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12.5 The Forum or Templum Pacis
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Roman Architecture
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The Creation of an Icon: The Colosseum and Contemporary Architecture in Rome
The Flavian dynasty of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. Vespasian linked himself to Divus Claudius by completing the Claudianum, distanced himself from Nero by destroying part of the Domus Aurea, filling in the artificial lake and replacing it with the Colosseum. Titus commissioned Rome's first preserved example of the "imperial bath type," characterized by grand scale, axiality, and symmetry.
Conoce a los instructores
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
We talked about the Temple of Divine Claudius.
I remind you of a model of it here again.
And the relationship of that Temple of Divine Claudius with the temple,
conventional temple on top of a very tall podium.
The fact that that looked back to the architectural experiments very early on,
2nd to 1st centuries BC.
At the sanctuaries of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina and
of Hercules Victor at Tivoli.
It was that kind of thing that was being looked back to.
And it's interesting to see that it was that same plan, that idea of a great
open rectangular space with a temple as part of it, that was used,
and with the temple put along one of the longer ends, that was used by Vespasian
for his own forum in Rome, the so called Forum Pacis.
It's sometimes referred to as the Templum Pacis because we're not
actually sure how it was used.
We don't think it was actually used as a typical forum with shops and
a law court and so on, but may have been used in a different way, and
I'll speak to that in a moment.
So we don't quite know what to call it, and
we call it either the Forum Pacis or the Templum Pacis.
In order to see its location,
I show you this view of all of the Imperial Fora in Rome.
Those fora that line the Via Dei Fori Imperiali across from the Roman Forum.
We've already looked at, here's the tail end of, or the side of
the Roman Forum here, and right next to it, two Fora that we've already discussed,
the Forum of Julius Caesar, and then the Forum of Augustus.
Nothing else, this wasn't there then, this wasn't there then.
But Vespasian decides to build a forum himself.
In close proximity to the Forum of Augustus.
In fact, it's interesting to see that it faces, the temple is actually on this end.
So in a sense, it faces the Forum of Augustus.
So another smart, strategic move on the part,
a smart political move on the part of Vespasian
to associate himself not just with Claudius, the emperor who was divinized.
But also with Augustus the founder of the Julio Claudian Dynasty, and
the first emperor of Rome.
So to build his structure facing that of Augustus's,
his temple facing that of Augustus's.
But you can see that he wants to outdo Augustus, so
he make his larger than Augustus's.
This area here that's labeled as the forum of Nerva wasn't a forum at all at
this point, it was a street called the Argiletum, A, R, G, I, L, E, T, U, M.
And that street, the Argiletum, and you can see it labeled up there,
that street led into a part of Rome, a residential area of Rome,
that I've referred to before called the Subura.
The Subura was, again, a place where there were a lot of, I've mentioned it again,
we saw there, or there were there,
a lot of apartment houses mostly made out of wood, rickety apartment houses that
were lived in by large number of people with lesser means.
And there were consequently always fires there.
And you'll remember that Augustus' architects had to build that large
precinct wall out of peperino to protect the Temple of Mars Ultor from the fires.
They used to break out all the time in the Suburra, so
you have to imagine this as a street in between in the forum of Augustus and
Vespasian's Forum Pacis in ancient Roman times.
Also interesting is again the plan,
a rectangle with a temple on one end, dominating the space in front of it.
You can see there are columns all the way around.
There are these alcoves that open off the center space.
And you can see they're screened from that center space also by columns.
We know that some exotic materials were used here,
marble that was brought from other parts of the world.
We saw that beginning already under Nero, bringing marble from Asia Minor and
Africa and Egypt and so on for his buildings.
That also continues under the Flavians, so
another Neronian innovation that remains important.
We see it here, we see red granite columns used for the colonnade.
We see yellow columns from Africa used for the columns that screen
these alcoves from the larger space, and then we see white marble for the rest.
So this combination of imported marbles used for the Forum Pacis in Rome.
The Forum Pacis no longer survives, you can't see any of it today.
We do know it's location though, and we do have a good sense of it's plan,
once again from the so called Forum of Orbis,
from this marble map of Rome that has a few fragments of the Forum Pacis.
You can see one fragment here, one fragment here, and
then a third fragment up there.
