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The History of Art Survey
Lecture 15
The Art of the High Roman Empire
Gardner 274-289
A High Roman Empire (Trajan - Comodus ) AD 98 - 192 CE
40 Timgad, Site plan, c100 CE, Timgad
41 Trajan Forum, Apollodorus of Damascus, (model), ded. 112 CE, Rome
42 Column of Trajan (Trajan Forum), 112 CE, Rome
43 Markets of Trajan, Apollodorus of Damascus, 100-112 CE, Rome
44 Trajan Markets, interior, Rome
45 Arch of Trajan, 114-118 CE, Benevento
46 Funerary relief of a circus official, 110-130 CE, Ostia
47 Portrait bust of Hadrian as a general Tel Shalem
48 Pantheon, 118-125 CE, Rome
49 Pantheon, longitudinal & lateral sections, Rome
50 Pantheon, interior Rome
51 Canopus and Serapeum, 130-138 CE, Tivoli
52 Al-Khazneh. 2nd c CE, Petra
53 An insula (model) Ostia
54 Room IV, Insula of Painted Vaults, 3rd c. CE, Ostia
55 Neptune mosaic, Baths of Neptune, 140 CE, Ostia
56 Funerary reliefs of a vegetable vendor and midwife, 2nd c. CE, Ostia
57 Apotheosis of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, 161 CE, Rome
58 Decursio, pedestal of the Column of Antoninus Pius, 161 CE, Rome
59 Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, 175 CE, Rome
60 Portrait of Marcus Aurelius, 175-180 CE,
61 Sarcophagus with the myth of Orestes, 140-150 CE,
62 Asiatic sarcophagus, 165-170 CE, Melfi
70 Mummy portrait of a man, 165-170 CE, Faiyum

Art Historiography
One of the most interesting developments of Roman culture and one they have bequeathed to those who have looked at their monuments is their discovery and interest in space. The Romans built on a scale that reached out and articulated space in a way that was both rational and elevating, and others could recognize and emulate this ability and interest. We’ve seen it already in the forum and the amphitheater at Pompeii and in the Domus Aurea, and we can see it in the great forums of Rome and Timgad and Tivoli and in the Pantheon.

This space is captured and made visible on two scales, the monumental abstract scale of the giant outside in the forums and the concrete and personal of the great geometry of their interiors. There is nothing here that has not been done before or elsewhere, before and since. What is particularly interesting about the way the Romans did it is that they did it so well and on such a scale that others could recognize their use and adopt it for themselves.

High Roman Empire (Trajan - Comodius) AD 98 - 192 CE
The second century of the common era marked the high point of the Roman Empire’s power and its greatest extent. It was then the unchallenged super power of its day, though there were people struggling against it on all sides. Within the empire the Pax Romana was the rule and prosperity reigned. [For the elite, and for a certain percentage of the citizenry.

Trajan was adopted to become the next emperor. He was a general, and born a Spaniard, and the first non-Italian emperor. The empire was international. “Trajan was so popular he was granted the title Optimus (the Best), an epithet he share with Jupiter (who was said to have instructed Nerva to choose Trajan as his successor).“ (274) This is only a few lines after: “[Domitian] demanded to be addressed as dominus et deus (lord and god), angering the senators.”

I don’t know how they decide what to capitalize in this book, other than those things the want to make seem more imortant, but it is clear that our writers are surprisingly credulous when they want to be. Domitian is an official villain and Trajan an official hero.

40 Timgad, layout, founded c 100 CE, Timgad
Timgad (anc. Thamugadi) was a new colony established for army veterans in
100 CE. (I’ll leave of era marks now that we will be entirely in the common era.) It was constructed 100 miles south of the Mediterranean in North Africa. The town was fully planned on the model of the army camp (castrum) it grew out of.

Though some scholars believe that army camps were based upon new towns, it might be best to think of both designs as being generated out of the same interest in rationalizing the use of public space. The Roman world, unlike the Greek world it conquered, and to an important degree incorporated, was one vast and expanding region surrounding the Mediterranean (the middle sea) and centered on the city of Rome. Where the Greeks saw themselves as citizens of quasi-independent city states spread over a wide area, many of them more or less separate islands, the Romans saw themselves as citizens of a single cosmopolitan (or multicultural) region. The Roman conception of the world they lived in was one of vast, encompassing spaces.

