9. From Brick to Marble: Augustus Assembles Rome - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Prof: Good morning everyone.
Back to Rome today, back to Rome,
which was beginning to emerge as the world's,
or the ancient world's, greatest superpower,
an emergence that we're going to see had a profound impact on
Roman architecture.
And we'll also see that there were a number of men who
effected this superstardom for Rome,
and they're men that I'm going to talk about with you today.
These included Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great,
Mark Antony, and Octavian Augustus,
especially Octavian Augustus: Augustus,
first emperor of Rome, and it's the reason that I have
decided to call this lecture today "From Brick to
Marble: Augustus Assembles Rome."
You see on the left-hand side of the screen a portrait of
Julius Caesar.
It's a green diabase portrait of Caesar.
It's now in Berlin, and I believe actually that it
is a portrait that was commissioned by Cleopatra
herself.
She commissioned it for a building that she and Caesar
were putting up in Alexandria, called the Caesareum that
honored Caesar, and you can see that he is
represented as he was-- it's a quite realistic portrait
with the lines and wrinkles, with his receding hairline and
so on accentuated in this portrait.
On the right hand-side of the screen we see an image of Pompey
the Great, a marble portrait that is now in the Ny Carlsberg
Glyptotek, in Copenhagen.
And a portrait that shows that Pompey the Great very much
wanted to ally himself with Alexander the Great,
because if you look at his very full head of hair,
you can see that he wears it in the center,
pushed up in a kind of pompadour, which is a reference
to the same kind of upsweep that was worn by Alexander the Great.
I want to give you a little bit of information about Caesar,
about his life, about some of his
accomplishments, because these are going to have
an impact on the architecture, on our discussion of the
architecture that he commissioned in Rome.
We know that Caesar was elected consul, in 59 B.C.
He then joined with Pompey the Great, and with a man by the
name of Crassus, to form what is known as the
First Triumvirate.
The result of that First Triumvirate was in part that
Caesar received a consulship in Gaul.
But despite all good intentions, just a few years
later, in 54 B.C., the Triumvirate fell apart.
Difficult times were the case in Rome between 53 and 50 B.C.
There were food shortages and riots in the city,
and the Senate was very concerned that these uprisings
would lead to a takeover by the populace of the city.
Pompey took charge.
He took control of the Senate and he restored order,
and his reward for so doing is that the Senate was willing to
work with him to try to overthrow his rival,
that is, Julius Caesar.
Crassus, the other member of the Triumvirate,
had since died.
But Caesar got the upper hand, at the end of the day,
and it was Caesar who defeated Pompey the Great at a very
famous battle, the Battle of Pharsalos,
which took place in 48 B.C.
After the Battle of Pharsalos and his defeat by Julius Caesar,
Pompey fled to Egypt where he was murdered,
and in fact the Egyptians slit Pompey's head,
put it on a plate and presented it to Caesar.
Now you'd think Caesar would have been happy about that.
He wasn't, because although he was thrilled to have defeated
Pompey the Great, he did not like seeing the head
of a fellow Roman delivered to him on a plate.
Caesar, at that point, despite his victory,
what was foremost in his mind was his affair with Cleopatra,
and he stayed in Egypt with Cleopatra for a period of time.
But in 45 B.C., by 45 B.C., he had returned to
Rome.
He was acclaimed Dictator in that year,
in 45, and after that he pursued fiscal reforms for Rome,
and also he commissioned a number of very important public
works, and that's where Roman
architecture obviously comes into play.
Despite the fact that he initiated those reforms and
built buildings and built up the city in interesting ways,
the aristocrats in Rome considered Caesar a tyrant.
They considered him a tyrant because they felt that the
influence of Cleopatra had rubbed off too much on him and
his ambitions were too monarchical,
and the aristocrats encouraged his murder.
And he was assassinated, as all of you know,
by Cassius and Brutus in the year 44 B.C.,
on the Ides of March, and he was divinized by the
Senate, he was made a god by the
Senate, in the year 42 B.C.
In his biography of Julius Caesar,
the writer Suetonius, who was a secretary and a
biographer to the emperor Hadrian in the second century
A.D., Suetonius wrote a biography of
the Twelve Caesars, a very famous biography that
many of you may know served as the basis for Robert Graves'
very well-known Claudius, which also accentuates again
the biographies of those first Twelve Caesars.
And although Caesar himself was dictator, not emperor,
he is the first of the Caesars who is covered by Suetonius.
And in Suetonius' biography of Julius Caesar,
he tells us about some of these major architectural commissions
that Caesar embarked on in Rome.
And it's interesting to read about these because we'll see
that all of them seem to have been the best and the greatest.
And I think one of the explanations for this is the
time that Caesar spent in Alexandria, in Egypt,
with Cleopatra.
She wanted to show him the sites, and in fact they went on
a very famous barge trip together,
down the Nile, in which she showed him the
pyramids and the sphinxes that were there to be seen.
And he was extremely impressed by what he saw in Egypt,
and decided that one of the most important things that he
could do, that he could contribute to
posterity vis-à-vis Rome, was to make Rome into a city
that was the equal of Alexandria,
that had similar large-scale buildings and impressive
monuments, the way Alexandria did.
So he came back to Rome, he undertook this major
building project, and Suetonius tells us that he
built-- he wanted to build,
he started to build a Temple to Mars that Suetonius describes as
the biggest in the world.
Why?
To compete with the buildings of Alexandria.
A vast--not just a theater--a vast theater.
Greek and Latin public libraries.
We know, of course, that the greatest library in
the ancient world at this particular time was the Library
at Alexandria.
So he wanted libraries in Rome that could compete with the
great Library of Alexandria.
And he was also particularly interested in engineering
marvels.
He built, or he began to build, a highway from the Adriatic,
across the Apennines, to the Tiber,
and then most famously a canal cut through the Isthmus of
Corinth.
That was, in large part, achieved, and one can still see
that canal, if one visits Corinth in Greece today.
So he had vast ambitions.
But many of these ambitions were cut short by his
assassination in 44 B.C.
He was not able to achieve architecturally all that he had
hoped.
One building that he was able to complete, or almost complete,
was a forum in Rome.
The Forum Iulium, I-u-l-i-u-m,
which is after his family name Iulius.
The Forum Iulium, or as we usually call it the
Forum of Julius Caesar in Rome was a building that he was able
to begin in the year 52 B.C., and then it was inaugurated in
46 B.C., which is a couple of years
before his assassination.
It wasn't quite finished at the time of its inauguration and it
was left to Caesar's follower, Augustus, first emperor of
Rome, to actually complete some of the details of the forum.
But for all intents and purposes it was done by 46.
I show you a Google Earth aerial view of the Roman Forum,
as you see it here--we've looked at this before--
the Roman Forum, the Colosseum,
just for you to get your bearings,
the Circus Maximus, the Palatine Hill,
the Capitoline Hill, the Victor Emmanuel Monument
here, Mussolini's Via dei Fori
Imperiali here, the so-called Imperial Fora,
of which Augustus' forum, which we're also going to talk
about today is a part.
