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B1 Intermediate US 8774 Folder Collection
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Prof: Good morning all.
Today's lecture I have called, as you can see,
"The Mother of All Forums: Civic Architecture in Rome
Under Trajan."
And I think you'll see what I mean when we look both at a
Trajanic bath building, and also the Forum of Trajan in
Rome, what I mean by 'Mother of all
Forums.'
These were gargantuan buildings, bigger than anything
that we have seen before, and interesting in all kinds of
ways.
We left off with Nerva, with the emperor Nerva.
And you'll recall that Nerva was old, and in fact also
relatively sickly, when he became emperor of Rome.
You'll also remember--and I remind you of his portrait on
the left-hand side of the screen--
you'll also recall that he was a member of the Senate,
and that he was chosen by the Senate,
one of their own, to become emperor of Rome,
the first emperor to come from the senatorial ranks in the
history of Rome, and he was very popular with
the Senate.
But Nerva recognized quite early on that,
although he was popular with the Senate and with the
aristocracy, he was not a favorite of the
army, and he realized that was not a good position to be in,
and so he wisely decided, very early on,
that he would select the most popular military man and the
most highly successful military man in Rome,
a man by the name of Trajan, as his heir.
And so Nerva adopts Trajan--and you see Trajan's portrait on the
right-hand side of the screen-- Nerva adopts Trajan in 97 A.D.,
so that in 98, when Nerva dies--because he
dies after only sixteen months in office--
when Nerva dies, Trajan succeeds him without
contest.
Trajan was an extraordinary emperor for Rome.
There are a number of important points about Trajan that should
be made that have an impact on our understanding and analysis
of his architecture.
One of those is he's the first Roman emperor to be born outside
of Italy.
He was born in Spain, the first emperor born in
Spain.
That's not to say that Spain was the boondocks,
by any stretch of the imagination.
Spain had already been colonized by Rome and was very
highly developed with regard to its civilization.
He also came to power as a relatively young man.
He was only 45 years of age--a couple of years younger than
Obama-- and consequently he was in--and
he was in very good physical shape,
and so he had the physical wherewithal to be the kind of
energetic emperor that Rome needed at this particular point.
He undertook many military campaigns,
and very successfully, and he was the emperor that
extended Rome to its furthest reaches,
to its greatest borders, to its most extensive borders,
during his reign.
And actually these were borders that were never gone beyond.
After this point, we'll see that the emperor
Hadrian consolidates the extent of the Empire,
as reached by Trajan, and no one ever takes it beyond
that.
So this is going to be the furthest extent of the Empire
that we'll see in the course of the semester.
And he was also extremely wise when it came to his choice of
the kinds of buildings that he wanted to put up,
because he followed in the footsteps of Vespasian and
Titus, by favoring major public
architecture in Rome, and by eschewing private
architecture.
He wanted, above all, to disassociate himself from
Nero, and from Domitian, who had favored palatial
architecture, as you'll recall.
And so he builds public architecture in Rome,
and allies himself in this regard to such earlier emperors
as Augustus and as Claudius and as the Flavian dynasts,
and we're going to see that in his building projects today.
Like so many other emperors, when he first came to power,
he looked around to see which buildings had fallen into
disrepair, and he decided to restore as
many of those as he could.
And he chose very carefully.
Again, he obviously did not choose buildings of Nero,
many of which had already been destroyed,
in any case, but rather looked back further,
in fact, dug deep into the Republic,
a time, a simpler time in many respects,
and a time prior to the shenanigans of the monarchically
minded emperors like Nero and Domitian,
and he restored buildings from the Republic and from the
Augustan period.
And he looked back, for example,
to the Forum of Caesar in Rome, the Forum Iulium,
which you all know well, and we've talked about it
before, and I'm not going to discuss it in any detail today.
Just to remind you that it began to be restored--
that is, the Forum of Julius Caesar--
under Domitian, and that that restoration was
completed by Trajan at some point during his reign,
between 98 and 117 A.D.
And I remind you of that here.
You'll recall its location, right next to the Victor
Emmanuel Monument in Rome.
You'll remember that even though it was restored by
Domitian and Trajan, it has fallen on hard times.
And if you look at the Temple of Venus Genetrix,
you see that all that survives, besides the podium and the
staircase, are three columns from that
restored version, by Trajan.
You see the same three columns over here,
and then you'll recall the great open space,
with colonnades on either side, and then the market area,
the shops or tabernae on the left.
