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The History of Art Survey
Lecture 15
The art of the Late Roman Empire
Gardner 289-299
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C
Style Period: Late Roman Empire (Severus - ) AD 193 - 330
64 Painted portrait of Septimius Severus and his family, 200 CE Egypt
65 Portrait of Caracalla, 211-217 CE
66 Chariot process of Septimius Severus, Arch of Sep. Sev.203 CE Leptis Magna
67 Baths of Caracalla, plan, 212-216 CE Rome
68 Baths of Caracalla, reconstruction, Rome
69 Portrait bust of Trajan Decius, 249-251 CE
70 Heroic portrait of Trebonianus Gallus, 251-253 CE Rome
71 Battle of Romans and Barbarians, 250-260 CE Rome
72 Sarcophagus of a philosopher, 270-280 CE
73 Temple of Venus, plan and reconstruction, third c. CE Baalbek
74 Portraits of the four tetrarchs, c 305 CE
75 Palace of Diocletian, model, 300-305 CE Split
Peristyle court of the Palace of Diocletian Split
76 Arch of Constantine, 312-315 CE Rome
77 Distribution of largess, det of, Arch of Constantine, 312-315 CE Rome
78 Portrait of Constantine, Basilica Nova, 315-330 CE Rome
79 Basilica Nova (or Basilica of Constantine), reconstruction Rome
Basilica Nova (or Basilica of Constantine), 306-312 CE Rome
80 Aula Palatina (Basilica), early 4th c CE Trier
81 Aula Palatina (Basilica) Trier
82 Coins with portraits of Constantine, 307 & 315 CE

Historiography
Style Period: Late Roman Empire (Severus - ) AD 193 - 330
“By the time of Marcus Aurelius, two centuries after Augustus established the Pax Romana, Roman power was beginning to erode.” By the death of Commodus, his son, order on the frontiers was difficult to maintain, the economy in decline, and the bureaucracy disintegrating. The state religion was losing ground to “Eastern cults.” The chief of these cults being the one that eventually took possession of the entire empire, and was, according to Gibbon’s the reason for the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Christianity.

Why is there talk of empire’s “Eastern cults” without equally significant interest in the empire’s “Eastern bread basket,” Egypt? or the “Eastern art centers” of Syria and Alexandria, Ionia, and Athens?

One of the most significant elements of the success of Roman art is its multicultural reality. Syrian Glass, Alexandrine (Egyptian) encaustic painting and plaster decorations and miniatures, Greek sculpture. All the arts of the vast region—conquered by Roman armies and ruled by Roman laws, and knit together by the Pax Romana and the international Roman commerce—are considered Roman. And in an important way they were. The main point of the Roman empire is its multicultural essence, its extension beyond Rome to include a large number of distant and quite different other cultures.

The culture of the city of Rome was Italian, however much it indulged in the imported pleasures of the many cultural regions, that is the many cultures of the empire. Rome’s art was thus cosmopolitan as was that of Alexandria and each of its great cities to an extent. But each was also local.

It is important to apply the same distinction to its other cultural phenomena, such as its commercial wealth, and even its military success. There was the central, cosmopolitan production that characterized the city of Rome and the Italian peninsula, and there was the culture and wealth of the empire, divided among its various ethnic regions.

The emperor to succeed Commodus was a general born in Africa, Septimus Severus. [Born in Africa doesn’t make it clear what his ethnicity was, only where he was born, in this most successful and multicultural of ancient empires. Seeking legitimacy he adopted himself to be Marcus Aurelius son. His official portraits carried the “father’s” long hair and beard, “whatever his actual appearance may have been.”

It didn’t seem to trouble our authors that Hadrian was a Spaniard “by birth.” But it does that Septimus Severus may have actually been someone without long hair. Could he have been an African? This is important...in the America of today.