The Forum of Caesar is very close to the Roman Forum.
It's located just to the left here, and above,
the wedding cake of Victor Emmanuel.
You see it here, and you can barely make out the
three columns that are still preserved from the temple that
was located inside this forum.
So you can see it was adjacent to, and in fact connected to,
the Roman forum that lay over here.
So a forum, and in that forum a temple,
a temple to Venus, Venus Genetrix,
G-e-n-e-t-r-i-x, Venus Genetrix,
who was the divine ancestress of the Julian family.
The Julian family traced its ancestry back to Venus via
Aeneas, through Aeneas.
So this was the very special patron goddess of not only
Caesar himself but of the Julian family.
This is a plan of the Forum of Julius Caesar,
as it would have looked when the building was inaugurated in
46 B.C.
And I think you can see here that it has two major
prototypes, models that were being looked back at when this
was designed, beginning in 52.
You can see that it is based heavily on earlier Roman forum
-- Samnite/Roman forum design -- as we saw it in the city of
Pompeii; think of the Forum of Pompeii.
But it also was based in part on a building that we have not
looked at and which no longer survives,
but we have information about, and that is that Caesareum,
or Caesareum of Julius Caesar, that he and Cleopatra put up in
Alexandria.
And we know enough about that building to know it too was an
open rectangular space with colonnades around it and a
temple as part of it.
So this whole idea of temple in a rectangular complex.
We see it in Alexandria.
Contemporaneously we see it earlier in Pompeii at the Forum
of Pompeii.
So a great open rectangular space, open to the sky,
with colonnades on either side.
You can see on this side there are some additional chambers,
and based on what those look like in plan,
I am sure you can tell me what they are.
Does anyone know?
Think back to what we saw in Pompeii that looked similar to
this.
What are these here?
What?
Student: >
Prof: Storage did you say, or-- Student:
Storage.
Prof: Storage.
Not exactly storage; shops, tabernae.
Remember the tabernae that we saw fronting the houses
in Pompeii.
These are a series of shops, or tabernae,
opening off the left colonnade of the forum,
and then on one of the short sides,
pushed up against the back wall--in fact,
in this case, almost projecting out of the
forum to a certain extent-- the Temple of Venus Genetrix.
We can see it in plan, and it dominates the space in
front of it, just as the Capitolium did at Pompeii.
We can see the general plan conforms to early Roman temple
architecture, as we've described it,
with its use of the Etruscan plan and the Greek elevation.
We can see that there is--well I'll show you this in a moment,
but take my word--it has a high podium;
it has a deep porch; it has freestanding columns in
that porch.
It has a façade orientation,
although one idiosyncrasy of this particular temple is that
the staircase is located, not just on the front,
but on the two sides, but only at the level of the
podium.
The staircase does not encircle the building,
as it would have in a Greek temple,
but it goes beyond the front to the sides of the podium,
to allow access to it that way as well.
A single entrance, because this is the Temple of
Venus and not the Capitoline Triad,
and then columns, freestanding columns on either
side, but a flat back wall very much
in the Etruscan manner.
So a temple that is very much in keeping with the other kind
of temple architecture that we have seen thus far.
What's significant though again is that the choice of goddess to
honor here, the fact that it is Venus
Genetrix, a personal goddess,
from the point of view of Julius Caesar:
someone who was associated closely with his family,
with the genesis of his family, and not with the Roman State as
a whole.
And that's a very important distinction,
the difference between putting up a temple to the Capitoline
Triad, a very state-oriented thing to
do, and putting up a temple to your own personal goddess.
It signals a certain change vis-à-vis the way these
individuals thought about themselves,
and may again have had something to do with the way
Caesar was perceived in Rome, and to his eventual demise.
In fact, I should also add that Caesar,
because of his relationship with Cleopatra,
ended up putting up a statue of Cleopatra as the Egyptian
goddess Isis, in this temple as well,
standing right next to Venus Genetrix.
Which was a pretty arrogant and probably a pretty stupid thing
to do in Republican Rome where Cleopatra was considered a very
interesting public figure, because she did come with him
to visit Rome at one point, but was also maligned by many
among the aristocracy as an enemy of Rome.
I'm showing you here a view of the Forum of Caesar,
as it looks today, and you can see the columns on
the left-hand side, from the colonnade.
Some of those still stand.
You can see the staircase or the foundations of the staircase
and the podium, tall podium again,
of the Temple of Venus Genetrix.
But you can see that only a very small number,
three in fact, of the columns are preserved.
So it is in actually quite ruinous state.
And what you're looking at here is actually not even,
for the most part, the Julian building,
because we know that this building was seriously damaged
in a fire, later, and that it was restored
by the emperor Domitian, in the late first century A.D.,
and then by the emperor Trajan, into the early second century
A.D.
And so what stands today is primarily a later structure.
But we do believe it was based very closely on the original
Julian building, and in that regard is a very
good reflection of what it would have looked like.
This coin over here shows the temple as it was in the time of
Julius Caesar.
We see the altar in the front, the altar;
because the sacrifice always takes place in the front of a
Roman temple.
The temple itself, with its columns that are
parted on this coin, only to show the statue of
Venus Genetrix inside: the cult statue.
The colonnades on either side.
And then if you look closely at the pediment,
you can see that there's sculpture in there,
and we have literary descriptions of what that
sculpture depicted, and we know it was a scene of
Venus rising from the sea: so Venus Genetrix rising from
the sea.
The closest thing probably to it is something like,
for those of you who know it--Botticelli's Primavera
in Florence is probably sort of the idea here for
emerging from the waters, and her depiction in this
particular pediment above.
And we know that there were also scenes of cupids carrying
the arms and armor, probably of Mars.
This is me with a former graduate student of mine and
pointing out-- he wrote a dissertation on the
Forum of Caesar, which was afterwards published
as a book.
But he's pointing out to me here some of the architectural
detail that still survives, that one can see when one
wanders through that forum today.
And you can see the very deep drill work here,
deep drill work that is actually not characteristic of
the time of Julius Caesar, but rather of the time of
Domitian and Trajan.
So probably this decoration belongs to the later renovation
of this particular structure.
This gives you perhaps the best idea of what the temple would
have looked like in the forum: a restored view of the Temple
of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Julius Caesar,
with its inscription telling us that Caesar,
a dictator of Rome, put it up; "fecit,"
as you can see here.
You can see the tall podium.
You can see the façade orientation, although again
there was a staircase on three sides of that podium.
You can see the birth of Venus in the pediment above.
You can see the columns over here of the side,
the colonnade of one--of the left side of the forum,
which would have had statues on bases.
The shops behind.
And most importantly what this restored view shows you is the
relationship between the Temple of Venus Genetrix and Caesar's
Forum, and the Capitolium,
on the top of the Capitoline Hill.
