Rome and Its Art (30 B.C. – 96 A.D.)

Debt to Greece

The Romans were not, in their own degree, an artistic people. Before Augustus they were a nation of warriors; after him they became rulers. They counted the creation of order and security through a vast benevolent government a greater thing than the creation or enjoyment of beauty.

They paid extravagant prices for the works of past masters, but looked with contempt upon living artists as lowly workmen. The kindly Seneca said: While we worship the statues, we despise their makers.

Only law and politics, and among the manual arts only agriculture (even then by the hands of laborers), seemed to them an honorable way of life. Except for the architects, most Roman artists were slaves, freedmen, or hired Greeks. Almost all worked with their hands and ranked with the artisans.

Latin authors rarely thought of recording their lives or names. For this reason Roman art is almost completely anonymous; no living personality illuminates the history of Roman art, whereas the story of Greek aesthetics is brightened by such figures as Myron, Phidias, Praxiteles, and Protogenes.

Here the historian is forced to speak of objects rather than of persons when listing coins, vases, statues, reliefs, paintings, and buildings. With the vain hope that their accumulation, with great labor, may convey to the reader something of the crowded splendor of Rome.

The product of art reaches the soul through the eye or ear or touch, not through the intellect. When we turn those works into thoughts and words, we diminish their beauty. The world of words is only one of several worlds. Each sense has its own world; therefore every art has its own medium that cannot be translated into words. Even the artist writes in vain about art.

The Greek Influence

A special misfortune has overtaken Roman art: before reaching it we have seen Greek art, which at first appears as model and master of Roman art. Just as Indian art disturbs us by its strange forms, Roman art cools our enthusiasm by the monotonous repetition of familiar shapes.

Long before, we have seen these Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns and capitals, these soft and imaginative reliefs, these busts of poets, rulers, and gods. It is even said that the astonishing frescoes of Pompeii are copies of Greek originals; only the inlaid arrangement has Roman originality, and even that offends our conception of the unity, simplicity, and restraint of classical art.

It is certain that the art of the Augustan age in Rome was overwhelmingly Greek. The forms, methods, and ideals of Hellenic beauty entered Roman art through Sicily and Greek Italy, through Campania and Etruria, and finally through Greece, Alexandria, and the Hellenistic East.

When Rome became the mistress of the Mediterranean, Greek artists poured into the new center of wealth and patronage and made countless copies of Greek masterpieces for Roman temples, palaces, and squares. Every Roman conqueror brought back specimens of Greek works. Every ruler ransacked cities to find the surviving treasures of Greek art.

Gradually Italy became a museum of paintings and statues that had been stolen or bought, and these fixed the tone of Roman art for a century. Artistically, Rome had been swallowed by the Hellenistic world.

Resistance to Greek Influence

But this is not the whole truth. In one respect, as we shall see, the history of Roman art is a struggle between the architect and the arch; in another respect it is the native Italian effort of realism to save itself from the Greek invasion of the peninsula.

Greek art had portrayed gods instead of men, Platonic ideals instead of earthly individuals, and had sought supreme formal perfection instead of the truth of perception and expression.

That native masculine art which had helped to engrave forms on Etruscan tombs had fallen asleep between the Greek conquest and the philhellenic ecstasy of Nero. But at last it broke the Hellenistic mold and, with realistic sculpture, impressionistic painting, and an architecture of arch and dome, revolutionized classical art.

Through these arts, as well as through the beauties it had borrowed, Rome remained for eighteen centuries the artistic capital of the Western world.

Rome at Work

A traveler in antiquity who set out to tour Flavian Rome and moved northward from Ostia along the Tiber would first notice the rapid muddy current carrying the soil of hills and valleys down to the sea.

In this simple truth lie hidden melancholy notes: erosion, the difficulties of two-way river trade, the constant dredging of the Tiber’s mouth, and the floods that almost every spring covered the lowlands of Rome, driving inhabitants to higher levels they could reach, and often destroying the grain stored in warehouses at the port.

When the water receded it left houses in ruin and men and animals in the realm of death.

As the traveler approached the city his eyes fell upon the Emporium, the great market extending three hundred meters along the eastern bank of the river, filled with the noise of workmen, warehouses, markets, and moving goods.

Beyond the Emporium rose the Aventine hill, where angry plebeians had staged their “sit-down strike” in 494 and 449 B.C. On the left bank lay gardens that Caesar had bequeathed to the people in his will, and behind them the Janiculum.

Near the eastern shore, beside the beautiful Aemilian bridge, was the cattle market with its two temples (still standing) to the goddess of Fate and the goddess of Dawn. In the far north, on the right, appeared the Palatine and Capitoline hills covered with palaces and temples.

On the left bank lay the gardens of Agrippa and beyond them the Vatican hill. North of the city center, on the eastern shore, stretched the broad meadows and ornamental buildings of the Campus Martius. The theaters of Balbus and Pompey, the Circus Flaminius, the baths of Agrippa, and the stadium of Domitian stood in this quarter.

Here soldiers drilled, athletes competed, charioteers raced for the prize, people played ball, and associations met in the imperial period to imitate democracy.

Urban Structure and Streets

When the traveler alighted in the northern quarter of the city he saw the remains of a wall attributed to Servius Tullius. It is probable that Rome rebuilt this wall after the Gallic invasion of 390 B.C., but Roman military power and apparent security allowed the ramparts to fall into ruin; no new wall was raised until Aurelian in 270 A.D., and its erection marked the loss of Rome’s security.

In the middle of the wall gates had been opened in the form of single or triple arches so that the great consular roads, from which they took their names, could pass beneath.