Art Historiography
The great turn: What can an esthetic style actually tell us? The generation who of writers who established art history as a separate discipline, the men and women who wrote about art and history and art in history between the two great wars of the twentieth century and after, brought to fruition ideas that were in circulation earlier about the meaning of style. In trying to understand the significance of the great turn away from perceptual art to the abstract conceptualism of abstraction in Impressionism and then Post-Impressionism and what followed, they had become focused on style over subject matter. And beyond that, focused on a still-unanswered question of what it might mean that a vast human culture could change direction as profoundly as it seemed the western European culture of Paris, London, Rome and Berlin had, when the successors of Ingres and Delacroix, Turner, Constable and Reynolds turned out to be Monet and Renoir, and then Gauguin and Van Gogh, and then Matisse and Picasso. There had been a revolution in the high art world of the of the later 19th and early 20th century and it seemed to have the potential of great meaning, but they didn’t know what it was, and they couldn’t get over its novelty and the possibility that its novelty meant something profound. Why would an entire culture change esthetic directions so dramatically?

OK! The entire culture hadn’t changed. Only the tastes of its elite art market had changed. But the change was profound. In a culture that had pursued optical capturing of the material world’s likeness with zeal for over half a millenium there had been a turn away, a turn backward it seemed, toward conceptual diagrams and decorative patterns. Why? Why would the men and women who could afford prestigeous pictures so optically convincing that you could hardly take your eyes off them want to cover their living room walls with pictures that were hardly more than smears of color or doodles? How did the mannered figures of Rodin replace the elegant idealized figures of Carpeaux and Gerome, only themselves to be followed by Lipschitz and Brancusi? Indeed why? Why, when most people, who couldn’t afford to play with their taste so strangely, still enjoyed painted imagery and sculptural decorations that looked so much like the continuing naturalistic traditions that had been developing since the Renaissance?

Looking back into history they noted that there had been another turn, quite parallel to this one. Once before in the history of art and human culture there had been a tradition of brilliant control of the optical world that had turned its back on this fascinating and indeed quite marvelous talent, at depicting the world as it looked and telling exalting stories with that talent, to an art of caricatures and diagrams. And though the turn had taken centuries, eventually it involved not only its elite but eventually its entire culture. And the turn, which had its own internal development, had lasted a millenium or more. Maybe, if they could manage to use the perspective of history to understand what had caused that earlier turn, they could better understand this one.

It is that earlier turn that we are now observing. The artists of the later Roman empire abandoned the subtle and sophisticated realism and idealism of the classical era, what seemed to be one of its most cherished accomplishments, extending back for a thousand year or more, sacrificing all that had been gained from Kritios and Exekias to Praxitiles and Phidias and Philoxenos and Epigonos. Skills that were so common in the halcyon years of the Roman Empire, that authors of the painting in the Villa Livia and the sculpture of the Ara Pacis, the Trajan column and the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, that they went unnoted, were now cast aside.

When we look at the art of the Later Roman empire, in what Gibbons pointed out in his seminal history, as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, we see the test case for the importance of style in the history of art. First we will look at the style and then we will speculate on what it may have meant. Then. And for whom it had this meaning. And only much later, when we have come up to the present and considered the two later revolutions in style that have followed since, will we be able to speculate on what the meaning of style in our own day is.

64 Painted portrait of Septimius Severus and his family
1’2”, c 200 Egypt
This is the only surviving identified portrait of an entire Roman imperial family. It incudes the emperor, his wife, Julia domna (daughter of a Syrian priest), and their two sons, Caracalla and Geta. It is a work in tempera (egg-based paints) on wood. The emperor’s hair is shown gray, suggesting an advanced age. [Or the reality of early graying?] Geta is erased. Which reminds us of Thutmose III’s destruction of the portraits of Hatshepsut. When Caracalla became emperor he had his brother murdered and his memory damned. “[T]he Romans employed damnatio memoriae as a political tool more often and more systematically than any other civilization.” (290) He later ordered his own wife, Plautilla, murdered as well.