I showed you this view as well, pointing out one of the
architectural blocks that belonged to the restored
building, the building under Trajan.
And you can see that Trajan continues this interest in
ornamentation that was characteristic of the Flavian
period: very ornamental architectural decoration,
very deeply carved, with a strong contrast between
light and dark.
So he does continue this Flavian interest in very
elaborate architectural decoration.
You'll remember that the Temple of Venus Genetrix,
in the Forum of Julius Caesar, had a pediment that had in the
center of that pediment a scene depicting Venus rising from the
sea.
And there is other Venus imagery, and I show you a
detail-- and it's on your Monument
List--I show you a detail of part of a frieze that depicts
cupids-- chubby, winged babies,
as you can see here, cupids--who are carrying the
arms--you can see one of them with a sword sheath over here--
they are carrying the arms and armor of Mars:
Mars, of course, the consort of
Venus, and Mars making reference also to military victory.
This frieze, as far as we can tell,
does belong to the Trajanic renovation of the building,
but it probably does look back to an earlier Julian frieze that
decorated the original temple in Rome.
And I use that restoration of the Temple of Venus Genetrix,
in the Forum of Julius Caesar, as an example of the kind of
restoration work that Trajan embarked on,
at the beginning of his principate.
But much more important to us today are two buildings,
the first a bath, and the second a forum,
that are examples of the devotion that Trajan had to
public architecture during his reign.
And I show you a view here, in fact, a plan of the
so-called Baths of Trajan in Rome that were dedicated in A.D.
109.
As you can see from the Monument List,
we know the architect in this particular case.
It is Apollodorus of Damascus.
And his name says a lot about him: Apollodorus from Damascus,
modern Syria.
So it's very interesting.
We have an emperor from Spain and an architect from Syria,
who worked together.
This is a sign that things are beginning to change in the Roman
Empire, as the Romans--as Trajan extends those borders even
further.
It brings in even more multifaceted civilizations
around the world, and talent begins to pour into
Rome from all of those places.
Apollodorus of Damascus, as we'll see today,
was an extraordinary architect, right up there with Severus and
Celer, and with Rabirius:
in fact, one could argue even the equal of Rabirius.
And what's particularly interesting is that Apollodorus
of Damascus, like Severus and Celer before
him, appears to have been, above all, a great engineer.
He actually accompanied Trajan on Trajan's military campaigns,
and served as Trajan's military architect.
So his first commissions were building bridges--
I'm going to show you a reference to one today--
building bridges, or building forts and camps on
Trajan's military campaigns, and then using that expertise,
ingratiating himself with the emperor,
who sees that he is enormously talented--
because Trajan participated in these campaigns himself--
seeing how talented he was, and then putting him in charge
of his building projects in Rome,
which is really quite interesting.
And so these projects are not only aesthetically pleasing and
fascinating, but also show extraordinary
engineering skill on the part of the major designer,
namely Apollodorus of Damascus.
Now these Baths of Trajan are very interesting in all kinds of
ways.
You can already see, by looking at the plan,
their location.
They are located on the Esquiline Hill and part of the
Oppian Hill, which I don't think I've mentioned
before--O-p-p-i-a-n, the smaller Oppian Hill.
And the Baths of Titus--well let me remind you first that the
Domus Aurea of Nero was built, in part, on the Esquiline Hill.
And you'll recall the so-called Esquiline Wing,
which is the one wing of Nero's Domus Aurea that is still
preserved underground.
You'll recall that after Nero's damnatio memoriae,
and the coming to power of the Flavian dynasty,
that Vespasian and Titus, and even Domitian,
razed to the ground Nero's buildings--
Vespasian did that--and then he and Titus and Domitian built new
buildings, on top of those,
and chose to make those buildings the kind of public
buildings that the citizenry as a whole would enjoy;
from the Colosseum and amphitheater to the Baths of
Titus.
And you see again the Baths of Titus here, located right again
on top of this area that originally belonged to Nero's
Domus Aurea.
Trajan follows suit.
He not only is interested in public architecture,
like Vespasian and Titus before him,
but he follows their lead in building these buildings on top
of earlier structures, now destroyed, of Nero.
So it's again this same message, giving back to the
people the land that Nero had taken illegally from Rome during
his reign.
The Baths of Trajan are based, in large part,
on the plan of the Baths of Titus, with some additions.
But you can see the extraordinary difference in
scale.