As the traveler circled the city wall on the east and then the north he saw the distinguished gardens of Sallust, the tented camps of the emperor’s guards, and the arches of the Marcian, Appian, and Claudian aqueducts, and then on his right the hills of the Pincian, Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline in succession.

When he left the wall and walked northwestward along the Appian Way through the Capena gate at the southern foot of the Palatine toward the Via Nova and then northward through a number of arches and buildings, he would stop in the old Forum, the head and heart of Rome.

This square was originally a market place 180 by 60 meters; but by this time (96 A.D.) the vendors had moved to nearby streets or other forums; only in the columned halls near the square did men still sell shares in tax companies, make contracts with the government, defend themselves in courts, or consult lawyers on ways to evade the law.

Around the square, like the neighborhood of Wall Street in New York, simple temples to the gods and larger temples to Mammon had been built. Numerous statues adorned the square, and the porticoes of great buildings cast a shade that no few ancient trees could have provided.

From 145 B.C. until Caesar’s time this square was the meeting place of assemblies. On both sides stood the speakers’ platform called the Rostra because the earlier platform had been decorated with the beaks of ships captured at Antium in 338 B.C.

At the western end stood the Milliarium Aureum or Golden Milestone, a column of gilded bronze that Augustus had erected to mark the meeting point and beginning of several consular roads. On this milestone were inscribed the chief towns and their distances from Rome.

On the western side ran the Via Sacra, which joined the temples of Jupiter and Saturn on the Capitoline hill. North of this forum the traveler saw a larger square called the Forum of Julius, which Caesar had built to relieve the older forum; nearby were additional forums arranged for Augustus and Vespasian; and shortly afterward Trajan created and adorned the greatest forum in that area.

Daily Life and Tenement Houses

Even in that hurried tour the traveler realized the varied crowds of the city and the inadequacy of the winding streets that had grown without plan. The width of some of these streets was between five and six meters. Most of them were crooked passages in the Eastern style.

Juvenal complained that the noisy passage of wagons over the uneven pavement at night made sleep impossible, and the crowds that jostled one another turned daytime walking in the streets into a kind of warfare.

No matter how fast we hurry, an army of people rises before us and blocks the way ahead, and a dense mass of humanity presses from behind. One strikes me with his elbow, another with the pole of a litter, one hits me on the head with a beam, another with a wine cask. My legs are covered with mud. Huge feet trample me from every side; a soldier plants his hobnailed boot full on my toe.

The main public thoroughfares were paved with five-sided blocks of volcanic stone, sometimes so firmly set with mortar that several of them still survive. The streets had no lamps; whoever went out in the dark carried a lantern or followed a slave with a torch; and in either case he fell into the clutches of numerous thieves.

Doors were locked with bolts and keys, and windows were barred at night; those windows level with the street — as in our time — were protected with iron bars. Juvenal adds to these dangers of nocturnal travel the objects, liquid or solid, thrown from upper windows. He believed that on the whole only madmen would go out to dinner at night without first making their will.

Since there was no public transport to carry workers from home to work, most plebeians lived in brick tenement houses near the city center or in rooms behind or above their shops. A tenement house usually occupied an entire block and was therefore called an insula.

Many houses were six or seven stories high and so poorly built that many collapsed and killed hundreds of inhabitants. Augustus limited the height of the front of these houses to about twenty meters, but apparently this law allowed the rear of the building to be raised higher, for Martial speaks of the unfortunate man whose garret room was reached by two hundred steps.

The ground floor of many tenements contained shops; some had balconies on the second floor. A few connected their upper floors by arched corridors above the street. In these corridors additional rented rooms were given as annexes to certain plebeians.

Such insulae or tenement houses were numerous on the Via Nova and the Victory hill on the Palatine and in the Subura — a district full of brothels between the Viminal and Esquiline hills.

In these houses lived the dock workers of the Emporium, butchers of the Macellum, fishmongers of the Forum Piscatorium, cattle dealers of the Forum Boarium, vegetable sellers of the Forum Holitorium, workers in the factories of Rome, and clerks and apprentices of merchants. The slums of Rome lay along the edges of the Forum.

Houses of the Great

If the traveler sought to study middle-class housing he found those dwellings away from the city center on the great branching roads. The exterior of these houses, built of hard brick and stucco, was still, as before, constructed in a simple and solid style dictated by insecurity and intense heat; the Roman bourgeois wasted no art on the gaze of passers-by.

Few houses had more than two stories. Storage space was limited, roofs gleamed with red tiles, windows were fitted with shutters or occasionally had glass panes. The entrance was usually double-leaved, each half turning on a metal pivot.

The floors of the rooms were of mortar or tile, often arranged in patterned squares. There were no carpets. The main rooms of the house were arranged around a central courtyard, and this is the origin of the porch of the church and the university quadrangle.

In the houses of the wealthier, there were one or two rooms for washing, usually performed in basins shaped like modern tubs. The Romans carried plumbing to a degree unprecedented until the twentieth century. Lead pipes brought water from the aqueducts and main branches to all houses and tenements. All joints were of bronze, some cast in very ornamental forms.

Gutters and lead downspouts carried rainwater from the roof. Most rooms, if heated, used charcoal braziers; a few houses, many villas and palaces, and all public baths had central heating consisting of wood or charcoal furnaces that sent hot air through flues or channels under the floor or inside the walls.

In the early imperial period something completely Hellenistic was added to the houses of wealthy Romans. To create the privacy that was not always possible in the courtyard, rich Romans built an open peristyle garden behind the courtyard, usually roofed, planted flowers and shrubs, adorned it with statues, surrounded it with a colonnade, and placed a fountain or basin in the center.

