, how they, just like in the shrine, in the Temple of Hadrian, in Ephesus, the use of decoration covers almost every available space and helps to not only decorate or ornament, but dematerialize the architecture elements. Something again we saw in painting, Third Style Roman painting. Here we see it--and on the Ara Pacis; so we have seen it in architecture--here we see it in architecture in the Western [correction: Eastern] Empire.



Another very interesting city, and issue, is in the Roman City of Gerasa, or Jerash, in what is today Jordan. I show you--we will look at a couple of buildings in Jordan, later in the term, but not at this particular one. I show you a plan of what the Roman City of Jerash looked like, and where the Roman buildings were located. You can pick out all the obvious components of a miniature Rome. You see a hippodrome, for example, over here, with its hairpin shape. There was an Arch of Hadrian over here. There were two theaters, the North Theater over here, and there's another theater somewhere there, the South Theater, up there. And you can see that they conform to the shape of a typical Roman theater. You also see there was a temple to Artemis here as well. There are a couple of tetrapylons. We haven't seen tetrapylons in Rome, and in fact the Romans didn't build tetrapylons in the city. A tetrapylon is a four-sided arch that is made specifically to span two streets, so that you can go through the arch. And the arch is right over the intersection of those two streets, so that you can drive your cart, or walk, right through the arch on either street, either of the two streets. These tetrapylons were very popular in the eastern part of the Empire. We'll see a number--we'll see a couple of them today, and others in the course of the term, and you see that here.



And for anybody interested, both in Jerash and in tetrapylons, I recommend--I'm not going over the specific references here, but if you don't--you probably didn't bring this today, but on the web portal you will find bibliography for each one of these topics, and again, as I mentioned, most of these are on reserve for the course. I recommend, in particular, the book by William MacDonald, called The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Volume 2, in which he focuses specifically--anyone working on one of the cities in the East, the eastern provinces, will find this book very valuable. Because he, in very poetic language, he is able to conjure up the way in which these cities were planned, the way in which these buildings interacted with the streets of the city, and the kind of vistas and visual kind of views that were carefully orchestrated by the designers of these cities, as well as the ways in which they wanted to move people around those cities. I think you'll find that book particularly valuable.



Let me just go back for a moment. I just want to show you that plan one more time, because eventually I am going to show you the Forum of Gerasa, which you see is located right over here, and the shape of that forum is particularly interesting, as we shall see. Just a couple of buildings from Gerasa. On the left-hand side of the screen, the Arch of Hadrian, which you can see, once again, stone construction here; with large projecting columns; niches on the second story; contrast between larger order and smaller order. Here we again see projecting columns with projecting entablature, but then a pediment that is recessed. So again, this playing around with the traditional language of architecture, in a way the Greeks themselves would not have done. Same happens up here. You have tall projecting columns with a triangular pediment, but a triangular pediment that is made up of projecting wings on either side, and then the central part of the pediment is placed in depth. Here a view of the fountain, or the nymphaeum, of the city of Gerasa, where you can see again the use--just as the Library of Celsus--the use of columns, in this case sets of columns that are placed one on top of the other, in two tiers. There would've been a columnar display here, probably--certainly also in two stories, on the interior of this building.



Now this is the part of Gerasa that I think is most interesting, and that is that it has an oval forum; an oval forum, a forum in an oval shape. Now we've seen ovals before, for amphitheater architecture, the elliptical plan of an amphitheater, but we have not seen--and we've seen octagonal rooms, and we've seen round rooms--but we have not seen the Romans in Italy use the oval for anything other than amphitheater architecture. And yet we see here this wonderful forum in Gerasa that consists of an oval, which is defined essentially by a series of columns on a curve. So placing of columns, placing of the traditional language of Greek architecture along a curve, which we've seen before. We saw that at Palestrina, for example, but we see it here, with this oval shape. And the other thing that you see in this view, that is so interesting, is the fact that many--most of the streets in the cities in the eastern provinces are colonnaded streets, are streets that have columns all along them. We never, ever see this in Italy. There is no ancient Roman town in Italy that has a colonnaded street.