The Baths of Titus were not small, and yet the Baths of
Trajan are at least three, if not four or more,
times the size of the Baths of Titus.
So this tells us something again about the grandiosity of
the vision of Trajan, about the funds that he had at
his disposal, and he got those funds,
in large part, because of all these military
victories in which he took all kinds of spoils and booty,
which he used to fund his building campaigns in Rome.
And it also tells us something about his ambitions.
Now I don't want you to get the impression that we never had big
buildings before.
You can think back way to the beginning of the semester when
we talked about Julius Caesar and his architecture,
and his bragging that he had built a--
or one of the authors of that period tells us that Julius
Caesar had built a Temple to Mars,
the biggest in the world.
So in its own day it was, supposedly, the biggest in the
world.
But we're getting even more ambitious vis-à-vis
scale.
And I think--perhaps again I'm psychoanalyzing Trajan too
much-- but I think the fact that this
is a man who had the ambitions that he did,
to extend the Empire to its furthest reaches,
seems to be in keeping with the kind of man who would want to
make the buildings in Rome, that he built,
a kind of microcosm of that hugely expanded Empire.
With regard to the plan of the baths,
you will see that it follows the so-called Imperial Bath type
that was initiated by the Baths of Titus,
at least with regard to baths that are still preserved.
I mentioned to you, when we talked about the Baths
of Titus, there may have been an earlier
bath of Nero that actually followed this same Imperial Bath
form.
But we're not absolutely sure about its plan,
that is, the Neronian Baths.
They existed, but we're not absolutely sure
about their plan.
But if we look back at the Baths of Titus,
you'll remember that what made them distinctive,
and what made them differ from the earlier Stabian Baths or
Forum Baths at Pompeii, was the way in which they
placed the bathing block in the center,
rather than to the side; that they arranged the main
rooms--the tepidarium, the frigidarium and the
caldaria, in this case--in axial
relationship to one another.
And then all the other rooms of the bath were displayed around
those, in a symmetrical way.
So axiality and symmetry reigned supreme.
And then otherwise we saw here the rest of the precinct,
with an elaborate entranceway over here.
We see roughly the same in the Baths of Trajan,
in that again the bathing block is located right at the center
of the structure, and the main rooms are aligned
with one another axially.
If you look up to where it says Baths of Trajan that at the
northern end is the entrance into the baths.
You enter from there, into N, which is a
natatio or swimming pool; a piscina.
And then you can see that is surrounded by columns.
On axis with the swimming pool is the frigidarium,
at F, and you can see, just like that of the Baths of
Titus, it is a groin-vaulted room:
a triple groin vaulted room, as you can see by the three x's
over the rectangular area.
It has a kind of an apse or exedra at the uppermost part,
through which one comes from the natatio into the
frigidarium, and you can see that is
screened by columns.
Then from there into the fairly simple,
rectangularly shaped tepidarium,
that serves more as a kind of passageway from the
frigidarium, into C, which of course is the
caldarium, or the warmest room,
the sauna of the baths.
That also has a rectangular shape, but with these radiating
alcoves, radiating alcoves that we're going to see are screened
by columns.
And they are, of course, facing the southern
end where the sun is, and that would,
of course, help to heat the caldarium as well.
And then what we see though with regard to the Baths of
Trajan, that make them differ from the
Baths of Titus, and are part of this evolution
of Imperial Bath architecture in Rome,
is the fact that the bathing block is placed in this very
large rectangular precinct.
And this large rectangular precinct has a series of rooms
around it, as you can see, real rooms, and rooms that take
all kinds of shapes.
Many of them are these hemicycle type shapes,
screened with columns from the larger central space,
but some of them also look like the tabernae that we've
become used to in plan.
We see all of those there, and these were used,
as far as we can determine, as meeting halls,
lecture halls, Greek and Latin libraries.
So there's this extension of the bath,
from being just a place where you went for wellness
essentially, to bathe and to relax and to
have social interaction with your friends.
They are adding an intellectual element to the bath buildings,
so that you can also go there if you want to read--
if you want to go to the library and read Greek books,
read Latin books--go to lectures, go to seminars,
have conversations, intellectual conversations,
are also beginning to happen here.
So the bath becomes even more of a mecca for people who are
interested in intellectual life, as well as bathing and social
life, which is a very important
development culturally for the Romans.
Note here also this great hemicycle,
down here, which is part of the bath building --
a hemicycle that had seats on it, which probably served for
performances of whatever kind, that would have taken place
here.