Around this garden they added several rooms: a dining room or women’s quarters, a room for fine crafts, a library, and a room for the household gods. There might also be additional bedrooms and small belvederes called outlooks.

In cheaper houses a garden replaced the open peristyle; and if there was no room even for that, window boxes held flowers or plants were grown on the roof. Seneca says that on some large roofs arbors of vines and shade trees were planted in soil boxes.

Most houses had a place called a sun parlor where the Romans took the sun.

Villas and Palaces

Many Romans wearied of the noise and bustle of Rome and fled to the peace of the countryside and suburbs; rich and poor alike developed feelings toward nature that had no parallel in ancient Greece.

Juvenal believed that anyone who could buy a beautiful house in a quiet Italian town with the rent of one dark tenement room in Rome, enclose it with a garden fit to entertain a hundred Pythagoreans, and still live there, must be mad.

The wealthy left the city in early spring for their villas in the Apennines or on the shores of lakes and the sea. Pliny the Younger has left a charming description of his country house at Laurentum on the coast of Latium. He says of it: It is large enough for me to be comfortable in, yet not so large that its upkeep is expensive.

But when he explains further it seems he has been modest. He describes: a small porch enclosed with bright windows and hanging eaves … a beautiful dining room washed gently by the edge of the waves and with so many wide windows that it offers a view in three directions, as if it were three different seas; and a courtyard whose outlook is a creation of woods and hills. It has two sitting rooms, a semicircular library whose windows admit light all day, a bedroom, and several rooms for servants.

On the opposite wing are a graceful sitting room, a second dining room, and four small rooms. It has a bath consisting of a pleasant dressing room, a plunge pool, and three basins of different temperatures, and a hot bath entirely warmed by hot-air flues of the central heating system. Outside are a swimming pool, a playing field, a storeroom, a colorful garden, a private study, a banqueting hall, an observatory tower with two suites of rooms, and a dining pavilion.

Pliny concludes: Now tell me, do I not have the right to devote my time and affection to this little retreat?

If a senator had such a villa by the sea and another at Como, we can imagine the lavish luxury of Tiberius’s estates at Capri or Domitian’s at Albanum, not to speak of the estate that Hadrian later built at Tibur.

To find a parallel for this piled-up extravagance the traveler would have to seek the palaces of millionaires and emperors on the Palatine hill. The Romans had no desire in interior architecture to imitate the ancient Greeks, whose houses were modest and whose temples were rich, and they built their palaces in imitation of the courts of the semi-Orientalized Hellenistic kings.

The Ptolemaic style came to Rome with Cleopatra’s gold, and royal architecture accompanied monarchical politics. As the duties of the court increased, Augustus’s palace also expanded on all sides. Most of Augustus’s successors built additional palaces for themselves and their staff: Tiberius built the House of Tiberius, Caligula the House of Gaius, and Nero his Golden House.

The Golden House of Nero

This Golden House became one of the wonders of Rome. 83,500 square meters lay under its buildings alone, and these buildings were only part of a villa covering 2.6 square kilometers that stretched from the Palatine to the surrounding hills.

A vast park surrounded the palace with gardens, lawns, fish ponds, game preserves, aviaries, vineyards, streams, fountains, waterfalls, lakes, royal barges, pleasure houses, hot-houses, greenhouses, and colonnades a kilometer long.

An angry wit wrote on a wall an epigram that expressed popular feeling: Rome has become the dwelling of one man. Citizens, it is time to migrate to Veii — unless Veii too is swallowed by Nero’s house.

The interior of the palace gleamed with marble, bronze, gold, gilded Corinthian capitals in countless numbers, and thousands of statues, reliefs, paintings, and industrial objects bought or stolen from the classical world. The Laocoön was among them.

Some walls were decorated with mother-of-pearl and various precious gems. The ceiling of the banqueting hall was covered with ivory flowers that at a signal from the emperor’s head showered fragrant dust upon his guests.

The dining room had a spherical ivory ceiling painted to represent the sky and stars, and this ceiling revolved slowly and continuously by hidden machinery.

A suite of rooms formed the hot bath, cold bath, tepid bath, salt-water bath, and sulfur bath. When the Roman architects Severus and Celer had almost finished the building, Nero moved in and said: At last I am housed like a human being.

In the next generation this palace, which was to the Versailles of seventeenth-century France what Nero’s house was to the luxury of its age, and whose upkeep amid surrounding poverty was extremely costly and dangerous, fell into great neglect. Vespasian built the Colosseum on its ruins, and Titus and Trajan their great public baths.

Decorative Arts

In these palaces and in the homes of the wealthy hundreds of arts were employed to make everything beautiful and, if not beautiful, at least expensive. The floors of rooms were often of colored marble or mosaic whose small colored cubes produced paintings interesting for their realism and durability.

Furniture was not abundant and in comfort fell short of modern pieces; but in general its design and workmanship were superior. Tables, chairs, benches, mattresses, beds, lamps, and various utensils were made of durable materials and heavily ornamented; the finest woods, ivory, marble, bronze, silver, and gold were used with care, shaped into desired forms, and decorated with plant or animal motifs or inlaid with ivory, tortoiseshell, engraved bronze, or precious stones.

Tables were sometimes made of costly citrus or cedar wood. Some tables were of gold or silver, and many were of marble or bronze. Chairs were of many kinds, from folding stools to thrones, but they had not been refined enough, like modern chairs, to spare the spine.

Beds were of wood or metal, with slender but strong legs, and often ended in the head or foot of an animal. A thin bronze sheet served as springs under a mattress stuffed with straw or wool.