Because when you take away the Victor Emmanuel Monument,
which is there now and which we saw in the earlier image,
you can see that the building that was up on top of the hill
at this particular time was of course the Capitolium,
the Temple of Jupiter OMC.
And I mentioned to you at the time we talked about the Temple
of Jupiter OMC, although the Campidoglio,
as redesigned by Michelangelo, with the Senatorial Palace in
the back, which is where the Temple of
Jupiter OMC was, faces modern Rome.
The ancient temple faced ancient Rome,
faced the Roman Forum, and so you see it facing the
Roman Forum in this restored view.
So I don't think it was coincidental.
The Romans were very careful, as we've learned,
about how they sited their buildings, and they liked to
make references from one building to another.
I don't think it is any coincidence that Caesar chose
this site for his Temple of Venus so that anyone who gazed
at it would also see, out of the corner of their eye,
the Temple of the Capitoline Triad,
on the Capitoline Hill, and that would only enhance
Caesar's stature in the eyes of his contemporaries.
You see now portraits of Mark Antony,
on the right-hand of the screen, a black basalt portrait
of Antony, now in England,
and a portrait of Rome's first emperor,
Octavian Augustus, on the left-hand of the screen,
a fantastic bronze image of him that was part of an equestrian
statue found in the North Sea near Greece.
With regard to Antony and Octavian, after Caesar's
assassination in 44 B.C., it was Mark Antony who rose to
power.
Octavian was only 19 at the time--so your age--and he was
the grandnephew of Caesar.
So he had a familial relationship,
although a fairly distant one, to Caesar: the grandnephew of
Caesar.
And this 19-year-old upstart tried to overthrow Mark Antony,
and he was not successful.
In the wise "If you can't beat them,
join them" way of thinking about life and
the world, Octavian joined,
with Antony, with Mark Antony,
and a man by the name of Lepidus, to form what we know of
as the Second Triumvirate, and that happened in the year
43 B.C.
Once they had formed the Second Triumvirate together,
Octavian and Antony took all of their military forces--
and each of them had a considerable amount--
and they combined them, with the objective of going
after Cassius and Brutus: Cassius and Brutus who you'll
remember had murdered Caesar.
And they were successful at so doing.
They beat and murdered Cassius and Brutus at the Battle of
Philippi, in the year 42 B.C.
A very important battle, the Battle of Philippi in 42
B.C.
Mark Antony, who not only rose to power
after Caesar's assassination, but rose in the life and times
of Cleopatra.
They had entered into--well there's some rumors that this
happened, or began much earlier in time.
But at any rate, Mark Antony takes up with
Cleopatra and he joins her in Egypt and he spends a good deal
of his time in the eastern part of the Empire with his paramour.
Octavian very smartly realized Antony is distracted.
"This is a perfect time for me to try once again to gain
the supreme power that I want.
I don't want to be part of a threesome, I want to rule Rome
completely, myself."
And he defeats Antony and Cleopatra at one of the most
famous battles of all time, the Battle of Actium,
a naval battle which took place off the northwestern coast of
Greece, in 31 B.C.
After that very famous battle, Antony and Cleopatra commit
suicide and Octavian becomes the sole emperor of this newly
emerging super power, and he is appointed as
Augustus, which meant that he had a special kind of majesty,
in the year 27 B.C.
We have additional information about Augustus from Suetonius'
biography of him-- he wrote one of him obviously
as well-- and from Augustus' own account
of his life and of his accomplishments.
I mentioned that Octavian--and that's called the Res Gestae
Divi Augusti-- I mentioned that Octavian took
the title of Augustus in 27 B.C.,
and he was emperor of Rome for a very long time,
from that year 27 until his death in AD 1.4.,
at the age of 76, which was a very ripe old age
to live to, at a time when most
people--women were dying in childbirth at 10 to 20,
and men were dying, for the most part,
in their thirties.
So 76 was a very old age indeed, in ancient times,
and it meant that Augustus was emperor of Rome for a very long
period, as you can see.
Now at his death, Augustus deposited three
documents, besides his will,
with the Vestal Virgins in Rome,
and these included instructions for his funeral;
a kind of state of the union address;
what was the situation in Rome and in the Empire,
at the time of his death, or right before his death?
And then most importantly for us, a résumé
of his acts, a résumé
of all of his accomplishments during his lifetime,
which were meant to be carved on two bronze plaques that were
to be set up in front of his tomb in Rome.
These are the famous Res Gestae Divi Augusti,
and that means the list of things accomplished of the
divine Augustus, because Augustus,
like Caesar before him, was made a god,
was transformed into a god at his death.
And this lists all of his accomplishments at home and
abroad-- the battles that he won,
the cities that he formed-- but most important for us,
it lists dozens and dozens of building projects.
For example, it lists eighty-two temples
that he either restored or built in Rome, in Rome itself.
So it gives you some sense of the magnitude of this man's
building objectives and is very important to us as a compendium
of what he does.
Some of these buildings still survive.
Some of them don't.
But this is a very informative list indeed,
and it shows us that to Augustus, as to Caesar before
him, the building of buildings was
extremely important: the making of buildings not
only to remake Rome as a great city of the ancient world,
but also to leave something for posterity,
and, of course, both of them were successful in
both of those objectives.
Very important for us today are also the words of Suetonius.
Suetonius tells us that Augustus bragged that he--
and I quote--"found Rome a city of brick,
and left Rome a city of marble."
A city of brick, meaning that brick tile that we
saw in Pompeii, he found a Rome that was built
out of that same kind of brick tile that we saw at Pompeii,
but he wanted to transform, he left the city of Rome a city
of marble.
And that's exactly the major thrust of today's lecture:
Augustus builds Rome as a marble city in the model of
ancient Greece, in the model of Athens,
in the Greek part of the world.
It's a rhetorical exaggeration, but we're going to see,
from the two Augustan buildings that I show you today,
that it wasn't far off the mark, that he really did create
a city of marble, on the Tiber,
and he left for posterity that Greek marble city,
a Hellenized city that builds on the Hellenization of Roman
architecture that we've already talked about.
What made Augustus' boast possible was the fact for the
first time in its history a high quality marble was available to
Rome, in close proximity; that is, marble from Italy
itself, as opposed to imported marbles.
We've seen up to this point that the Romans wanted to build
marble buildings; that they created faux marble
walls, the First Style, at Pompeii for example,
and also in Rome.
That they created temples with columns and superstructures that
were made out of tufa, or travertine,
and then they stuccoed those over white,
to make them look like marble, even though they were not
marble.
But that they just didn't have access to marble readily enough
to transform, to actually make these
buildings out of marble itself.
There was some flirtation with it.
They did import a certain amount of Greek marble to use,
for some buildings, but it wasn't available at a
low enough cost to allow the kind of full-scale marble
building that they wanted to do.