To control their ever-expanding world the Romans developed a plan that went beyond the rationalizing, Hippodamian grid (e.g., 5-75) of the Greeks, to a more comprehensive shape. The Greek city-grid could wander around any site in a manner that fit its unique geography, rationalizing that geography. The Roman ideal, which can be seen in their castrum and their new towns, set that grid within a walled-square or near-square rectangle, and divided it into major quarters by broad, axial crossing streets, [later] named the cardo and the decumanus. Monumental gates to the site were located where these streets reached the wall. A wide forum was located adjacent to the crossing, where the major market and civic activities could take place.

The army camps, were the basis for the empire’s expansion and indeed its very existence. Without the army to force them together, all these regions would have gone their separate cultural ways. The design of those camps and the replication of that design throughout the empire both represent the centralization of Roman rule. The Roman Empire was after all a military state with a single ruler.

I am discussing space and the articulation and rationalization of space, as people used it to situate themselves and to understand their situations in the world. The empire was a vast state, knit together by trade, taxes and the army. The map of this empire was made up of a series of cites located along trade routes and within frontiers, patrolled by armies, living within castrum encampments. Each camp had its crossing cardo and decumanus leading to highways that connected with the other camps and cities of the empire. Each city was organized around a civic and administrative focus in a forum at its center, and all were linked ultimately to Rome at the empire’s center. Unlike the Hellenic and later Hellenistic worlds of city states spotted around a world along side other states and cultures, the Romans had a single, unified empire. Timgad was a rational diagram of the state in which each citizen could locate themselves socially and politically as well as economically and personally.

The Roman Forum, the center of Republican civic life in early Rome, grew haphazardly, as one after another temples, meeting places and other structures were added to it, irregularly over the years. It was here that the Roman Senate met. Beginning with Augustus, the rulers of the Empire began the construction of separate and more carefully organized self-contained forum complexes, with the purpose of exalt their creators and to demonstrate their beneficence, while giving a location emphasizing their independent rule.

The Forum of Augustus12 BCE, Rome (reconstruction)

The Forum of Augustus, 12 BCE, was one of the first of these. It was a complex consisting of a temple and meeting structures around an open square. Roman temples were different from those of the Greeks not only in their facing in one distinctive direction, but also in their being parts of public compounds joined with other civic functions, rather than isolated separately, like the Parthenon on the Acropolis. The temple of Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger) that was the focal point of the Forum of Augustus, was surrounded by an enclosing colonnaded cloister and hemicycle containing spaces for public law courts and gatherings. It was constructed next to the Forum of Caesar (50 BCE) and followed by adjacent Forum of Nerva (XX CE), each with more or less the same arrangement.

41 Trajan Forum, Apollodorus of Damascus (model),
ded. 112 CE, Rome
Trajan built a huge new forum in Rome. It was twice the size of the nearby Forum of Augustus. It commemorated Trajan’s conquest of the Dacians and added markets and other spaces to the city’s center. Apollodorus of Damascus was the designer. He was Trajan’s main military designer, who had constructed a fine stone bridge across the Danube during the campaign against the Dacians. When Trajan became the emperor of the Rome, he became the chief designer of Rome. The dominant structure of Trajan’s forum was not a temple, but a basilica. And its design can be seen as a model of the Roman handling of space, both exterior and interior space.

When we look at the model of the Trajan Forum we see a wide, open courtyard surrounded by colonnaded structures. When I speak of the articulation and rationalization of monumental space I am referring to the designer’s ability to direct and inform the experience had by anyone walking through such a broad courtyard, to recognize and think its limits and focuses, and so to recognize their place within them. Surrounded by colonnades on three sides and a wall behind, one can measure the distances one covers as one enters and traverses the great courtyard. The equestrian statue of Trajan that stood at its center punctuated the space. Any space among buildings has some of these characteristics, but a space with a regularly patterned outline is more distinctive.