And those fragments are enough, when we look at those, study those,
and compare those to other buildings, to allow a very accurate reconstruction.
It tells us the shape of the temple, and it shows us without any question,
because one of the fragments includes lots of this,
that this too like the Claudianum in Rome had bushes,
as a kind of garden that decorated the center of the structure.
So bringing the country in a sense into the city for these incredible complexes.
This is a restored view.
And you see it also on your monument list,
of what the Forum Popus would have looked in antiquity.
A quite severe facade as it seems, with a number of entranceways.
The temple pushed up.
In fact, not only pushed up against the back wall,
but part of the colonnade that flanks it on either side.
You can see the red granite columns.
You can't see the yellow columns that would have been further in,
screening the alcoves from the colonnade.
You see an altar right in front of the temple.
You see the bushes that were a part of the plantings that made this look like
a kind of garden complex in front of the temple.
We don't actually know if it was used as a temple.
We have no divinity that's been associated with it.
We actually think it may have been used as a museum, and
I'm going to say more about that in a moment.
Here is another reconstruction, this one is from Ward Perkins.
You can see that it is roughly the same as the other with one exception, and that
is it shows an entranceway that's made up of three doors and a number of columns.
This was thought for a very long time to be the case,
that there was an elaborate entranceway with columns and projecting entablatures,
the sort of thing that we haven't seen yet in built architecture.
But we did see in second style Roman wall painting, but
that idea has been discredited and
now people believe it is much more likely that the facade was very plain.
The reason this idea came to the fore is that eventually when the ardulateum
was filled in with the forum by Vespasian's second son Domitian.
Domitian did build a forum that is in part preserved,
which we will look at next week I believe.
But that forum had on the walls a series of columns with projecting entablatures.
And that does still exist now, a part of it does still exist,
so I think that's what originally gave archaeologists that idea that
that was there before, and was part of Vespasian's complex.
But that seems not to have been the case, and the reconstruction that you have
on your monument list is the one that you should go by.
Let's get back to the whole point about the museum,
whether this served as a kind of museum in the time of the Flavian emperors.
I mentioned the great victory that Titus had over Jerusalem.
A victory, at least from the Roman point of view, was great.
Obviously, it was not great for Judea because the area was taken over by
the Romans and the the famous Jewish temple was destroyed.
And Titus also did not hesitate to ramble through with
his men, with his soldiers, go through the temple and pick and
choose what he wanted to bring back to Rome as spoils.
He took the great seven branched candelabrum from the temple,
he took the Ark of the Covenant from the temple.
He took a whole host of other items from the temple, and
he brought them back to Rome as trophies.
And we see this famous scene on the Arch of Titus, an arch that Domitian
put up in honor of his brother, and we'll look at that on Tuesday.
The arch of Titus has a scene that depicts the Roman soldiers bringing
the seven branch candelabrum and a table with other objects on it,
from that temple back to Rome, and parading with those through an arch.
Those spoils we know were placed by Vespasian], by his father,
with whom he shared a joint triumph.
Because of this victory over Jerusalem.
It was placed in the Forum Pacis once that was built.
So it was in part a place where he could display the spoils of war,
because of the fact that the legitimacy that he gained through this conquest
was so important to his dynasty, to the right of his dynasty to rule, and
to the right of his sons to rule after him.
So he wants to make that point clear, but again he's very shrewd politically, and
he also wants to make sure that the people have access to this.
He wants to remind them when Nero was emperor of Rome,
he had things in his villa that he would never have dreamed of sharing with you.
You weren't able to come in and dine there and have petals and
fragrances fall on you while you dine, you were not allowed into this space.
But now you can come to the Coliseum.
And you can go to this museum, and while you're in the museum you might as well
look at these great spoils that I captured from Jerusalem that bring credit to me and
legitimacy to my dynasty.
He also took what also interesting and makes this more museum
like is that he also took some of the statuary that Nero had stolen
from Greece when he went there to compete in those Olympic games, and so on.
That he had stolen from Greece and elsewhere, and put it up in his villa.
He also put those in the museum, and
opened that collection also to the Roman people.
And we even know some of the statues that were there.
That were taken from Nero's Domus Aurea and put in to this museum.
One of them was a famous cow, a cow that had been done by the well
known Greek artist Myron, M, Y, R, O, N, the Cow of Myron.
