B. from the Antonines to Constantine
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| Silver repoussé, with gilding: The Parabigio Plate. Dated variously from the 2nd to the 4th century, the earlier (Antonine) date seems perfectly plausible to me. Found in northern Italy. D. 0.31m (over a foot). Cybele, the Great Mother, with her lover Attis (who castrated himself) in Phrygian cap. Lions draw the chariot. At the top, sun and moon. Below, earth, ocean, and the seasons. At right, an Atlas holds a zodiacal belt with a nude youth in it (Aeon?) and a snake winding up an obelisk on a three-step base (Agathos Daimon?). Of it Jas Elsner says, "this scene seems overdetermined with symbolic imagery professing grand cosmic claims and hidden meanings." Like the Munich mosaic (behind the Munich Antinoos head), the coins with baby seasons and the Mother of the Gods, and the Aeon in the Apotheosis of Antoninus and Faustina, and even the style of the decursio on the other two sides of that column base, the style and atmosphere of this may be perfectly Antonine. FAIR USE: educational only; do not download |
The founder of
the Severan dynasty which took over after the death of Commodus was a north
African Roman soldier named Septimius Severus; his wife, Julia Domna, was
Syrian. From this time onward,
however good individual rulers might be, there remained very little of ancient
Latin traditions and Italic religious customs around the seat of power. During the third century emperors came
from anywhere, from England to the Middle East; since most were elevated to the
purple through military coups, few lasted very long, some not even long enough
for official portrait types to be made, except on their coins. It was not a great age for architecture
or even, one imagines, for the proper maintenance of Roman roads and aqueducts.
The last great builder (until Diocletian and Constantine) was Septimius Severus's dreadful son, Caracalla, whose great Baths are still partly preserved. However bad life became in the "Barracks" period, portraiture, in the absence of larger imperial sculptural works, was excellent. Not surprisingly, universal religions offering salvation in a better life flourished; Mithraism and Christianity were only two of them. And the last great pagan philosopher, the neo-Platonic poet Plotinus, lived and taught in this century. Among the most interesting works of the late Roman empire are the sculptures and paintings of half Romanized Syrian cities like Palmyra and Dura Europus, the latter producing religious art of half a dozen different faiths, all represented in her polyglot traders population. This period saw the building of a temple to Mithras in London, England, and the introduction in northern India of representations of the Buddha in human form, wearing something like Roman drapery.
The last great builder (until Diocletian and Constantine) was Septimius Severus's dreadful son, Caracalla, whose great Baths are still partly preserved. However bad life became in the "Barracks" period, portraiture, in the absence of larger imperial sculptural works, was excellent. Not surprisingly, universal religions offering salvation in a better life flourished; Mithraism and Christianity were only two of them. And the last great pagan philosopher, the neo-Platonic poet Plotinus, lived and taught in this century. Among the most interesting works of the late Roman empire are the sculptures and paintings of half Romanized Syrian cities like Palmyra and Dura Europus, the latter producing religious art of half a dozen different faiths, all represented in her polyglot traders population. This period saw the building of a temple to Mithras in London, England, and the introduction in northern India of representations of the Buddha in human form, wearing something like Roman drapery.
By the end of
this chaotic century, however, the reforms of Diocletian were sorely
needed. Perhaps it was too late;
they did not work. Diocletian
retired to his native Dalmatia (part of the west coast of Croatia) at the end
of his twenty-year reign, building there a palace with a mausoleum for
himself. Into the remains of that
palace the town of Split (Italian Spalato) is built; the mausoleum is its
cathedral; Split/Spalato takes its name from eis palation, late Greek for "at the palace", i.e.,
Diocletian's palace.
The reign of
Constantine is not the end of the western Roman empire, but it is the last
reign of the whole empire and the last western reign not wholly Christian. Constantine's is the last imperial
reign to adorn Rome (as well as Constantinople, where little of his building
remains) with important new civic buildings. Among Constantine's works were three great Christian
churches: the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher
in Jerusalem, and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. But the greatest was the secular basilica, begun by Maxentius and
completed by Constantine, called the Basilica Nova. This influential building functioned as a basilica but was
designed in the same form as the great halls of the Roman baths, like the Baths
of Caracalla and the Baths of Diocletian (now Sta. Maria degli Angeli,
remodeled by Michelangelo, and the Terme Museums) in Rome.
[MG 229] [MB
71] Ostia, like Pompeii, has buildings and other finds over a long
period of time and could be considered in this course at any point after ca.