The sides of the Forum of Trajan are symmetrical, regular and continuous. The focal facade of the Basilica Ulpia is regularly tied to the side walls by its own colonnade, but then it is also articulated and focused by rising higher and symmetrically and by the bays pushed out from its facade that give it a center. There are three projected bay complexes, a central set of three bays to mark a focus for the entire square, and flanking echoes on either side that lead the eye to it. Thus the entire space is given a visibly thinkable form. It isn’t just a space, it is a place that orients the person in it to a particular direction and focuses them on a particular spot, which is the goal of their likely reason for coming into it, the entrance to the basilica.

From above, as we can see from the model, one can see the auxiliary structures that further amplify this orientation and this focus. There are hemispherical hemicycles on either side of the colonnades and the basilica, symmetrically flanking the courtyard and its central axes. Anyone familiar with the space knows of their reverberating call and answer symmetry. But most important, the basilica at the front is the goal of the design physically and socially. It is the major interior and most spectacular location of the site. Beyond the basilica lies the column with reliefs depicting Trajan’s greatest triumphs, flanked by two great libraries (one Latin, one Greek) and ultimately the temple of the deified Trajan.

Temples were the focus of earlier forums, such as Augustus’s or the one we saw first at Pompeii, or the Roman forum. But here it is the basilica that stands in the middle of the complex and as the focus of great courtyard. If the temple still lies at the culmination of the layout, it is also in size and location subordinated to the basilica.

This combination of symmetrical arrangement along an axis, articulation of outlines by colonnades and punctuated focus in facades and interiors results in the creation of a rational and quite handsome and measurable space. The Trajan column, located between the basilica and the temple is the geographic and intellectual peak of the design, the feather in the cap that adds a visual, intellectual crowning touch.

The overall organization of the forum followed the program of the military camp. There is an open area and then a basilica next to the sanctuary of the legionary standards (the column of Trajan) a place for military archives (the two libraries). (Pescarin)

One entered the forum through an impressive gateway resembling a triumphal arch, filled with sculpture of Trajan honored by a victory. Indeed every structure in the complex carried reminders of Trajan’s military accomplishments.

The Basilica Ulpia, 112 CE, Forum of Trajan, Rome
The Basilica Ulpia is a gigantic interior space, as large than a modern football field, 400 feet in length and two hundred feet wide, surrounded by pairs of colonnades on all its sides, connecting with half-round apses on each end. One is drawn to the center by its opening and the light focused there, and from there looks in all direction through rows of pillars. It is an open field or stage surrounded by the rich multiplication of colonnades. Focus is forced toward one or the other ends, while kept within the colonnades.

Colonnades give the edges of the design measurable thinkability while the apses suggest areas that lie beyond. Statues and raised diases articulate the apses and give them specific personality. Within the space there is the lighted area of the interior, created by the raising of the timber roof over a clearstory, in the manner we’ve seen before at Karnak. The raised story above each colonnade offers a series of light admitting windows. A pair of colonnades raises one clearstory over another. So those in the space know they are at the center of a room and where to look in the room for the important activities that bring them there. It is less focused than a theater with a proscenium, but focused all the same. Surrounded by rhythm of colonnades, one can measure their location and the distance to any other spot in the design.

Laws were promulgated here, emperors bestowed congiaria, monetary donations to the populace, schools and reading areas were located here.

It is a satisfying and rational space as well as one that exalts by its opening up, through a crescendo of pillars running down the length, in a manner one can think and understand. It is a space that lets one locate themselves and also encourages one to survey as vast and encompassing. One can know where they are and enjoy the growth of the articulated forms that reach out and expand their command of the space.

In the courtyards and interiors of the Forum of Trajan we see the Roman’s working out, because of the scale of their programs and with a sensibility developed through their space encompassing vision of their world and those elaborate architectural interiors and complexes, an esthetics of space and grand spatial organization that was not known earlier. It is a model for others in the centuries to come.

42 Column of Trajan (Trajan Forum), 112 CE, Rome
The only element of Trajan’s forum to survive largely intact to the 21st century is the column that stood between the Basilica Ulpia and the temple. With the forum the design of the column and the invention of a new form was the work of Apollodorus of Damascus. It was a giant column with a continuous spiral narrative running up its shaft. 128 feet high and once crowned with a nude image of Trajan, its base served as the emperor’s mausoleum. The continuous narrative of Trajan’s two Dacian campaigns runs 625 feet. There are 150 episodes, 2500 figures. It was originally painted. The width of the band increased at the harder-to-see top.