So that's another interesting addition to the bathing scene,
and should you remind you of the kind of hemicycles that we
saw, for example,
in the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina,
or the Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli,
where they also had those performance areas.
So bringing in some of those elements from sanctuary design,
into bath design, in the Baths of Trajan in Rome.
The Baths of Trajan, some parts of them still exist,
but scattered, and in fact they are located
now in a kind of a pleasant garden area,
as you can see here.
This is a Google Earth view that shows you their proximity
to the Colosseum; we see the edge of the
Colosseum over here.
So the Esquiline Hill, in large part.
And you can just barely make out here--
if you look, see this curved wall,
down here, that curved wall is in fact
that hemicycle with the-- for the theatrical performances
that I showed you, just before.
And that is actually the entrance -- for anyone going to
Rome over break, that's actually the entrance to
the Domus Aurea.
If it's open--it periodically closes, sometimes,
if things are falling down--but if it's open,
that's how one gets there.
And over here you can actually see this is the--
I may have shown this to you before--
but this is actually the oculus of the octagonal
room of Nero's Domus Aurea.
You can see it, if you wander through this
park, you can see it from above,
with a grate on top of it, as well as down below,
if you visit the palace itself.
And then up here, you can see another--
just right up above my finger--you can see another
curved wall, and there's another one
somewhere down here, that are part of those curved
rooms, those hemicycle-shaped rooms,
that are these lecture halls and meeting halls and so on.
And actually that one, the one that's up here,
actually has niches in the wall, with shelves,
which indicates to us that that was used as one of the
libraries.
The scrolls would have been placed on those shelves,
and then have cupboards in front of them.
So one can see remains--it's made out of concrete,
faced with brick--one can see remains on the top of that hill.
But a model over here gives you a better sense of what it looked
like in antiquity.
We're again looking at that large hemicycle that served,
with its seats that served for performances here.
We're looking at the outer precinct wall.
We can see the semi-domes of some of the hemicycles here.
And we can also see the bathing block;
at the uppermost part, the entranceway;
the courtyard, surrounded by columns,
which is where the pool or natatio was located.
The covered area here was the frigidarium;
then the tepidarium.
The caldarium is here, and here you can see those
radiating alcoves, with columns,
that opened them up for vistas and the like,
as well as to the warmth of the sun.
So an incredible bathing establishment,
and one that has taken us a step further in the evolution of
imperial bath architecture in Rome,
and will serve as the major model for the two most famous
and much better preserved baths in Rome,
and that is the Baths of Caracalla and the Baths of
Diocletian, which we'll look at later in
the semester.
But I'd like to turn from the Trajanic baths to unquestionably
the most important public building that was commissioned
by Trajan during his reign, and I can't overemphasize
enough the importance of this building in the history of Roman
architecture.
And we're going to see that it is two part, in the sense that
it has--it is a forum, it has the forum proper,
and it also has markets appended to it.
They are done in a different architectural style,
and herald something very important;
a very important development in Roman architecture that's going
to be carried further by Trajan's successors.
What we're looking at here is a spectacular aerial view of the
part of Rome in which the Forum of Trajan finds itself.
We are looking at buildings that we have looked at before;
so we can get our bearings.
This is, of course, the wedding cake of Victor
Emmanuel, over here.
You can see a part of the oval piazza, designed by
Michelangelo, of the Campidoglio.
You can also see--what's this, down here?
Forum?
Student: The Julian.
Prof: The Julian Forum, the Forum of Julius Caesar,
much lower ground level than the rest of the city today.
And you can actually see those three columns,
from the temple, that I showed you just before,
as well as the tabernae of the Julian Forum.
And note the relationship of the Julian Forum to the Trajanic
Forum.
He's restoring Julius Caesar's Forum, at the same time he's
building his own.
I can also show you here--if you look right above my hand you
can see the Piazza Venezia and the Palazzo Venezia.
If you look at the center of that building,
right over the doorway, there's a balcony.
That is the famous Mussolini balcony;
that's the balcony from which Mussolini made all his speeches,
with his followers gathering in the Piazza Venezia.
And from that, from the Piazza Venezia,
the street that goes from there to the Piazza del Popolo,
is the Corso, the racecourse,
the Corso of Rome, which is one of the major
streets of Rome, one of the major shopping
streets of Rome, as well as one of the major
thoroughfares, that takes you--if you go down
halfway, take a right,
you are at the Via Condotti, and ultimately at the Piazza di
Spagna, or the Spanish Steps,
which of course is a trek that everybody who visits Rome
follows that path, to see the Spanish Steps.