100. Little of what we see today
is earlier than Trajan, but most of it is later. Ostia was covered by river silt, not volcanic ash; ostia means "mouths", and the
site is at the mouth of the Tiber; it is the port city of Rome, as Piraeus of
Athens, as (later) Classe of Ravenna.
Except that water damage precluded the preservation of many wall paintings,
it is as well preserved as Pompeii and gives us a vivid idea of a Roman
imperial town in Italy. As usual,
the quality of public works (pavements, drains, storage facilities, state
control of building standards in apartment blocks, warehouses, baths, etc.) is
impressive. Ostia shows us how
most Romans lived; the comparable buildings in Rome itself do not survive,
because they were not covered over, but we know of them from Roman authors. The bricks and mortar and concrete used
for apartment blocks (insulae: they
called their blocks "islands") are the very same, and just as well
constructed, as for Trajan's market, the Pantheon, or Domitian's palace; the
public housing did not, of course, have the rare marble veneers or gilding. The insulae
were built around courtyards, so that every room had light and fresh air;
towards the street, the apartments opened onto balconies; staircases were
solid, sufficient, and well placed.
Using the ground floor facing the street for shops meant (a) that one
could get what was needed near home, and (b) that no one's apartment opened
directly onto the street, which was noisy and could be dirty (horses and
donkeys don't cause ozone depletion, but they excrete, and metal-shod hooves
and wheels on stone pavement are noisy).
The Roman Empire middle classes lived in insulae, the wealthy in large
townhouses and suburban and/or country villas, the underclass wherever they
could--yet Rome and Ostia did not have vast barrios. The Baths of Neptune (one of several public baths in Ostia) preserves
two rooms of floor mosaics completed just after the death of Hadrian. Like floor mosaics generally, these are
of stone tesserae, black and white
marble. By this time, the ancient
stories of Neptune's realm have provided a repertory of decorative motifs:
Neptune's chariot, Tritons, dolphins, hippocamps, sea nymphs; this repertory is
called the marine thiasos, by analogy to the repertory of
Dionysos, the original thiasos of his
satyrs, silens and maenads. The
marine thiasos is obviously appropriate
for the floor of a bath.
[A 428] Of the Antonine emperors (the first of
them was named Antoninus), Marcus Aurelius is the most famous, because his
"Meditations", his book of Stoic philosophy, is one of the
influential classics of western literature. Also, he was the last of the "Good Emperors". This is the lovely Indian Summer of the
Pax Romana, and it might have lasted longer if one of his older children
had lived to be heir instead of Commodus.
Art-historically, the Equestrian
Statue of Marcus Aurelius is one of the most influential sculptures in all
of western art. Like the She-Wolf
and the Spinario, it has always been visible in Rome. Even in the Middle Ages, it inspired several equestrian
portraits of rulers, but the Renaissance genuinely appreciated it as a work of
art and made it the ancestor of all the bronze equestrian portraits on view in
western (and in a few Asian) cities.
When it was made it was one of many equestrian statues, neither the
first nor the last. Most of the
others are wholly lost, having been melted down (being pagan) for their bronze;
a few are preserved in fragments.
It was not for his high Stoic ethics that Marcus Aurelius's survived;
the story grew up in Christian Rome that the gilded bronze gentle-looking rider
was Constantine, who was a canonized saint in the Church. They were not very inquisitive; none of
Constantine's portraits is bearded, but Marcus Aurelius (and the other
Antonines) followed Hadrian's ideal of the emperor as philosopher-king and wear
even fully beards than Hadrian.
Marcus Aurelius is shown addressing the army from horseback, but unarmed
and without weapons. The horse is
(as Renaissance masters realized) a masterpiece, but we have no idea who the
sculptor was, though his statue is as great as the equestrian Gattamelata by
Donatello or the equestrian Colleoni by Verrocchio in the 15th century. Sometimes we wish that the Romans had
valued artists as the Greeks did, or, later, the Romans of the Renaissance. Perhaps one reason is that they usually
hired ethnic foreigners (viz, artists
in the Greek-speaking lands of the Empire) and thus were disinclined to make
them culture heroes. Another,
surely, is that they valued art for many extraneous reasons, above all as
expressing power and glory and Roman ideals (which did not include aesthetics
as such). The Equestrian Marcus
Aurelius has recently been cleaned and the corrosion arrested that had resulted
from post-World War II auto exhaust, which had gone so far that there were
actually holes in the bronze; he has to remain inside, climate controlled. Since such statues were designed to be
seen in space and sunlight, it is much to be hoped that Rome will do what
Venice and Paris have done for public statues that have had to be brought
indoors, make a new cast of the statue and set it up on the base in the middle
of the Campidoglio (Italian for "Capitolium"), since the base was
made for it by Michelangelo and the statue is the centerpiece of his great
design for the Campidoglio.