What happens in the end of the reign of Caesar and into--
or the dictatorship of Caesar and into the emperorship of
Augustus is that all of a sudden a high quality,
relatively inexpensive marble becomes available.
Because what happens is the Romans begin to exploit,
in the late Caesarian period and into the age of Augustus,
the marble quarries at Luna, on the northwest coast of
Italy.
This is the same town as modern Carrara, the same quarries that
were used centuries later by none other than Michelangelo
himself.
Carrara marble, you all know Carrara marble,
called Luna, the site called Luna in ancient
Roman times.
So Luna or Carrara marble.
I show you a view here of the marble quarries,
or one of the marble quarries, at Luna/Carrara,
what it looks like today.
This is a re-enactment of bringing the marble blocks down
from the mountain for use in construction.
They basically do it the same way today as they probably did
it in ancient Roman times.
And it was fairly easy to get this.
Since it was on the coast, it was fairly easy to load this
marble into boats, bring it down to Ostia,
and then up the Tiber to Rome.
And that began to be done, with great success,
especially in the age of Augustus.
Going to Carrara today is a pleasure.
It's an interesting place to visit,
especially if you go there at the time of the marble
exhibition that they have and the competition that they have
where people make whatever out of Carrara marble and compete
for prizes.
And I show you a view taken during one of these contests
here now on the screen.
And there are some amazing, amazing works of art,
we might call them, that come out of these
competitions.
Here's one of my favorites.
You see over here the Luna marble version of an Italian
Cinquecento.
These Cinquecentos, which were miniscule,
are not--not many of them exist today, although you do see some
antique versions here and there.
But I had one of these once, and you can see a picture of me
in fact here, in front of American Express,
not far from the Spanish Steps, the Piazza di Spagna,
with my Cinquecento.
It was a long time ago.
But you can see how small it is.
I'm actually standing on the front passenger side and popping
up through the sun roof.
But my size there--and I'm about 5'7--compared to the car,
gives you some sense of how small these cars were today.
So the Italians have been very good about this sort of thing
for some time, and continue,
as you well know, to drive,
for the most part, small cars through the city.
And another one of my favorite entries into the competition are
these Luna marble decapitated heads of Juan and Evita
Perón that were put forward in one of these
competitions some years ago.
With regard to transforming Rome into a marble city,
now that Carrara marble was available at a fairly low cost,
compared to the importation of Greek marbles,
Augustus begins to build his marble city.
And I'm going to show you two major commissions of Augustus
today.
The first of these is the Forum of Augustus in Rome,
a forum--or the Forum Augustum in Rome--
that was very much in Augustus' mind from the beginning of his
rise to power.
In fact, it's Suetonius who tells us that the reason that
Augustus built a forum in Rome was because even though there
were already two forums in Rome--
that includes the Roman Forum and the Forum of Julius Caesar--
even though those two existed and were both being used,
that the population--Suetonius tells us the population was
growing by leaps and bounds, as were the need to try
judicial cases, and that the spaces in the
forums--of the Roman Forum, and in the Forum of Julius
Caesar--did not allow for the needs of the populace or for the
needs of these judicial cases, and that they needed to build
another forum.
Well, that's a good story, but the likelihood is it had
pretty much nothing to do with that--
it may have had something to do with that,
but not a lot to do with that--because Augustus had
ulterior motives.
Augustus -- it was at the Battle of Philippi,
that battle of 42 B.C.
when Mark Antony and Octavian joined forces to defeat the
assassins of Julius Caesar.
It was right before that battle that Augustus vowed that if he
won, if he were successful,
that he would build a temple to Mars the Avenger,
Mars Ultor, U-l-t-o-r, Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger,
in gratitude for helping him avenge the death of Julius
Caesar, the murder of Julius Caesar,
the assassination of Julius Caesar.
And so when he was successful, he said, "I will build
that temple."
And that temple needed an environment,
and as we've seen, Romans often built temples
inside complexes, whether it was sanctuaries or
forums, and so he had a good excuse to
build a major forum in Rome, as a domicile for the Temple of
Mars Ultor.
He didn't get around to it for awhile--
again, the Battle of Philippi, 42--but he had a lot of other
things to contend with, namely Mark Antony and
Cleopatra.
It wasn't until after the Battle of Actium,
when he got rid of the two of them, that he had time to build
this Temple to Mars Ultor.
And we see it beginning to go up in 28 B.C.--
so considerably later than the original battle--
28 B.C., and it was dedicated in Rome,
on a very important date, the date of 2 B.C.
So begun in 28 B.C.
and dedicated in 2 B.C., and that's the date that I've
given you on the Monument List, the dedication of the Temple of
Mars Ultor and the Forum of Augustus in 2 B.C.
We see its plan here.
We will see momentarily that it was built in very close
approximation ; in fact, right next to the
Forum of Julius Caesar.
Why?
Because, of course, Augustus wanted to associate
himself with his divine adoptive father Caesar.
So he puts his own forum right next to Caesar's.
We see the Forum of Augustus here.
We can see that it follows in the main, the plan of the Forum
of Julius Caesar.
It is a rectangular space, open to the sky,
with colonnades on either side, with a temple in the center,
pushed up against the back wall, and dominating the space
in front of it.
The only change here is the addition of these hemicycles,
one on either side, looking very much like the
hemicycles that we looked at from the Sanctuary of Fortuna
Primigenia, at Palestrina:
these embracing arms that served to accentuate
architecturally and visually the temple in the center,
and that also served as a place--there are niches on
either side where they could put statuary and the like,
seen through the columns, as you can see here.
The Temple of Mars Ultor itself, again very similar to
temples, early Roman temples that we've
been talking about, using the Etruscan plan:
façade orientation, single staircase,
deep porch, freestanding columns in that porch,
freestanding columns on either side,
but yet, like an Etruscan temple, a flat back wall.
As you can see here, some columns inside,
decorating the cella of the temple, and then a single niche
for the cult statue inside.
And note here also the base--I'll say something about
the statue that stood on that base later.
Here's a Google Earth view of this part of Rome,
showing the connection between.
You can see here the Forum of Julius Caesar as it looks today.
This is the entrance.
We're moving back toward the Capitoline Hill.
These are those three columns that I showed you before,
are still preserved, as well as the columns of the
colonnade, on the left side,
that entered into the shops.
Here's the modern Via dei Fori Imperiali, built by Mussolini.
What Mussolini did was slice the Roman Forum and Julian Forum
from the so-called Imperial Fora, to which they were
originally attached; and any of you who've been in
Rome recently know that this entire area is being excavated.
The plan is--the street is still there now,
but the plan is eventually--we'll see whether
this really happens, because it would be a traffic
nightmare-- but the plan is to take that
Mussolini street down eventually and reunite all of these forums
in some great archaeological park someday.
It would be exciting if that were to happen.
So the modern street.
But initially the Forum of Caesar would have stood exactly
next to the Forum of Augustus.
We see that here, and if you look carefully you
can see the remains of the Temple of Mars Ultor,
as well as a precinct wall that is preserved.