* Details
In the continuous narrative Trajan appears many time. He is see as he addresses his troops, sacrifices to the gods, crosses bridges and so on. It is not scrupulously chronological. It shows more preparation for battle than fighting, but that is where the campaigns were won. Slatkin points out that one of the distinct realities one recognized in the narration is the public presence of women. There is thus quite a different sort of subject here than the heroic struggles of men and gods at Pergamon. The focus here is the daily life of soldiers and the common life of people, and women are important people.

(In the middle ages the nude figure of Trajan was demolished. It was replaced in the by an image of St. Peter in the 16th c.) Though it is impossible to really enjoy or even follow the narrative as it spins higher and higher out of sight, it was probably easier when there two libraries and the basilica still flanked it and one could climb to places on their upper stories for viewing it.

43 Markets of Trajan, Apollodorus of Damascus, 100-112 CE, Rome
The markets of Trajan, which surrounded and echoed the exedra of the forum’s courtyard on north are the only elements of Trajan’s great complex to have survived. Their structures remain in fairly full condition. Its outline was a semi-circle of two stories. It combined a repetition of vaulted cells opening on an arcaded corridor.

44 Trajan Markets, interior, Rome
It is entered through a corridor flanked by taberna cells on two sides. These could serve as shops of offices. All in all it resembled a modern shopping mall. The basic form us a series of groin vaulted chambers in stone, concrete and brick,

45 Arch of Trajan, Benevento, 114-118 CE
This arch commemorates completion of the Via Traiana. It is closely similar to the arch of Titus, but it is covered with reliefs trumpeting Trajan’s glory: entering Rome, distributing largess to children, founding colonies, building a port. In several scenes Trajan, who had by then died, is seen interacting with the gods. From this date on such imagery became common.

46 Funerary relief of a circus official, 110-130 CE, Ostia
The Circus Maximus was the venue for chariot races. We can see the circus on this former racing official’s tomb sculpture. It is an example, unlike the other sculpture seen in this selection, of work made for the more common people [our book says the working class], not the elite. The circus is in distorted perspective, and continuous narrative (the same figure is shown doing different things at different times, in the same scene). The charioteer is seen three times: driving the chariot, receiving the palm branch, and as a toga-clad official in later life. Deceased, he is shown holding his wife’s hand (a symbol of their marriage). She is shown smaller in scale and standing on a base, indicating she is already passed away. These are non-classical elements only visible at this time in plebeian production, though they will soon turn up in elite work as well.

47 Portrait bust of Hadrian as a general, 2’11’ h, 130-138 CE,
Tel Shalem
Trajan’s successor was also a Spaniard, Hadrian. There are more surviving portraits of Hadrian than any other emperor. He ruled for over 20 years. His portraits, as here show him as a mature adult (always at this age) and with a beard. Our book points out how it is more like the Kresilas portrait of Pericles (5-39) than those of any earlier emperor. The beard was taken as a Greek affectation in his day, but became the standard for subsequent emperors. He is shown wearing a general’s cuirass with images of gladiators upon it.

48 Pantheon, exterior, 118-125 CE, Rome
The Pantheon was a temple for all the gods. It is one of the best preserved buildings to survive from the ancient world. Its is a concrete structure, faced in brick, with a dome constructed out of a very sophisticated mixture of stone in concrete. Originally it stood, like the temple of Trajan or Mars Ultor, at the end of a colonnaded courtyard so that its conventional, pedimented porch gave no hint of the circular and domed surprise of its magnificent interior. Its exterior is so totally focused on the fine materials and finish of the porch that the drum of the rotunda is left without an articulated finish, like the backdrop of a stage set. The temple’s facade is a deep, pediment-crowned porch of eight giant Egyptian granite columns, with white marble Corinthian capitals. As amazing as the survival of the structure’s engineering is th e quality of architectural detail .