Bronze three-legged tables with delicate shapes served the purpose of modern side tables, and in every corner stood cupboards with compartments for books. Bronze braziers heated the rooms. Lamps lit them.

Mirrors too were of bronze, well polished, and engraved or chased with floral or mythological designs; some mirrors were made concave or convex, horizontally or vertically, so as to reflect the image in ludicrously thin or fat distortion.

Silverware and Glass

The factories of Campania, working with the rich output of Spanish mines, turned out silverware in large quantities for scattered markets; by this time silver vessels and utensils had become common in middle- and upper-class families.

In 1895 a digger found in the cistern of a villa at Boscoreale an interesting collection of silver that the owner had apparently hidden there before his unsuccessful flight from the fire of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

One of the sixteen cups has an almost complete design of simple foliage; on two cups reliefs of skeletons appear; on another Augustus is shown between two deities who are rivals of man.

The most interesting of these cups shows the Stoic Zeno pointing with reproach at Epicurus, while Epicurus eats a large piece of cake and a pig with raised paws politely begs for a share.

The coins and jewelry of the early empire show the progress of the engraver’s art. The coins of Augustus possess the same good taste and sometimes the motifs of the Altar of Peace.

Precious stones brought from Africa, Arabia, and India were cut and set in rings, brooches, necklaces, bracelets, cups, and even in walls. Wearing a ring on the hand was a social necessity; a few flashy dandies wore rings on every finger except one.

Romans sealed their signatures with a signet ring and therefore liked the ring to have a distinctive and unrepeated design. Some of the best-paid artists in Rome were the gem cutters, such as Dioscorides who made Augustus’s seal.

The cutting of cameos reached a height in the golden age that no one has since surpassed. The cameo preserved in Vienna as the Gemma Augustea is one of the most delicate of its kind.

The collecting of jewels and cut stones became one of the occupations of wealthy Romans — Pompey, Caesar, Augustus. The imperial jewel treasury grew by inheritance until Marcus Aurelius sold it to pay for the war against the Marcomanni.

The office of Keeper of the Seal, now customary in England, is derived from the office of guardian of the jewels and seals of the Roman emperors.

Pottery and Glass

During this period the potters of Capua, Puteoli, Cumae, and Arretium filled the houses of Italy with various kinds of ceramic art. Arretium had mixing jars with a capacity of 10,000 gallons.

The red-glazed tableware of Arretium enjoyed greater popularity than all other Italian products for a century, and examples of it have been found almost everywhere. Iron stamps with raised designs were used for jars, lamps, and tiles. The ancients knew this much of the art of printing, but they made no effort to develop it because the wages of slave copyists were very low.

The workers of Cumae, Liternum, and Aquileia advanced from pottery to artistic glass. The Portland Vase is a famous example of this work; and finer still is the blue glass vase found at Pompeii, which with lively and graceful movement depicts the vintage festival of Bacchus.

Pliny and Strabo say that under Tiberius the glass industry was brought to Rome from Sidon or Alexandria, and soon small bottles or scent flasks, cups, bowls, and other shapes were made so delicate and beautiful that they became the passionate desire of art collectors and millionaires.

In Nero’s time 6,000 sesterces were paid for two glass cups now known as the Thousand Flowers, made by fusing pieces of glass of different colors. More valuable still were the murrhine vases brought from Africa and Asia.

These vases were made by placing white and purple glass fibers side by side to produce the desired pattern and then firing them; or by embedding pieces of colored glass in a white transparent body.

Pompey, after his victory over Mithridates, brought a number of these vases to Rome. Although Augustus melted down Cleopatra’s gold plates, he kept her cup, which was of murrhine glass. Nero paid a million sesterces for such a cup. Petronius, at his death, broke another of this kind lest it fall into Nero’s hands.

On the whole the Romans did not lead in glassmaking, and among the art collections of the world few sets are more valuable than the Roman glass in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Sculpture

Pottery advanced from fired clay to sculpture — small statues or clay reliefs, toys resembling fruit, grapes, and fish — and finally to life-size statues. Glazed terracottas were abundant in the ruins of Pompeii.

The pediments and projecting edges of temple roofs were decorated with palms, acroteria, heads of mythical animals, and half-relief terracotta figures. The Greeks laughed at these ornaments; they went out of fashion in the imperial period; Augustus was no lover of clay.

It is probable that it was owing to the Attic taste of Augustus that the making of statues and reliefs in Rome reached a level comparable with the best Hellenistic works. In the course of one generation Roman artists carved fountains, tombstones, arches, and altars with such delicacy of feeling, precision of execution, calm dignity of appearance, and just proportion of sampling and vision that Roman reliefs take their place among the masterpieces of world art.

In 13 B.C. the Senate celebrated Augustus’s return from securing peace in Spain and Gaul by ordering an Altar of Augustan Peace to be erected in the Campus Martius. This altar is the finest surviving relic of Roman sculpture.

Perhaps this monument in shape recalls the Pergamon altar and in its moving groups the frieze of the Parthenon. The altar was raised on a platform in an enclosure whose walls were partly decorated with marble reliefs. The pieces now extant are fragments that have survived from these walls.

One fragment shows Tellus (Mother Earth) with two children in her arms while grain and flowers grow around her and animals rest contentedly at her feet. The main ideas of the Augustan reforms were the restoration of the family to reproduction, the return of the nation to agriculture, and the achievement of imperial peace.

In this image maternal maturity and ripeness are combined with feminine beauty, grace, and charm, giving it a delightful perfection for which no parallel can be found in the ornate goddesses of the Parthenon.