It may be of interest here to think of the Iraqi citizenry and US army’s equal enthusiasm for tearing down the statues of Sadam Hussain. There remains an interest in all cultures in the way visual images manifest, as well as represent, the power of those they symbolize, and so the destruction of these symbols manifests the experience overcoming their power.

65 Porf Caracalla, c 211-217, 1’2” trait o
This is Coracle’s official portrait, surviving in large numbers of copies. “The sculptor suggested the texture of Caracalla’s short hair and close-cropped beard with incisions in the marble surface.” But it is the “emperor’s suspicious nature” developed after the introspective portraits of Marcus Aurelious, that is most interesting: his “Knotted brow.” Like so many Roman emperors, Caracalla was to die by assassination.

It is a wonderful and most powerful appearing portrait. And it was undoubtedly meant to appear menacing. Still, we shouldn’t assume it is a faithful rendering. Anything offensive to the emperor would have led to punishment of the artist. It is what Caracalla wanted to appear as.

66 Chariot procession of Septimius Severus, Arch of Septimus Severus, 5’ 6” high, 203 CE, Lepcis Magna
The Severans were from Lepcis Magna on the coast of what is now Libya. This is from the arch of Septimus Severus constructed there of 203 CE. It shows a chariot procession of Septimus and his two sons. Compared with the procession on the Arch of Titus (10-39) this one is static, in flat, low relief, all verticals and no diagonals. The figures all face the viewer, not the direction of the scene. Horse riders and horses of the second row float without explanation. Both these devices were common in earlier art of plebeians, the lower classes (10-4, 10-5). Now this style is being taken up into the Royal repertoire.

“As is often true in the history of art, this period of social, political, and economic upheaval was accompanied by the emergence of a new aesthetic.”

This is a major point of view. Is it so? Is that what happened in El Amarna for the Egyptians of Akhenaton’s time?

67 Baths of Caracalla, plan, c 212-216 CE, Rome
These were the largest of all the recreational baths. Construction was concrete covered by bricks. Enormous groin vaults sprung from thick walls, 140’ high. They covered 50 acres. The design is bilaterally symmetrical. The central axis runs from cold to warm to hot baths. Stuccoed vaults, mosaic floors, marble-faced walls, colossal sculpture. The surrounding landscape was planted lavishly. Inside there were also libraries, exercise courts and meeting rooms.

68 Baths of Caracalla, reconstruction Rome
The reconstruction of the interior of the frigidarium gives an idea of the size, the lavishness of the finish and general grandeur. This is what Roman concrete engineering and wealth could do. The effect wasn’t equaled till the turn of the 20th century, with the interior of Grand Central Station in New York City, [which is based upon it. Or something like it.] Coffers in the ceiling catch the forms in the light, pouring through the groined clearstory. The classical detail is massed here for an incredibly ostentatious effect.

It is luxury piled upon luxury. It almost suffocates the mind in glitter and polish. It is what happens when someone runs out of ideas before they run out of funds. More is often not better. Who am I to make such opinions? We all have the tastes we have developed over the years. That is mine. It works for me. Yours may be different. But I am here offering mine.

235-284 CE a series of soldiers declared themselves emperor, only to be murdered by the next general in line. It was a sort of chaos at the top. [Still the state was so well constructed the chaos at the top did not cripple the working order of the body.]

270-275 CE Aurelian built a new defensive wall circuit for the capital. The need for such a defense, rising at this time, reveals the weakness of the state.

69 Portrait bust of Trajan Decius, 249-51 CE, 2’7”,
Each new emperor stamped out coins and commissioned sculpture with their faces, to be spread around the empire. [American presidents do the same with portraits in every post Office and federal Instalation.] Trajan Decius is best known for his persecution of Christians. He is seen here with all the verism of a Republican Senator, bags under his eyes, fallen expression. His eyes reach upwards. Our text suggests that these images seem to it to reveal “the anguished soul of the man—and the times.”

