The Roman Empire, Augustus to Hadrian

THE ROMAN EMPIRE

For this course, the following periods of Roman history provide a sufficient chronological framework:

Augustus  30 B.C. to 14 A.D. (all dates hereafter are "A.D.")
Julio-Claudian  14 to 69
[69 is the year of four emperors]
Flavian  (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian)  69 to 96
[96-98 is the brief reign of Nerva]
Trajan  98-117
Hadrian  117-138
Antonine  138-193
Severan  193-235
"Barracks Emperors" (frequent coups)  235-284
Diocletian  284-305
Constantine  sole emperor 312-337

(A)From Augustus through Hadrian.

As the emperor Augustus and his artistic advisors had the poet Vergil produce a Roman epic, the Aeneid, to emulate the Greek Iliad, so they had their sculptors create official art intended to emulate Athenian art of the age of Perikles, taking classical art to express stability and justice under the Pax Augusta.  Thus Roman imperial art began with a classical revival with a political message, propagating the new emperor's peace platform, rather than with a simple continuation of the advanced Hellenistic mixed styles; considered as imperial propaganda, the latter would convey mixed messages, recalling not only the Ptolemies and notions of divine kingship but, nearer home, Julius Caesar and Sulla and Pompey the Great.  The Augustan art program was carefully thought out, and, although late Hellenistic historicism (see above) was a requisite antecedent to it, Augustan classicism was something new and thoroughgoing, affecting all the arts.  At the same time, the conquest of Egypt just completed caused a flurry of Egyptianizing (a Roman version of Ptolemaic Egyptian art).  The important idea is that Roman imperial art begins by radically politicizing a certain style of art and with the assumption that art exists (i) for state propaganda and (ii) for private luxury.  In the second category, Roman patrons liked much the same decorative arts and genre pieces and copies of famous masterpieces as their Greek-speaking counterparts:

From Antioch.  Beginning of 2c AD  Judgment of Paris.  Louvre MA 3443 (MND1945)  Considering the full page pictures in the Paris Psalter (late 10th c. CE) and some of the pictures in Pompeii, such as those in the House of the Vetii, and the border designs from Pergamon, I can think of no way to decide whether this Judgment of Paris goes back to a free painting or a wall painting or a picture book book (a codex), but I venture that "reproductions" of famous paintings abounded in the Empire.  They seldom find their way into textbooks, or even coffee-table books, but their existence is important to keep in mind.

Julio-Claudian art continues what Augustus had begun, but it is noticeably less austere and/or less exquisite.  Under Nero Roman architecture begins to exhibit the revolutionary combination of engineering and design that makes Roman architecture basic to all subsequent western architecture; the surviving parts of Nero's Golden House (palace) show that his architects were among the most original that the world has known.  Wall paintings from the Golden House show that the so-called Fourth Style of Pompeian wall decoration had begun to be popular by the last years of his reign, i.e., in the 60s A.D.

The eruption of Vesuvius occurred at the end of Vespasian's reign, in A.D. 79; nothing at Pompeii, Herculaneum, or Boscoreale can be later than that year.
Flavian art begins by redefining the Roman Empire through its art; as opposed to Nero's portraiture, that of Vespasian is unsparing in its homeliness and verism, saying more plainly than words that Vespasian foreswore Neronian profligacy.  Few portraits of Titus are from his short reign; he was more important as his father's right hand man during Vespasian's ten years; from the Roman point of view, putting down the uprising in Judaea in A.D. 70 was as obviously right as "Desert Storm" seemed to us, although sacking the Temple in Jerusalem was both unwise and insensitive, reminding the Jews of Antiochos IV, the Seleucid king of the 2nd century B.C.  Titus's younger brother, Domitian, had the longest rule of the Flavians, and seems to have been among the most vicious monarchs of all time, but he was a great builder.  He completed the Flavian Amphitheater, begun by his father, erected the fine Arch of Titus to commemorate his brother's victory in Judaea, and built the great palace on the Palatine Hill (the word "palace" comes from the name of the Hill), in which all emperors lived right down to the fifth century A.D.  The Palace is too complicated to study in this course but must be mentioned, because so many influential innovations were made by its architects.  By the last years of Domitian's reign, imperial portraiture at the court had reached the style nicknamed "Flavian Baroque" because it had come so far from the plain statement of Vespasian's portraits (or, for that matter, the intellectually pure classicism of Augustus's).

Trajan was arguably the best of all Roman emperors and a great builder, too.  Portraiture again was redefined to make his political statement; his portraits almost miraculously combine idealism, sober verism, and Hellenistic technique.  His was the last of the great imperial fora (fora is the plural of forum) and almost certainly was designed by his great engineer and architect, Apollodorus of Damascus.  [Note that, as in the New Testament books of about the same period, the names show that we are dealing with a cosmopolitan, international world, in which a Roman architect with a Greek name comes from Damascus, the capital of Syria.]  Trajan's family name was Ulpius, which is why the Basilica in his Forum is called Basilica Ulpia; the historiated column illustrating his Dacian campaigns stood between Greek and Latin libraries next to the Basilica Ulpia; both were part of the forum complex, which also included the Markets, the Mercati Traiani, a great shopping mall in five stories.  Having no son, Trajan designated Hadrian as his successor.

Hadrian's reign, with hindsight, seems pivotal in Roman art history.  He takes up where Trajan leaves off, even employing the same architect/engineer, Apollodorus of Damascus, and, like Trajan, he was a very competent and conscientious emperor.  But, unlike any previous emperor, he was a philhellene, and he liked to travel, and he was an amateur architect and poet.  He probably designed the Pantheon himself, but he certainly didn't do the engineering of it.  He probably had a large part in the laying out of his villa at Tivoli (ancient Tibur) with all its philosophical allusions; the villa is replete with original architectural ideas.  The sculpture of his reign reflects his firsthand acquaintance with Greek art, obtained through his travels.  Hadrianic classicism is far more romantic than Augustan, and its message is personal rather than propagandistic, but also it is based more on the Greek art of Athens and Asia Minor of his own time than on Athenian art of the fifth century B.C.; he and his Athenian banker friend Herodes Atticus endowed Athens with new buildings and restored old ones.

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 [A 329]  In the Woman from Vasciano [A 319], we already saw in full measure Augustan sculptors' skill in vying with Classical drapery and in the Man from Delos [MA 73] and L'Arringatore [A 327] the remarkable realism of Late Hellenistic portraiture.  

