Roman Art and Architecture Notes

Menander

The most famous portrait is that of the Greek poet Menander in the House of Menander, labeled as "the first to write New Comedy."

Another genre explored by Roman mural painters was still-life painting. A still life with peaches and a carafe from the House of the Stags in Herculaneum exemplifies Roman mastery of illusionism.

Early Empire

Following Julius Caesar's assassination, Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra, leading to Egypt becoming a Roman province in 30 BCE. In 27 BCE, the Senate granted Octavian the title of Augustus, marking the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.

Pax Romana

Augustus brought peace and prosperity, establishing the Pax Romana. Public works were commissioned, and imperial portrait statues and monuments were erected. These portraits and reliefs were used to mold public opinion.

Augustus and the Julio-Claudians

Augustus presented himself as the son of a god, with portraits designed to depict a godlike leader who never aged. His portraits depicted him in various roles and emulated Classical Greek statues, such as Polykleitos’s Doryphoros. The reliefs on his cuirass advertised the return of Roman legionary banners captured by the Parthians.

Art and Society

Portraits of emperors, empresses, and their families were displayed throughout the Roman Empire. Imperial sculptors combined portrait heads with different statuary types, depending on the person's position or assumed guises. Ordinary citizens also engaged in role-playing.

Livia

A marble portrait of Livia revealed that imperial women shared the emperor's eternal youthfulness. Ordinary citizens also engaged in role-playing.

Ara Pacis Augustae

The Ara Pacis Augustae was dedicated to celebrate Augustus's establishment of peace. Figural reliefs and acanthus tendrils adorned the altar's marble precinct walls. Processions of the imperial family and dignitaries appeared on the north and south sides. Augustus used relief sculpture and portraiture to further his political and social agendas.

Forum of Augustus

Augustus constructed a new forum next to Julius Caesar’s forum. The ready availability of Italian marble made possible the emperor’s boast that he found Rome a city of brick and transformed it into a city of marble.

The Res Gestae of Augustus

The Res Gestae Divi Augusti summarized Augustus's achievements, including restoring liberty to the Republic and his extensive building program.

The extensive use of Carrara marble for public monuments was part of Augustus’s program to make his city the equal of Periclean Athens. The Forum of Augustus incorporated copies of the caryatids of the Erechtheion.

Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture

Vitruvius's Ten Books on Architecture became the handbook of classical architecture. The treatise insists on broad training for architects.

Pont-du-Gard

The Pont-du-Gard aqueduct provided about 100 gallons of water a day for each inhabitant of Nîmes.

Porta Maggiore

The emperor Claudius erected the Porta Maggiore, an outstanding example of the Roman rustication masonry style.

Nero’s Golden House

After a great fire in 64 CE, Nero constructed a luxurious palace, the Domus Aurea. Severus and Celer designed the palace with innovative concrete engineering, including a dome-covered octagonal hall.

The Flavians

Vespasian emerged triumphant after Nero's suicide, establishing the Flavian dynasty. The Flavians constructed the Colosseum, reclaiming land for the public and providing an arena for gladiatorial combats and spectacles.

Colosseum

The Colosseum was built with concrete and featured a complex system of barrel-vaulted corridors. The exterior travertine shell was approximately 160 feet high. The architect divided the facade into four bands, with large arched openings framed by ornamental Greek orders.

Flavian Portraiture

Vespasian's portraits reflected his simpler tastes and resuscitated the veristic tradition of the Republic. Portraits of people of all ages survived from the Flavian period.

Arch of Titus

Domitian erected the Arch of Titus to honor his brother. The arch is a typical early triumphal arch with one passageway. Reliefs depict personified Victories and the triumphal parade of Titus. Inside the passageway of the Arch of Titus are two great relief panels.

Apotheosis of Titus Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar was the first Roman to be deified by the Senate. Roman sculptors represented the apotheosis (ascent to Heaven) of these new gods.

High Empire

In the second century CE, under Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, the Roman Empire reached its greatest geographic extent and power.

Trajan

Under Trajan, imperial armies brought Roman rule to ever more distant areas, and the imperial government took on ever greater responsibility.

Timgad

Trajan founded a new colony at Timgad. Timgad is a square divided into equal quarters by its two colonnaded main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, which cross at right angles.

Forum of Trajan

Trajan completed the Forum of Trajan. The architect was Apollodorus of Damascus. The Basilica Ulpia was a much larger and far more ornate version of the basilica adjoining the forum of Pompeii.

Arch of Trajan, Benevento

The reliefs present Trajan as the guarantor of peace and security in the Empire and as a divinely sanctioned ruler in the company of the gods.

Column of Trajan

The Column of Trajan is noteworthy for its spiral frieze. The frieze was probably the brainchild of Apollodorus of Damascus. The reliefs recount Trajan’s two Dacian campaigns in more than 150 episodes.