It was a 115-foot precinct wall, protecting the forum from
just the area we were talking about before--
that question about housing for the well-to-do and the less
well-to-do in ancient Rome-- protecting the forum from the
so-called Subura, S-u-b-u-r-a,
which was that area of Rome in which all of those rickety,
wooden tenement houses were located and which were
constantly going up in fires, to protect the temple--because
marble can burn-- to protect the Temple of Mars
Ultor from all of that stuff that was back there in the
Subura.
Here's another view from Google Earth,
taken from the other side, showing the remains of the
Temple of Mars Ultor, pushed up against the back
wall, and then that precinct wall,
that is very well-preserved, snaking its way around,
dividing the forum proper, the sacred space,
from the residential area called the Subura that was
behind.
Here's a view of the precinct wall as it looks from the
outside of the forum today.
There are some additions that were made in later times,
Medieval-looking windows and the like, but for the most part
it's preserved as it was.
You can see we're dealing with ashlar blocks,
made out of peperino stone, p-e-p-e-r-i-n-o.
We've talked about peperino before.
It's a form of tufa, a stone that was used here with
ashlar blocks, for the encircling precinct
wall.
You can see the coloration of those peperino blocks,
grayish/brownish color here.
And you can see the difference between that and the temple,
the remains of the temple, the columns,
the steps of the temple, as well as some other
decoration, and also some of the walls were
made out of Luna or Carrara marble: Luna or Carrara marble
for this temple.
This is a view of the Temple of Mars Ultor as it looks today.
It's in ruinous state, but enough is preserved for us
to get a very good sense of what it originally looked like.
You can see that the podium is tall.
You can see that it's made out of tufa.
You can see that the steps are sheathed in Carrara marble,
brought from those quarries that we discussed before.
You can see that the columns were also made out of solid
Carrara marble.
We see that here.
We see a wall in Carrara marble, and we see the
distinction between that and the peperino walls.
You can also see, in this very good view,
one of the hemicycles on the left-hand side,
and you can see those niches that I mentioned before,
that would have held statuary that you could see through the
columns.
This is a restored view in the Ward-Perkins textbook,
which shows you what the temple would have looked like in
antiquity, when it was in its final form,
and you can see everything we've described:
the tall podium, single staircase,
façade orientation.
You can see also that there was sculpture in the pediment,
and we know something about that.
You can see the columns on either side,
and you can see in the second story--
you can barely make them out but take my word,
those are, instead of columns they are figures of women that
we're going to say something about,
and you can see those again on both sides.
So this gives you a sense of what the temple would've looked
like in its heyday.
The favored capital column type, and capital of the Romans,
the Corinthian, is what is used here.
You can see a preserved capital, and how beautifully
rendered they were: very high quality,
capitals done out of Luna or Carrara marble.
We can see the characteristic triple row of acanthus leaves,
the spiral volutes growing out of those,
the central flower that we see always in the Corinthian order
for the columns that were used for the temple and for most of
the side columns on the first story as well.
But in some cases those columns were replaced with others that
have instead of the spiral volutes growing out of the
acanthus leaves, pegasi, winged horses,
and I show you a detail of one of those pegasi here.
A capital with an animal, replacing the spirals,
is called a zoomorphic capital: zoo, z-o-o;
zoomorphic, z-o-o-m-o-r-p-h-i-c,
zoomorphic capital.
And it's interesting to note that we see similar zoomorphic
capitals in Greece a bit earlier than this structure,
at a gateway that I'm going to show you at a place called
Eleusis-- we'll return to this when we
discuss Roman Greece later in this semester--
and these have, instead of pegasi,
these have bull protomes, the tops of bulls emanating out
of the acanthus leaves.
But I show it to you to make one point,
and that is that it seems very likely that there was some
interesting architectural exchange--
ideas, architects and so on--going on between Athens and
Rome in the late Republican period,
in the time of Julius Caesar and into the age of Augustus,
and it's an issue that we'll return to in the future.
We're going to see that Augustus not only builds his
marble city in order to make it look more like Greece,
more like Athens, and to connect his new Golden
Age with the Golden Age of Periclean Athens,
but we see very specific Greek models being used.
For example, one of these is a frieze from
the Forum of Augustus.
The other is a frieze from one of the three temples on the
Acropolis, in Athens, of the fifth century
B.C., the so-called Erechtheion,
or Erectheum, in the Latinized version,
and one of these is from one and one of these is from the
other.
And I just wondered quickly if any of you want to guess which
is the Roman one and which is the Greek one that it copies?
You can see this alternation of the lotus and palmette leaves
here.
Any quick thoughts?
How many of you think this is the Greek one?
How many of you think this is the Greek one?
This is the Roman one; this is the Roman one at the
top, this is the Greek one down here.
The Greek one down here, more deeply undercut,
which is I think what throws people.
The Roman one, from the Forum of Augustus up
above.
But the important point for us again, that they are looking
back at Greek buildings of the fifth century,
and they are copying what they see.
We see here a model of the Forum of Augustus,
with the Temple of Mars Ultor inside that forum,
with the embracing exedrae or hemicycles on either side.
You can see that the exterior of the structure was quite
plain, just in the way that a Domus
Italica outside was plain, and it was only when you got
inside that you got a real sense of the glory of the
architecture.
So I think you can see well here.
And most interesting for us, I mentioned that these columns
on the temple were Corinthian; the columns on the first story
over here were Corinthian.
But in the second story, on the left and right sides of
the forum, the columns are replaced by
figures of women, by figures of maidens,
and I show you two of them have survived--
two of them are well-preserved.
I show them to you here.
These figures of maidens that replace the columns,
that support the capitals, on top of their heads,
and they flank this shield in the center with the depiction of
a male head.
This is the god Jupiter, a certain guise of the god
Jupiter, Jupiter Ammon,
as you can see him here, and we have information that
tells us that Alexander the Great used to place shields in
the Parthenon in Athens, and elsewhere,
after great military victories, and it is possible that that
sort of thing is being referred to here,
because we know Augustus, like Pompey before him,
had a thing for Alexander and liked to associate himself with
Alexander.
But most important for us is the fact that these maidens have
clear precedents in the Greek world.
The famous Porch of the Maidens on the Athenian Acropolis,
fifth century B.C., the Erechtheion again--
E-r-e-c-h-t-h-e-i-o-n, in the Greek version--
the Erectheion of Athens, fifth century B.C.
Same set of maidens.
We know that these had fallen into disrepair in the age of
Augustus.
Augustus visited Athens three times.
He did not like seeing these in disrepair,
and in fact he had his own architects replace one of them
with a Roman copy, and while they were doing that,
they made plaster casts of these maidens,
they brought those plaster casts back to Rome,
and then in reduced scale they duplicated them for the Forum of
Augustus in Rome.