Over here, the forum that we're going to be talking about today,
the Forum of Trajan.
Much of that forum is underground, and some of it was
turned into a garden, as you can see here:
a pleasant park, as you can see here.
Here we are looking at some of the columns from the Basilica
that's part of that forum, from the very well-preserved
Column of Trajan.
And also over here we'll see the markets of the forum.
But I just wanted you to get your bearings again in terms of
where it's situated in Rome, and what it looks like today
from the air, although it is changing all the
time.
And I wanted to show you a Google Earth image as well,
because this is much more up to date than the aerial view that I
showed you just before.
And you'll see the same buildings.
You'll see the Victor Emmanuel Monument, and you'll see part of
the Campidoglio.
You'll see the Mussolini balcony and the Corso,
and you'll see the Column of Trajan, and part of the
Basilica.
But what you see here is that park has been replaced by
structures, because they are excavating.
I've mentioned this before, they are excavating more of
this now, with the hope of someday rejoining the Roman
Forum with the Imperial Fora.
That may not be able to happen, because of traffic concerns,
but it is certainly something that's on the drawing board.
And at the very least, right now, without narrowing
the street, the main Via dei Fori Imperiali,
they are doing excavation in that park area.
And you can see what they've brought up.
This is not ancient, it's actually mostly Medieval
houses.
I hope--I felt there are no Medievalists among you--
but I hope they'll eventually realize that these are--
well, who's to say?--that they should probably remove these as
well and take us back to the original Forum of Trajan;
I hope that happens someday.
They're not very distinctive.
If one looks at them, they're just mainly rectangular
rooms.
But nonetheless they're at that Medieval level now,
and the question is whether they're going to go down any
further.
But here you can see, not only the remains of the
Forum of Trajan, but also the Forum of Augustus.
Here's the Temple of Mars Ultor -- that great precinct wall that
divided it from the Subura, also visible here.
And here we see the great hemicycle that we'll look at
today of Trajan's Forum, behind it the Markets of
Trajan.
It's important for us to look back at the general plan of the
Imperial Fora, to see where the Forum of
Trajan fits in.
We have already looked at the Forum of Julius Caesar,
with its Temple of Venus Genetrix.
We have looked at the Forum of Augustus, with its Temple of
Mars Ultor.
Remember the exedrae on either side of that temple,
the embracing arms, that were new at that time,
and an important component of the Forum of Augustus.
Vespasian adds his Forum Pacis over here.
Domitian adds a narrow forum, the so-called Forum
Transitorium that served as a point of transit between the
Roman Forum and the Subura here.
He puts a temple to his patron goddess, Minerva,
in that forum.
But it is, at his death, it is taken over by Nerva and
renamed the Forum of Nerva.
I mentioned to you, when we talked about the Forum
Transitorium, that Domitian also had his eye
on this property over here.
He had schemes as grandiose for public architecture,
at one point, as for palatial architecture,
but palatial architecture won out and he put all of his effort
into the palace, on the Palatine Hill,
and never realized any construction in this area.
When Trajan became emperor, he decided that he would again
focus on public architecture, and that he would build a forum
like none other before it.
And so he begins to do that.
Now that was no small feat in this particular part of the
city, because most of this area was occupied by a hill;
the so-called Quirinal--Q-u-i-r-i-n-a-l--the
Quirinal Hill, in Rome, occupied most of this
space.
So what he needed to do--it's great to have an architect
engineer in your back pocket, so he set Apollodorus of
Damascus to work.
He said: "You're a great engineer.
All you need to do is take down a good part of the Quirinal
Hill, to make way for this great forum that I want to
build."
And lo and behold, Apollodorus was absolutely up
to the job, and that's exactly what he sets out to do.
He removes 125 feet of the Quirinal Hill,
in order to make way for the Forum of Trajan.
And that very number, 125 feet, is actually
commemorated in the Column of Trajan,
because the Column of Trajan was built to that very same
height, 125 feet, to show you,
as you stand in the forum, how much of that hill had to be
cut back in order to make way for the forum.
You can see by looking at this plan of the Imperial Fora as a
whole-- and this is--not only did
Trajan take the Empire to its furthest extent,
this is the last forum that was added to the Imperial Fora,
in Rome.