The outer wall frieze has a panel of poppy, daisy, broad leaves, and heavy clusters of ivy berries, which is also unique in its world. Another panel shows two processions moving from opposite directions to meet before the altar of the goddess of peace. In these groups appear calm and dignified faces that probably represent Augustus, Livia, the imperial family with nobles, priests, Vestal Virgins, and children.

Particularly the faces of the children with their modest innocence are strikingly true to life. One child, a very small boy, walks indifferently and without interest in the ceremony in the manner of children; another is a boy who already carries himself with premature dignity; a third is a girl with a bunch of flowers; and another, who has evidently done something naughty, is gently scolded by his mother.

From this time onward children found an important place in Italian art. But Roman sculpture never again gained such mastery over the drapery of its works, nor succeeded in gathering so many figures effectively and naturally into one composition and blending light and shade. Propaganda also found a perfect setting in this altar, as in the works of Virgil.

Reliefs and Realism

The only Roman rivals of these reliefs are the carvings of the chambers erected for the entry of victorious generals. The best surviving arch is the Arch of Titus, begun by Vespasian and finished by Domitian; it was raised to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem.

One relief shows the city in flames with its walls destroyed, the people frantic with terror, and its wealth plundered by the soldiers. Another relief shows Titus in his chariot among soldiers, animals, judges, priests, and captives, marching into the city at the head of the sacred candlestick of the Temple and various spoils of war.

Here the artists boldly experimented. They carved different figures at different levels, scattered them over uneven surfaces, hollowed the background with the chisel to create an illusion of depth, and colored the whole work so that additional shadow gave fullness and distance to the mind.

The action is not shown by separate pieces representing parts of the story but by continuous narration, as in the reliefs of Mesopotamia and Egypt and later on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius; and thus the idea of movement and life is better conveyed.

The figures are not idealized in a lofty manner nor softened into the gentle Attic repose of the Hellenistic Altar of Peace. These figures are taken from living men and the ugly realities of life and carved in the earthy realistic Italian tradition that is full of the zest of life. The subject was not perfect gods but living men.

It is this intense realism that distinguishes Roman sculpture from Greek sculpture. Had it not been for this repeated fidelity to this special impulse, the Romans would have added little to the treasury of art.

Wall Painting

The traveler found painting more common and more popular than sculpture in the temples, dwellings, colonnades, and squares of Rome. He came upon many works of the masters — such as Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Apelles, Protogenes, and others — and saw that these paintings were valued by the wealthy emperor as highly as Renaissance paintings are prized by rich America today; and because of better preservation he saw in far greater quantity the works of the Alexandrian and Roman schools.

This art was old in Italy, for walls spoke and begged for ornament. Once even Roman nobles painted, but the influx of Hellenistic culture made painting seem to the Romans a Greek and lowly art, and matters reached the point where Valerius Maximus wondered how anyone like Fabius Pictor had stooped to paint murals in the Temple of Health. There were exceptions, however.

In the late Republic, Arellius gained fame by hiring prostitutes to pose in special attitudes so that he might model goddesses from them; in the time of Augustus a dull noble named Quintus Pedius, finding every career closed to him because of his dullness, took up painting; and Nero hired an artist named Amulius to decorate the interior of his Golden House, who painted with the greatest dignity and always wore a toga.

But these men were the rare exceptions among the multitude of Greeks who in Rome, Pompeii, and throughout the peninsula copied Greek paintings on Greek or Egyptian subjects or created various types.

This art was practically limited to fresco, of which there were two kinds: in the first, for true fresco, the freshly whitewashed wall was painted with colors dissolved in water; in the second, colors mixed with glue were painted on the dry surface.

Copyists sometimes used the same method as tile makers, in which color was mixed with wax at high heat. Nero ordered his portrait painted on canvas 36.5 meters high — and this is the first time we know canvas was used for this purpose.

Painting, as we have seen, was done on statues, temples, theater scenery, and large pictures on cloth displayed in triumphal processions or in the Forum; but its special place, which painters preferred, was the inner or outer wall. Romans rarely leaned furniture against the wall or hung pictures on it. They preferred to devote the entire wall to one painting or to a series of related paintings.

Thus the wall became part of the house and an integral element of the architectural plan.

Styles of Painting

The fiery nature of Vesuvius has preserved about 3,500 frescoes for us. In Pompeii paintings have been found from the whole ancient world. Since Pompeii — destroyed under Vesuvius — was a small town, one can imagine how many wall paintings once adorned the houses and tombs of ancient Italy.

Of the discoveries from the ruins of Pompeii, the better ones have been moved to the Museum of Naples; even there the gentle splendor of these images affects the viewer. But only contemporaries saw these paintings with their full depth of color and in the architectural setting that gave each image its place and locality.

In the House of the Vettii the wall paintings have been left as found: in the dining room Dionysus surprises the sleeping Ariadne; on the opposite wall Daedalus shows his wooden cow to Pasiphaë; on the far side, while Hephaestus binds Ixion to the wheel of torment, Hermes stands calmly watching; and in another room a series of playful frescoes shows the mischievous Cupid taking over the industries of Pompeii, including the wine industry of the Vettii family.

The tooth of time has bitten into these surfaces that were once brilliant, but enough remains to humble the viewer; the faces are almost perfectly drawn, and they have such bodily color that they can still send the blood of desire racing through the veins of spectators.

Art historians, using these Pompeian paintings, have tried to understand the nature of pictorial art in ancient Italy and to classify periods and styles. This method lacks validity because Pompeii was Greek before it was Italian, but what remains of early painting in Rome and its suburbs fully accords with the developments of painting in Pompeii.