[A 336, right, with Trajan's in preceding Post,]
[A 343] The Column of Marcus Aurelius in Piazza Colonna (named for it) on the
Corso in Rome was erected at the time of his father's death by Commodus, ca.
180. Everything about it is
directly inspired by the Column of Trajan: it commemorates military campaigns north
of the Alps (in this case, against some Germanic tribes), it has a reclining
river god in the first winding at the bottom, and so forth. Therefore, the differences are
especially significant for changes of taste and style in the intervening
sixty-five years. The relief is
higher (that is, the carving is deeper, with more use of the running drill),
the contrast between light and shade more emphatic; there is more physical
activity represented, with less indication of specific site (it is less
interesting to ethnographers and military historians, having less specific
visual information) or horizons or ground lines; overall, there is more gesture
and feeling and less detail. In
these respects, it resembles some of the best Battle Sarcophagi ([B 370] is a
later one), which use all-over activity, with no horizon or ground line, to
convey the feeling of a melée.
There is one unique image, in the fifth winding from the bottom, on the
Column of Marcus Aurelius: a scene showing the Roman army saved by a miraculous
downpour, and the rain (or Jupiter Pluvius personifying it) is shown as water
embodied (given arms and a face) and also winged, to show that the storm is
airborne. The German tribesmen and
their horses are swept away in the ensuing flash flood. Whether there is anything in the later
story, that it was the prayer of a Christian in the Roman army that was
efficacious, is hard to say.
[MG 41] [K
196] Much of the finest Antonine
art is not from Italy. We already
alluded to the economic shift to greater wealth in the eastern provinces, such
as Asia Minor (where, in the ancient cities like Miletus and Ephesus, this is a
great period) and Syria and Egypt.
The Market Gate at Miletus
(now set up in the Pergamum Museum, like the Ishtar Gate and the Zeus Altar and
much else besides) probably dates from the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Now you see Roman Imperial architecture
with deep roots in Greek Hellenistic design and stone construction (there is no
source of hydraulic cement for concrete here, anyhow), yet new and exciting,
quite unlike anything built by the kings of Pergamon or by Antiochos Epiphanes
in the 2nd century B.C. This
is also the Roman Imperial architecture that Byzantine Empire architecture will
spring from. It drives home the
point: the Roman Empire was not culturally uniform. We Americans can understand that: New York and Chicago have
each a distinct ethos and so have
Boston and San Francisco (much as they admire each other); Miami is as Hispanic
as Minneapolis is Scandinavian; the University of Hawaii teaches more Asian
than European art history. It is
not that everything outside Rome was "provincial", either; far from
it. They simply had their own
traditions. So the Market Gate at
Miletus is built entirely of fitted ashlar stone, marble, and its columns
deviate less from Hellenistic Greek columns. But as a gate?
This resembles no ancient propylon. It looks more like the skénê
of a theater; shoving back the center of a pediment and pulling forward the
wings at left and right come from theater design; in fact, you can find them
much earlier in some 4th Style wall paintings from the last days of Pompeii and
Herculaneum, and theater architecture is doubtless the inspiration here. But there are no urban gateways like
this in the West, except in North Africa (west of Egypt), where there were
close links, architecturally, with Asia Minor. As for the Fayum
Mummy Portraits (the earliest of which go back to the time of Christ, the
latest down to Late Antiquity), Egypt wasn't provincial, but these are funerary
art, serving the same purpose as Tutankhamen's gold mask 15 centuries earlier
but for ordinary middle-class people.
Therefore, their average high quality both as portraits of real people
and as examples of virtuosity in the encaustic
medium (here used quite differently from what was done in the Knucklebone
Players from Herculaneum, drawn in encaustic on marble) is remarkable, for
these are work-a-day, unassuming painters. Here the pigment suspended in wax and glue is thicker but
kept liquid enough to apply and mix a little by the use of heated spatulas
(small spatulas, like small palette knives); when it cools and sets, it is
waterproof and cannot be reworked.
The finished product looks somewhat similar to oil paints applied with a
palette knife, but oils dry very slowly and thus can be worked into and blended
a lot; encaustic cannot, and it requires great deftness. Some modern painters use encaustic, but
they leave out the glue, which makes a big difference in working it. Since these are, literally, facial masks
it is remarkable that almost all the faces are in three-quarter view; that they
are implies that the whole culture took for granted the three-quarter
view for portraits, almost always turned to proper right (which is more natural
for a right-handed artist), with modelling of the face--took it for granted so
strongly that it prevailed even in a mummy mask. The large, staring eyes, on the other hand, are probably
related to their being masks of the dead, looking the living straight in the
eye, as if to insist on the persistence of personality.