You can see, by looking at it in connection
to the others, that if you count it,
plus the markets-- which you see wending their way
up what was left of the Quirinal Hill here in plan--
if you compare that to the others, you can see that the
Forum of Trajan, and the Markets of Trajan,
were almost as large as all of the other fora--
not counting the Roman Forum--but all of the other
Imperial Fora together, which gives you some sense of
why I called this "The Mother of All Forums."
Now we're going to look at the plan of this,
and I'm going to show you an individual plan in a moment.
But what I want to say, while this is still on the
screen, is that I want you to look at
the exedrae that you see on either side of the main space of
the forum, and on either side of the
basilica over here.
These are not coincidental.
They are certainly meant to make reference to the exedrae of
Augustus' forum.
Trajan modeled himself after Augustus.
He became a kind of neo-Augustus.
He took on Augustus' hairstyle and his manners,
and so he was trying to associate himself,
in his life, with Augustus.
He's doing it here also, through architecture,
by placing those exedrae on either side of his forum.
Here's a plan of the forum itself, on the left-hand side of
the screen, where we can see all of its major features.
You'd enter into the forum down here.
There was a very elaborate entranceway, here.
And you can see that the façade is actually not
straight, but convex, convex:
a convex façade, which is very interesting,
curved façade, with an elaborate entranceway
over here.
The entrance into the main part of the forum,
rectangular in shape.
There's a base here for an equestrian statue of Trajan.
The exedrae on either side, mimicking those of the Forum of
Augustus.
Colonnades, also on either side, and some additional
columns here.
And we're going to see that just as in Augustus' forum--
another reference back to Augustus--
that the columns in this main area are Corinthian below,
but in the second tier there are figures --
not figures of caryatids, but different kinds of figures,
and I'm going to show you those soon.
Over here the basilica, which is perpendicular to the
forum proper.
This is quite different from the Forum at Pompeii,
where you'll remember the basilica was splayed off,
to the side.
Here we have it as a more integral part of the forum,
and perpendicular to the main space here.
It's a very large basilica.
It takes the name of Trajan's family.
His family name was Ulpius, U-l-p-i-u-s.
This is the Basilica Ulpia in Rome, with a central nave,
and side aisles, a couple of side aisles around
it.
So a veritable forest of columns, and then other exedrae,
matching exedrae, or, in this case,
apses on either end.
Then through here you see the location of the Column of
Trajan, in a small piazza, and to left and right,
libraries, Greek and Latin libraries.
And then at the end, a temple.
We don't know what Trajan actually--
the northern end of the structure was not completed at
Trajan's death, and we don't know if he would
have put a temple there.
It's highly likely, because what forum have we
seen, without a temple at the short end?
They all had them.
So it's a good guess that Trajan had that in mind too.
But the temple that was built there was actually built after
his death, by his successor,
Hadrian: a temple that Hadrian put up to honor Trajan,
and also Trajan's wife, Plotina, P-l-o-t-i-n-a.
Now we know quite a bit.
A lot of the forum, some of the forum,
is still preserved, and we have evidence for other
parts of it that are not preserved.
This entrance gate, down here.
Believe it or not, we have coins that have an
entrance gate on them, and nicely they
say--fortunately they say, down below, FORVMTRAIAN,
Forum of Trajan.
So putting two and two together, we have to go on the
assumption that what we are looking at here is a rendition,
on a coin, of the entrance gate into the Forum of Trajan,
FORVMTRAIAN.
And if we look at it here, we see some interesting things.
We see, first of all, that it has a single arcuation
in the center -- so one doorway.
It has a series of bays, that have in them what we call
aediculae, a-e-d-i-c-u-l-a-e,
aediculae, which are little temple fronts
that are-- niches with little temple
fronts around them, with columns and pediments.
And then you can see statuary, inside those.
So a series of bays, decorated with these
aediculae with statues.
Then a series of circles with blobs in them.
I think those series of circles with blobs in them are probably
portraits represented on shields,
because we have remains of actual portraits on shields from
the inside of the forum.
So that seems to be the case here as well.
And then in the uppermost part, we see that the gate looks very
much like an arch, in the sense that it supports a
quadriga, at the top, and that
quadriga represents two people,
possibly the emperor--again, we're dealing with blobs here;
we have to do the best we can to interpret them--
but they seem to be probably the emperor,
and possibly Victory crowning him, the way we saw Victory
crowing Titus in his chariot, on his arch.
Six horses in this particular case, and then on either side
trophies, these tree trunks decorated with captured arms and
armor.