70 Heroic portrait of Trebonianus Gallus, 252-3, 7’11”, Bronze, Rome
Trebonianus was Decius’s successor. This bronze is larger than life and heroically nude. [Except for the sandals?] The body isn’t the idealized youthful athlete, but the barrel chest and great thighs of a seasoned wrestler. The head is dwarfed by the torso.

71 Battle of Romans and barbarians, (Ludovisi Battle
Sarcophagus), c 250-260 , 5’ h, Rome
By the 3rd century burial had become widespread and even the impeial family was practicing it, in place of cremation. This is a particularly large sarcophagus, covered by a fairly chaotic battle scene: Romans and northerners (Goths?). No space only writhing figures. For all the realism in the figures the lack of space is unclassical. “It underscores the increasing dissatisfaction Late Roman artists felt with the classical style.”

I’d say dissatisfaction with the classical style as it was. They were taking the style, in a particularly busy direction, and a less rationalized way. Still, many individual figures had much of the classical about them.

The bareheaded central horseman is gesturing with an open hand, to show he has no weapon. He has been identified as Trajan Decius. His gesture means that he is fearless and feels assured of victory. There is an emblem of Mithras, the Persian god of light, truth and victory over death, one of the mystery cults of great popularity, [that rivaled Christianity at this time]. The individual buried here is projecting themselves in the guise of a general.

72 Sarcophagus of a philosopher, c 270-280 , 4’11”h
Another sort of sarcophagus can be seen here, with a Roman philosopher as its central figure. He holds a scroll, and is flanked by a pair of women. There are portrait faces on the women and on both central males. There are another pair of flanking philosophers, possibly students, on the ends. This was a popular Christian sarcophagus type, with the philosophers representing Christ flanked by deciples, (e.g., 11-4 and 11-5). Frontal central figures flanked by deciples such as this and 10-66 and 5-17 were common. Our book calls them three part compositions.

73 Temple of Venus, plan and reconstruction Baalbek
(ancient Heliopolis), 3rd century.
Here is a form combining classical elements like the temple pediment and pillars in very non-classical ways, as seen already at Petra. Our book calls this fantasy Baroque, after a style that followed the classical revival in the 17th century. The Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus would fit the same category: a wilder, freer, more or less undisciplined classical. Here we have a circular temple with a surround of pillars holding up a scalloped roof! The pediment is broken by an arch, or scalloped.

The pediment is distinctly, and rather awkwardly, larger than the dome behind it.

74 Portraits of the four tetrarchs, c 305, 4’3”, Venice
The general turned emperor , Diocletian, broke up rule of the empire among three others besides himself, when he established the tetrarchy (rule by four) in 293. There was to be an Augustus and a Caesar of the West and an Augustus and a Caesar of the East. The tetrarchy survived until his retirement in 305, but the division of the empire into East and Western halves continued.

This is an image of the tetrarchs, located on the corner of Saint Mark’s cathedral in Venice. It is done in Porphyry, a very hard volcanic stone, As it shows the two pairs it is a strong image of the intended scheme. Still it is impossible to name any of the figures personally, as they all have the same mask-like, generic cubical faces and squat figures, as well as the same pose and garb—another step away from the classical. They embrace in a display of concord.

“[E]ight centuries after Greek sculptors first freed the human form from the formal rigidity of the Egyptian-inspired kouros stance, the human figure was once again connived in iconic terms. Idealism, naturalism, individuality, and personality now belonged to the past.” (295)

Gardner’s text goes all the way back to the Kritios Boy (5-33) for a non-iconic, Early Classical model. And this is the main line argument. The great Greek discovery of individuality and personality and its 8 centuries of development was being cast aside. Of course they could have mentioned that the Egyptians had used the same sort of realism and personality in figures like Ka-Aper’s wooden figure (3-14)or the Seated Scribe (Kay?) (3-15) in the Old Kingdom, two and a half millenium earlier. But that might suggest that art wasn’t all in a single Greco-Roman tradition.