Beyond this deep porch lies “a concrete cylinder covered by a huge hemispherical dome 142 feet in diameter,” and rising up 142 feet above. It is a cylinder with a ceiling in the form of a globe. Or, as our book puts it so nicely: shaped “so that the interior space could be imagined as the orb of the earth and the dome as the vault of the heavens.” (278)

Unlike uneducated of Columbus’s era, the Roman elite of Hadrian’s time and many later conceived of the earth form as a globe.

The structure’s engineering is a triumph of this particularly Roman skill. The drum is formed of concrete mixed with basalt in proportions and types that grow gradually lighter as it rises, stronger and weightier at the bottom, lighter and thinner at the peak of the dome, where volcanic pumice replaced the stone. The dome’s structure continues this lightening by thinning as it goes. The structural problem of an arch or dome is to keep the center from falling in by bursting its “shoulders.” As you look at the temple’s section, you can see the loading of the springing—where the curve of the dome leaves the cylinder of its support—to protect against this bursting, and the thinning of the shell to lighten the load. You can also see the most interesting visual single element of the design: the open, oculus, 30 feet in diameter, at its top. This is the only window in the structure, and a very effective source of light for the interior. The inner ring of the oculus is a stone circle that acts as the arch’s keystone.

This dome is not only the largest constructed up to that time, it was the largest ever constructed up to more or less equivalent ones on St. Peter’s in Roma and Gol Gumbaz, the tomb of Ibraham Adil Shah at Bijapur in India, in the 17th century. All three depend upon the Roman’s favorite structural material, concrete. They were not surpassed until the invention of reinforced concrete and the Centenary Hall at Breslau in 1912.

50 Pantheon, interior, Rome

The designers of the Pantheon devised their impressive engineering in order to create the wonderful experience of its vast interior space, the largest of any structure in the world, both in the extent of its area and the expansion of the canopy above. Discussions of domed ceilings in the ancient world are replete with references to the “dome of heaven.” and this is likely be the experience the designers of the Pantheon intended to achieve.

The interior of the dome is articulated by five concentric rings of coffers that both lighten its weight and give rugged visual texture to its form. Unlike the smoother finish of the Treasury of Attreus (4-22), this dome’s vast concave surface is strikingly and clearly demonstrated, by the radiating rings of coffers that rationalize and dramatize its shape, by catching and holding the light streaming in through the oculus.

Renaissance drawings show there were once “glistening” copper rosettes at the center of each coffer, “enhancing the dome’s symbolism as the starry heavens.” (282)

The marble veneer interior of the Pantheon is our best surviving example of a monumental Roman interior. Because the temple was converted into a Christian church in 609, it has been preserved against the decay and vandalism that have destroyed nearly every other. Before the Romans, Mediterranean architectural interiors were largely halls filled with the structures supporting their roofs. With their engineering of timbered roofs and arching vaults and domes, the Romans were able to create a new esthetic of expansive interior spaces. The interior of the Pantheon was a single “interior whole.”

The elevation of the interior, below the springing of the dome, is divided into a lower, super-story and an attic, articulated in handsome detail. On plan the perimeter of the Pantheon it constructed around six deep, pillar-screened niches, that acted as chapels for the various gods, plus an open entrance bay and the open, focal niche directly opposite the entrance. Between the chapels are walls bearing framed niches alternating between curving and triangular pediments. The attic above carries a repeating sequence of flush and indented blind windows. Thus the entire interior is articulated as a unified structural ensemble, though this is more symbolic depiction than actual structure.

The fine marble chosen for this decoration is very handsome stone in itself. The organization of the design is balanced and harmonious, and in its super scale quite impressive to walk within. The craft of the detailing is also superb. The luxury of the total—structural engineering, size, scale, materials and finish—is amazing and awe inspiring. That, of course, was the entire point. Whether it was the emperor’s desire to impress the gods with his piety, or his desire to impress the citizens of Rome with his magnificence and power, he certainly managed to create a spectacular show of human ingenuity and splendor

51 Canopus and Serapeum, Hadrian’s Villa, 130-138 CE, Tivoli
If not the actual designer of the structures attributed to him, Hadrian was clearly interested in architecture and architectural form as more than just propaganda. He apparently was interested in the forms themselves, as many people are. Our volume recounts a tale of his murderous anger at receiving criticism of his own design from Apollodorus of Damascus, Trajan’s favorite architect. We may remember the anecdote for what it tells us of the Emperor’s unbridled viciousness as well as Apollodorus’s lack of respect for his ability.