So appropriations from Greece; appropriations in part because
Augustus liked them, but also I don't think there's
any question that he was trying to draw a relationship between
himself, his new Golden Age,
and the Golden Age of Periclean Athens.
We also have evidence for what the pediment,
the sculpture in the pediment looked like, and I want to turn
to that now.
This is a relief that dates to a slightly later period that
purports to represent the pediment of the Temple of Mars
Ultor.
And I show it to you here, and we can tell from this
exactly what the sculptural display was all about in the
pediment of this temple.
We see here in the center, not surprisingly,
Mars Ultor himself; Mars Ultor depicted with a bare
chest.
Next to him, to his right,
to our left, we see a figure of a woman.
This is Venus, and Venus, as you can see,
has something on her left shoulder.
It is a Cupid.
So Venus with Cupid, Venus the consort of Mars.
And then over here a personification that we believe
depicts Fortuna: Fortuna, the goddess of
Fortune, who brought fortune to Augustus in his battle.
And then over here, a seated figure of Roma,
with her arms and armor.
Keep this figure in your mind, because I'm going to show you
another seated Roma very soon.
And then over here, a reclining figure of the Tiber
River, the river on which Rome was built.
Over here, a seated figure we believe is Romulus,
the founder of Rome, on the Palatine Hill.
And over here a reclining personification of the Palatine.
So, most important, that the building honored,
of course, Mars Ultor, and that Mars Ultor was
depicted in the pediment.
There was also a cult statue inside the Temple of Mars,
and we believe we know what that looked like as well,
because we believe we have a copy of it in a relief from
Algiers that is still preserved, that depicts Mars,
in the center, this Mars Ultor again,
this time the warlike Mars Ultor, because you can see he's
wearing his breastplate and his helmet.
His consort, Venus, is once again by his
side.
Venus is leaning on a pedestal.
She's very seductive.
Her drapery is falling off her shoulder, as you can see,
as she looks toward Mars.
And then Cupid down here, offering her a sword in a
sheath, probably Mars' own sword.
And then over here a figure that's very controversial,
a youthful looking figure with a bare chest,
and you can see a full cap of hair,
and we think that he is actually the divinized Julius
Caesar, very botoxed compared to
what--he's rejuvenated compared to what he looked like in that
green diabase portrait that I showed you before:
a very youthful, divine Caesar,
which shows you what happens to people in Roman times when they
were divinized.
They were able to shed a fair number of years and were
depicted in much younger versions in their divinized
state.
So this probably a reflection.
As you can see, the figures stand on bases,
and figures that stand on bases in Roman relief sculpture are
usually meant to be statues, and we believe that this is
again a rendition of what that triple set of statues would have
looked like inside the temple.
To return to the plan quickly, just to make the point that the
sculptural program-- we're concerned here primarily
with architecture-- but the sculptural program was
very complicated, but very interesting,
and the figures were very carefully aligned with one
another to get the message across.
So as you looked at the temple, you would have seen Mars Ultor
in the center of the pediment.
If you were allowed to walk into the temple,
which usually only the priests could do,
you would see the cult statue with Mars Ultor in the center
there.
There was an equestrian statue that was put up,
of Augustus in 2 B.C., when he was given the title
Pater Patriae, the father of his country.
And then all along the colonnades there would've been
statuary, including an image of Aeneas on
this side, Romulus on this side,
and the so-called summi viri,
the great men of Rome, both Augustus' colleagues and
also his rivals, in their portraits on either
side: a kind of giant picture gallery,
a giant portrait gallery of Rome, of the great men of Rome,
of the greatest men of Rome, namely Augustus himself,
and of his ancestry, both divine and mythological,
via Aeneas and also Venus.
The second marble building that I want to show you today is the
famous Altar of Augustan Peace, the Ara Pacis Augustae,
which is one of, if not my most favorite
building and monument in Rome, and one that I've had a
personal obsession with my entire scholarly life.
I've written a lot on this monument and have a lot of
thoughts, which have changed significantly over the years,
about this very important structure.
We know about it--Augustus tells us about the Altar of
Augustan Peace himself in his Res Gestae.
He tells us on his return--and I'm quoting Augustus here,
from the RG--on his return to Rome from Spain and
Gaul; he had gone to Spain and Gaul,
which were the western part of the Empire, in order to make
some diplomatic treaties.
"On my return to Rome from Spain and Gaul,
after successfully restoring law and order to the provinces,
the Senate decided" (and this happened in 13 B.C.)
"to consecrate the Ara Pacis Augustae,
on the Campus Martius" (the so-called Field of Mars,
an area of Rome) "in honor of my return,
at which officials, priests and Vestal Virgins
should offer an annual sacrifice."
We believe that the monument being referred to here is the
one that you see now before you, The Ara Pacis Augustae,
made entirely of Luna or Carrara marble,
solid Luna or Carrara marble, and even more of a marble
building, in a sense, than the temple and
forum that we've looked at thus far.
It is a marble building that we believe that we know.
We know its dates quite specifically.
We know that it was consecrated on the 4^(th) of July--an easy
date to remember, for all of us--the 4^(th) of
July in 13 B.C.
was when it was consecrated, and it was completed and
dedicated on the 30^(th) of January in 9 B.C.;
the 30^(th) of January just happened to be the birthday of
Augustus' wife, Livia.
No coincidence there.
She was obviously lobbying for that.
So on her birthday, 30^(th) of January in 9 B.C.,
this structure is dedicated.
We know that it--there's a lot of controversy as to exactly
what event is referred to on this monument,
because we'll see that there is a procession that refers to some
historical event.
We will also see that the monument is covered with all
kinds of sculptural decoration, including flowering acanthus
plants, including mythological and
legendary scenes, including historical scenes.
And trying to decipher the web of all these and their
relationship to one another is fairly complex.
What's important to us as we look at this is--
and I want to show you here, from Ward-Perkins,
a plan and an axonometric view, which will give us a very good
sense of what this altar was all about.
We can see that the altar proper was located in the center
of the structure.
It's a kind of u-shaped altar, which goes back to Greek
precedents.
The most famous u-shaped altar of the Hellenistic period,
some of you may know it, the Altar of Zeus at Pergamon,
the great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon,
which you see in the uppermost part,
now in Berlin.
But these u-shaped altars were used in Greece,
and you can see that same u-shaped form here,
used for the altar.
The altar proper, where the sacrifice was
actually made, is located inside this
precinct, which is open to the sky,
and most importantly has double doors: a doorway on the eastern
side of the monument and a doorway on the western side of
the monument.
Even though there are two doors, you note that there is
only a single staircase on the western side.
So the Romans, despite the fact that they've
given it a dual focus by putting two doors, they still give it a
single focus by a single staircase.
So facadism of Roman architecture reigned supreme,
as you can see here.
The fact that there were double doorways -- very significant,
and we've tried to sort out why that might be.
There are two possible precedents or two possible
references that are being made here.