Just as good a way to see the tetrarchs and the other verging from the classical in later Roman art, as a divergence from the classical, would be as a rejection of the naturalistic. That in fact has been a common alternative, and one I would follow. This is an important question, because it isn’t just a momentary variation like Akhenaton’s individualistic ripple in the smooth development of Egyptian style, but the emergence of a genuinely revolutionary change in the direction of Roman and so western European art that was to last a millenium.

Does it tell us anything that this image, or set of images, which now stands at a corner of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, was brought there from Constantinople as part of the booty from the 4th Crusace, c 1204?

75 Palace of Diocletian, (model), c 300-305, Split
On his retirement from the empire Diocletian returned to the region of his birth, Dalmatia (in the region of Croatia), where he built a palace on the Adriatic coast. Our book calls it a palace, It is built in the form of a 10 acre fortress, laid out like a castrum: a square divided into four quarters with watchtowers all along the fortified walls.

Peristyle court of the Palace of Diocletian Split
Where the forum would go in a city, or camp was placed a courtyard leading to the palace entrance, as in a city it would have led to the temple of the main god. This court had an open air arcade down each side scribing out the space an arch-interrupted-pediment at its end, as an entrance to the palace proper. This facade is referred to here as a “gable of glorification.”

On one side of the court, past the arcades, was a temple of Jupiter, on the opposite side was the emperor’s mausoleum, a two story octagonal form surrounded by a covered colonnade.

76 Arch of Constantine, c 312-315, Rome
The tetrarchy broke down with Diocletian’s retirement and the eventual winner of the free for all was Constantine, the son of Diocletian’s Caesar of the West. Invading Italy in 312, Constantine took control of the entire empire with his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian bridge. Because of a vision Constantine attributed his victory to the Christian god and in 313, issued the Edict of Milan, ending the persecution of Christians within the empire. Constantine ruled with Licinius until 324, when he defeated him to become sole ruler of the entire empire. The same year he founded his New Rome on the site of Byzantium at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and called it Constantinople. The next year at the Council of Nicaea he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the Roman state religion began to decline. Constantinople was consecrated in 330, and Constantine himself baptized on his deathbed in 337.

Many scholars begin the Middle Ages with these events.

In the world of the arts they correlate roughly with the shift we have been observing away from naturalism and toward a more abstract, conceptual art.

At the entrance to the Roman Forum Constantine had erected a great arch, with which to commemorate his victory, the military victory that, as it has turned out, meant more than just the coming of one more general to the top of the Roman Imperial heap, but a turning in the direction of the entire empire and of human history and culture in Europe. For his arch Constantine collected the finest artists he could find to build a monument to his power and his initiative.

What they built has remained in quite fine repair, as bright white marble jewel next to the looming hulk of the Coliseum, on the path leading to the Roman forum. It is a giant, triple arched monument to the power and glory of the Roman empire, incorporating imagery from other monuments of the past in a design that attempted to encompass and even surpass them.

Like the empire it exhalted, the for his arch Constantine commandeered a structure already in place at the time of his victory. It was in all likelihood one begun for Maxentius, whom he had just defeated. This was a triple-passaged arch eight times larger than the modest single span of Titus, constructed two centuries earlier, and much more elaborate. Where the arch of Titus was a single span decorated with reliefs in a few framed sections, this was a triple arch covered with sculpture on nearly every ornate surface, with fully-round pillars standing out from its structure on both faces, carrying over-life-sized figures.

As if his intention was to add up the successes of the empire’s development Constantine had his arch decorated with images taken from the monuments of his successors. The over-life-sized figures were taken from a decayed arch of Trajan (98-112); the great roundels that are the work’s most prominent figurative designs come from the time of Hadrian (117-138); the panels the upper levels come from the time of Marcus Aurelius (161-180); and the panels of the lower reaches, on the bases of the pillars and in and above the spandrels are newly created for this monument.

A brief survey of these sculptures will show us how we have come to this moment.

Battle relief from the period of Trajan, probably taken from the Basilica Ulpia, c 100 CE. Here we see cavalry and infantry lined up in formations and engaging in combat with all the spatial richness found in the Trajan column. Space is compressed, but real enough to hold the large handsome bodies of horses and men. It is much more naturalistic than the abstractions of the more-Classical Parthenon.