So we begin to see these interesting differences between Rome and the provinces. Why is this? It's interesting to ask ourselves why this might be. I think again it probably has to do with the fact that there was a long tradition, in Greece and in Asia Minor, for Greek architecture: Greek architecture made out of stone, using columns, for the most part. And that was something that they were used to. They liked it, and they continued it on. But they began to do it in a different way. The Greeks would never have built an oval meeting or marketplace, but here we see the oval. So this combination of the idea of the oval, probably from amphitheater architecture, combined with the traditional language, the traditional vocabulary, of Greek marble architecture.



Another extraordinary site is the site of Palmyra, which is in--P-a-l-m-y-r-a--which is in modern Syria. And I show you a view of the ancient remains of Palmyra, as they look today. And you can immediately see that Palmyra, just like Gerasa, has colonnaded streets. Here's the street. You can see all of the columns along it, as well as a series of large buildings that are part of the Roman structures that were added to the city of Palmyra, in Roman times. Here's an example of one. This is a stone arch at Palmyra, and you can see that the stone arch has been made part of that colonnaded street. And the columns that lead up to it create a very interesting vista toward the arch. And then you can see--this is very interesting, we also see this quite commonly in the eastern part of the Empire--not only do they have columns, but they place brackets on those columns, that project out from them, and those brackets were meant to hold honorific statuary: so statues of some of the famous people of the city, or magistrates or whatever, of the city of Roman Palmyra.



I mentioned a tetrapylon, a four-sided arch that would span two streets. We see one of those here, a very well-preserved tetrapylon, in Palmyra. And you see that once again they've used the traditional language of architecture: made out of stone, with columns supporting straight lintels, that serve--and placed on stone bases, as you can see here--that serve as the four sides of that tetrapylon. There would've been some roof on top of this, of some sort; or maybe not, I've forgotten whether that was the--I've forgotten what people think about this particular arch, whether there was--some of them have roofs and some of them do not. I don't actually recall what the case is with this one. But it gives you again a very good idea of this tetrapylon arch that was so popular in the eastern part of the Empire.



But the building again in Palmyra, that I think is by far the most intriguing, and makes a perfect paper topic--because one can try to decode which aspects of this are Roman and which aspects of this are local, and that's essentially the name of the game when you try--when you go out into the Roman provinces, to try to determine what it is; in what ways has what's going on in the capital had impact on what's happening in the provinces, and what local traditions are so strong that they continue to exist, and even resurface, in some of these buildings? It's usually a coming together of both of those elements--elements from Rome and local elements--and the way in which those co-exist and end up creating an entirely different architectural phenomenon; which is what we see in this building here. This is called the Temple of Bel, B-e-l, at Palmyra, again in modern Syria.



And you say to yourself, "Well who is Bel?" Well Bel is a god, and that tells you something already. Bel is a local god. So this is not a temple to Jupiter or to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. This is a temple to Bel. So that already tells us something about this structure, as it goes up in Rome, that they are--as it goes up in Palmyra, during Roman times, that they are interested in commemorating and honoring a local god. If we look at the plan--and maybe you can help me here with this--if we look at the plan, and we think back to what we know of typical Greek, Etruscan, and Roman temple architecture, we should be struck by this plan. What is it that strikes us? What elements strike us about this particular plan? Anyone? Yes?



Student: The porch goes all the way around.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The porch, the staircase? The podium you mean? The podium.



Student: The podium.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The podium. The podium goes all the way around, and the columns go all the way around, and--you can see in this restored view--the staircase goes all the way around. So the podium, the staircase and the columns--which are freestanding, as you can see here--go all the way around. So that is characteristic of what kind of temple architecture? Greek: Greek temple architecture. However, what else do we see that's curious? This is not entirely a Greek temple type, it's--yes?