[G 92] [MG
9] After Commodus, an army general
from Leptis Magna (near Homs in modern Libya) named Septimius Severus became
the only African-born emperor. His
empress, Julia Domna, was Syrian. The dynasty he founded lasted from 193 to 235. They had two sons, Caracalla and Geta,
and Septimius arranged for them to rule jointly on succeeding him. Caracalla, however, had Geta murdered;
then he had all Geta's portraits erased from Septimius's monuments. Caracalla, understandably, gets bad
press notices in Roman history, and his portraits suggest no better. He left, however, one fine and
influential monument in Rome, the public baths (thermae, Ital. terme)
that bear his name. The Baths of Caracalla, even roofless, have
inspired later architects. As soon
as they were surveyed and measured and drawn up (in restored form) and
published, they became known to architects world wide. The main hall of New York's
Pennsylvania Station (torn down), for example, was based on the Great Hall of
the Baths of Caracalla [MG 9].
Today, operas and symphonic concerts and pop concerts (and after the
World Cup of 1990 the Three Tenors concert) are staged in the summer with the
ruins of the great baths as their background. For these Baths, though laid out in the same way as
Trajan's, were far larger. They
also were farther from the center of Rome, providing thermae in a neighborhood that had not had them before. For pennies, any Roman could spend all
day in the baths. The warm baths
were for basic bathing, the hot baths like a sauna, the cold bath was a swimming pool, but there were exercise
rooms, meeting rooms, lecture rooms, reading rooms, as well; one met people
there. Then as now the baths were
surrounded by gardens. One of the
aqueducts brought water. Furnace
rooms on the perimeter heated the water, vents (hypocausts) from the furnace rooms under the floors provided
central heating. The baths
employed workers in numbers like MacDonald's (from furnace stokers to bath
attendants to purveyors of refreshments to cleaner-uppers to errand runners on
up to the politest sort of personnel who arranged and managed things--and don't
forget the gardeners). The baths
were luxury for everyman, adorned like a palace, with marble veneers and
painted stucco vaults and mosaic floors (in black and white; some are still
there), with columns of colored marble and statuary in all the niches. The Naples Museum has some of
Caracalla's statuary; it is large and unsubtle but must have looked splendid in
the great baths. As you should
have guessed, the Baths, all of them, are built of brick-faced concrete and
vaulted with concrete; on the outside, the brick was visible but inside was a
feast of colored marbles, the
setting for white and colored marble statuary. In the Baths of Caracalla, built 211-217, the brick work is
still good, but there is beginning to be thicker mortar between the bricks; it
is not so good as 2nd-century brickwork (not quite so strong and solid). We have already seen groin vaults in
the aula of Trajan's markets, and
there was a groin vaulted hall already in Trajan's baths, too, and lots of
others, but the Great Hall of the Baths of Caracalla [MG 9] was vaster and more
imposing. Notice the arched windows
at the sides of the groin vaults which do the same job as a clerestory in
lighting the tall central space.
[A 427, right]
[MA 72] The greater part of the
3rd century (A.D. 235-284) is called the age of the "Barracks
Emperors" because, generally speaking, there was one military coup after
another. For this reason, after
the Severans and before Diocletian, we have very few great public buildings and
monuments; few reigns lasted long enough or could command the necessary
resources; a few of these emperors never even got to Rome. Luckily Rome's infrastructure and Roman
law were so well founded that they kept working for quite a while. Philip
the Arabian [A 427, compared with Trajan] in whose reign Rome celebrated, in A.D. 248, the
millennium of her foundation (752 B.C.) was one of them. It is instructive having his portrait
beside Trajan's, because you can use similar language about both (sober,
realistic, powerfully carved) but they are not alike. This is not because Philip was a bad man; history doesn't
say that he was. It is because the
style of Imperial portraiture has changed. All portraits by this date have eyes carved rather than
simply painted, increasingly with the pupil given the illusion of a glint by
drilling, often with a deep heart-shaped drilling, and the eyes tend to roll
upwards a bit (evidently what they felt was impressive or expressive). Also, they tend to stare, almost as
much as the Fayum masks. Then, the
emperors whose background was military are shown with crew cuts and a day or
two's growth of beard, evidently to express something like true grit. Not that they were better commanders
than Marcus Aurelius; they just had to look that way. Of course, in the case of Philip the Arabian, the man just
has very rugged features, besides.