The (40”) rondels of Hadrian’s time, c 125 CE, are more sophisticated. The Boar Hunt over the side passageway shows a large wild animal in front of hunters on foreshortened steeds, moving across the plane and then turning toward the viewer. The worship scene of soldiers before an altar carrying the image of a classical deity also suggests space by scale and overlap and placement within the frame, as well as the artists familiarity with idealized anatomy.

The panels from Marcus Aurelius time, in the middle of the third century, still offer spatially believable imagery, but figures are lined up in carefully parallel to the picture plane, emphasizing the verticals and horizontals of that plane, not recession within it.

77 Distribution of largess, det of freize, Arch of Constantine Rome, c 312-315, 3’4” h.
And then we come the images of Constantine’s own time, located in narrow panels beneath the rondels over the side arches. Here are images in the vein of the Philosopher’s sarcophagus, lined up in a flat row, all their bodies facing full front with some of their faces in contradictory profile. Believable space is gone. Classical anatomy is gone. The image is more of a diagram than a scene.

We have just turned a corner following a patient and consistent development of optical naturalism that stretches back in Mediterranean tradition from high Roman realism to the Hellenistic and Classical art of the Greeks, Sicilians and Cretans to the Archaic and Geometric. But now that procession from diagram to depiction, and subtle evocation of every nuance of the visible world, has been turned a hundred and eighty degrees and we find artists marching away from the optical toward the schematic.

And that is the direction we will be following for the coming millenium.

These are not insignificant decorations, but among the most important images on the monument. They depict Constantine himself, distributing wealth to the citizenry of Rome. The central figure here, in the frontal seated pose of a reigning deity or emperor, represents Constantine. The figures lined up to receive the largess are squat and repetitive in the manner we have seen in the tetrarchs. All display the “repeated stances and gestures of puppets.” Constantine’s own head was carved separately in higher relief and added, but it has been lost. [Or vandalized?]

This flat, stylized, rigidly frontal imagery was once categorized by 20th century historians as a decline of classical form and skill. But it soon was to become the preferred style throughout the empire. Thus we can be sure they weren’t the result of a slackening of skill, but a change in ideal.

If we look back we can even see, in an interesting way, where this “new style” came from. Indeed we’ve seen it before in the art of Rome’s plebeian classes. Take the funerary reliefs of later Republican times (10-4 and 5), the high empire (10-46 and 10-56) and even surfacing occasionally on imperial images like the Decursio scene on the pedestal of Antoninus Pius’s memorial column(10-57 & 58). It is the style of the plebeians, the common people, or those plebeians with enough wealth to have their shared style set into the permanent materials of stone, that has lasted, when most has long since disintegrated.

Unlike the ripple of individual idiosyncrasy seen in Akhenaton’s one-reign style diversion from the regular development of Egyptian elite tradition, this style is a revolutionary shift in the direction of elite Roman culture. And as we may learn from the history that follows, it seems to be a result of a plebeian centered conquest of the Roman state that will last in ways that the continual coups of imperial generals could not. This revolutionary esthetic transformation seems to mark a revolution in Roman culture, we are about to explore.

78 Portrait of Constantine, from the Basilica Nova, c 315-330, Rome, fragment height: 8’ 6”
The giant image of Constantine, whose fragments survive on the Capitoline hill, displays the recently elevated style. The portrait image from which it comes, would have sat 30’ tall on its throne. It was a composite image, with a brick core, bronze armor torso and limbs and head of marble. It was modeled on the standard formula for seated images of Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods. “The emperor held an orb (possibly surmounted by the cross of Christ), the symbol of global power, in his extended left hand.” [And certainly a symbol for the shape of the earth in the Roman imperial mind.]

