Rome: Republic and Early Empire,

pp. 92-110Roman Heritage:

The power of Technology

Sculpture:

Republican Verism

Augustus and the Greek Model

Iconography

Painting:

Fresco technique

Second Style:

Linear and Atmospheric Perspectives

Architecture:

The temple: Roman Eclecticism

The Pantheon: the dome

A New Building Material: Concrete

Rome is the archetype of the empire

based on rational efficiency and

practical genius

(visually exemplified by the grid

organization of Roman military camps)

Rome success in conquering most of

the known world depended on its

highly organized infrastructures

(streets and aqueducts),

and technological superiority (both in

military and civic terms)

Roman Heritage:

The celebration of Roman achievements both in the civic

and military fields is embodied by the Triumphal Arch

Originally realized to celebrate victorious military

campaigns and the completion of infrastructures such

as bridges or major streets,

it would significantly become a successful symbol of great

accomplishments in Western capitals:

-Rome, honored Titus’s capture of Jerusalem of 70 CE

-Paris, commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 after the victory

of Austerlitz

-New York, celebrated George Washington inauguration as

president of the US at its centennial (1888)

Roman Heritage:

Head of a Romanpatrician, from Orticoli,Italy, ca. 75-50 BC,marble.

Sculpture: Republican Verism

What does this figure tell you?

Why would someone pay a sculptor to have

such a pitiless record of his forefather’s

ugliness?

This kind of portraiture had a specific function

in Roman tradition:

it is related to Roman aristocracy’s cult of

ancestors (patricians kept portrait of their

ancestors in their homes)

and to funerary rituals (they would parade

them in funerary processions)

Head of a Romanpatrician, from Orticoli,Italy, ca. 75-50 BC,marble.

Sculpture: Republican Verism

To own many portraits meant being

descendant of a good lineage

Such meticulous realism is called verism

(from Latin verum = true),

and probably derives from Roman practice of

making death masks of deceased relatives

(these are the true likenesses of my

forefathers!)

But also expresses some fundamental values

of Roman Republican culture

I’m ugly

But I don’t care(actually I’m proud of it)

Because I am

virtuous:

serious, experienced,

determined, and loyal

to family and state

Not only are his wrinkles the physical

demonstration of this person’s virtuosity

and responsibility,

they are also a reflection of the value

placed on age and experience within

Roman culture (minimum age-limit for

holding certain offices)

Head of a Romanpatrician, from Orticoli,Italy, ca. 75-50 BC,marble.

Sculpture: Republican Verism

Scholars have also interpreted the extreme

realism of the late Roman Republic as

politically charged:

a reaction against the Roman craze for Greek

culture

In 221 BC the Romans had conquered the

wealthy Sicilian Greek city of Syracuse and its

artistic patrimony was brought to Rome

In 146 BC Greece had become a Roman

province

The impact on Roman society, culture, and art

was immense

As the biographer Plutarch wrote, the Romans

“who had hitherto been accustomed only to

fighting and farming”

now began “affecting urbane opinions about the

arts and about the artists”

This patrician is defending the good old values

that have made Rome great:

simplicity, practical sense, respect for the aged,

and tradition

Republican verism is in fact the contrary of

Classical Greek idealization,

which celebrates values such as beauty, eternal

youth, divine perfection

Augustus as

General, from

Primaporta,

Italy, perhaps

a copy of a

bronze original

of ca. 20 BC

Compare and contrast

Augustus (“exalted, sacred”), great-nephew

of Julius Caesar, is the first Roman

emperor

rarely has art been pressed into the service

of political power so directly as in the Age

of Augustus

In this period, poetry and art are filled with

the imagery of a blessed world, an empire

at peace under the guide of a great ruler

- the Augustus of Primaporta combines

traditional Roman with Greek formal

characteristics

It is composed of Classical Greek forms

subtly mixed with just a few authentic

physiognomic traits

Sculpture: Augustus and the Greek

Model

As opposed to Greek nameless athletes,

Augustus’s face is a recognizable portrait of a

specific person.