And we're not absolutely sure what's surrounding them in this
case, whether they're prisoners or Roman soldiers.
So this gives you a very good idea of the entrance gate into
this structure.
And I also want to point out, if you look very closely at the
columns and the elements above them in the attic,
you can see that the columns project,
and the attic seems to have projecting entablatures.
So it looks as if we have the kind of scheme here that we saw
in the Forum Transitorium, with that wall decorated with
columns that project out of the wall,
and that have projecting entablature,
giving this undulation--undulating movement
from projecting to receding, projecting to receding,
across the façade of the entrance gate.
The figures that were located on the upper tier of the
center-- of the main body of this forum
again were not caryatids, or female figures,
but rather male figures: male figures of captured
Dacians, because the war that Trajan
had, that enabled him to celebrate and to fund this
building, was his wars against the
Dacians, D-a-c-i-a-n-s.
Dacia, ancient Dacia, modern Romania today.
Trajan had two military campaigns there,
one from 102 to--excuse me, the first one from 101 to 102;
the second one from 105 to 107.
He was victorious in both of those, and this forum was built
from the spoils of that war, to honor his victory over the
Dacians.
And we see therefore that the figures that are in the
uppermost tier, of the main body of the forum,
are depictions of captured Dacians;
of Dacian prisoners brought back to Rome.
You see two of them here.
Here a headless figure, here a much more complete
figure.
The headless figure still can be seen on the site,
and the one on the left-hand side of the screen now in the
Vatican Museums in Rome.
The one on the left gives you a better sense of what these
looked like in antiquity.
You can tell that these are not Romans;
wearing leggings, a tunic, a fringed mantle,
that the Romans did not wear, a long fringed mantle.
And then above you see that he has,
unlike Trajan's closely cropped Augustan-type hairstyle,
you can see he has very long hair, and also a beard,
and this identifies him as a very different--
sort of boots that seem to be made out of suede or felt of
some sort.
So a very different kind of image.
Clearly these are again the Dacian prisoners,
one after another, aligning that second tier.
And for any of you interested in the fact that the Romans made
nearly exact duplicates of things,
mechanical copies, you can see in this particular
statue-- we rarely have this preserved,
so it's an interesting example of these points--
you see these little excess pieces of marble.
The Romans had created a kind of pointing machine,
which they used to make exact replicas of originals.
And they usually, when the statue was done,
they would usually obviously take these away,
carve them away, which they didn't do.
This one probably was not used, for some reason;
it was copied and never put up on the building,
and so those points still remain.
This is a model of the Forum of Trajan, as it would have looked
in antiquity, with that convex entranceway;
the location of the equestrian statue, the exedrae on either
side here.
You can imagine the Dacians in the second tier.
The roofed Basilica Ulpia here.
The Column of Trajan, flanked by the Latin and Greek
libraries, and then over here the Temple to Divine Trajan.
The plan, again, and here I just want to
mention, looking back at that plan,
that there was also another elaborate entranceway from the
main part of the forum, into the Basilica Ulpia,
on its long side.
And once again, how fortunate we are that we
have coins that say BASILICAVLPIA,
Basilica Ulpia.
So we can guess, I think quite accurately,
that this must be the entranceway to the Basilica
Ulpia.
Here we see something different.
We see three openings, not arcuated openings but
trabeated openings, straight lintels above.
But look again in the way in which they're represented.
It looks like they're quite solid, and that they project
into the spectator's space.
So again this idea of projection, recession,
projection, recession, across this façade.
This is very important because, as I mentioned,
Roman architecture, using the traditional language
of Greek architecture, ultimately developed something
that we call a baroque trend in Roman architecture,
and you see it happening here, in Rome,
based on the experiments of Domitian's Forum Transitorium.
And you can see that same, roughly that same scheme here.
Up above, once again, a chariot, in this case a
four-horse chariot, seemingly with one figure,
and a series of standards, being held, possibly by Roman
soldiers.
The Forum of Trajan has been the professional,
the life work of a professor, formerly of Northwestern
University, James Packer,
who spent a very long time pulling together all the
evidence that the Forum of Trajan still provides,
to allow a very good reconstruction of what that
forum looked like.
It's computer generated.
I urge you all to look at it.
If you just Google James Packer, Forum of Trajan,
UCLA--because that's the, or the Getty,
either of those two, because UCLA and the Getty
supported this work-- you will be able to see
computer simulations of his work.