The Roman Patrician Holding the Busts of his Ancestors is a perfect example of the synthesis achieved by the best sculptors working for the Imperial family and the upper class during the reign of Augustus, although it must be noted that the principal head, although ancient and of this period or hardly earlier, does not belong to the body (it was joined to it by a restorer long ago).  It should be noted that the folds of the toga (now a full, long toga) have less relief and body than the Classical drapery folds that inspired them.  That the man holds the busts reflects the Roman tradition of keeping busts (often based on masks made from the face at the time of death or in life) of one's ancestors in a shrine in the house; it is part of Roman pietas.  The sculptor even observed the style of the busts of father and grandfather; the one held higher is like portraits of the time of Pompey, in the middle of the first century B.C, and the one above the palm tree trunk is in a style going back to the time of Sulla, or even L'Arringatore.

Athens, Nat. Arch. Mus.  Fragmentary Equestrian Augustus  Bronze.  The horse is missing.  Imagine the inset eyes, too.  This is more than a century earlier than the Marcus Aurelius.  Remember that fine bronze sculptures stood all over the Empire, not just in Rome, and this also is earlier than the famous Primaporta Augustus:

[A 418]  The most famous, most perfectly preserved Augustan portrait is the Primaporta Augustus, so called because it was found at the Villa of Livia (Augustus's empress) at Primaporta, a suburb of Rome.  The creation of this portrait type probably commemorated the recovery of the Roman Legionary Standards from the Parthians (centered in Iran), who had hurt Roman pride by capturing them in a battle shortly before the Principate of Augustus (it was called the Principate, because Augustus styled himself "princeps inter pares", first among equals, a contradiction in terms designed to deny that he was making himself anything like a Hellenistic King).  The delivery of the Standards by the Parthians is represented in relief on the breastplate of his armor, and his outstretched arm combined with his wearing armor means that he is shown as Imperator, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.  He also became Consul, the most important civil office of the Roman Republic, and Pontifex Maximus, Chief Priest of the Roman State.  What the assumption of all these titles came to mean in western culture is shown by our words, Prince, Emperor, and Pontifex (the title of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, in Latin).  To strengthen the supporting leg (which here has to support the extra weight of all that drapery) the sculptor used a winged baby Eros on a dolphin; that doesn't seem very military, but this statue dates from the time when the poet Vergil was creating a myth for the Roman Empire in his great Aeneid: Eros refers to his mother, the goddess Aphrodite (Latin Venus), who via specious descent from Troy was made divine ancestress of the Julian clan, to which, through adoption by Julius Caesar, Augustus belonged.  It is hard to imagine that the Roman public did not grasp that the man who was given a divine ancestress was indeed heir to all the Hellenistic kings, as Rome was heir to all their kingdoms.  Hellenistic rulers, however, were often shown in heroic nudity; Roman emperors, except for egregiously megalomaniac types later, are not; it is even remarkably "Greek" (to the Romans, that meant "effete") for Augustus to be shown barefoot, rather than in army boots, so it is surely symbolic of some aspect of his "divine destiny".  It is important to remember that this idea of divinity, which the Greeks and Romans got from conquering Egypt, is nothing like the Judaeo-Christian or Moslem idea of the divinity of God.  Although armed, Augustus is bareheaded, too; this is the Commander in Chief as a man of peace; the Pax Romana had just been proclaimed.  In other words, we are meant to read this statue like a book, almost as we did the Palette of Narmer, and part of the message is the new style.  The pose is a variant of the Spearbearer by Polykleitos (but with the legs farther apart and a smaller head, which are due to this coming at the end of Hellenistic developments), and the portrait head is a skillful combination of Polykleitos with a portrait of Augustus, such as we see on his earliest coins.  As the Syllabus says, now, for the first time, a very carefully devised eclectic style is formed (by extremely knowledgeable and skillful artists) for specific propaganda: the Pax Romana is a new Classic Age.  Never mind that real politics in the age of Perikles were rather messy.

[MA 79]  The Portland Vase is another example of this kind of classicism, combining their understanding of fifth-century idealism with elements of Hellenistic accomplishments from the intervening centuries, the whole being cooler and more detached in feeling than any of its models.  It is private art, not public propaganda, but it is a rare masterpiece and may well have been made for a member of the imperial family or one of their friends.  Cameo glass, yes, is a substitute for real cameo (naturally occurring layered stone, whose white surface can be carved away), but it is not used for cheapness.  Natural cameo is more or less flat, impossible for a vase.  Cameo glass is extremely rare.  Into a mold coated with opaque white glass the glassblower blew the dark glass to make the vessel; then an artist, probably one trained as a gem cutter and die engraver (for coins), carved away the white overlay just as he would do with natural cameo; where only very thin white remained, the black shows through and makes shading in the figures.  The Portland Vase is the finest example of this art.  The subject matter is idyllic and ideal, vague enough that modern art historians do not all agree in detail as to what it represents.

[MA 6] [MA 51] [A 332]  The Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace) is a dated monument, begun in 13 B.C. and dedicated in 9 B.C.  It is imperial propaganda to the nth degree, twice, since Mussolini had it reconstructed in the 1930's in a deliberate attempt to identify with the Augustan idea: Peace and Prosperity.  Its present site is not its original one (which wasn't available); it now stands on the bank of the Tiber, off the Corso.  Augustus's reign terminated a century and a half of intermittent civil war, as the Roman Republic broke under the strain of inheriting Hellenistic power, wealth, and responsibilities; the Pax Romana would, in fact, last for two centuries, a world order based on due process of law and equitable taxation (not that abuses did not occur) guaranteed by disciplined military organizations (the army wasn't its own boss).  The Ara Pacis proclaims the Pax Romana.  It is one of those architecturally enclosed altars, the altar proper inside and elevated, as you see in the general view; unlike the Pergamon Altar of Zeus, it has no colonnade; instead, it resembles the fifth-century Altar of the Twelve Gods (also called "Altar of Peace") in the Athenian Agora, which, significantly was a place of asylum (if you just could get to it, you were safe).  The non-figural decoration on the Ara Pacis Augustae is very beautiful: swags of branches and fruit tied with ribbons on the interior of the walls and, on the exterior below the figured panels, the most elegant and delicately executed plant-and-scroll work imaginable.  The whole structure is of fine marble.  The figured panels on the long sides (on either side of the entrance and in the corresponding positions on the back, where the Tellus panel is) are in a pictorial style very similar to what we saw in cameo glass on the Portland Vase.  The Processions on the sides are inspired specifically by the Panathenaic Procession frieze on the Parthenon in Athens, but they produce a very different effect.  The figure of Tellus mothering two babies (like Charity in Christian art later) is based on the goddesses of the Parthenon, particularly by the Artemis in the east frieze, but the illusionistically carved plants and rocks (as delicate as the schiacciato reliefs of the Early Renaissance in Florence) were unknown before Hellenistic art (the use of female figures, personifications, to embody the meaning of abstract nouns we saw first in the Eirene and Ploutos by Kephisodotos of 370 B.C.).  The female on the bird is a land breeze, on the sea monster a sea breeze; their billowing cloaks show that they are wafted on the breezes they personify.  The overturned pitcher is sources of sweet water, the cow and sheep stand for contented herds yielding milk, cheese, leather, wool.  Peace makes it possible.  The propaganda may be obvious, but the extremely skilled artist has not allowed it to compromise his work.  Most specialists believe that the sculptors hired to carve the Ara Pacis were in fact Athenians.  (The Sleeping Endymion, [A 306], that we already studied as an example of neo-Attic pictorial relief is not so fine, quite, as the Tellus, but the same kind of thing).  The Processions on the Ara Pacis differ in important and significant traits from the Parthenon's Panathenaic Procession: (a) the foreground figures are recognizable portraits of living persons, members of Augustus's family and administration and (b) to keep all the important people up front and recognizable, and not too much overlapped by other important people, the figures are so crowded that we can't see through the crowd for a sense of breathing room; in the Parthenon frieze, even where we have horsemen four abreast, there are planned gaps where we see the background, and it is so carved that we feel that it represents space, light, and air.  It is the price that they pay for the political value.  For the portraits are very individual; we easily recognize Augustus and his son-in-law Agrippa, his right-hand man.