In the first or incrustation style (second century B.C.) walls were mostly painted to resemble marble panels, as in the House of Sallust in Pompeii. In the second or architectural style (first century B.C.) the wall was painted to imitate or reproduce a building, façade, or colonnade.

Often columns were shown as if seen from inside and the exterior space between them was pictured; thus the artist gave views of trees and flowers, countryside and stream, and playful or resting animals to a room that probably had no windows.

The imprisoned resident of the house, merely by looking at the wall, imagined himself in the gardens of Lucullus; he could fish or row or hunt or, without suffering from the untimely calls of birds, watch their eager movements; nature had been brought into the home.

The third or ornamental style (A.D. 1–50) used architectural forms merely for decoration and made the landscape subordinate to the architectural forms. In the fourth or intricate style the artist freed his imagination, created imaginary buildings and shapes, placed them in positions that playfully defied gravity, piled gardens, columns, villas, and pavilions upon one another with the disorder usual in modern times, and sometimes achieved that feverish effect in which the picture is completed by the unconscious memory and filled with light.

In all these related styles architecture was the handmaid and servant of painting: it both served it and employed it, and created a tradition that awoke again sixteen centuries later in Nicolas Poussin.

Architecture

To give the forgotten traveler of the ancient world the maximum benefit from this tour, we have reserved for this section the greatest art of Rome, in which it defended itself most successfully against the Greek invasion, displayed all its power, inventiveness, and courage, but originality does not arise by itself; like Abbot it is a new combination of elements that already existed.

All cultures in their early stages are eclectic, for education begins with imitation; but when the spirit or a nation reaches the age of reason it stamps the mark of its own personality and character — if it has any — on all its works and words.

Rome, like other Mediterranean cities, took over the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian styles from Egypt and Greece, but at the same time adopted the arch, barrel vault, and dome from Asia and with them built a city of palaces, basilicas, amphitheaters, and baths such as no land had seen before.

Roman architecture became the artistic expression of the Roman spirit and state: courage, organization, grandeur, and the force of violence raised these unparalleled buildings on the hills. These buildings are the Roman spirit made visible in stone.

Most of the chief architects of Rome were Romans, not Greeks. One of them, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, wrote a book On Architecture (about 27 B.C.) that has survived.

He who had served as engineer in Africa under Caesar and as architect under Octavian, sat down in old age to formulate the principles of Rome’s most honored art.

He himself confesses: Nature has not given me stature, my face has been worn by the passing years, and illness has robbed me of strength. Therefore I hope to win attention through knowledge and my book.

Just as Cicero and Quintilian considered the study of philosophy the first condition of becoming an orator, Vitruvius considered it necessary for becoming an architect. In his view philosophy develops the architect’s aims while science improves his means.

Philosophy made him a man of lofty thought, gifted and courteous, just, sincere, and free from greed, for no true work can be done without pure and unstained faith.

He describes the materials of architecture, the styles and their execution, and the various types of building in Rome, and adds discourses on machines, water clocks, odometers, aqueducts, city planning, and public health.

In contrast to the rectangular plan that Hippodamus had established in many Greek cities, Vitruvius recommended the radial arrangement usual in Alexandria (and in the modern city of Washington). Nevertheless the Romans continued to expand their cities on the rectangular plan of their military camps.

He warned Italy that the drinking water of several places caused goiter and declared that working with lead caused poisoning. He defined sound as the vibrating movement of air and wrote the oldest extant discussion of acoustics in architecture.

His book, rediscovered in the Renaissance, profoundly influenced Leonardo, Palladio, and Michelangelo.

Building Materials

Vitruvius says the Romans built with wood, stucco, concrete, and marble. Brick was the usual material for walls, vaults, and barrel vaults and often served as facing for concrete. Stucco too was frequently used for the surface.

It was made of sand, lime, marble dust, and water; it took a good polish and was rubbed several times until it reached a thickness of 7.5 centimeters; and in this way it preserved its appearance for nineteen centuries, as in some parts of the Colosseum.

In the making and use of concrete the Romans had no rival until modern times. They mixed the volcanic ash abundant near Naples with water and lime; they added fragments of brick, tile, marble, and stone; and from the second century B.C. they produced a kind of cement as hard as rock that could be poured into any desired shape.

The Romans, like modern builders, poured it into forms made with boarding. With this cement they could roof vast halls without columns with hard domes — without relying on the lateral projections of a vaulted roof.

Thus they roofed the Pantheon and the great baths. In most temples and luxurious houses stone was used. A special stone brought from Cappadocia was so translucent that a temple built with it remained sufficiently lighted even when all doors and windows were closed.

The conquest of Greece stimulated the Roman taste for marble — first satisfied by importing columns, then marble, and finally by opening the quarries of Carrara near Luna. Before the time of Augustus marble was used only as facing for brick and concrete. It was only in this superficial sense that Augustus left Rome a city of marble in some quarters and went away.

A wall entirely of marble was rare. The Romans liked to combine the red and gray dentate stone of Egypt, the green stone of Euboea, and the black and yellow marble of Numidia with the white marble of Carrara and varieties of limestone, basalt, alabaster (white marble), and porphyry in one building. Never had building materials been so composite or so colorful.

Architectural Styles

Rome added the Tuscan and Composite styles and some modifications to the Doric, Corinthian, and Ionic styles. Columns were often monolithic instead of being built of superimposed pieces. A Ionic base was added to the Doric column, and in the latter style it was slender and without fluting.