You will notice that the hegemonic history retells the anecdote to emphasize “the absolute power Roman emperors wielded and...how seriously Hadrian took his architectural design.” (282) It is uncritical, possibly even impressed with, the great man’s inhumanity, while it assumes the most positive possible interpretation of his supposed-skill as a designer.

Whether it was the size at which they wanted to build, or a recognition of the intrinsic esthetic enjoyment possible in the shaping of space, the Romans developed a mastery of this experience.

So, the Canopus and Serapeum, the commemoration of his travels in the Roman province of Egypt, is a great example of this interest in molding and articulating space. The Canopus is a long pool outlined in an elegant free-standing Corinthian colonnade of white marble. What would have been a sheet of water without the colonnade, becomes a visible, measurable expanse with its presence. Once again we have a Roman form that takes off from earlier Mediterranean roots to entirely new regions of design. This colonnade doesn’t support a roof and isn’t connected to an inhabitable interior. It is merely a luxurious perimeter.

What we expect from a colonnade is pillars and lintels, and that is what we get here, but we get it in the surprising new form of pillars carrying conventional straight lintels alternating with arching lintels. To add to the luxury and to the richness of the perimeter there were fine reproductions of famous Greek sculptures set under the arches.

At the one end of the pool is a concrete grotto designed by the emperor himself, that plays with Egyptian motifs. Our volume calls this melding of Greek and Egyptian imagery and invention Roman eclecticism.

52 Al-Khazneh, 2nd c CE, 130’ h., Petra (Jordan)
Another strikingly inventive variation on the existing ornamental system can be found in Al-Khazneh, the treasury, the giant tomb in Roman Syria (modern Jordan), carved out of the side of a rock precipice. The tombs 130 foot facade, what would be 13 stories in a modern building, is divided into two gargantuan stories. The story below is in the form of a standard pedimented temple with slight horizontal extensions, and uneven spacing of its columns. The upper story goes even further in developing the classical vocabulary. Here the pediment facade is broken apart to reveal a round temple at its center, creating a stunning contrast in strong geometric forms.

“At Petra, as at Tivoli, the vocabulary of Greek architecture was maintained, but the syntax is new and distinctively Roman.”

Well, not exactly. This vocabulary has been Roman for the past several centuries according to what we have seen. This is like my example in class of calling words with French roots like “beef” (from boef, which has been in English for many centuries) French. Indeed the architectural order here is Composite, a Roman type unknown to the Greeks. Nor is the playfulness of the architectural elements (the “syntax”) new. As our book goes on to remind us, this design is quite like the sort of architectural fantasy seen in Republican era Roman paintings at Boscoreale, two hundred years before (10-16).

53 An insula (model), 2nd c CE, Ostia
Ninety percent of Rome’s population, of over a million, lived in multistory apartment blocks (insulae). After Nero’s famous fire of 64 CE, these were constructed of concrete and faced with brick. Many of these insula are preserved in Rome’s port city, Ostia. These have a number of the features we find in the comparable structures of the large American cities at the turn of the beginning of the 20th century. They had shops on the ground floor and up to for floors of apartments above. Besides windows on the exterior, they had light and air shafts within. Though nothing was as comfortable or spacious as single story structures built in the countryside. There were glass windows facing on the street, though this was more likely opaque than clear glass. Latrines, except in the most luxurious locations, were communal and separate.

54 Room IV, Insula of Painted Vaults Ostia
Built as they were with concrete vaults, many of the finer houses featured mural decorations. Here is an example of a ceiling painting that plays with the geometry of the actual vaulting to develop its forms. Here the four lobes of the groin vault are divided into a depiction of an eight faceted dome, with flowers in and birds in each segment.

55 Neptune mosaic, Baths of Neptune, c 140 CE, Ostia
As if decorated walls and ceilings weren’t enough, the wealthiest Roman houses also had rich mosaic floors. As this example, many were in simple black and white and oriented as the surface designs they were, to be seen from all sides and with little use of modeling or perspective, that would give them the window on the world effect of wall paintings.