[MB 43]  We already saw the portrait of Augustus from the empress Livia's villa at Primaporta.  Now, as an example of Augustan imperial interior design, we have the Garden Room from that villa.  It is not the only garden room in existence; there are several at Pompeii, but Livia's is best.  It is a variant of a 2nd Style megalography wall (cf. Villa of the Mysteries); instead of an architectural framework you have a landscape architecture framework.  Represented at the bottom of the fresco, so closest to us, is a light garden fence made of wicker, perhaps (it also is a psychological definition of where real room space ends and imaginary space begins).  Then, represented as if about six feet back, is a marble barrier, painted to look like the kind of carved marble parapet that we saw on the upper storey of the Stoa of Attalos in Athens; at intervals a recess is represented, so the white wall won't feel like a boring, confining white stripe, and a tree is shown planted in each recess.  Then, as if behind the white wall, is a richly varied untrimmed natural seeming garden (of course, in nature, you can't have plants in flower and in fruit at the same time, as here!).  All the spaces between the recognizable plants (botanists have a field day here) are filled with plant-like brushwork, so that the garden seems endless (it works the same way as the army in the Alexander Mosaic).  The idea is to make a small, stuffy room psychologically cool, fragrant, green, and unconfined.

[B 12] It was at the beginning of Augustus's principate that the last Hellenistic kingdom, Cleopatra's Ptolemaic-dynasty Egypt, fell to Rome in 30 B.C.; coins were issued, with a crocodile (for the Nile) and the legend AEGYPTA CAPTA on the reverse.  Very soon thereafter a new style of wall decoration appeared, first in houses owned by persons close to the emperor.  It is called the 3rd Style; for a couple of decades it coexists with the 2nd.  It is exquisite, spindly, favoring miniature motifs; some of these motifs, such as sphinxes and lotuses, are Egyptian.  We suspect that the 3rd Style is a Roman version of Late Ptolemaic interior design (to be sure, we'd need actual examples in Egypt).  This phenomenon makes us think of all the pseudo-Egyptian motifs in Art Deco (and clothing fashions and jewelry) following the publication of King Tutankhamen's tomb in the 1920's.

[MG 158] [G 78] [MB 41]  It is best to take the remaining style of Roman house design and interior design here, although it belongs to the period between the earthquake of A.D. 63 that seriously damaged Pompeii and the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, or, in terms of emperors' reigns, to the time of Nero (whose Golden House, his palace in Rome, built in the early 60's, has this kind of wall design) and Vespasian (who died, coincidentally, in the same year as the eruption of Vesuvius).  The House of the Vetii in Pompeii was built between 63 and 79; it is one of the largest and best preserved houses at Pompeii, with all its wall paintings still in it (new roofs where necessary).  It is the same kind of house, with atrium and peristyle garden, as the House of the Silver Wedding but larger.  The plan and reconstruction drawing show exactly how the roofs over atria are built.  A view of the peristyle garden is instructive, because the garden has been replanted (archaeologists have studied planting at Pompeii exhaustively, based on root channels and actual seeds as well as literary sources) and we can appreciate the amenities of Roman upper-class life.  The painted room that we choose for study is the Red Room, also called the Ixion Room (Ixion was one of the paradigms of sin punished (he murdered his father-in-law then attempted to seduce the goddess Hera) after the subject of one of the copied paintings (doubtless from a famous original; the Vetii clearly were the sort of people who wanted all the famous stuff) represented as if set into the design of the wall.  The wall design is typical, egregiously typical 4th Style, for which "vulgar" is a perfectly just epithet.  The skill is high, the details often fine, the whole is overloaded and chaotic, jumbling all the inherited elements of 2nd and 3rd style together on a single wall.  Where does it come from?  In the 2nd Style cubiculum from Herculaneum in the Metropolitan Museum we already saw Roman theater mania.  The new elements in the 4th Style, that is, the vistas of backlit, open, unroofed architectural flats, with, in the upper part of the wall, statues, masks, even representations of living people in trompe l'oeil, suggest the answer: it comes from the elaborate scene buildings and the painted scenes incorporated in them in use of the Roman theaters then newly built.  This reminds us not of King Tut influence but of William Randolph Hearst's pleasure dome at San Simeon, California, or of some of the more extreme Coconut Grove period villas of Florida: Cecil B. DeMille house design.  Americans are particularly well equipped to understand Roman art.

[G 98]  The Romans inherited and developed the Greek architectural orders along with everything else, but they seldom used Greek Doric columns.  They also had inherited the Etruscans' cushion capital, and they used a development of it instead, with its unfluted column shaft; sometimes they combined it with the Greek triglyph and metope frieze.  This Tuscan Doric is what Renaissance architects saw when they went to Rome, so until the 18th century (when architects began to travel in Greece) it is what European architects will use for Doric, too.  The Ionic used by architects in Rome usually has both a frieze (as in Athens) and dentils (as in Ionia); the shaft is often, but not always, unfluted.  Corinthian, as in the Greek Hellenistic, is similar to Ionic at first, but the Romans felt freer to develop it in their own way, and even in the first century A.D. it develops an elaborate cornice.  They also felt free to create the capital we call Composite, having both Ionic volutes and Corinthian acanthus leaves; in the Late Roman Empire, Composite can be very elaborate; it also may have figures of humans and animals placed between the volutes on the capitals, and these figured capitals are the ancestors of the story-telling capitals of medieval architecture.