One, to a Greek altar, a Greek fifth-century B.C.
altar, which shouldn't surprise us since we've seen that
Augustus is looking back at the fifth century B.C.
in Greece and mining it for architectural ideas and
associations.
We see here what is a restored view of the Altar of the Twelve
Gods, or the Altar of Pity,
that was located in the Greek marketplace,
in Athens, the Athenian Agora, the marketplace in Athens,
fifth century B.C.
You can see that it consisted of an altar in the center,
with a precinct wall, with double doorways,
one on either side here, and with relief sculpture.
So it looks like that might well be an important model,
again not surprisingly since it dates to the fifth century.
But also important, and I show you an image of it
on a Roman coin here, is the so-called Shrine of
Janus--the two-headed god, J-a-n-u-s, the Shrine of Janus,
which we know is located in the Roman Forum.
And tradition had it that when the doors--because it had double
doors; well it had two sides because
he was a two-headed god.
So two sides, both with doors,
both with double doors, and that when those double
doors were closed, it signaled that peace reigned
throughout the Empire.
And we know in the Res Gestae, Augustus tells us
that he closed the doors of the Shrine of Janus,
he brags, three times during his reign.
So it is very likely that the double doors on the Shrine of
Janus are referred to, not surprisingly,
in an altar that was put up to peace,
to the peace that Augustus brought to Rome through his
various military victories and also through his diplomatic
conquests, his diplomatic treaties like
the one that he signed in Spain and Gaul.
I want to take you quickly through the monument--
and keep in mind always that it's made out of Luna or Carrara
marble-- to show you some of the--this
is not a course in sculpture, so I'm not going to go into the
sculpture in any detail, but I want you to be aware of
it because some of the motifs are important in our
understanding also of architecture.
We see here two views of the altar.
You see these winged lion griffins that are very popular
motifs in the Augustan period, as well as the spiraling
acanthus plant that was also popular in Augustan times.
A figural frieze that represents the Vestal Virgins
that were referred to as those to which offerings are--
the sacrifice is taking place in part in honor of them.
But we see here a sacrifice itself where the animal victims
are being brought in for slaughter.
We also see if we look at--we're now inside the
monument, we've looked at the altar proper.
If we look at the precinct wall, the inside of the precinct
wall, we see that is very
well-preserved, and we see it is zoned,
essentially two zones, with slats, all done in Carrara
marble, slats down below that look like
either a wooden wall or perhaps a fence of some sort.
Then above, also depicted in Carrara marble,
these great garlanded swags that you see hanging from
pilasters, but also from the skulls of
bulls--I'll show you a detail in a moment where you'll see those
skulls better-- the skulls of the bulls that
have been sacrificed on this altar.
And then above the swags you can see these libation dishes.
And what has been speculated--and I think it's
ingenious on the part of the scholars who first came up with
this-- that what they think is being
represented here is actually a copy or a rendition of the
wooden, the temporary wooden altar that
would've stood on this site.
Because remember they're consecrating it already in 13
B.C., but the structure itself isn't
built until 9, and they have to keep offering
this annual sacrifice.
So they have to offer it somewhere.
So the suggestion is they made a makeshift wooden altar,
that looked like this, with actual wooden slats,
wooden poles, real garlands and so on,
and that what they've done on the altar is to create a
rendition of that on the interior precinct wall of the
Ara Pacis.
A detail of these garlands.
Here you can see the bull skulls or bucrania
extremely well, and I thought you'd be
interested to see, and perhaps not surprised,
that we can see very close renditions of this also in
painting of the time.
This painting on the left comes from the House of Livia in Rome.
We didn't look at it; we looked at the Villa of Livia
at Primaporta, and we looked at Augustus'
house, but when we did that I told you Livia had her own house
across the street from Augustus',
and this painting is from that.
It's clearly a Second Style wall, residual First Style:
done in paint; projecting columns;
garlands hanging from those columns, garlands interlaced
with ribbons, just as you see here.
And when this was painted, which it was in antiquity,
it would've looked very similar to what you see on the other
side of the screen.
So interesting inter-relationships between
decoration in sculpture and architecture,
and decoration in paint.
The axonometric view again shows you--
here's that inner precinct that we've just described--
that the outside had a series of panels,
square panels, four of them on the short sides
and then-- or on the front sides,
where the doors are, flanking the doors -- and then
on the other sides, the north and south, a frieze.
And I show you a detail of that frieze;
a frieze, the subject matter of which is somewhat controversial.
I'm not going to go into that here today.
Suffice it to say though that Augustus,
senators, magistrates, members of the priesthood,
members of the imperial family, all take part in these
processions that are located on the north and south.
Those processions rest on these acanthus plants down below,
which when you think of it has absolutely nothing to do with
reality, because how could a procession
of human figures be supported by acanthus plants below?
Impossible, and yet it is--some of that fantasy thinking that we
saw in Third Style Roman painting,
and I show you--I remind you of a detail of Garden Room Q over
here, where we saw some of that
fanciful Third Style painting, seems to come into play here.
In fact, the delicate acanthus leaves, absolutely beautifully
rendered in the Ara Pacis.
You see the same sort of thing in the black background of the
Garden Room Q.
So again, interesting correspondences between painting
and architectural decoration.
The frieze on the south side has a portrait of Augustus
himself.
You can see him here veiled, taking part in this procession,
as well as members of the imperial family,
including children.
Here's a little boy in a toga, and here's a little boy who's
very controversial in some kind of a foreign costume.
And I mentioned that I've written a lot on this,
and in my most recent article on this subject I talked in
particular about these children in foreign dress as possibly
children who were what we call "pledges of empire,"
or hostage guests, that belonged--that were
children of very important rulers of other parts of the
world who were brought to Rome to live with the emperor in his
house, in the palace,
to be trained, with the objective of
eventually sending them back to their native lands to serve as
rulers.
It was Augustus' way of creating a kind of hegemonic
empire that he controlled, by getting all of these people
on his side and then placing those friends of Rome into
important positions around the world,
and I think that's referred to in these scenes.
Again, I'm not going go in any detail into the mythological
scenes, but they are scenes like Roma,
seated on a pile of arms and armor,
just as we saw her in the pediment of the Temple of Mars
Ultor.
And here a scene that seems to have shown Mars overseeing
Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf.
So references to Rome's historic and also legendary and
mythological past clearly in this monument.
Perhaps most interesting to all of us from the point of view of
architecture is the original location of this monument in
relationship to Augustus' tomb, and also what has been
happening there in recent years, under the direction of the
famous American architect Richard Meier.
I show you a view from Google Earth,
an aerial view, showing the Mausoleum of
Augustus, this large round tomb that we
will look at on Thursday, showing a piazza around it,
and showing, from the air,
the Richard Meier Museum that has been built to enclose the
Ara Pacis.
This was not--right near the Tiber River--this was not the
original location of the Ara Pacis, which was up over here.
It ended up beneath a palace in the Renaissance period,
and at that time some pieces of it were taken apart and made
their way to museums in Rome, but also to museums as far away
as Paris.