Student: The side entrance into the [inaudible]



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The cella.



Student: The cella.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The cella is here. We have a single cella. We have a staircase, an additional staircase, on one side, which leads into the cella, from the side; not from the end, as we usually see. You usually enter from one end, one short end, and you have the apse, or the place where the god's statue was kept, on the other side. But here we see a staircase that's placed in the center--and it isn't even quite in the center, it's actually slightly off-center--on one of the long sides of the temple, which we have never seen before. So we have this interesting location of the other staircase, but also this combination of a staircase that goes all the way around, in the Greek manner, but then a kind of façade-orientation, by the placement of an additional staircase on one side of the monument. So a very schizophrenic building, in that regard. And the list goes on and on.



Let's look at the restored view. What do we see here that's curious? Anyone? We have tall columns, with capitals. Look at the doorway. Can you see? I don't know how clear it is to you, from where you sit. What's happening above the doorway? We have additional--we have the upper part of the column and the capital, truncated, placed on top of the doorway. That's strange. How are we meant to read that exactly? We've never seen that before. And look at the top. We have crenulations on the top of the monument. And at the very top we have some kind of a deck up there, that may have been used for something having to do with the worship of Bel. So one asks--so we see this interesting combination of the influence of Greek temple architecture, Roman temple architecture, and local practice. And so one would want to ask oneself, or one would try to find out what one could, about the worship of Bel, and about whether there were any earlier temples of Bel here, and whether any of these features have to do with local practice. The building still stands, or part of it, and you can see it here. Here you see that doorway that we were looking at just before, some of the columns, and you can see the kind of very nice honey-colored stone, out of which the Temple of Bel was made.



Another terrific topic--and for anybody who lives on the West Coast and is going home to the LA area for break. You probably have already been to the Getty Museum. You can go again. But if you have never been, it's an extraordinary--this would be a perfect time to go. The Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, a villa comparable to some of the villas that we've looked at this semester, whether it's Boscotrecase, or the Villa Jovis on Capri, a very important villa in Campania, of the early Roman period. The Villa of the Papyri is so-called because of papyrus fragments that were found there. The owner of this particular villa had his own library--we're back to libraries again. And by the way, on the bibliography, there's a particularly good book by Lionel Casson, C-a-s-s-o-n, on the libraries of the ancient world, that anybody who works either on Ephesus or this will probably want to take a look at. He has his own library here, and there were scrolls from that library, especially from one specific author, that were found there, and it is because of those papyrus fragments that the villa got its name, the Villa of the Papyri, in Herculaneum.



The excavations--excavations were done some time ago of this villa. A plan was drawn of the villa at that particular time, but the excavators found that noxious gasses were starting to be emitted from the ground, and there was a great--it was a health hazard. And so after they unearthed it, after they drew it, they covered it back over again. And it's only been in very recent years that excavation has again begun on the site. And I show you a couple of views of the excavation that is currently underway, that is once again revealing some of the original walls, as well as some of the stucco and paintings of the original villa.



Now what's particularly interesting, and where the Getty Museum comes in, is John Paul Getty, when he designed his villa at Malibu--which serves, of course, as a museum of antiquities--when he was building that, he used the Villa of the Papyri as a model, and I mean as an exact model, he really duplicated quite precisely the Villa of the Papyri. This is the plan of the Villa of the Papyri, as it was drawn, when it was originally excavated. And you can see--I guess of the structures we looked at, it's probably most like the House of Loreius Tibertinus, where you'll remember there's a small amount of space given to the house on two stories, and most of it given to a large garden. We see the same idea here, where we have--and you can see it better over here--where we have one area around a court, that has living spaces on the second story, and then the rest of the villa is taken up, in this case, by a huge, hugely long pool, that has statuary and the like around it.