Yet, if compared to the republican verism,

Augustus is a “classical,” idealized beauty:

- regular shape, symmetrical features (even in

his hair: each lock has been carefully arranged),

- always young (as opposed to the rule by

elders that had characterized the Roman

Republic)

The body of Augustus combines the gesture

typical of Roman earlier representations of

orators

with the contrapposto pose and ideal

proportions of Polykleitos’s Spear Bearer

Through this stylistic combination, Augustus

presents himself

as the synthesis of Roman traditional values

and Greek most refined and elevated heritage

Aulus Metellus,

ca. 80 BC

The propaganda purpose of this statue is

even more evident in its complex

iconography

Iconography: (literally: “the writing of

images”) is both the content or subject of

an artwork and the study of content in art.

It includes the study of the symbolic, often

religious, meaning of objects, persons, or

events depicted in works of art

The presence of a Cupid, son of the

goddess Venus, is a reference to Augustus’s

claim to descent from Venus through her

human son Aeneas

In this way Augustus underscores both his

divine origins

and presents himself as the embodiment of

the continuity between Greek and Roman

cultures (Aeneas was a Homeric hero)

Sculpture: Augustus and the Greek Model

The relief on the emperor’s

cuirass advertises an

important diplomatic

victory,

showing Augustus as the

author of the new period of

stability, internal peace, and

economic prosperity known

as Pax Romana (“Roman

Peace”)

Sculpture: Augustus and the Greek Model

Wall Painting: Pompeii and the Four Styles

In 79 CE many Roman towns near Naples were

buried by the sudden eruption of the volcano

Vesuvius

among them, the most important was Pompeii

Because of this catastrophe, however, these cities

were preserved under the lava until their discovery

in the 18th century,

permitting an extremely precise historical

reconstruction of the art and daily life of Roman

towns of the Late Republic and Early Empire

The number and good conditions of mural paintings

from different periods, that were found in Pompeii,

permitted archaeologists and art historians identify

how taste and style in painting changed through

time

Four main stages were therefore called the Four

Pompeian Styles, which were then used as a point

of reference to analyze and date other Roman

paintings outside Pompeii

We will focus on the Second Style, which is

a pivotal passage in the history of Western

pictorial representation

Second Style wall painting (general view),

from Boscoreale, Italy, 50-40 BC,

Metropolitan Museum, New York

The interior walls of Roman houses

were often decorated with frescoes

Fresco: a painting done rapidly in

watercolor on wet plaster on a wall

or ceiling,

so that the colors penetrate the

plaster and become fixed as it dries

This was a bedroom of a villa at

Boscoreale (now at the Met), buried

by the Vesuvius

Its walls are completely covered

with fresco paintings that create the

illusion of a space extending

beyond the limits of the shallow

cubiculum

The Second Style painter

represented fake columns

Through the colonnade, the viewer

can admire fantastic urban

panorama

In order to create this fictional tri-

dimensional space on the the picture

plan, Roman painters developed a

sophisticated representational device,

LINEAR PERSPECTIVE,

This introduced the concept of the

painting AS A WINDOW,

that would be perceived, from the 1300s

to the early 20th century, as a major

characteristic of the Western approach

to image making (Panofsky, Perspective

as Symbolic Form)

Linear perspective: the impression of

real space is obtained through lines and

size of represented objects:

- The architectural details follow

diagonal lines that the eye interprets as

parallel lines receding into the distance

-objects meant to be perceived as far

away from the viewer are shown smaller

than those intended to appear nearby

- The volume of objects is obtained through the

depiction of light and shading: things are coherently

lit from one (or more) source of light and cast their

shadows accordingly

Compare and contrast

2 main differences:

3) Representation of

space: in stead of the

Egyptian subdivision of the

pictorial surface into

registers,

Roman artists create the

illusion of a coherent

vision,

where the viewer

understands things and

space in 2 ways:

a) the reciprocal position

of things in the fictional

tri-dimensional space,

b) their position in relation

to the viewer (above,

below, near, far away):

new relationship between

real and fictional spaces

Compare and contrast

Second difference:

2) Proportions of

represented

figures/objects:

in Egyptian hierarchical

proportions, the size

corresponds to the

importance of things in the

represented scene and to

people’s social rank,

in Roman Second Style

painting, the size of things

and persons, depends on

their position in space

3) Light contributes to a

more true-to-life effect but

also is a new device to

focus the viewer’s

attention on certain details

Gardenscape, Second

Style wall painting, from

the Villa Livia,

Primaporta, Italy, ca. 30-

20 BC

Second Style painters

invented another device to

suggest recession in the

represented space,

Atmospheric perspective:

This fresco comes from the

dining-room walls of an

aristocratic villa

The artist created the

illusion of being on or

pavilion looking out over

a low fence into a garden

of fruit trees

These are filled with a

variety of realistic birds

Depth is indicated not only

through linear perspective,

Gardenscape, Second

Style wall painting, from

the Villa Livia,

Primaporta, Italy, ca. 30-

20 BC

but also by the increasingly

blurred appearance of

objects in the distance

(atmospheric perspective)

the foreground and middle-

ground (fences, trees, and

birds) are precisely painted,

While the foliage on

background is represented

with an indistinct green

Here we find again the

dichotomy between a

painterly (atmospheric p.)

versus a linear (linear p.)

approach to image-making

Teple of Fortuna Virilis, Rome, ca.

75 BC

What is the style of this temple?

The columns and frieze are Ionic, and also the

structure columns-pediment-cella imitate the Greek

model

However, as in sculpture, also Roman architecture

combined Greek with traditional Roman forms

Architectural peculiarities of the Roman temple:

-the Roman temple stand on a raised platform, or

podium

-A single flight of steps leads to a front porch

entrance

-The Ionic columns are freestanding on the porch

and engaged (set into the wall) around the cella

The stress on the façade and the elevation of the

building on the podium were inherited by the

Etruscans

Reconstruction of an

Etruscan temple

On the other hand, they were a way to effectively

distinguish the sacred building in the chaotic

urban context

A feature of Roman architecture is what scholars

have defined as ECLECTICISM

Eclecticism: deriving ideas, style, or taste from a

broad and diverse range of sources

Roman architects tend to adopt styles from

different sources (Etruscan and Greek) and to

combine them freely (Colosseum’s columns and

capitals)

Roman architectural eclecticism corresponds to

their cultural-religious permeability:

They adopted not only the Greek gods and

myths, but also religious beliefs from the

people they had conquered

Doric

Ionic

Corinthian capitals: a more

decorated variation of Ionic

capitals, they were preferred by

Romans for their richest buildings

Colosseum (Flavian

Amphitheater),

Rome, ca. 70-80 CE

Pantheon, facade, Rome, 118-125 CE

Perhaps the most remarkable

ancient building surviving in

Rome is the Pantheon (“all

the gods”)

Originally it stood on a

podium and was approached

by stairs from the square

street construction hide them

Attachment holes in the

pediment indicate the

placement of sculpture

The façade resembles that of

a typical Roman temple:

Corinthian capitals

Tuscan column were an

Etruscan variation of the

Doric column (they added a

base and leaved the shaft

unfluted)

This standard façade,

however, brought to a

surprise in the interior

Behind the porch is a giant rotunda. The walls

support a bowl-shaped dome that is 143 feet in

diameter and 143 feet from the floor at its summit

The design is based on the intersection of two

circles (one horizontal, the other vertical)

so that the interior space can be imagined as the

orb of the earth and the dome as the vault of the

heavens

Standing at the center of this hemispherical

temple, the visitor feels isolated from the outside

world

The eye is drawn upward over the circular

patterns made by sunken panels, or coffers, in the

dome’s ceiling to the light entering the central

opening

The coffers both reduced the dome’s mass and

provided a handsome pattern of squares within

the vast circle

Light is used here not only to illuminate the

building but to create a symbolic link with the

gods

The Romans developed

concrete constructions, which

revolutionized architectural

design

Such as huge domed rooms

without internal support

Concrete enabled Roman

architects to think in terms of

space rather than of sheer

mass

While masonry domes could

not accommodate windows

without threatening their

stability,

Concrete domes could be

opened up at their apex with a

circular “eye” (oculos) allowing

light to reach the vast spaces

beneath