And it is actually to Mussolini that we can be grateful for
bringing all of those pieces back together and reconstructing
the Ara Pacis-- couldn't reconstruct it,
because that palace is still there now--
but reconstructing it right on the Tiber River,
next to the Mausoleum of Augustus, and then having this
whole piazza redesigned as the piazza honoring Augustus:
the Piazza Augusto Imperatore honoring Augustus,
but also honoring Mussolini, because there's a major
inscription to Mussolini, as well as buildings very much
in the so-called Fascist style.
We see the Meier building again here.
And I show you the travertine--because Meier was
careful to use at least some travertine in this
structure--the travertine base; although this was not his,
this actually belongs to an original precinct that was
located before, that was done by Mussolini's
architect, with the entire text of the
Res Gestae.
Fortunately Meier kept that and kept that wall as part of his
own building.
Here you see one of the Fascist structures in the area,
built by Mussolini, and then the famous Alfredo
Ristorante.
I'm not actually recommending it, but it's well known;
there are better restaurants to eat in Rome,
but because it has a certain historical caché,
at any rate I just mention to you that it's there.
This is the interesting inscription that makes reference
to Mussolini.
And note the flying victory figure,
which we'll see decorates often Roman arches,
carrying this bundle of twigs and rods that the Romans,
the Roman bodyguards of the emperor used to carry,
these so-called fasces.
If you ever wondered where the word Fascism comes from,
it comes from the Roman fasces.
Mussolini's name, you can see part of it here,
M-U-S-S-O-L; part of it scratched out after
his death and discredit in the '30s.
And then ultimately, what's been interesting to me
is I've watched this inscription and photographed it year after
year, whenever I'm there.
I've noticed recently that he's having--
there's something of a revival -- and he is,
Mussolini is having something of a revival in Italy,
and there's a good deal of interest in him,
and they have filled his name -- when they redid the museum
they also re-filled in his name, as you can see here.
I just wanted to make a point about the siting of the Ara
Pacis and its relationship to the Mausoleum of Augustus.
Remember, it's no longer--its original location--now it's over
here, right next to the Mausoleum on the Tiber.
That was not its original location.
It was located over here, along the ancient Via Flaminia,
the street that Augustus took when he returned from Spain and
Gaul.
It was put up right here, and it had in front of it an
obelisk that was brought from Egypt,
and that obelisk was part of a sundial that was orchestrated
carefully enough so that the shadow from the sundial would
fall exactly on the center of the Ara Pacis,
on Augustus' birthday.
That's how carefully orchestrated it was,
and the fact that there is an Egyptian obelisk,
and there's mention in the inscription on that obelisk of
the victory over Cleopatra and Antony,
at the Battle of Actium, and that the Ara Pacis
commemorates his diplomatic treaties in the western part of
the Empire, in France and Spain,
seems to me to be a reference to the fact that Augustus was
victorious in all parts of the Roman Empire:
the western as well as the eastern part of the Empire,
referenced here.
And then close proximity to the Mausoleum of Augustus.
Because we've already talked about the fact that in the minds
of the Romans, victory in battle and victory
over death were essentially synonymous;
both of them referred to here.
I'm not implying that this was planned as a complex.
The Mausoleum, as we'll see on Thursday,
dates to 28 to 23.
It was built much earlier than the Altar of 13 to 9.
But I think when they decided to add the Ara Pacis to this
complex, there was a great deal of
thought that was given to siting it in relationship to the tomb,
and to thinking about the whole as a complex,
at least at that particular juncture.
And I show you two more restored views,
where you can see the obelisk and the way in which it cast--
it served as a sundial--cast a shadow toward the Ara Pacis.
And then, even though this is a little bit out of focus,
the relationship of the very large tomb to the obelisk and
ultimately to the Ara Pacis.
So an area that was not planned as a complex but grew into one.
An image of Mussolini, a wonderful photograph of
Mussolini, visiting the Ara Pacis after it
was restored and dedicated and placed in a complex designed by
his architect.
And then an image down here of Richard Meier,
celebrating the cleaning and placement of the Ara Pacis
inside the new museum designed by him.
And in just a few minutes I'd like to run through a series of
slides.
Because I think a particularly interesting issue for all of us,
and one that I hope that we will debate in the online forum,
is the fact that the building by Richard Meier,
this museum, which has been praised and
maligned both, this museum is the first modern
building that has been put up in the central core of Rome,
since the time of Mussolini, since Mussolini redesigned the
Piazza Augusto Imperatore and added some other buildings to
the landscape of Rome.
There are other--there are buildings by major architects,
including Meier himself.
Meier built a Jubilee Church a few years--a number of years
ago, and Renzo Piano, and other architects have been
working in Rome.
But they are not--their buildings are located on the
outskirts, the sort of suburbs of the city, and not in the city
itself.
This is the only new building that has been added to the city.
And you can see, from this particular view,
why some people think of it as a kind of white elephant that
really doesn't fit the tenor of the city.
And, in fact, when it first opened in 2006--
and I was there not long after, and taking some photographs of
some pictures of the building that were outside that had
been-- that graffiti had been added
to, and they call it the Meier "criminale."
And over here, this is my favorite,
it says: "meglio gli architetti di secoli fa,"
meaning those architects of the past were a lot better than
Meier, is the message here.
So there are many people who do not like this building,
and I think a case can be made with regard to the outside.
There is a nod to ancient Rome with the travertine wall that is
outside and continues inside.
But it's typical Meier white glass,
and a lot of people--I don't mind that sort of thing,
but a lot of people feel that it doesn't really suit the
environment with the two Baroque churches right across the way,
and so on and so forth.
So I think a case can be made for the exterior.
But when you enter into the museum,
and pay your fee, and then go into the door,
and into the Ara Pacis itself, I have to say--
and past the plaster casts of Augustus and his family,
that you can see lined up against the travertine wall--
when you confront the building itself,
in its new interior, I have to say I'm very
impressed and very moved by this interior.
You've got the sort of egg crate ceiling and these
wonderful louvered windows that allow you to see not only
Mussolini's Fascist buildings next door,
but also the Mausoleum of Augustus,
that it really--and the light is superb,
and it really does give you a chance to see this altar in a
way that it hasn't been seen before.
And especially at night, I enjoy seeing it at night,
because as you go by it they have it lighted up.
As you drive by--one of the greatest things to do in Rome,
by the way, is late at night, when all the traffic has died
down, either by car or Vespa or
whatever, just get around the city,
go from one part of the city to another,
which you can zip around late at night.
And driving along Lungotevere, the street along the Tiber
River, and seeing the altar,
the Ara Pacis Augustae lighted up inside the new Meier Museum,
like a jewel in a jewel box, I can't help but think Augustus
is smiling somewhere to think that everything he did to try to
preserve his memory for posterity has been done,
and has been helped to a great extent by the great American
architect, Richard Meier.
Thank you.