[G 74]  The Maison Carrée at Nîmes is, of course, neither a house (maison) nor square (carrée), but we do not know the ancient name of the temple, and the French traditional name is convenient.  It was built when Agrippa was governor of the provincia (thus called Provence in French) and probably reflects his taste and intelligence in the choice of an architect.  It is the perfect traditional Roman temple, nobly proportioned and beautifully executed, differing from the "Temple of Fortuna Virilis" built a century or so earlier in Rome in the greater clarity of its design, in using the Corinthian instead of the Ionic order, and, being larger, in having six columns across the façade instead of four, but it is the same kind of temple: religious architecture is typically conservative.  At Pompeii we saw how the Temple of Jupiter sits at the end of a forum which frames it; so did this temple (archaeologists have excavated the foundations of the colonnades of the forum here at Nîmes).

[G 75] [G 93]  The Romans did not let towns grow where roads could not be built to provision them and (in case of invasion) bring the army in to defend them.  They also made sure that a reliable supply of clean water was available.  Aqueducts built all over the Empire, from Spain to the Middle East, are known--and many of them are still working!  Clean water typically comes from the hills and mountains.  Buried pipes keep it cool and clean.  Roman engineers surveyed carefully and built aqueducts maintaining a slight, constant slope.  Gravity always works; where they had to, they used siphons.  Where a ravine or river seriously altered the gradient, they built the structures that are visible parts of the aqueduct systems; where they needed to carry across a road (via) as well as water (aqua) in the same place, the arched structure would be broad enough in the lower storey to be a combined viaduct and aqueduct, such as this one, the Pont du Gard at Nîmes, France.  It is not nearly wide enough for today's fast traffic and "semi" trucks, but it continued to carry wheeled traffic until about 50 years ago, and it is still perfectly sound.  When this part of France has its serious Spring floods and the rivers wash out the bridges, the Pont du Gard stands fast.  Two ideas need to be grasped: (1) the Pont du Gard is the work of engineers and has no applied architectural orders, but the proportions of its arches make it very beautiful, and (2) the Romans sensibly build in the material best for the task that is available; even where hydraulic cement is available for concrete (and it is not available in southern France), where weight-bearing capability and durability are essential, they build in stone (as we shall see in the Colosseum in Rome); structures sensibly built in stone are not "conservative" but just good engineering.  Many specialists think that the Pont du Gard was built at the same period as the Maison Carrée, under the governorship of Agrippa.  The exact date of the much longer and more tall-stilted aqueduct at Segovia, Spain, which crosses a wide valley, is not known; it is simply an aqueduct, since a road can cross a wide valley on the ground; it still carries water.  In a photograph that captures its great length in perspective it is one of those monuments that make us understand why diverse peoples were glad to be ruled from Rome.

[G 81] [G 80] [MG 233] [G 82]  Rome is the City of Seven Hills; two of them are the Capitoline and the Palatine.  On the Capitoline was the Capitol, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.  Behind the temple, the slope of the hill is very steep, and there is a long natural hollow between the Palatine and the Quirinal; that hollow is the ancient heart of Rome, the Forum Romanum, too old to have any overall plan.  There was a settlement contemporary with Greek Geometric in the Forum; the historical Romans thought that one round hut was Romulus's.  Today, if you stand at the foot of the Capitoline (at the top of the Print with a plan) and look straight down the hollow (the Triumphal Arch in the foreground is the Arch of Septimius Severus, which is not in this course), you see at your right, beyond the columns of the Temple of Saturn, the Basilica Julia; in the distance at the end of the Forum is the Arch of Titus, which we shall study, and beyond the Forum the Colosseum; if you know where to look in the distance at the left you can see a bit of the Basilica Nova/Maxentiana/Constantina, which is one of the latest Roman buildings that we shall study.  You also see lots more!  When you go to Rome, buy a very good guide book and plan on spending a day, at least, in the Forum.  Of course, this isn't the only forum; there are also the imperial fora: of Caesar, of Augustus, of Vespasian, of Trajan, which are designed much like the forum of Pompeii.  The hill to your right is the Palatine, where there are Renaissance as well as Roman ruins.  In fact, our word "palace" comes from the name of the hill (not vice versa); the emperor Domitian (ruled 81-96) built the palace there that all the emperors ruled from thereafter; it is very complicated and cannot be studied in this course, but in [MG 233] we are looking at the Palatine, with the vast palace on it, from the other side of the hill.  We see the Circus Maximus in the hollow on this side of the hill and the curved loggia from which the imperial party could watch the races without leaving the security of the palace.  In this model of the city of Rome, we also see the aqueducts at upper right and the great oval of the Colosseum (properly the Flavian Amphitheater) on the other side of the Palatine, at the top in the photo.  Back in the forum: the Basilica Julia, [G 82], as its name suggests, was begun by Julius Caesar, but it was completed by Augustus and remodelled later.  This Print gives us a very accurate idea of a Roman basilica, of which we already studied an earlier example at Pompeii, and it prepares us for the Colosseum in its use of superimposed and stacked orders.  To review: The Bouleuterion at Miletus had superimposed orders on a flat wall.  The Stoa of Attalos had stacked orders, free columns, Ionic over Doric.  The Porta Augusta at Perugia had superimposed orders, of a sort, being Etruscan Hellenistic, framing an arch.  It is the arch that is structural.  On the façade of the Basilica Julia, in the restored drawing, you see superimposed orders framing arches, stacked: Tuscan Doric (with a Greek Doric frieze) on the ground floor, Ionic above.  This is what we shall see on the Colosseum, too; it also is basic to the columnar orders that articulate the walls of Romanesque and Gothic churches in the Middle Ages.  The superimposed columns/half columns give the expression of post-and-lintel support systems to flat wall with, or without, arched openings; they define storeys, establish scale, and provide sculptural relief for light and shade; sometimes, too, they coincide with buttressing, strengthening at intervals.  Not until 20th-century building materials and methods make them obsolete and too expensive will western architecture abandon these principles.  Take a look at the two Boyd Halls, for example, on the LSU campus, late as these are.  In the drawing of the Basilica Julia, we also see the taller center of the basilica, with its clerestory windows, rising above the two-storied aisles; all basilicas have clerestories, even ones built of wood and mud in Wales.