Gallienus [MA 72, left], son
of Valerian (see O 418 in the next section), who ruled alone from 260 to 268,
had small features and wore a beard and longer hair to express affinity to
Hadrian and the Antonines (he was interested in philosophy), but the frowning
brows and the carved eyes, rolled upward, and a mouth so set that he looks
desperate (in the event, his soldiers murdered him at Milan) reveal this as
another of the wonderful 3rd-century portraits: Renaissance sculptors
particularly admired Roman portraits of this period, in which the ghost of
Alexander the Great is no longer discernible. One of the most unforgettable faces of the 3rd century,
found at Ostia, is probably a portrait of the Greek Neo-Platonic
philosopher-poet Plotinus (he
presented his ideas in a long poem called the Enneads). Here the
carving has the kind of expressive plasticity that we noticed first in the
reliefs on the Column of Marcus Aurelius; the lines and hollows are exaggerated
to suggest great spirituality.
Plotinus's philosophy is radically idealistic and dualistic, also
influenced by Iranian theology; it appealed to minds that might also be
attracted to Christianity (later, St. Augustine is a good example); his
philosophy and that of his disciple Porphyry were very popular among Roman
intellectuals, so it is not too surprising to find at Ostia a portrait dating
not long after his death (A.D. 270) or even in his lifetime.
[B 370] The Ludovisi Sarcophagus was
already compared with the Column of Marcus Aurelius; it is the finest of the
3rd-century Battle Sarcophagi.
These sarcophagi may look jumbled and confused to us, but perhaps we
need to look at them with the eyes of genius: there is a relief with a
"Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs" that Michelangelo carved as a boy
(before he was 18); it pretty obviously was inspired by a sarcophagus relief
such as this one. Michelangelo's
boyhood work, however, is clearer and finer and has more real feeling. His is carved; here most of
stone-removal was effected with the running drill. If you look closely, hair looks like a sponge, and some of
the drapery looks like wormwood, with deep tubular channels. It looks great from a distance, not so
hot close up, and the principal horseman looks like a doll on a toy horse; his
legs don't connect to a body, and his arm just flaps out. Using the running drill is nothing new,
but being content to let its grooves, unretouched, suffice for drapery
is new. There's a "that'll
have to do it" attitude evident here, and not only on sarcophagi.
[MG 15] [MG
225] It was in the 3rd century
that the sanctuary buildings at Baalbek
in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon were completed, though most of the main
temples is a century older. The
octagonal gatehouse is extremely interesting. This, too, is solid stone construction, with extremely rich
carving on the interior and in the ceiling coffers of the Bacchus temple (the
one at left); that rich carving is executed with very deep drill work,
producing strong contrasts and even a lacy effect where the drill work is
densest. The smaller round temple
(called "Temple of Venus" only because of the curvaceous character of
its style) is of the 3rd century and makes a good example contrasting to the
round colonnaded temples of Greece (Epidauros) and Italy (Rome and Tivoli) that
we have studied, respectively ± 600 and ± 300 years earlier. The Round Temple at Baalbek
has a podium, but it is scalloped; it has an entablature on its columns, but
it, too, is scalloped, all the way back to become tangent to the cella
wall. The niches in the cella wall
have a molding over them that is like a bit of arcuated lintel. The outward leaning of the columns,
however, is not part of the design (notice the cracks opening in the
entablature). The whole is a
playing with concavities against convexities, and there is nothing like it at
any date in Rome. Yet it is a
"Roman temple" with podium and with a regular temple porch attached
to it.
[K 206] [K
208] As we go farther east, the
styles become more mixed. One of
the most fascinating things to study (at the 4000 or 7000 level, however)
between the 2nd and the 7th century is the gradual attenuation of Greco-Roman
traditions as you go from site to site along trade routes farther and farther
east; but, before the Greco-Roman traits disappear you notice that the art is
beginning to show the effects of Chinese trade coming from the opposite
direction. The traders' oases,
such as Dura Europos and Palmyra (see MAP 1) are
fascinating. At Dura the
excavators found religious buildings of Palmyrene gods, of Mithraic worship,
even a small church of the Christians there, besides the Synagogue of the Jewish merchants of Dura. The walls of this Synagogue are covered
with paintings. In Israel itself,
synagogues of the Roman period have religious symbolic motifs, such as the menorah and the rams' horns, in fine
mosaic. Here we have something
unique: stories from the Hebrew Bible, the whole Moses cycle, with some of the
figures labelled in Greek, and much more; it is like having all the readings
for a Seder in pictures on the wall.