And the second was an image, a sculpted image.
We're not sure, I don't think we know whether it was in marble or bronze,
the original.
But an image of a reclining Nile River who was surrounded by 16 kids
who were running around up and down on top of him and around him.
Another famous statue that was in Nero's possession.
That gets put in to what appears to have been a very important museum.
>> [COUGH] You see here another excellent Google Earth view,
aerial view of part of the Roman forum.
The Colosseum of course is way over here, and
we can see the central part or part of the central part of the forum.
We're looking back towards the Victor Emmanuel Monument, we're looking back
toward the Campidoglio redesigned by Michelangelo, the Oval Piazza.
And in fact here we can even see in the upper left the Theatre of Marcellus.
So you can see that the Theater of Marcellus was basically in a diagonal
dialog in a sense with the Colosseum, that was located back over here.
The reason that I show this view to you now is to point out also the tabularium,
which we've already looked at, the archives.
It's on the back of the senatorial palace redesigned by Michelangelo.
But right in front of it there was a temple that was put up in honor of
Vespasian at his death, by his son Titus.
And then when Titus died only a few years later,
also of natural causes, his brother Domitian became emperor, and
Domitian decided to rededicate the temple to both of them.
To Vespasian and also to Titus.
So it became the temple of the two divi
because Titus was also divinized at his death.
And there were statue bases that were found that stood in front of
this temple with inscriptions indicating that they honored those two individuals.
And that they were depicted undoubtedly in statues in front of this temple.
Only three columns of that temple still survive,
some of the foundations as well, of course.
And you can see it in the Roman Forum, right near the tabularium in Rome.
If you look at it, you can see that these are Corinthian fluted capitals.
It was probably a quite conventional temple, but you do see that
there is a frieze that seems to represent a number of sacrificial implements,
a libation dish and pitcher and so on and so forth.
A very large chunk of that frieze and entablature is still preserved today,
it's not with the temple, but rather in the tabularium itself.
And I show it to you here, an extremely well preserved section of the decorative
frieze of the Temple of Vespasian, the Temple of Divine Vespasian in Rome,
which you see again dates to around 70 to 81 A.D.
And it's very instructive, not only in terms of the way in which Titus first,
and then his brother, were thinking of honoring members of their family, but also
Incredible in how ornamental this is.
I mean, this is decoration that is more richly textured
that any that we've seen thus far.
And also more richly undercut.
The artists are beginning to use the drill
to create very deep shadows among the decorative motifs.
To make them stand out even more.
And you might remember, I didn't bring it back to show you, but
you might remember that section that I showed
you from the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Julius Caesar.
Where I mentioned that that had been restored in the time of Domitian,
second son of Vespasian, and also in the Trajanic period.
And that the very deep carving indicated to us
not only that it had been done later, but also the fact that the Flavians
were particularly interested in this very ornamental decoration.
Very deeply undercut ornamentation.
And we see that so well here.
We see also the interest in the variety of motifs in this frieze and
in the decorative part of it.
And then the frieze itself is very interesting, if we look at the objects,
we see that they are mainly objects that are used in ritual sacrifice.
We see the skulls of bulls just as we saw them in the inner
precinct of the Ara Pacis, one on either side.
We see a livation dish.
We see an axe over here.
That's to knock out the animals.
Here's the knife to slit the throat of the animals.
The pitcher to pour wine on an alter.
A whip for whatever purpose that had.
And then over here a helmet, as you can see.
So all of these implements that were used in a sacrifice,
regularly used in sacrifice arranged like a still life against a blank background.
And I don't know about you but
when I look at this I am reminded of some fourth style Roman wall decoration,
of the still life paintings that we saw in the third and the fourth style,
where you have individual objects against a blank background.
And also the decorative nature of
this conjures up some of the decoration that we see the perfusion,
the almost overly decorative element of fourth style Roman wall painting.
And since this dates to 79 to 81, and you'll remember the fourth style is 62
to 79 at Pompeii, but we know the fourth style continues on.
It was the fourth style that was the most popular style post 79, obviously
not in Pompeii but or Herculaneum, but elsewhere In the Roman world.
So this very much in keeping, we're seeing in architecture something very much in
keeping vis a vis decoration, as we see in fourth style Roman wall painting.
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