[G 84] [MG 234] [G 85]  If you call this building by its familiar name, you must spell it correctly: Colosseum.  When it was built, there was beside it a huge statue, gilded bronze, of Nero, based on the Colossus of Rhodes, a huge Hellenistic statue of the sun god, Helios, at the harbor of the island Rhodes, which was one of the Hellenistic Wonders of the World list.  This wasn't the only amphitheater in Rome, so it was specified as the one by the Colossus of Nero, the Colosseum.  It is because of the size of the statues that the word "colossal" means "huge", not the other way around.  If you spell it like the one in Los Angeles, I must conclude that you mean the one in L.A.  If spelling is a problem, call it the Flavian Amphitheater, which is its proper name, anyway.  We have already seen that Roman theaters are built on flat ground, with vaulting instead of the hollow of a hill to support the seats.  So, too, usually, are amphitheaters.  The Flavian Amphitheater was begun by Vespasian, the first Flavian emperor, on the site of an artificial lake that Nero had in the landscaped grounds of his Golden House.  It is a very strong political statement.  Where Nero had expropriated half of the center of Rome to build a palace that was like a country estate on a grand scale, Vespasian, that sober old senator who came to rule a grateful city in A.D. 69, returned to the people of Rome for their entertainment this prime real estate, with the world's most wonderful amphitheater right in the heart of Rome.  Its solid, deep volcanic tufa foundations more than filled the hole of Nero's lake and made ample stable rooms, storage rooms, and preparation rooms underneath the floor of the arena.  Fine-arts theater was presented at the several pre-existing theaters; this was entertainment for everyone, equivalent to much of what we put in the Centroplex or a stadium.  Feeding Christians to lions was not on the calendar; such martyrdoms were later and were mostly in the eastern cities of the Empire.  If for sports we take for granted structures with exits for each section of seats and access gates all around the perimeter, to ensure getting tens of thousands of ordinary citizens in and out safely (and being able to take measures when the backers of one team take a loss too hard and riot), we owe it to the design of Roman amphitheaters.  For the most part, the Colosseum is built of solid stone, Roman travertine, a fine local limestone.  Only the vaults in the upper parts use concrete.  As in the aqueducts, in theaters and amphitheaters you want the compressive strength (weight-bearing capability) of stone, and, of course, you want the appearance of fine travertine for the outer shell.  It is a wonder that so much of the building survives.  Rome was so desperately poor and incompetent to mine and extract metals in the middle ages that they dug into the stone walls of ancient buildings just to get the bronze clamps and lead packing from the joints of stones; you can see their holes all over the Colosseum.  Besides, the legends that grew up about martyrdoms in the amphitheaters made it seem downright pious to sanctify their stone by taking it for use in churches, and almost all the marble seats are gone from the Colosseum as well as more than half of its travertine shell.  The Renaissance came in the nick of time.  In cross section and in the plan we see how the Colosseum is built in concentric ovals, four storeys high at the exterior, down to one storey in the center.  The rings and the staircases are vaulted.  Light and air throughout are provided by the arches in the walls.  It is wonderfully cool and quiet in the vaulted passages of the Colosseum.  An incredibly huge awning system provided shade over most of the seats.  The exterior of the outer shell is the most important example of superimposed and stacked orders, not only because this is the only four-storey amphitheater, but because it was visible and standing and was closely studied by early Renaissance architects (and doubtless by medieval ones before them).  Tuscan Doric, then Ionic, then Corinthian, then pilasters with Composite capitals at the top; the attic of each storey becomes the base of the next order above it and also makes a parapet to keep people from falling.  Very likely there were statues in the arches, but none remain.

The Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, portrait of the elderly Vespasian.

[MA 54]  The portraits of Vespasian are designed to convey the same message as the Colosseum (which took years to build, being completed during the reign of Domitian).  Since Augustus, a mixture of Classicism and the imagery of Hellenistic rulers (going back to Alexander the Great) had prevailed.  After Nero, no one wanted to see more of that.  Vespasian's portraits are resolutely unglamorous, unclassical, unflattering, although they are by fine sculptors and employ all the skill inherited from centuries of portraiture.  My favorite is the one in Copenhagen that shows him as a toothless old man; it is very fine sculpture.  Very probably he intended them to evoke memories of the portraits of conspicuously honest leaders of the Republic.  The practice of making copies of portraits of famous men ensured that these types were as familiar as Stuart's portrait of George Washington is to us.

[MA 3] [A 335] [A 334]  From his short reign, 79-81, one might think Titus, Vespasian's competent elder son, could not be an important emperor, but he had been his father's right-hand man.  One problem that he had been in charge of solving gave him a very bad name in Jewish history: his father sent him to quell an uprising in the province of Judaea in A.D. 70; he did so easily enough but the army ransacked the very Temple in Jerusalem, recalling the abomination of Antiochos Epiphanes who had set up his own image in the Temple.  Nevertheless, Titus was basically a sensible and honest general and ruler.  When he died rather young, his brother Domitian, who had not been groomed to be emperor, succeeded him and ruled until A.D. 96.  The stories of vice in high places during Domitian's reign are extreme, and true, but from the art-historical point of view he accomplished a lot, not only completing the Colosseum and building the Palace but having erected the triumphal Arch of Titus, commemorating his brother's triumph (procession) when he returned to Rome.  However politically insensitive the subject matter from our point of view, both the Arch and the reliefs of the Sack of Jerusalem and the Triumphal Procession are extremely important.  Like the Colosseum, the Arch of Titus was always visible to visitors to Rome; in the Early Renaissance the design, divided into three parts both vertically and horizontally (like a tic-tac-toe grid), with the columns framing the arch and with the entablature of the columnar order tied to the arch (just as an architrave spans columns, so an archivolt arches, or jumps, from impost to impost), raised on a basement and topped by an attic, seemed like a wonderful design solution, which they used a lot.  Painters (and sculptors) were more interested in the reliefs in the passage.  These are in a vigorously illusionistic relief style of very high quality, with great play of light and shadow, and they show a crowd in the same way as the Alexander Mosaic, from a low vantage point.  Giotto saw it and used it for the crowd of soldiers in his "Kiss of Judas" at Padua in 1305/6; Masaccio and Paolo Uccello used it, too.  The deep shadows and the very low vantage point in the "Spoils of Jerusalem" make it really suggest a crowd of indefinite depth as the Ara Pacis reliefs do not really do.  Notice how the arch represented at the right is made to fade into the background.  The relief also shows us accurately what a menorah (seven-branched candelabrum) of the period looked like.  The "Triumphal Procession" relief, with Titus in his quadriga (this is where Giotto got the idea of the spears as evidence of further figures behind those we see, a device that painters as late as Velasquez in the "Surrender at Breda" use) is just as powerfully carved, but we also see here for the first time the incompatibility of Hellenistic illusionism based on empirical scientific attitudes and the Roman cult of the imperial image: Titus (whose apotheosis on the back of an eagle bearing him heavenwards is carved at the top of the vault) is the divine emperor (no matter how certain of his mortal nature he may have been as a private person), so he cannot be shown in side view, foreshortened, with part of his features obscured: he is, in short, an icon, an image.  It is like the old Egyptian idea of showing the honored deceased like an eternal statue, all conceptual essence, free of perceptual accidents, resurfacing in a new form as Roman art begins to lose its grip on the optics and humanism of the Greek art that it had inherited.  The carving shows that the sculptor was steeped in the traditions of Hellenistic art, but Imperial requirements result in compromise.