Now John Paul Getty decided again to use this Villa of Papyri as the model for the Getty Villa. And this is actually the Getty Villa that you're looking at here, from the air: a painting of the Getty Villa that you see from the air here. And you can see that it is almost exactly the same, in plan, as the actual Villa of the Papyri. So going to the Getty Villa--and this is, of course, a view of that long pool at the Getty Villa--going to the Getty Villa is like going back in time, to the Villa of the Papyri. And I know a lot of people think this is sort of Disneyland in Malibu, a Roman version of Disneyland. Yes, to a certain extent. But the truth of the matter is you will get a better sense of what a Roman villa looked like, in Roman antiquity, from going and looking at the Getty Villa than you will get from going and looking at the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii -- only because they have restored, and because it is in such good condition and because they have added to it--the kind of plants that would have been used there. The paintings are in good shape. They've placed statuary, actual copies of the ancient statuary that would have been at the Villa of the Papyri; because hundreds of statues from the Villa of the Papyri have survived, and they have--you can see them all at the Getty.



I'm going to show you a few views of this, because I think it's such an interesting topic. I think one could write a very interesting paper on the original villa, as seen through the eyes of the Getty Museum. For those of you who have either been there, or have not been--or have never been there, just a few views. The entranceway into the villa today; one of the ramps. They have just--if you saw this a few years ago and haven't been back, they have made some additions in the last several years, including their version of a theater--and you can see it here--an ancient theater, which you can see here, with the cavea and with the cunei, or wedge-shaped sections of seats. Two very good restaurants, up above. And then this is a view, standing up on the top of the cavea, looking down toward the orchestra, toward the stage building, which is of course part of the Getty Villa itself. And you see also that it's very accurate--it looks a little too new--but it's very accurate, in that they have even used here the typical columns with the white top and the red bottom, that we saw so characteristic of architecture in Pompeii, and also in Herculaneum.



A view of another pool, with some famous copies of some famous bronze dancers from Herculaneum; I'll show you the originals in a moment. This is the Getty's version of First Style Roman wall painting, along the walls, as you can see here. It's not quite the same, but nonetheless it conjures up what one of these walls would've looked like, if you had it all the way along your corridor. And they have Second Style Roman wall painting as well, and these of course based--they looked mostly at the villa, but when it came to the paintings, they certainly used other models. And if you walk around the villa you'll able to say: "Oh yes, that comes from the--". This is a very Ara Pacis like motif, with the garland and the columns and so on here -- so Second Style wall painting, in these particular cases. Here's another example of Second Style wall painting at the Getty, where they have wonderfully incorporated the door and two of the windows, into this Second Style scheme, as you can see here. And here we're dealing with an atrium, in the Getty Museum, which is based, I think, on a building that I'm sure you all know and learned for the exam, which is which house, the atrium of which house? Which?



Student: The Vettii.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Vettii, do you think Vettii? What about this second story up here?



Student: Samnite.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Samnite, Samnite; the Samnite House, with its second story in the loggia, and then with its impluvium and its compluvium. This is really good stuff. And then here, here you see a view of one of the pools, looking back through the doors. They would've had the wooden door jambs. We saw those in Herculaneum, preserved. Through that, to the pool, with the dancing women. And then at the very end you see a fountain that is based exactly on the large fountain--I showed it to you earlier this term--at Pompeii. And here this whole concept of vista, panorama, from one part of the house to another, taking advantage of light streaming through the compluvium, onto the pool, reflections in that pool, statuary. This really conjures up, as I said, better than anything I can show you, what an ancient Roman villa actually looked like.



There are rooms like this at the Getty, with marble incrustation, that is very much like both marble incrustation we've seen, and also like First Style Roman wall painting. Areas like this, where you can see again columns surrounding a garden, with rooms on the second story; paintings, First Style paintings on the wall; statuary in the center. And all of this, again, based on the actual statuary that was found; a great--a huge collection of statues that this particular owner had, that are now on view in the Archaeological Museum in Naples, were copied for this here.