But, as everyone knows, Hebrew texts are not illustrated in this
way. Having images could lead to
worshipping them. Perhaps many of
the congregation at Dura could not read, so needed pictures. Perhaps the presence all around them of
religions that used pictures influenced them (but that usually has the opposite
effect). There isn't another
synagogue anywhere like this one.
The drawing is careful and rather good, though a little amateurish,
being the work of a local artist in a caravan town; he renders the Temple in
the shape of a Roman temple! He
knows about drapery folds, more or less, and shading; he puts little shadows
under figures' feet, but as if he had learned to do so by rote (so they look
like smudges). One very
interesting thing is that most of the figures are wearing tunics and trousers
tucked into boots (felt boots); these are the garments of horseback-riding
Iranians and of others who learned from them to wear such clothes. The Funerary Portraits of the nobility and well-to-do of Palmyra in Syria are conventional in
their subject matter but quite extraordinary in style. Palmyra is important; strong Roman
influences reached this far, but so did the Chinese silk trade (not that there
is anything at all Chinese about any of their art). Palmyra was a quite wealthy city, where the upper classes
could pose as Romans both socially and in their images for eternity. The poses and garments are Roman
(Greco-Roman), the jewelry more or less so, but somewhat heavy and excessive,
the technique of carving careful and rather skillful, BUT there is no
organic or tectonic structure to the human figures; the man's eyes are pasted
on (it looks so odd here, because this is not archaic art, not
consistently patterned like the New York kouros
of ca. 600 B.C.), one of the woman's arms is very small, but not to show
a woman with a withered arm. Here
you have an interesting imitation of the shell (so to speak) of the Greco-Roman
tradition by a rather good carver who has no sympathy with or understanding of
the rationale (empirical + formal) that had given rise to the workshop tricks
(e.g., for drapery) that he is using.
It is easy to forget that in the very many cases where this has happened
in human history, we not only get very interesting and rich hybrid art but whatever
art forms the less evolved culture might eventually have developed are nipped
in the bud. It can't be
helped. "There are no islands
anymore", and there were already very few isolated places by ca. 250 A.D.
[G 129] [1601]
[MB 49] We already called
attention to the Jewish Christian community in Rome in the 1st century, but the
Epistle to the Romans is our evidence.
We have no churches, even house churches, preserved so early as that,
nor did the Christians of Rome yet dig catacombs to bury their dead. By the 3rd century, the time of the
earliest catacomb paintings, Christianity was one of several non-Western
salvation-oriented mystery religions in Rome; except when things came to a
head, they were all tolerated. The
mysteries of Mithras, from Persia, was very popular, especially in the army,
which spread it all the way to the Atlantic. Orphism was still viable. So were Bacchic mystery cults. For intellectuals, Neo-Platonism was as much a religion as a
philosophy. And Christianity kept
growing. A mystery religion is one
into which one must be initiated and which has rites both meaningless and
inaccessible to those not initiated.
In Christianity, the mysterion
is the partaking of the body and blood of Christ in the Mass, and the
initiation is Baptism, which is a new birth and dying to the Old Adam. The catacombs tunnel down from a
cemetery plot owned by a member of the Christian congregation; the volcanic
tufa under Rome makes this possible.
The poorest Christians had coffin-sized loculi [G 129] in the walls of the tunnels; these could be sealed
with a slab or, if you could not afford a slab, with bricks. Those who could afford to pay to have
them dug out had family vaults (cubicula,
plural; we already learned at Herculaneum that the word means
"bedroom"; here you rest perpetually). It is the cubicula
that are painted. It cannot be
overemphasized that pagan Romans also had family vaults; very wealthy ones have
elaborate vaults executed in painted stucco. The pagan ones divide up the ceiling area in the same way;
the Christians simply do with a ceiling what everyone does, make a tomb ceiling
rather like a house ceiling. Not
all Christians, by any means, were poor, although Jesus himself had been poor;
by the third century well-to-do persons were Christians, and in the fourth
century the emperor's mother. They
seem to have thought it wrong to spend a king's ransom on grave plots and
standing tombs and gilt stucco.
Thus they got around the prices of grave plots and the funerary art
industry by initiating the catacombs.
Secrecy probably was not a
primary motive, unless they craved secrecy for the feeling it gives of being
special, but they did have commemorative funerary meals down in the catacombs
at intervals after an interment.