[A 438]  One reason why it is easy to believe Suetonius's tabloid-like stories of immorality at the court of Domitian is the total impression made by the portraits of the female members of the royal family and their friends.  Titus's daughter Julia was her uncle's mistress and set the styles.  The unknown woman in the magnificent portrait in the Capitoline museum (let us call her the Flavian Lady) shows us those styles, not only in her coiffure of hair not her own piled up on a frame and made to stay with some sort of ancient mousse but in the tilt of the head and elongated neck.  Obviously, the Flavian dynasty has changed since Vespasian.  As a virtuoso work of sculpture, the Flavian Lady is brilliant.  A new stylistic trait here is playing off the textured and deeply drilled hair against the highly polished marble surface of the skin.  This is no ordinary portrait; the features are different from those of the Flavian women, so I do not doubt that this is one of the friends or woman attendants of Julia Titi or of Marcia Furnilla.  Any female portrait with this coiffure belongs to the years just before A.D. 100.

This is a cropped image of the British Museum's bust of Trajan.  By this date (probably the end of his reign) busts not only included the complete pectorals but when they also were nude meant that the emperor was deified; notice that the style is a little slicker than on the Ostia one.

Note: the portrait of Philip II ("the Arabian") belongs in the next post.

[A 427, left]  In A.D. 98, Trajan succeeded the elderly emperor Nerva who had put matters in order after Domitian's death in 96.  The empire was largest and strongest under Trajan.  He was the wisest and most systematic builder.  He devoted a powerful mind and all his energy to governing Rome well.  Born in Spain of an old provincial family, he was the first emperor not born in Italy; Nerva adopted him in A.D. 97 on his merits.  Some of his monuments are not well preserved but known to us: his public baths, a model for later ones; the dredging and rebuilding of the harbor at Ostia.  His great forum and basilica are not well preserved but have been uncovered by excavations.  His portraits, especially the one from Ostia found in modern times and free of restorations (as of the tip of the nose), perfectly exemplify the qualities of Roman art under Trajan.  The Ostia Trajan has as great skill in modelling and carving as the Primaporta Augustus; it is as serious as the portraits of Vespasian; it ennobles the emperor without prettifying him or suggesting ties with Hellenistic kings.  In sum, it uses the whole technical and artistic heritage without imitating anything: that statement could have been the motto of all Trajan's sculptors and architects.

[A 336, left] [MA 52] [MG 36, right]  Trajan's forum differs from the imperial fora of Caesar and Augustus by the addition of a basilica, the very greatest Roman basilica, cutting across it and separating the forum space from the Temple of Trajan deified (erected after his death, but a temple in that position was planned from the outset).  The column and the libraries on either side of it are new, too, but by themselves would not radically alter the character of an imperial forum.  At LSU, we easily grasp what the placement of the great basilica did: before Middleton Library was built in the 1960's, Foster Hall at the north end balanced Atkinson Hall at the south end of the Quadrangle (≈Forum).  The Basilica Ulpia did just what the Middleton Library does to the total space, because, like our library, it was tall as well as broad.  The aisles were two storeys high and, as we saw at the older Basilica Julia, the clerestoried central space was a storey still higher; the attached libraries on either side of the Column of Trajan would not, by themselves, have been high enough to prevent viewing the temple, which stood on slightly higher ground, from the forum space.  Although only its plan and the stumps of some of its columns survive today in situ (some of its columns survive in Christian basilicas in Rome), it remained standing until the end of Roman power and was the most influential model for the design of Early Christian basilicas, preeminently Old St. Peter's.  Like all basilicas (but one) earlier and later, it had a flat timber roof (which at this scale must have required imported cedars from Lebanon).  Trajan had an innovative great architect-engineer (he also devised the army engineers' bridge across the Danube and the harbor works at Ostia) who may have designed not only the Basilica Ulpia but the whole complex around the Forum of Trajan.  His name was Apollodoros of Damascus.  Those familiar with the Christian Bible will remember the world that Paul travelled in a generation or so earlier: a letter to Jewish Christians in Rome is written in Greek.  It is by now not really unusual that the leading imperial Roman architect should have a Greek name and come from Damascus, Syria (which had been part of the Hellenistic Seleucid Kingdom).  These innovations may have been Apollodoros's ideas; just as important, Trajan was the emperor whose open-minded patronage made ideas into realities.  The Column of Trajan, erected in A.D. 113, records Trajans's recent, successful Dacian Campaigns.  [See MAP 1: ≈ modern Rumania]  It is the original storiated column; that is, a continuous carved frieze unwinds spirally from bottom to top.  In my opinion, the best explanation of its invention is that which suggests that the illustrated scroll-books (rotuli) that a staff artist-reporter made during the campaigns provided both the model for the spiral frieze and the compositions that the fine sculptor (his name is not recorded) used.  We do not have any actual rotulus books as old as this, but we have, for example, a copy of an illustrated Iliad in Greek from the age of Justinian (syllabus, # 12), which has comparable bird's-eye battle ranks compositions.  Pen-and-ink illustrations of military campaigns, always in rotuli which are more portable and afford variable widths of compositions, may always have had this kind of skewed perspective, back to the days of Alexander the Great.  These campaign rotuli served the same purpose then as press photography and video coverage do today; the goal is to show as much as possible as clearly as possible.  The goal in the Alexander Mosaic and the reliefs on the Arch of Titus, to the contrary, was preponderantly artistic (in the latter, the low vantage point coincides with where we stand on the ground).  You would not use the low vantage point in a military record; you would choose to record as much information as possible.  Accepting this explanation, we should conclude that the major novelty here is transferring that kind of illustration to a public architectural monument.  Novelty it is, but we already saw willingness to compromise optical space and foreshortening to preserve the iconic character of Titus's figure [A 334].  Some authors say that the reliefs on the Column of Trajan "anticipate the Middle Ages", or words to that effect.  The truth is that both on the Arch of Titus and on the Column of Trajan we have evidence of Rome's abandoning the optical empiricism, the wedding of science and art, that she inherited but had not herself created.  The Middle Ages, in turn, will inherit late Roman Empire art.  Returning to the actual column [MA 52], we see the work of a sculptor fully capable of natural drapery and anatomy, from any angle, often foreshortened, master of his tools and proud of the quality of his work, consistently abandoning perspective (the science of foreshortened space) and scaled proportion (both the relative sizes of real things [his boats small relative to his men] and the relative sizes and angles of things in space [city walls, amphitheaters, etc.] and visual plausibility [the Danube River is shown symbolically, while the activities of the army are shown literally]).  The result is like a mixture of Assyrian narrative space (which this does return to, though they didn't know the Assyrian work) with all the skills in rendering inherited from the preceding seven centuries.  The base of Trajan's column, by the way, in the event served as his tomb, since the imperial mausoleum built by Augustus was full; Trajan's successor, Hadrian, will build a new mausoleum.  The statues on the tops of Rome's two storiated columns are late Renaissance and represent SS. Peter and Paul.