And then just another view showing that they too, at the Getty Villa at Malibu, were very cognizant of the siting of the structure, placing it on a cliff, so that you can have a beautiful panorama down from there: very much in line with the way the Romans sited their buildings. And then just quickly, just to give you a sense of how compelling some of the sculpture is from here. These are the originals. This is the head of an original athlete or gladiatorial figure from Herculaneum. You can see how vivid it is, especially--it's done in bronze--but especially with the inlaid eyes, that were customary for statues of this type. This has got to be the best hair in Roman Art. I love this one. It's a fantastically dramatic photo of this particular head that also comes from the Villa of the Papyri. And here are dancing ladies. These are the original versions of the dancing women that would have surrounded a pool in the actual villa at Herculaneum, extremely well preserved, and in every possible posture, as you can see here.



If villa architecture is your thing, but you're not interested in the Getty or in Herculaneum, but are an Anglophile and want to do something in England, I've got two topics, two British topics. We're not going to look at Roman Art in Britain. So for any of you who are particularly interested in art in the British Isles, this might be a good topic for you. I have both a villa and a bath. This is the Roman Villa at Fishbourne, in Sussex, England. It's a model of what that villa would've looked like. And you can see that it has a lot in common with the Templum Pacis in Rome, with its great rectangular space and one of the buildings pushed back against it. But one of the questions one would ask for this, as for any buildings that were done somewhere other than Rome: What is based, and how close is this to what's going on in Rome, contemporaneously? And what is different? What has to do with local practice?



If one visits the Fishbourne Villa today, you can still see the mosaic floors that are well preserved here. And you can also--here's a detail of one of them, which is touted as the oldest to be seen, the earliest to be seen anywhere in Britain, as you can see from the label. And you can even see at the Fishbourne Villa, for example, a private bath, with the hypocaust. So clearly the impact of Rome is clear here. And they even have such elements preserved as these roof tiles that you can see here, on the right-hand side.



Another British topic is the Roman Bath at Bath, Aquae Sulis, now in Avon, England. This is a view of the magnificent city of Bath itself, as it looks today. And here's a view of part of what is preserved of the Roman Bath at Bath; the water as green as the Tiber, as you can see in this view. But this is part of the bath structure, and again what one would ask oneself is--and there are, there's enough there, that plans of what this bath would've looked like exist--and one would ask oneself, "What is this--how does this compare to baths that we saw in Italy? What is it--how does it compare to the bath at Pompeii, the Forum Baths or the Stabian Baths, to the imperial bath architecture of Titus? Are there similar kinds of rooms? What is the construction technique? Who was this used for? Who did this belong to? Who put this up? And what part did it play in the social and cultural environment of the city of Aquae Sulis in ancient Roman times? Another view of that, where you can see some of the stone construction. And then, once again, a very well-preserved hypocaust at the bath at Bath, as well as a very interesting brick arch, that you can see here. So the whole question of technology. What kind of technology is used in buildings like this is an intriguing question.



Another great topic, if you want to make your way to the Middle East, to Masada. This is the famous cliff at Masada. I don't know how many of you have climbed. How many of you have climbed Masada? Anyone climbed Masada? A couple of you. Did you go on the Snake Path?



Students: Yes.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: See you're so--I didn't go on the--and I was there a long time ago. So I should've gone on the Snake Path, but I didn't. I went on the cable car. So here--this is what you do when you go and you take the easy way out. You take the cable car up. But you can get some good pictures of other cable cars, as well as of the mountain, as you make your way. But the thing to do is definitely to take the Snake Path up to the top of the peak of Masada, which is steeped in history, as we know.