56 Funerary relief of a vegetable vendor 1’5”,
2nd half 2nd c CE, Ostia
The tombs of the working classes resembled insulae of the living, and like them were communal. Those of the middle classes were decorated with painted terracotta plaques “immortalizing” the activities of their inhabitants. This important occupation has always been, and this hereditary. Here is one for a vegetable seller, showing him at work with his goods.
These works are much less sophisticated in their perspective and detail than things made for the elite. You see the table here tilted forward without the aid of diagonals, and different objects on the table without the benefit of overlaps.

56 Funerary relief of a midwife, 11” 2nd half 2nd c CE, Ostia
This sign for a midwife also shows her at her most important of all human occupations. It is the facts that she is looking out at the spectator rather than her client and that these are mostly occupational in nature, that tells the historian that the plaque is for the midwife rather than the prospective mother. Though motherhood was the more dangerous occupation and the one that led most quickly to need for a plaque.

It is one of the more interesting, if less exalting, aspects of Roman art that we have depictions of common life and the crafts of the common people preserved, unlike most other cultures.

57 Apotheosis of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, 161 CE, Rome, 8’1”
An apotheosis is the elevation to divine status of a great being. The Romans did this through their state religion as other contemporary cultures did through their religions.

Antoninus Pius was adopted by Hadrian as his successor, and required by Hadrian to adopt Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as his. And according to Imperial Roman tradition, each was then proclaimed a deity by the Senate upon their deaths.

This is the base of the memorial column set up by Marcus and Lucius for Antoninus Pius. The column is lost. On one side was an inscription and on the opposite side was this image of Antoninus and his wife Faustina being carried to the heavens, as we saw earlier in the vault of the Arch of Titus.

The design here is in the optical manner of the elite classical tradition. Well-proportioned figures move in a measurable space. Campus Martius, the personified local, sits on the base of the image holding an Egyptian obelisk, which serves as a ground line, he violates playfully with his overlapping draperies. Roma, the city personified, sits opposite with her armor, overlapping the edge of the relief behind her. They both gesture farewell to Faustina and Antoninus Pius, who are born into the heavens by a personified eagle, accompanied by two others.

The portraits of the emperor and his wife are idealized as is the relationship between the two. She actually died two decades before her husband. This joining of her to him on the funerary monument, which we have seen earlier on a more plebeian monument, was something new, here, for an imperial one.

58 Decursio, pedestal of the Column of Antoninus Pius,
161 CE, Rome, 8’ 1”
On either side of the classical depiction of the Apotheosis are identical images of the Decursio, the ritual circling of the imperial funerary pyre by mourners. This design “break[s]... strongly with classical convention. The figures are much stockier than those in the apotheosis relief, and the panel was not conceived as a window on the world.” (286) The soldiers marching at the center stand upon their own floating patch of ground and each of the horseman circling them stands upon its own patch of ground. We can see this too earlier in Plebeian art (10-5). Thus in both cases we have nonclassical art invading the realm previously reserved from it.

59 Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, 11’6”, Rome
Though the mounted equestrian portrait is one of the great iconographic types of the Roman Empire, few have survived. Most were melted down in antiquity, in part out of disrespect for their pagan subjects and in part for the use of their metal. The Marcus Aurelius has survived because it was mistaken in antiquity for Constantine, the emperor who converted first himself and later the empire to Christianity. He is show here on an enlarged scale in relation to the horse he straddles. His gesture of reaching out, here, indicates greeting and the offer of clemency. There may once have been an image of a fallen enemy beneath the horses raised leg. It is, as our text says, a portrait expressing “the Roman emperor’s majesty and authority.”

Historians have been interested to note that the face on the emperor here brings with it an element not seen earlier in the idealized emperor portrait. There is an element of emotional ambivalence, here, even more clear in the life-sized detail from a lost arch illustrated next (10-60). Here is the emperor presented, not with the infinite calm standard in the classical portraits we have seen, but an element of disquietude, of anxiety.