The Ionic capital sometimes had four small columns so that each side presented one face; the Corinthian column and capital became so beautiful and delicate that they had no precedent in Greece. But in later decades this style was ruined by unnecessary excesses.

Another excess led to the use of many flowers on Ionic small columns to create a Composite capital of the type of the Arch of Titus; sometimes the small columns ended in animal or human shapes and seemed to foreshadow the ornaments of the Middle Ages.

Extravagant Romans mixed several styles in one building, as they did in the Theater of Marcellus. But again, with parsimonious economy, they left the side columns attached to the wall — as in the Square House at Nîmes in France.

Even when the development of the arch caused the supporting function of columns to be removed from them, the Romans added the column to the building as a useless ornament — a custom that has survived to our own age.

Temples

Rome preserved the Greek principle of trabeation in almost all its temples — that is, long strong beams resting on columns and supporting the roof. Augustus was as cautious in art as in everything else, and in most temples built by his order the old tradition was maintained.

After his time the emperors multiplied the houses of their Olympian rivals and covered their own debauchery with that architectural piety that covered the hills and filled the streets with tiled or gilded shrines.

Jupiter of course led in finding many houses. Among the numerous temples one was dedicated to Jupiter Tonans (the Thunderer) and another to Jupiter Stator (the Stayer), because Jupiter had stopped the Romans in flight during battle; and with Juno and Minerva, the goddess of Rome, he shared the most sacred shrine of Rome on the summit of the Capitoline hill.

In that temple, in the central cella surrounded by a three-story colonnaded portico, stood the huge gold-and-ivory statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Tradition attributed the building of the first form of this chief Roman place of worship to Tarquinius Priscus; it was burned and rebuilt several times afterward.

Stilicho (404 A.D.) tore off its gilded bronze doors to pay his soldiers, and the Vandals carried away the gilded tiles of its roof. Fragments of its marble pavement still remain.

On the northern summit of the same hill stood the temple of Juno Moneta or Juno the Warner; the mint of Rome was here; and of course the word that has become the source of so much greed and ambition is derived from the name of this temple.

On the southern side of the hill lay the shrine of Saturn, the oldest god of the Capitol. The Romans dated the first dedication of this temple to Saturn in 497 B.C.; eight Ionic columns and one architrave of it still survive.

In the Forum at the foot of the hill stood the temple of Janus, god of beginnings. The doors of this temple were open only in time of war, and throughout ancient Roman history they were closed only three times.

At the southeastern corner of the Forum stood the temple of Castor and Pollux, built in 495 B.C. From the time when Tiberius restored it three slender Corinthian columns remain. It is generally agreed that these columns are the most beautiful in Rome.

Augustus added to his forum a temple called Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger), which he had vowed before the battle of Philippi. Three magnificent columns of it still stand. One end of its cella is a semicircular altar, a form of architecture destined to become the apse of the earliest Christian churches.

Augustus built on the Palatine a splendid marble temple to Apollo in gratitude for the god’s help at Actium; he adorned it with statues by Myron and Scopas, added a magnificent library and an art gallery to its precinct, and did everything possible to make the people feel that the god had left Greece and come to Rome, bringing with him the spiritual and cultural leadership of the world.

At this time, when Augustus’s mother was dead and no danger threatened speakers from that quarter, Augustus’s friends whispered that Apollo had taken the form of a nimble serpent and begotten the clever emperor.

The Arch Revolution

Secular architecture in Rome was greater than its religious architecture. Here it could escape the bondage of tradition and combine engineering with art — utility and power with beauty and form — in a way peculiar to its own people.

The basic principle of Greek architecture was the straight line (even when, as in the Parthenon, it was masterfully adjusted): the vertical column, the horizontal architrave, and the triangular pediment. The principle destined to be peculiar to Roman architecture was the curve.

The Romans wanted grandeur, boldness, and spaciousness, but they could not roof their vast buildings on the principle of straight lines and trabeation without placing a multitude of obstructive columns underneath, unless they used the arch (usually in its round form), the barrel vault (a longitudinal arch), and the dome (a round arch). Perhaps Roman generals and their assistants had become increasingly familiar with arched forms in Egypt and Asia and brought them home, reviving earlier Roman and Etruscan traditions that had long been dominated by pure Greek styles.

At this time Rome used the arch on so vast a scale that the whole art of building took its lasting modern name from this architectural form.

The Romans, by placing brick buttressing like warp and woof along the line of thrust before pouring concrete into the wooden form of the roof, created the barrel vault; by intersecting two cylindrical or barrel arches vertically they produced a network of supporting ribs in the vaults that could bear greater weight and sustain greater lateral projection. These were the principles of the Roman arch revolution.

It was in the great baths and amphitheaters that the new style reached perfection. The baths of Agrippa, Nero, and Titus were the first of a series of baths that ended with those of Diocletian. These were massive buildings with whitewashed or brick exteriors and considerable height.

The interiors of the baths were paved with marble and mosaic, decorated with colored columns and coffered ceilings, paintings, and statues. These baths were equipped with dressing rooms, hot and cold baths, a tepid room with warm air, swimming pools and massage rooms, libraries, reading rooms, sitting rooms, and probably art galleries.

Most vaults were heated by central heating through wide flues that passed under the floor and inside the walls. These baths were the largest and most luxurious public buildings yet constructed and have never been rivaled in their class and type.

These baths formed part of that social movement of repair and expansion by which the empire sought to justify its transformation into a monarchy.

Theaters and Circuses

The same paternal attention of the imperial government built the greatest theaters in history. The theaters of Rome were fewer but larger than those of the great capitals of the modern world. The smallest of these theaters was the one built by Cornelius Balbus in the Campus Martius (13 B.C.), which seated 7,700 persons.