This face shows elements of the current stylistic repertoire quite different from the mask-like caricature faces in the tetrarchs. The “nervous glance” and realist character study, typical of the later third-century are gone, and instead we get a blander expression with slightly enlarged eyes in “broad and simple planes,” closer to the simplified classicism of Augustus.

“To find an image of comparable grandeur and authority, one must go back more than fifteen hundred years to the colossal rock cut portraits of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II,” (3-22) our text says. It seems to me we do well enough to return to the Primaporta Augustus (10-25) or the Livia from Faiyum (10-26). Size aside, I see bland impersonality, not grandeur. What do you see?

79 Basilica Nova (or Basilica of Constantine), 306-312, reconstruction, Rome
The colossal image of Constantine was to go into apse—the round room pushed out at one end—of the great basilica, constructed for Maxentius and taken over by Constantine, on the Roman Forum. It would have presided as a commanding presence in the great hall where his imperial business was enacted, the way a Roman gods image presided over its temple.

The hegemonic text, with its Christian ideological position, calls the Roman religion “pagan.” Though the term has several possible meanings, its primary one is heathen or non-Christian. It is an pejorative epithet, not the name of a system of belief. Writers on the history of religion simply call the Roman religion “the Roman religion.”

Basilica Nova (or Basilica of Constantine) Rome
The size of the Basilica Nova make it one of the most spectacular ruins in Rome. It spanned 300’ in length by 215’ in width. That is, roughly the size of a football field. Its structure was composed of line of three brick-faced concrete groin vaults 20’ thick. The groin vaults were buttressed below by barrel vaults. [We can see the effect of the interior, on a much smaller scale, in the photograph of the market hall Apollodorus built for Trajan (10-44) and in the reconstruction of the interior of the Baths of Caracalla (10-68). The walls and floors were finished in marble and stucco. The ceilings of the vaults were coffered. The open arches at the end of each vault admitted light through dormer windows. The area of the open expanse here was fully twice that found in the baths, the space was triple.

This was an immense engineering accomplishment in a world without steel girders. As most monumental architecture, the reason for its creation was not to satisfy any technical need, but to impress the viewer with the power and grandeur of its creators. Roman emperors ruled vast portions of the globe and vast numbers of people, and they did so nearly as much through the brilliant portrayal of their power as through the overwhelming violence of their great armies. Without the success of the armies in conquest, no foreign peoples would have been coerced to submit to their rule. But without the means of portraying the strength of those armies and the state behind them, these armies would have been kept at war full time, and there would have been no peace time, to develop the commercial wealth that was the point of the Pax Romana.

80 Aula Palatina (Basilica), c 310, Trier
A more modest basilica, when compared to that most gigantic one, is seen in the Aula Palatina at Trier (ancient Augusta Treverorum). It is a great meeting place on a more practical scale, intended as the audience hall of a provincial capital, its 95’ by 190’ interior with a 95’ ceiling, made it about as large a gathering space as one could possibly communicate within. It is important in large part as the model for the Christian basilican church that was to follow.

As seen from the outside the structure is composed of bricks in the form of a stilted arcade on thick piers, with windows in the arched recesses. A set of lower arches strengthen and stabilize the structure. The exterior walls were originally stuccoed, and carried timber galleries on the upper floors. The windows filling in between the arches were filled by the lead-framed glass panes, that let in a great deal f light.

The original structure was pulled down on two sides and incorporated in a Renaissance palace, only to be reconstructed as we see it now in the 19th century.

81 Aula Palatina (Basilica) Trier
On the inside we see a tall narrow space, with all the elements kept flush on one wall plane, to emphasize the unity of the interior. This plane surface is the opposite structural drama of the shadows caught by the thickness of the piers emphasizing the strength of the structural support on the exterior. Then there is the triumphal arch that separates the rectangle of the hall from the half-round of the apse. Above there is a coffered timber ceiling.