The particular aspect that would be at issue here would be to look at the Herod's Palace, the great Herod, about whom much is known -- a very interesting historical character, who was around in the first century B.C., the time of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra and so on. His palace at Masada, which was built on the top of the peak, is particularly interesting. Given its date, it's roughly contemporary to the sorts of things we saw going on in Italy, at Palestrina, and at Tivoli the placement of--well in that case, the pouring of concrete on a tiered hillside; in this case use of different materials, as you can see here. But two views of what the Palace of Herod on Masada would have looked like. Again, a tiered structure, multi-tiered structure, roughly three tiers.



So the question here is, what did he have in mind? Why did he put it here? Why did he choose to represent it as a kind of cascading structure, from top to bottom? How does it compare to Palestrina and Tivoli? What is it made of; is it made of concrete or is it made of something else? And why in each instance? What kind of architectural elements are used in this particular case? And if I show you a couple of details, you will see that Rome is not too far away, in the sense that once again we see a hypocaust system being used to heat the floor of this particular room, in Herod's Palace. Was this a bath or was this something else? Remember, we saw the hypocaust also used to heat the floor of Domitian's dining room, in his palace, in Rome. And then over here, look--wall painting: very similar to what we see in Italy, at roughly the same time. This is again B.C., so we're talking about First and especially Second Style Roman wall painting, or the transition between First and Second Style Roman wall painting.



Tombs, we've seen tombs are particularly interesting as a topic, because they're so varied, and have so much to do with the particular patrons who commissioned them. I showed you fleetingly the two tomb streets at Pompeii, the Via dei Sepolcri and the Via Nucera, and I told you that we would concentrate instead on tombs in Rome. But they make a very interesting paper topic, for someone who'd like to think further about Pompeii, and to think about the variety of tomb architecture in Pompeii. That varies from house--tombs that look like houses, to tombs that have columns in the second story, with statues interspersed among them, to tombs that again have a niche in the center, with statuary--unfortunately headless here--but preserved inscriptions. So if you want to get into who these people were, what we know about them, a kind of cultural study, you could do that. And this is my favorite tomb on the Via Nucera in Pompeii, because it should remind you of something we saw earlier when we looked at Roman tomb architecture. What was that?



Student: Columbarium.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: The columbarium, the columbarium, the Vigna Codini. But you'll remember that scheme of placing niches on a wall was for subterranean tomb architecture in Rome. And here we see--it's just a great idea. They took the idea of the columbarium and they slapped it on the front, on the façade of a tomb. So you see two tiers here of niches. Same kind of portraits that we saw, or urns that we saw, in the Vigna Codini columbarium, brought above ground. Same kind of inscriptions in front of each of them, and made into the façade, this very interesting façade of a tomb, on the Via Nucera in Pompeii.



Residential architecture in the Roman provinces. The houses in France at a place called Vaison-la-Romaine; Vasio Vocontiorum in antiquity. The French tout this as the French Pompeii. It is far from the French Pompeii, unfortunately, because it doesn't have all of those public buildings. It doesn't have an amphitheater or a theater or an odeon or a so on and so forth. But it does have some interesting houses. The houses are not as well preserved as those in Pompeii. But it's interesting to look at them. This is a model of one of them, showing the same sort of elements that we've seen in Italy: the peristyle--this is the Hellenized domus type--the peristyle court over here. The compluvium of the atrium over here. So it gives you--and then down on this end, a colonnade with a pool in front of it. So very similar to the kinds of things that we saw in Pompeii.



This is a view of some of the ancient houses, as they look today, and as they make up part of the modern town that surrounds them, in Vaison-la-Romaine. You can see that they're not--they're preserved, only the foundations essentially are preserved. But enough of them are to give us a very good sense of the plans, the architectural plans of these. And it can be interesting to look at these in connection to what we have from Pompeii, and to see how they stack up, and to whether they are different in any way, because of the fact that they were put up in what was ancient Gaul and not in Italy. And here a view of one of the peristyle courts of one of those, as well as a mosaic. And if you look at what remains of the wall painting, you can see that that is completely consistent with what's going on in Italy at the same time.