[MG 36] [MG 55]  In the plan of Trajan's forum, you see shops encircling the hemicycle at the right; these are just the inner ring of the first storey of Trajan's Market, which was built as the great forum itself was nearing completion, towards the end of his reign.  The best preserved of all Trajan's monuments, it was inhabited (remember Fortuna Primigeneia at Praeneste?) until a couple of generations ago.  It is gloriously planned and built to last forever.  In places, it is still preserved to a height of five storeys.  The dozens of shops in four storeys behind the hemicycle are only half of it.  Shops on both sides of the Via Biberatica (Pepper Street, Spice Markets Street) behind the apse of the Basilica Ulpia, integrated into the part around the hemicycle, were built in a straight line; alongside them is the Market Hall (Aula), where stalls could be set up on market days, itself with fine, large shops on both sides; structurally, these shops help to buttress the walls that bear the great groin vault.  Further buttressing is supplied by arches outside, above these shops, where the lines of the groins come down and meet, concentrating the weight and thrust; these exterior arches work similarly to the flying buttresses that we shall see in Gothic cathedrals.  A groin vault is created when, in principle, two equal barrel vaults intersect at right angles; the groins are the lines of intersection; to actually build one, the form is built underneath with wood, one square at a time, and (in Rome) concrete is packed in upon the wooden forms, which are removed when the concrete is well set (where there was no cement to make concrete, as in southern France, mortared stone vaults could be laid on the wooden forms, but, weighing more, they could not easily be made so large).  Since Trajan's Aula has never fallen, it could well have inspired later visitors to Rome.  The last time I was in Rome, it was in use for a sculpture exhibit.  Doubtless, you all will have concluded, correctly, that great shopping malls are not our invention.  This is a perfect urban one, with many staircases (for access from and egress to various points) and covered streets, built up rather than sprawling, within walking distance of most of the city.  It replaced hundreds of shoddily built stalls on the Quirinal and helped to protect the forum area from the disorders and fires that were the scourge of the poor neighborhood on the Quirinal.  Trajan's Market is built with brick-faced concrete walls and concrete vaults, as Domitian's palace had been, as the port city of Ostia was, as Hadrian's Pantheon will be.  Roman bricks are very hard and well fired and are a foot square (double bricks, twice that); to ensure responsibility for the product, the licensed manufacturers had to stamp every brick.  Since the stamp gave the year in the reign when the brick was made, the stamps can be useful in dating construction.  The use of these building materials and techniques goes hand in hand with innovation (it has been called a revolution) in architecture.  The architects now design sculptured spaces (the solid parts define them) instead of designing colonnaded and walled boxes of space.  The Basilica Ulpia, a traditional type of building, is designed as a box.  Trajan's Markets are of the revolution.  So is Hadrianic architecture, to which we now turn.

[G 87] [G 100] [MG 160] [G 88]  As Nerva had adopted Trajan, so Trajan, also without a natural heir, adopted Hadrian, who ruled from 117-138.  Like Trajan, Hadrian (also born in Spain) was an excellent commander in chief of the armed forces and a prudent administrator (for which reasons, doubtless, he had been selected), but, unlike Trajan or most other emperors, he was actively interested in the arts, philosophy, and literature (some of his poetry survives).  He also was a Philhellene, with friends in Athens and Asia Minor (he travelled throughout the empire, not only as a general but as an administrator); the finest Roman monuments in Athens date from the reign of Hadrian.  These facts are relevant to the distinctive art of the Hadrianic era, because they partly determined his choice of sculptural styles and of sculptors, which differed from Trajan's, and made him open to interesting architectural ideas, like Trajan, but he also did some designing himself.  There had been a Pantheon (temple to the planetary gods) built by Agrippa, Augustus's son-in-law, and bearing his dedicatory inscription.  When Hadrian built a new one, he retained (in a gesture of respect) Agrippa's inscription but built an entirely different kind of temple, one uniquely suitable for the planetary gods.  He not only departed from podium+columns+walls temple formula (retaining the façade as we retain spires on churches, symbolically) and built of brick-faced concrete, but created a circular-planned temple in which a perfect sphere will fit, tangent at the center of the floor, lit by an oculus 20 feet in diameter in the center of the dome.  What a perfect symbol for the harmony of the spheres, divine perfection of the divine mind behind everything, and even the circle of the zodiac.  Canopies in ancient Persia and Egypt had been the root idea; the canopy or dome had already long been connotative of divinity.  Circles and spheres, shapes without beginning or end, but a center, are connotative of infinity and perfection.  This is a unique temple, without design progeny until the Renaissance and later (cf. Monticello); it does not in any sense replace conventional temple forms, rectangular or round.  But its dome was inspiring from the moment it was built.  The Pantheon has always been a sacred building; it has been maintained but not restored; today it is a church, with the high altar at the apse designed for the statue of Jupiter.  The painter Raphael is one of the eminent persons whose tomb is in the Pantheon (hence the Paris Panthéon built in the 18th century to enshrine national heroes).  The exterior diameter of the drum is 160', and the walls are 20' thick (with even heavier foundations more than 20' deep under the walls: if the foundations were to settle unequally, the strain would bring the dome down), so the interior diameter = height is 120'.  Ribs and vaulted niches and other clever engineering devices concentrate the weight and thrust, permitting the alternating round and square niches all around the interior circle, preventing the oppressive feeling of an unbroken surrounding wall.  The concrete dome not only has clay pipe ribs (which being hollow also lighten) and is made thinner and thinner as it rises (thus to reduce total weight, and having less weight to bear above as it rises) but the concrete recipe contains more and more pumice as it rises; pumice weakens, but lightens, too.  The dome has never developed a major, really scary fault, not even after an earthquake (Rome, mercifully, has not had major ones like Pompeii or Corinth).  Once there were gold stars in the coffers (which were cast in the concrete); only the pin holes for them remain.  Almost all the original colored marble veneer, on the other hand, does remain and the yellow marble columns, giving us a better idea of the interior of a great Roman building (public/civic or religious) than any other example can.  From season to season, from day to day, from hour to hour, the moving beam of light falling through the oculus is never quite the same.  Being in the Pantheon, in my opinion, is the greatest architectural interior experience that I know; it makes one's consciousness keener and more serene, it heightens and calms.  Human response to the sphere and the controlled light is remarkable.  You can sit all day in the Pantheon and watch the greatest variety of humanity unconsciously come under its influence.  Hadrian himself designed the Pantheon (we don't know in how much detail; he also had a hand in the design of another unusual temple and certainly designed his villa at Tivoli), but he was not trained in engineering and was certainly no contractor, and most specialists believe that Apollodoros was responsible for the unsurpassable building solutions to the challenges posed by these new designs.  It used to be thought that the traditional temple façade of the Pantheon might be older, might actually be from Agrippa's Pantheon, but not only do we now know that the capitals of the columns and the moldings of the pediment are Hadrianic but when repairs were being done 50 or so years ago the brick stamps were investigated--and all the brick in the façade has Hadrianic stamps.