The paintings show only what is essential: figures personifying Prayer
(the orantes, plural) and figures
from stories that stood for salvation: the Hebrew Children in the Fiery
Furnace, Jonah, Daniel in the Lions' Den, Moses Striking the Rock, and, most
frequent, The Good Shepherd (who lays down his life for his sheep). The painting style is rapid, with no
frills, but it is fully competent, metropolitan Roman, professionally trained
work (the Dura synagogue paintings are painstaking but not quite
professional-looking; these may be slapdash but are exactly like some of the
minor paintings in third and fourth century houses at Ostia in their technique
and drawing). This is the art
properly called Early Christian; it is simply the Roman art of the Christian
religion before it was radically changed by being made the official religion of
the Empire under Constantine.
[MG 17] [MG 50]
[MG 51] Diocletian was born at Split on the Dalmatian coast, now in
Croatia. He came to the throne in
284 and ruled for 20 years; he might have ruled longer, but he had decided
orderly succession and proper preparation to rule the Empire were critically
important. He founded the
Tetrarchy (see [K 210]) in which he was one of two Augusti (senior emperors)
and two younger men were Caesars (juniors); after his twenty-year term he
retired to the retirement palace he
had been building in his native town.
Indeed, the modern name, Split
(like its Italian alternative form, Spalato) has developed from the Greek
phrase eis palation (at the
palace). The palace is laid out in
a square, like a Roman military camp; in one quarter was the palace proper, in
one Diocletian's mausoleum (like
those built by Augustus and Hadrian, round (well, octagonal), like an Etruscan
tomb mound), which today is the Cathedral of Split; the other two quarters were
for military and administrative personnel. The modern inhabitants of Split are very familiar with the
palace, since the town is built right into it, which also explains why we need
to make a reconstruction drawing to see it as it was ca. 300 A.D. Notice the sea gate and the high
octagonal dome of the mausoleum.
In the colonnades flanking the Peristyle,
we see something important for the future (it occurs earlier in Asia Minor but
this is the first time we have seen it): an arcade bearing a wall with the
arches springing directly from the capitals of the columns. Also, look at the pediment at the end
of the peristyle: we saw architrave alternating with archivolt standing free at
the "Canopus" in Hadrian's Villa, but here it is part of a pediment.
[K 210] In Venice in the Piazza di San Marco,
standing facing the façade, if you go to the corner of San Marco on your right
you see built right into it (like a trophy) one of the strangest pieces of
Roman statuary, the Porphyry Tetrarchs, Augusti embracing and
Caesars embracing. Porphyry is a
very hard, purple igneous rock the color of imperial purple dye (from the murex
shell) and these are only the best of several examples of portraits of the
Tetrarchs in this stone. Made in
Egypt? Whoever made them,
wherever, even at this date they are not typical of Roman sculptural
style. You can find other work
with large heads and short bodies, but not the rubber arms and the perfect
absence of connectedness behind the armor. It is not that they are bad; to the contrary, they are
wonderful, unforgettable, even haunting.
They also are interesting for the birds' heads on the swords and for the
emperors' wearing the slat armor that was worn by the Iranian horsemen of the
middle east. Although even at A.D.
300 these are far from typical, a hundred years earlier they would have been
unthinkable.
[MB 72] One place where you can see the same
kind of figures as the Porphyry Tetrarchs is in the mosaic of the Great Hunt in the Imperial Villa at Piazza Armerina in
Sicily. This sprawling
imperial villa with magnificent colored stone floor mosaics in nearly every
room of every building is thought to have belonged to one of Diocletian's
immediate successors. The figure
in the cylindrical hat, looking like doom itself, closely resembles the dourest
of the four tetrarchs in the Venice group, Constantius I Chlorus (not to be
confused with Constantine). You
may have seen the travelling exhibit of art from Tunisia a couple of years ago
in the New Orleans Museum; if so you will see why art historians attribute
these mosaics to a North African school of picture mosaicists. These are the most exciting mosaics of
the Late Roman period, and hunting seems to be their major interest. In any case, the similarity in style
between the porphyry statue and the mosaic proves that the hard stone is not
the explanation for the unusual style of the statues.
[MA 10] [MG
159] [G 83] Constantine the Great,
the first Christian emperor (but baptized only on his deathbed, being
influenced by early theology overconcerned about the problem of sinning after
having been washed sinless), was the son of Constantius Chlorus, one of the
tetrarchs. He called the Council
of Nicaea in 325 and made Christianity the state religion (not yet outlawing
all others, however). He made
Constantinople (Istanbul), named for himself, the capital of the Empire,
instead of Rome. After the Battle
of the Milvian Bridge in 312, he was sole emperor until his death in 337. The head and extremities of the colossal statue of Constantine that
stood in the apse of the Basilica Nova
give us an idea of one kind of Constantinian art, in which an attempt was made
to recapture the detached ideal classicism of Augustan art (by now more than
three centuries distant); it certainly is cool and detached, and its smooth
hardness combined with the deeply and sharply drilled eyes make this
six-foot-high head almost inhumanly terrifying, although such was not,
probably, the emperor's and artist's intent. The emperor's eyes, in this style of portrait, are as large
and staring as in any Fayum portrait.