Option 2 I'm not going to go into in any detail, but you'll see when you look on the website for Option 2; that that's called "Select a Building, Select a Theme." If there is nothing here that you liked, but you do want to do a research paper, and there is some building that you've seen on your travels, that we haven't talked about in this course, or even a building that we have talked about in this course, but talked about in a few minutes time, that you would like to write a paper on, for some reason, you may do that; and you would do it in the same way that you do the first one. It would be a research paper. You'd do--you will need to get permission from me, for which one you choose. You can do this either directly to me, by email, or via the teaching fellows; you can go to them and they will likely be able to be my surrogate, if the idea is good. And if they have any concerns, they will let me know and we'll talk about it, and we'll let you know. It would only be--the reason I want you to come to us is just because if we think that there's absolutely no--there's nothing to read on it, it's going to be very hard for you to do, we want to alert you to that. We want to make sure you choose something where there's a lot to think about and a lot to do that will be a fruitful experience for you. So that's Option 2.



And then Option 3 is by far--oh, I forgot one, I'm sorry. Very quickly, the last topic under Number 1, the Tower Tombs at Palmyra; we already talked about Palmyra in Syria. You see that these tombs here are very distinctive, these tall tower-like tombs, which is why they're called tower tombs. Here's one of them here, made out of local stone, very stark, usually with a niche in the center, that sometimes has a representation of a deceased member of the family lying on a bed. And here the interior of one of these: very ornate; a coffered ceiling with paintings, with portrait paintings in the top; and then a series of niches where you see either single portraits or group portraits of members of the same family, sort of like what we saw on the outside of tombs on the Via Appia, in this case on the inside of tombs. This would be an interesting topic for someone who would also like to use, to go actually look at something at the Yale Art Gallery, because we have some of the portraits that come from these Palmyrene tombs in the Yale Art Gallery. I show you one example of one of those here.



The last topic, my favorite by far, and I really urge--this is a tremendous amount of fun--so I really urge as many of you as possible, who would like to be truly creative, to choose this topic. It's "Design Your Own Roman City." You're an architect, city planner, you're competing for the major commission of your lifetime. I'll let you read the rest of that on the website. A colony of 10,000 people. You can build this anywhere in the Roman world that you want. So if there's a particular place you've enjoyed vacationing and you want to put it there, because you know that place well, that's fine. And you can almost do anything that you want to do. You can be as creative and zany as you want to be, as you do this.



The only thing that I ask--and you do need to do a paper along with this as well, which is a paper that you'll see from the--so there need to be drawings, which are either hand drawn or computer generated. That would usually include the city plan itself--although it doesn't have to--and a selection of buildings. So it's going to take you some time to do. Obviously if you're skilled at drawing, or you're an Architecture major, you're going to be able to do this more readily than someone else. But I just want to urge those who don't--we had one project basically with stick figures one time that was really fantastic. So even if your drawing skills are not great, it's the ideas. Will we be impressed by great drawings? You bet we will. But I don't want to discourage anyone for whom drawing is not your forte, because I think it's really the ideas that count, the creativity that counts here.



But you can choose any location--oh, I mentioned that there's a paper that has to describe the colony, the reason for its construction, giving its name--and again, be very creative here--its date, its location: Italy or the provinces. You can pretty much put anything you want in these cities, but in that paper you have to explain why. For example, if you were to build a town in Asia Minor, and it were to be filled with concrete buildings--which none of these towns were--you have to explain why this particular town is filled with concrete buildings. And you can come up with as crazy an explanation of that as possible; in fact, the crazier the better. But you need to explain something like that, so that we understand that you know there was no concrete architecture in this part of the world, but this particular town is special because of the following reasons. So I think you can see how your creative juices can flow.