Wounded Romans, Column of Trajan

In one of the most unusual details of the spiral frieze, the Romans tend to their wounded after a skirmish with Dacian forces.

Markets of Trajan

On the Quirinal Hill overlooking the forum, Apollodorus built the Markets of Trajan.

Hadrian

Hadrian greatly admired Greek culture. Hadrian always appears in his portraits as a mature man. Hadrian's beard was a Greek affectation at the time, but thereafter beards became the norm for all Roman emperors for more than a century and a half.

Hadrianic hunting tondi

Constantine's builders decorated the Arch of Constantine with Hadrianic spolia. The tondi represent the preparation for hunting, the hunt for boar, bears, and lions, and sacrifices to Diana, Apollo, and other divinities.

Pantheon

Work began on the Pantheon soon after Hadrian became emperor. The Pantheon is one of the best-preserved buildings of antiquity. The architect for the building is unnamed, but it showcases the full potential of concrete as a construction material.

The Ancient World’s Largest Dome

Executing the design of the dome of Hadrian's Pantheon required all the ingenuity of Hadrian's engineers. The builders were faced with the problem of constructing the largest dome in the world up to that time. The structure showed how magnificent the interiors of Roman concrete buildings could be.

Hadrian’s Villa

One of Hadrian's projects was the construction of a pool and an artificial grotto, called the Canopus and Serapeum. In keeping with the persistent mixing of styles in Roman art and architecture as well as with Hadrian’s love of Greek art, traditional Greek columns and marble copies of famous Greek statues, including the Erechtheion caryatids, lined the pool.

Al-Khazneh

An even more extreme example of what many have called Roman “baroque” architecture is the tomb nicknamed Al-Khazneh. As at Hadrian’s Tivoli villa, the architect used Greek architectural elements in a purely ornamental fashion and with a studied disregard for Classical rules.

Ostia

About 90 percent of Rome’s population lived in multistory apartment blocks (insulae). Conditions were much the same for the inhabitants of Ostia, Rome’s harbor city. During the second and third centuries CE, the most popular choice for elegant pavements at Ostia in both private and public edifices was the black-and-white mosaic.

Apartment Houses

The most common buildings in second-century Ostia were its multistory insulae. Another strikingly modern feature of these multifamily residences is their brick facades, which were not concealed by stucco or marble veneers.

insula of the Painted Vaults, Ostia

The frescoed vault of room 4 in the aptly named Insula of the Painted Vaults is typical of Roman painted ceiling design of the second and third centuries CE.

Isola Sacra

Brick-faced concrete was also the preferred medium for the tombs in Ostia’s Isola Sacra cemetery. Small painted terracotta plaques immortalizing the activities of merchants and professional people frequently adorned the facades of those tombs.

The Antonines

Early in 138 CE, Hadrian adopted the 51-year-old Antoninus Pius. When Hadrian died later in the year, the Senate proclaimed him a god, and Antoninus Pius became emperor.

Column of Antoninus Pius

Shortly after Antoninus’s death and deification, his adopted sons and new coemperors erected a memorial column in his honor. The pedestal had a dedicatory inscription on the front and sculpted reliefs on the other three sides.

Marcus Aurelius

In a larger-than-life-size gilded-bronze equestrian statue, the emperor possesses a superhuman grandeur. The Antonine sculptor ventured beyond Republican verism, exposing the ruler’s character, his thoughts, and his soul for all to see, as Marcus revealed them himself in his Meditations

From Cremation to Burial

Under Trajan and Hadrian and especially during the rule of the Antonines, Romans began to favor burial over cremation. Thus they required larger containers for their remains than the ash urns that were the norm until the second century CE. This in turn led to a sudden demand for sarcophagi.

Orestes Sarcophagus

Greek mythology was one of the most popular subjects for the decoration of these sarcophagi. Roman men and women identified themselves on their coffins with Greek heroes and heroines, whose heads often were portraits of the deceased. Sarcophagus production was a major industry during the High and Late Empire.

Commodus as Hercules

Commodus insisted that the Senate officially give him the name Hercules Romanus and declare him a god, and he ordered the state’s artists to portray him as Hercules on coins and in statues. The portrait presents the emperor as the source of plenty in the Empire, conqueror of the barbarian world, and a god on earth.

Melfi Sarcophagus

With her are her faithful little dog only its forepaws remain at the left end of the lid and Cupid at the right. The winged infant god mournfully holds a downturned torch, a reference to the death of a woman whose beauty rivaled that of his mother, Venus, and of Homer’s Helen.

Mummy Portraits

In Roman times, however, painted wood panels depicting the deceased often replaced the traditional stylized portrait masks. One of the hundreds of Roman mummy portraits unearthed in the cemeteries of the Faiyum district depicts a priest of the Egyptian god Serapis.