This ceiling may add an element of understanding to the coffering we have seen in concrete domes and vaults. As pointed-out previously, coffering in the ceiling gives it a strong element of visual presence and rationality or measurability. You see a coffered ceiling more insistently than a flat one, and you regularity of its grid tells you both where you are in relation to it and its extent in ways that a smooth ceiling cannot. What we can now see is something about the source of the idea of coffering. A coffered stone or concrete roof is one that has been sculpt out in an abstract pattern. The coffering in a timbered ceiling obviously comes from the natural structure of a set of intersecting rafters. It is based on the structure necessary to create a timber roof. It is thus likely that it was in mimicking the decorative effect of timbered ceilings that coffering in vaults came to be considered.

To return to the different effects on the interior and exterior of the Aula Palatina, we can see that different “finishes” achieve different purposes for the same structure. The desired effect for a Roman exterior is structural strength. The building should look stable, secure, and as if it will last. It represents the power of the state. This is accomplished by showing off the structure’s muscles: the bulging piers of its arcade that hold up the ceiling. The apse on one end indicates the direction it faces or that their is something going on inside. The interior’s smooth finish distracts totally from the structure, because the goal there is to focus the occupants on the rounded apse, which is where the official will be placed. As Constantine’s statue in his basilica, so the enthroned official here commands attention from his location in the apse, framed vertically by the curves of the triumphal arch partition and horizontally by the curving wall of the apse. Originally the interior surfaces of the Aula Palatina had stucco, marble, and mosaic decorations that were much richer than the plain surfaces that have survived.

82 Coins with portraits of Constantine,
307 CE Nummus, 1”
Both these coins carry images of Constantine as emperor. But there are some striking differences. The first was early in his reign, when he was one of the tetrarchs, the Augustus of the West. It carries not a personal portrait, but the anonymous tetrarch formula. Later on when he was more secure, he could be more idiosyncratic.

315 CE, silver medallion
The second coin is later, when his rule is more secure, and after the Edict of Milan, which declared an end to the persecution of Christianity. It shows him much as he looks in the colossal image of the Basilica Nova, clean-shaven (?), long-faced and wide-eyed (10-79). You can see the armor, shield and helmet that mark him as a soldier. The two children nursed by the wolf, on the shield, indicate his possession of Rome. The cross, topped by a globe with a cross, indicates the triumph of Christianity. It replaces the scepter of the Roman state religion. The foremost of the medallions that seem to form a halo or wreath or plume around his helmet is filled with the chi and rho, monogram for Christ. Thus he is represented as a the emperor who is a general in the army of the new god.

The Roman empire didn’t end with Constantine, but it was transformed by his conversion to Christianity and his conversion of the state from religion of Roman divinities to that of the new, Christian god.

The hegemonic history marks the shift in deities by a shift in orthography, referring to Constantine’s service in the “army of the Lord.” Previously there has been discussion of gods, now one particular god will be capitalized. The Christian god is given a degree of prestige here that others are not. The god of the Hebrews and that of Muslims, will get the same privilege, since they are assumed to be the same being. As Roman, Greek, and other pre-Christian religions are treated pejoratively as Pagan, so their deities are not to be honored at the official “western” god.

It is a petty issue, certainly, whether or not to capitalize one deity or another in a history text. But it is of interest to note, because it is a clear indication of the ideological orientation that pervades the text, on the level of presumption beneath those of conscious analysis and argument. I am not bringing it up here to suggest a conspiratorial plot, but to remind the reader that all texts have ideological subtexts, and that the hegemonic histories of the Anglo-American world are written from a Christian point of view. Its point of view is also distinctly masculine, American and elite.

The one of these that should concern us most is the last. If I have insisted upon following up the feminist interests by including Slatkin’s text as a corrective to the unconscious masculinism or paternalism of our text, I have been following myself the elitism, or as I have called it, the anti-democratic, aristocratic orientation.

Different readers may be more or less pleased or displeased with any of these orientations. My intention is not to argue here that there is necessarily something wrong with ideological bias, since I don’t see how we can write without a viewpoint, anymore than we can look without looking from a viewpoint. My intention is to make the viewpoint of the text visible and conscious, so we may understand it.