60 Portrait of Marcus Aurelius, 157-180 CE, life-sized
The text also points out the current practice of employing drills to get deeper holes and so stronger shadows in the hair and eye pupils and corners of the figure’s mouth. Mature looking emperors we have seen before, not troubled emperors. This is different from the verism of the Republican period. It moves in the direction of what art historians call expressionism, a degree of caricature that emphasizes emotions. Marcus Aurelius Meditations are filled with some of this same world weariness. Together these two expressions seem to the historians of Rome to indicate a change in attitude that “marked the beginning of the end of classical art’s domination in the Greco-Roman world.” (286)

61 Sarcophagus with the myth of Orestes, 140-160 CE, 2’7” h
The second century saw a shift of the Romans funerary practices from cremation to burial. Our text suggests that this may come with the “influence of Christianity and other Eastern religions, whose adherents believed in an afterlife for the human body.” Emperors and many continued to be cremated, but many turned to burial. This led to the need for sarcophagi.

“Greek mythology was one of the most popular subjects for the decoration of these sarcophagi...especially in the second and third centuries.” (If you are trying to connect the Greek mythology with Christian influence, you should shift to the more popular Eastern religions like the cult of Mysteries.) The standard format of these designs includes a continuous narrative image of the Greek myth. “Orestes appears here several times, slaying his mother Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus to avenge their murder of his father Agamemnon, taking refuge at Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi (symbolized by the god’s tripod at the right), and so forth.” (287) The repetition of such images suggests that artists used pattern books in the High and Late Empire.

Two basic types have been noted. The Western type from the Latin-speaking region, such as this one, has reliefs on the long side and two ends, since they were intended for placement in niches. The Eastern type was from the Greek-speaking region and had relief decoration all around, because they were intended to stand free from the wall in the center of a tomb, This is a parallel to the temples of the two regions, Italian temples approached from one side and Greek ones with stairs all the way around.

62 Asiatic sarcophagus with a kline portrait of a woman,
5’ 7” h., Melfi
An example of the Eastern form is found in this homme arcade sarcophagus from Melfi in southern Italy. “It was manufactured, however, in Asia Minor and attests to the vibrant export market for such luxury items in Antonine times.” (288) The design around all four sides is composed of Greek gods in architectural frames, which is “is distinctively Asian.” “The lid portrait, which carries on the tradition of Etruscan sarcophagi (9-4 and 9-14), is also a feature of the most expensive Western Roman coffins.” In this case it is a woman on the bed, kline.

This takes us back to our semester’s theme: how the “West” and the “East” are flexible identities that hegemonic Anglo-European texts shift freely to suit their taste in any particular situation. The Greeks were “Western” in the period of Athens’s ascendancy and its competition with the Persians or in contrast to the “unchanging” “Near East, ” and when Alexander goes to war against the Persian empire. But now the Greeks are “Eastern” when they are the subordinates of the “Western Romans.”

63 Mummy portrait of a man, 1’2”, CE Faiyum
Faiyum, in the delta of Roman Egypt has been famous for its funerary portraits in encaustic on wood. They are the surface equivalent of the stone portraits we have been looking at in Rome. Egyptians continued to bury their dead in mummified fashion even after their conquest by Rome. After all they were subjected to Roman laws and taxation, but not a transformation into Romans. The one chosen for our texts is much like the Marcus Aurelius of 10-59 and 10-60. Most of these come from the second and third centuries. This one is typical.

The likeness is achieved by a careful observation of personal characteristics rendered with a brush and careful attention to softly shaded modeling of the forms. The expressions are normally somber and sensitive. The somewhat enlarged eyes take us straight to the emotions..

“The Western and Eastern Roman sarcophagi and the mummy cases of Roman Egypt all served the same purpose, despite their differing shape and character. In an empire as vast as Rome’s, regional differences are to be expected. As will be discussed later, geography also played a major role in the Middle Ages, when Western and Eastern Christian art differed sharply.” (289)

Here we have the general point magnified, despite the lack of any particular usefulness at this point. There will be an important division later, so let us begin to look now, before it is visible in anything but the architectural practice of placing the tomb against the wall or out in the open that results in three or for sided decoration. At this point there doesn’t seem to be any major reason that we have been told, for dividing the eastern Mediterranean world into an “East” and a “West.”
When we look at the difference between Roman sculpture and Egyptian painting we might begin to wonder if there might not be several distinct cultural regions: Italian, Greek, Asia-Minor (the region of modern Turkey), Syria, Egypt, Libya and so on.