The competence of the sculptor, in any case, is extremely high; only,
the whole meaning of the imperial image seems to have changed.
[G 86] [A 436]
[A 437: filed under Hadrian] [B 371]
Although the Arch of Constantine
was erected in a hurry and mostly out of second-hand materials, which were not
at the same scale or in the same style or even related to each other in subject
matter, it seems to have been much admired in the Renaissance, since we see it
used dozens of times in the background of paintings by the very best
artists. Not only did it stand for
Rome but sculptors and architects picked up from it the idea of roundels as
architectural decoration. From a
distance it looks fine, and even up close the narrow frieze just below the
roundels, with its short, large-headed figures has a certain vigor and charm,
although it is roughly executed with running drillwork mostly unretouched and
may well have been done by sculptors usually engaged in carving sarcophagi (on
[B 371] the carving of the figures of the Good Shepherd, just a little earlier,
will show you what I mean). Yet
Constantine had obtained the services of a competent, even powerful artist for
his colossal statue, as we have seen.
But when you look closely at the figures in the spandrels and at the figures on the basement, below the columns,
you see work of unqualified crudity, as if the emperor and his architectural
advisers really didn't care. I
have heard someone seeing these for the first time say, But these look
downright Medieval! That's unfair
to the Middle Ages, because, as soon as Medieval sculptors try to do large
sculpture, they really try, and do the very best they can.
The Good Shepherd Sarcophagus,
dating from one of the last Barracks Emperor reigns or from the early years of
Diocletian, is still Christian art from the last decades before
Christianity was elevated to being the state religion, was still one of several
salvation religions. On sarcophagi,
they all might use grapevines and vintage, which symbolize rebirth and new
life, and the same sculpture workshops might work for adherents to differing
beliefs; there is not specifically Christian style or technique. But the figure of the Good Shepherd
proves that this one is Christian.
********
 |
| Another great hunt scene from the Imperial Villa at Piazza Armerina. To show the color range, here is one of my own teaching photos from the 1960s(?). |
The Basilica Nova (New Basilica; it had been a long time since a great one had
been built), [MG 159] [G 83], was begun before 312 by Maxentius and finished
under Constantine (who had the position of the apse changed)--thus it has three
equally correct names. This is the
one basilica that is the exception to the rule, the one Roman basilica,
civic or religious, that is vaulted. In the Central Hall of the Baths of Caracalla (above, [MG
9]), its inspiration is obvious; it is constructed exactly the same way as the
great halls of the imperial baths, covered by groin vaults, and with the same
arched windows between the exterior buttresses serving as a clerestory. We might think of a timber roof as
cheaper, but the contrary is true, since this span would need trees as tall,
straight, and strong as imported cedars of Lebanon, while the wooden forms
(which are called "centering")
to make the groin vaults could employ lesser timbers, and these timbers would
be reused, since one square unit of vaulting was built at a time; these units
are called bays. From one major support to the next is
one bay. The central space of the
Basilica Nova is three bays long, as you read on the plan from the three X's
over three squares. If groin vaults are to be built at a grand
scale, high and broad, as in the aula
of Trajan's Market, the central halls of the Baths, and here, they must be
built with perfectly round, exactly equal arches over squares (unequal sides
> unequal arches). At a smaller
scale, builders could (and did) cheat in all sorts of ways, as we shall
see. Even when perfect, they exert
no small thrust at the points where the groins converge on the major
supports. Here, as in the Baths of
Caracalla, barrel vaults one storey
high, perpendicular to the central space, buttress them (help prevent outward
buckling that would lead to collapse), and on top of the walls dividing these
barrel vaults, on the outside, above the roofs of the barrel vaults, there are
external buttresses besides (we already saw some in the aula of Trajan's market).
Today the central groin vaults have long since fallen, but they may have
stood for centuries and inspired architects (and persons who employed
architects, such as bishops and abbots) visiting Rome. These were true Roman concrete
vaults. Today three of the
coffered perpendicular barrel vaults still stand with two of the external
buttresses above them. The walls
are still excellent brick-encased concrete, magnificent even stripped of the
colored marble veneers and columns on the interior.
*****
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