The Louvre's Greek portraits of Hadrian (this one from Herakleion in Crete in full body armor)  are both sensitive in their carving and deliberately expressive of his philosophical self image.  His successors also will wear beards (which is as Greek according to the Roman stereotype as wearing sandals).

Munich, bust of Antinoos.  The boy always looks alike, and most of the portraits are after his Nile death, but the one at Delphi, full length, too, is the finest.

[A 417]  Although there is no record of unamiable relations between Hadrian and his empress, Sabina, they may have been less intimate than, for example, relations between Marcus Aurelius and his empress Faustina the Younger, who lost many children in infancy or early childhood (RH factor?) but kept having them.  Hadrian and Sabina were childless.  On his travels, in Bithynia (opposite Byzantion in Asia Minor: MAP 1), Hadrian met a young man named Antinoos, on whom he doted and whom he had formally divinized when Antinoos died in a boating accident on the Nile in A.D. 130.  Most of the portraits of Antinoos are subsequent to that date and show him assimilated to one kind of divinity or another.  For these portraits as for the copies of famous statues that Hadrian had made for his villa and the reliefs in roundels that are now on the Arch of Constantine, Hadrian hired sculptors of his own preference: Greeks, Athenians and East Greeks of the School of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor.  Thus, (1) Hadrianic sculpture does not continue where Trajan's left off, (2) like Augustus's choice of a distinctive style, so too Hadrian's gave a new direction; Antonine style is unthinkable without Hadrianic, and (3) in the first half of the second century, the economic center of the empire was shifting east, and Hadrian's travels and interest can only have hastened or put an imperial stamp on these shifts.  The Villa Albani relief of Antinoos from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli in its smooth idealism, its new kind of classicism (based on developments later than those inspiring Augustan classicism), its romantic and glamorous mood is typical of the portraits of the divinized Antinoos (note: the lower right corner of this relief is heavily restored, the rest mostly OK).  The Greek art of the Hadrianic age is no longer the eclecticism of the first century B.C.; styles had been evolving in Greek lands meanwhile (no matter that in this course we haven't been watching them!).

[A 347]  Our best examples of Hadrianic official public sculpture keep rather odd company with Trajanic, Antonine, and Constantinian sculptures on the oddest of ancient monuments, the triumphal arch built, ca. 315, to commemorate Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge in A.D. 312.  Can it really be that no one could be found in Rome capable of carving friezes to vie with those of the pre-existing triumphal arches?  Maybe, because the friezes and other figures of Constantine's own time on his arch look like the work of second-rate sarcophagus carvers: expressive, yes; skillful, no.  All the other sculptures on the arch came from pre-existing diverse monuments of diverse dates.  The Hadrianic roundels on the Arch of Constantine are unique; we suppose they came from a Hadrianic arch, but we have no record of one, and no other arch has roundels, and their subject matter is hunting rather than battles.  The main character in each roundel no longer looks like Hadrian, because the emperor's face (alone) was recarved to resemble Constantine, beardless; Hadrian wore a beard, an allusion to his interest in philosophy.  In two of the roundels, the god Silvanus (of the woods) is represented by a statue in the guise of Antinoos.  None of that interested Constantine's builders; in 312-315, the job was just to rear an arch in jig time.  An insensitive, or hasty, viewer might dismiss the roundels as conservative, and in a sense they are; they conserve skills that will not be seen again in Roman art.  The reliefs have been carved so that (without thinking) we read the background as indefinite space with light and air; as in the Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon, this effect results from judiciously carving back to varying depths and creating a mixture of sharper and darker or subtler shadows.  Consequently, we read the figures as free to move, only momentarily pausing, in their space--as alive.  Hadrian was surely the best kind of royal dilettante, one who really understood what he was looking at, if we may judge from his choice of sculptors for important monuments.  There were plenty of technically proficient sculptors in the second century, so it surely is significant that he chose one of the few who could handle ancient illusionism with the degree of sensitivity and conviction that we see in the roundels.

[MG 164]  In the later years of his reign Hadrian travelled less and devoted a great deal of effort to the creation of a cultivated and philosophical imperial retreat in the country, the Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli (if you want to visit it, be sure you are taken to Hadrian's villa, or they will assume you want to see the equally lovely Renaissance Villa d'Este at Tivoli).  Here Hadrian, you might say, made the world the way he wanted it to be.  What is the meaning of money and power?  It is the ability to control your environment.  This is highly innovative architecture and landscape architecture (and when it was excavated in the 18th century it provided lots of ideas for Enlightenment landscape architects).  The buildings are original and imaginative; we think the ideas are the emperor's own.  Some features, new in Rome, such as the alternation of free architraves and archivolts over the colonnade around the "Canopus" (named for a Hellenistic city in northern Egypt where Menelaos's helmsman, Canopus, was said to have been buried), may have been used by architects in Asia Minor earlier.  There is also a tiny private library-reading room on a round moated (with a drawbridge for privacy) man-made island, very cleverly designed--and much, much more.  Like Domitian's palace, Hadrian's villa would require a whole lecture.  Besides "Canopus", he called buildings at the Villa "Poikile" (after the Stoa of the Stoic philosophers) and "Academe" (after Plato's Academy).  There are other imperial villas, but none other so elegant and original as this one.

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