Transcript Chapter 8 Rome - HCC Learning Web

Chapter 8
Rome
Urban Life and Imperial Majesty
Origins of Roman Culture:
Greek and Etruscan
• As early as the 8th century BCE the Greeks had colonized
the southern coastal regions of the Italian peninsula
• The Etruscans occupied the part of the Italian peninsula
that today is known as Tuscany
• Scholars continue to debate whether the Etruscans were
indigenous to Italy or whether they migrated from the
near East
Italy in the Third-Second Centuries BCE,
Including Earlier Etruscan Cities and Greek
Colonies
The Etruscans
• Most of what we know of the Etruscans comes
from their art
--no literature survives
--scholars unable to translate their epigrammatic
texts
• Richly decorated burial tombs
• Foundations of mud-brick and wooden temples
Etruscan Sarcophagus
Terra cotta, 6’7” length
ca. 520 BCE
Plan and Reconstruction of an Etruscan Temple
She-Wolf
Bronze, 33”
ca. 500-480 BCE
• Etruscan founding myth—
twins Romulus and Remus
found on the banks of the
Tiber by a she-wolf
• Decided to build a city on
the Palatine Hill and argued
over who would name the
city. Romulus won by killing
Remus, and the city was
named after him
• The date, legend has it, was
753 BCE
Hellenized Rome
• By the second and first centuries BCE, Rome had
achieved political control of the entire
Mediterranean
• Even after Rome conquered Greece in 146 BCE,
Greece to be said to “rule” Rome at least culturally as
Rome was a fully Hellenized culture
• Romans loved Greek art
Laocoön and His Sons
• Found in the ruins of the emperor Titus’s (r. 79-81 CE )
palace
• Subject is the punishment of the Trojan priest Laocoön,
who warned his countrymen against accepting the “gift”
of a wooden horse from the Greeks. Virgil describes the
incident in Book II of his Aeneid
• Drama and expressionism of the sculpture are pure
Hellenism
Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athanadoros of
Rhodes, Laocoön and His Sons
Marble, 8 ½’
ca. 150 BCE
Republican Rome
• 520 BCE—Romans expelled the last of the Etruscan
kings and decided to rule themselves without a
monarch
• Unlike Greece, not every free citizen enjoyed equal
privileges. In the Etruscan manner, the Roman free
males were patricians (land-owning aristocrats) and
plebians (the poorer class)
• The Senate was exclusively patrician
Pietas and Portrait Busts
• Under Rome’s patrician system, the upper classes owed
dutiful respect, or pietas, towards others—the gods,
country, and family, in that order
• Propagandistic in nature, the portrait busts that
proliferated in the second and first centuries BCE depict
the subjects at or near the end of life, celebrating pietas
through the wisdom and experience of age
• Verism (Latin veritas, “truth”)—high level of realism;
revealing the subjects’ every wrinkle and wart
A Roman Man
Marble, life-size
ca. 80 BCE
Imperial Rome
• 27 BCE—Octavian, grandnephew and adopted son of
Julius Caesar, “reluctantly” accepted the Senate’s
appointment of imperium and the title Augustus, “the
revered one” in gratitude for his defeat of Mark Antony
and Cleopatra in 31 BCE and reunification of a Rome
divided by civil war
• Augustus ruled Rome from 27 BCE to 14 CE. His new title
gave him semidivine status
• In art he is always depicted as young and vigorous
Augustus of Primaporta
• Displayed at the home of Augustus’s wife, Livia, at Primaporta,
on the outskirts of Rome
• Idealized and propagandistic
• Military garb announces his role as commander-in-chief
• Cupid riding a dolphin at his feet recalls the Julian family’s
claim to be descended from Venus and Aeneas
• Extended arm points toward an unknown, but presumably
greater future
Augustus of Primaporta
Marble, 6’8”
ca. 20 BCE
Compare Pose and Proportion to
Polyclitus’s Doryphorus
Ara Pacis Augustae
• One of Augustus’s first acts was to address the
deterioration of morals and family life in Rome and the
declining numbers of the aristocrats
• He criminalized adultery, required men between the ages
of 20 and 60 and women between the ages of 20 and 50
to marry, and punished childless couples with high taxes
or inheritance deprivation
• His Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace)
celebrates family with its exterior-wall decorations
picturing three generations of Augustus’s family
Ara Pacis Augustae
Marble
13-9 BCE
Ara Pacis Augustae
Detail of Imperial Procession
South Frieze
• Augustus’s own large family—a model for all Roman citizens
• Spatial depth created by depicting figures farther away from
the viewer in low relief and those closest in high relief
“I found a city of brick,
and left it a city of
marble.”