Augustus rebuilt the Theater of Pompey, which seated 17,500; he completed another theater named after Marcellus, which seated 20,500.

Unlike Greek theaters, these had walls and their seats rested on vaulted substructures and were not merely placed on a hillside slope. Only the stage had a roof; but the spectators too were often protected from sun and heat by an awning. The awning that shaded the Theater of Pompey was 167 meters wide.

Above the entrances were boxes for important and distinguished persons. Some stages had a curtain that, instead of rising, was lowered into a slot at the beginning of the performance. The stage was raised about 1.5 meters. Its background was usually made to resemble an elaborate building that, stretching from one wing to the other, helped the actors project their voices to the vast audience.

Seneca speaks of “stage mechanics” who “build a machine that rises by itself, or floors of a room that rise silently into the air.” Scene changes were effected by revolving prisms or by withdrawing one scene into the wings or upper stage so that the next appeared.

Sound was amplified by sinking empty jars in the floor or walls of the stage. Sometimes a mixture of water, wine, and fragrant dust was sprayed over the spectators. The interior was decorated with statues, and large painted pictures served as scenic backdrops.

It is unlikely that any theater or opera house in the modern world equals the size and splendor of the Theater of Pompey.

But the circus, stadium, and amphitheater were more popular than the theater. Rome had several stadiums used mostly for athletic contests. Horse or chariot races and some spectacles were held in the Circus Flaminius in the Campus Martius or usually in the Circus Maximus, which Caesar had rebuilt between the Palatine and Aventine hills.

The latter was a large oval 670 meters long and 215 meters wide, with wooden seats for 180,000 spectators on three sides. The wealth of Rome can be gauged from the fact that Trajan rebuilt these seats in marble.

The Colosseum

The Colosseum, compared with what has gone before, was a relatively small building seating only 50,000 persons. Its plan was not new; Greek-Italian cities had had amphitheaters long before. As mentioned, Curio built an amphitheater in 53 B.C.

Caesar built another in 46 B.C., and Statilius Taurus one in 29 B.C. The Colosseum, which the Romans called the Flavian Amphitheater, was begun by Vespasian and completed by Titus in 80 A.D.; the name of its architect is unknown.

Vespasian chose as its site the lake in the gardens of Nero’s Golden House between the Caelian and Palatine hills. This amphitheater was built of travertine stone in the form of an oval 545 meters in circumference. Its outer wall was 48 meters high and divided into three stories: the first partly on Tuscan-Doric columns, the second on Ionic columns, and the third on Corinthian columns, with arches between the columns.

The main corridors had barrel vaults, and sometimes these vaults intersected in the style of medieval cloisters. The interior too was divided into three tiers, each under an arch, and each section subdivided into circular boxes or seats, with stairways forming a cow’s horn pattern.

The present view of the Colosseum’s interior resembles a mass of masonry into which a gigantic artist has carved arches, corridors, and seats. Statues and other decorations adorned the whole place, and many rows of seats were made of marble.

It had eighty entrances, two of which were reserved for the emperor and his entourage; these entrance and exit doors could empty the huge bowl in a few minutes. The central arena, 77.5 by 55 meters, was enclosed by a wall 4.5 meters high topped with an iron railing to protect the human animals from the wild beasts.

The Colosseum is not a beautiful building; its very size and mass reveal a kind of violence and loftiness in the Roman character. The Colosseum is only the most striking ruin left from the ancient world. The Romans built like giants; one must not expect them to finish like jewelers.

Conclusion

Roman art had taken over Attic, Asian, and Alexandrian styles — representing restraint, grandeur, and delicacy — in an eclectic jumble; it never fully combined these three styles in that essential unity which is the necessary condition of beauty.

In the raw power of buildings peculiar to the Romans there is something Eastern; instead of being beautiful they are awe-inspiring; even Hadrian’s Pantheon is more an architectural wonder than a work of perfect art.

Except in a few cases, such as the Augustan reliefs and glass, one should not look in Roman art for delicacy of feeling or refinement of workmanship. What one should expect is the art of engineering in search of perfect strength, economy, and utility; the keen interest of the parvenu in grandeur and ornament; the insistence of the soldier on realism; and the irresistible force of a warrior’s art.

That the Romans did not finish their buildings with the work of jewelers is because conquerors do not become jewelers. The Romans finished their buildings like conquerors.

There is no doubt that the Romans built the most influential and fascinating city in history; they created a modeling, pictorial, and structural art that every individual could understand; and they built a city that every citizen could use.

The masses of free people were poor, but the wealth of Rome belonged in large part to them; they ate the state grain; they sat almost without payment in the theaters, circuses, amphitheaters, and stadiums; in the baths they exercised, rested, amused themselves, and educated themselves; they enjoyed the shade of hundreds of colonnaded porticoes; and they walked under decorated arches that covered many kilometers of streets and alone in the Campus Martius extended five kilometers.

The world had never before seen such a capital. In its center was the great crowded Forum where trade was always active, the voice of oratory rang out, and the trembling debates of the empire kept it alive. Around it lay a ring of vast temples, basilicas, palaces, theaters, and luxurious baths in a disorder without parallel.

Then came the row of noisy shops and crowded tenements, and again a ring of houses, gardens, and more temples and public baths, and finally a circle of villas and estates that drew the city out to the suburban slopes and joined the mountains with the sea; and this was the Rome of the Caesars — a city proud, powerful, brilliant, materialistic, cruel, unjust, turbulent, and sublime.