I just want to show you very quickly, in the few, five or six minutes that remain, a series of these that were done by students over time, just to serve as a--I hope they won't be intimidating--but rather to serve as an inspiration. There are a couple of them along the way that were done by students of Architecture, that are particularly good in terms of the drawings. But others you'll see are quite simple, and I want to show you to not be intimidated by this particular topic. This is a wonderful city that someone created on a harbor. You can see the docks. You can also see the Port Authority that has been added here, as well as the warehouses. There's some misspellings, like cenaculae over here; Livian Baths, I guess after Livia. But look at this wonderful forum where we have a temple pushed up against one of the back walls. For some reason there's a tetrapylon in the middle of the forum, which kind of works for this street, but I'm not exactly sure where it goes, here; but it's an interesting motif. And then this market, this sort of interesting circular market that kind of projects on one side, creating a very interesting shape; gives you some idea. And a very regular plan, as you can see for this particular city.



This was done by a graduate student actually, in the Architecture School; very extraordinary drawings, and it was a huge plan. But just to show you again how creative it was, the City of Ultorium, after Mars Ultor, of course. And you can see some wonderful motifs, and all of them identified here. This large temple, a tetrapylon, there's always a fascination with tetrapylons in this project; some other structures over here, including a marketplace at 7. But I love, at 6, the curia; you never see a round curia, but this is a round curia, which is absolutely terrific, opening off the basilica, which you see over here, which is very closely based on basilican architecture of the Trajanic Period, and into the Severan period. Some interesting wedge shaped shops over here. So again, it gives you some sense of what's possible.



This, not by an Architecture student, but another one of these port cities that has--I love this--the sunken theater; you can see the sunken theater that goes right into the sea, over here, on this side, but as well as the port. You can see this was a Flavian--so again, you got to decide where you want to put it, which period--the Flavian period, so a Flavian port city. This, another one, also I think from that same project, where you can see the Flavian basilica; a Capitolium with a Temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. And then Titus is honored over here, with his statue, and a couple of victory statues, one on either side. Again, I think from the same project, this is the city itself, where you can see it has an amphitheater, it has a basilica and a forum, and it also has a colonnaded courtyard, a colonnaded street.



If you build a colonnaded street in a town in Italy, you've got to explain why this is the only colonnaded street in a town in Italy. If you put it in the East, it's obvious. Same project I think again, the--it should be the Thermae Titi and the Library. But I love this because the person has identified the stone. In the amphitheater here, stone has been imported from all over the world, from Syria and from Ephesus, to be used in this particular structure. An arch--again I think also; this was a very ambitious project--an arch from that same project, with a victory at the top and an inscription. And then this, the victory gate, again with the amphitheater in the background.



This was something simpler but interesting: a small fountain; composite capitals; coffered, misspelled; apse; a philosopher pose of Titus; scalloped pool, with a triple basin. This one, very simple and very derivative in a way; but I love this one anyway. This house plan shows us that the person was basing it on which house? It was actually on the exam, although you didn't see the plan.



Student: Mosaic.



Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: House of the Mosaic Atrium, because remember up at the top, the entranceway, the atrium and the oecus at the far end, in the form of a basilica. So a very derivative plan. But I just love this touch; just this touch did it for me, sticking those two palm trees in the center of the peristyle court was great. And I forget again exactly where this town was, but it had something to do with that particular--the kinds of flora and fauna of that particular part of the world.



This was another wonderful one. A big city plan; a huge piece of oak tag, with the entire city, a city of the Severan period, Septimius Severus, with buildings honoring him and his son, Caracalla, for example. But this one, because Septimius Severus' wife was particularly interested in astrological signs and used to tell him each day what his day was going to be like, based on those signs, the student incorporated elements of the Mithraic Mysteries, and those astrological signs, as you can see here, in many of these buildings: a Mithraic garden, and so on and so forth, which was really wonderful.



This was great. This was someone who made a book, and included in it was kind of a treasure map that included a preamble to where this city was. And interspersed within this--and