--Augustus
Public Works and Monuments
• Augustus inaugurated what amounted to an ongoing
competition among the emperors to outdo their
predecessors in the construction of public works and
monuments
• Rome had developed haphazardly, without any central
plan, a contrast to the empire’s provincial capitals which
were conceived on a strict grid plan
• Water was scarce, and hygiene was poor, so Augustus
had aqueducts built to provide more clean water to the
city
Pont du Gard, near Nimes, France
180’
late 1st century BCE, early 1st century CE
The Colosseum
• Built by the emperor Vespasian (r. 69-79 CE) between
72-80 CE
• Named after Colossus, a 120-foot high statue of Nero
that stood in front of it
• 615 feet long, 510 feet wide, and 159 feet high, it
could accommodate audiences estimated at 50,000
who could enter and exit its 76 vaulted arcades in a
matter of a few minutes
Aerial View of the Colosseum
Detail of the Colosseum’s Outer Wall
• Each level employed a
different architectural
order: Tuscan on the
ground floor, Ionic on
the second, and
Corinthian in the third
• Columns purely
decorative
Triumphal Arches and Columns
• While the arch was known to cultures such as the
Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks, it was
the Romans who perfected it, evidently learning its
principles from the Etruscans but developing those
principles further
• Hundreds of triumphal arches were built throughout the
Roman Empire
• Intended to symbolize Rome’s political power and
military might
Arch of Titus
Rome, ca. 81 CE
In 70 CE Titus’s army sacked the Second
Temple of Jerusalem. In this interior
detail from the arch, Titus’s soldiers
carry the Ark of the Covenant and a
menorah from the temple
Trajan’s Column
• Trajan, one of the Five Good Emperors who ruled Rome
after the Flavian dynasty (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian,
Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius)
• His column narrates in a spiral of 150 separate scenes his
defeat of the Dacians (modern Hungary and Romania)
• Laid out end to end, the complete narrative would be
625 feet long
• Suggestive not only of power but also of male virility
Trajan’s Column
Marble, 125’ (including base)
106-113 CE
The Forum Romanum and Imperial
Forums
• Chief public square of Rome, the center of Roman
religious, ceremonial, public, and commercial life
• Symbolic function—imperial power that testified to
the prosperity—and peace—that the emperor
bestowed upon Rome’s citizenry
• Julius Caesar the first to build a forum of his own in
46 BCE; Trajan’s (ca. 117 CE) was the last
Model of the Roman Forum and the Imperial
Forums
Rome, ca. 46 BCE-117 CE
Forum of Trajan
Restored View
The Pantheon
• One of the most ambitious building projects undertaken by
the Good Emperors
• A temple to all the gods (Greek pan, “all,’ and theos, “gods”)
• Cylindrical space topped by a dome, the largest built in
Europe before the 20th century
• Perfect hemisphere—diameter of the rotunda is 144 feet, as is
the height from floor to ceiling. The 30-foot circular opening
at the top, the building’s sole light source, is the oculus, or
“eye”
The Pantheon
118-125 CE
Interior of the Pantheon
Domestic Architecture
• In response to overcrowding, the Romans created a
new type of living space, the insula, a multistoried
apartment block
• Essentially tenements in which 90 percent of the
population of Rome lived
• Wealthier class in Rome occupied a domus, a
townhouse typically with a peristyle courtyard
Reconstruction of a Roman Insula
ca. 150 CE
Domus
House of the Silver Wedding, Pompeii
1st century BCE
Peristyle Garden
House of the Golden Cupids, Pompeii
62-79 CE