There's also a book by James Packer on the Forum of Trajan,
that's on reserve for this course.
I send you to it, less for the Forum of Trajan,
but for any of you working on city plans, again this could be
a very inspiring book to look at.
Not that I expect you to come up with something like this,
but nonetheless I think it can give you an idea of what one can
do as one thinks about designing one's own city.
He has done enough research to allow a very accurate
reconstruction of what this forum would've looked like.
We're looking at the entranceway into the Basilica
Ulpia here.
We are looking at the marble; you can see real marble and
variegated marbles brought from all over the world.
So Trajan continues the Flavian tradition of bringing marbles
from all over, from places outside of
Italy--from Africa, from Asia Minor,
from Egypt and so on-- for the decoration of these
buildings, and an interest in multicolored
marbles as facing.
We see also up here the Dacian prisoners, and between them,
in this instance, these shields,
with portraits on them.
We have remains of some of those.
So that's an accurate reconstruction,
the same sort of thing that we saw on the entranceway.
Then up there an inscription, several other Dacians,
and some other decoration at the apex.
I'm going to show you just a few of these quickly,
from Packer's book.
You see here a corridor with a barrel vault,
stuccoed and painted, lots of statuary.
There would have been lots of honorific statuary in this
structure.
Sometimes instead of the shields, with portraits between
the Dacians, we see piles of captured arms and armor,
as you can see in that view.
Here a couple more, showing again the marble
decoration of the walls, varied in color.
Here niches with portraits.
Over here, more shields with portraits.
And here you can see some of the sculptural remains:
some parts of a military figure in a breastplate,
a man--both of them headless--a man in a toga.
And over here part of one of these decorative shields with a
portrait.
We actually think this is a portrait of Nerva,
a portrait of Nerva that would've been placed inside this
shield and hung on the upper part of the wall above the
columns.
And this is important, and on your Monument List.
This is a view of the Basilica Ulpia in Rome,
what it would have looked like in antiquity.
You can see it conforms to basilican architecture that
we've looked at before, with a central nave,
divided by its two side aisles--
in this case, as you'll recall in plan--
and those are Corinthian capitals, as you can see down
here.
You can see also that it's a gargantuan structure.
Look at the size of the people, the men in their togas,
and the building itself.
And it had a flat roof with a coffered ceiling,
and you can see that it had a clerestory.
We've talked about the clerestory before.
We saw it in the House of the Mosaic Atrium,
for example, the clerestory,
which is the opening up of the wall,
in this case through Ionic columns,
to see the vistas that lie beyond, and to let light into
the structure.
And you can see the vista that lies beyond, of the Column of
Trajan and one of the libraries.
This is a photograph that I'm incredibly proud of,
because I took it from on top of the Column of Trajan.
It's not that difficult to climb the Column the Trajan
because there's a spiral staircase in the center of it,
that goes up to the top.
The part that's hard is getting permission to get in there.
It's always locked, and you have to get special
permission to do that.
So I did it only once, but it was a great thing to do,
and you go way up to the top, and you can look down.
You can see fantastic views of Rome.
But you can also get a very good sense of what the Basilica
Ulpia looks like today: not much.
But you can see the central space.
You can see some of the columns.
We can tell that those columns were grey granite.
So again, this interest in contrasting marbles,
grey granite with white marble, in the Basilica Ulpia and
elsewhere.
And you can also see the relationship between modern
ground level, which is much higher,
and ancient ground level, and the possibilities that
still remain, if they want to excavate this
part of the city -- what more of the Forum of
Trajan may be able to be seen.
Some of it can actually be seen under the street,
and Packer and others have actually gone in to look at what
is there, which is what has enabled him
to make the kind of accurate reconstructions that he has.
Everywhere in this monument there are references--yes,
this is a forum; yes, forums have practical
purposes.
They're a place for people to meet and to market and to
conduct law cases and so on, in the basilica.
But this monument reminds you again and again and again and
again that it is a monument in stone to Trajan's victories over
the Dacians.
And not only do we see those Dacians, as we looked at before,
but we see lots of other imagery that refers to military
victory.
This is a fragment of what we think was a frieze,
in the Basilica Ulpia, that depicts victories,
female personifications of victory,
winged, either kneeling at candelabra,
or over here, this woman, kneeling on the
back of a bull.
You can see that she's winged.
She's holding the snout of that bull back.
She's got a knife in her right hand, and she is about to slit
the throat of the bull.
And she is doing this to--not only is victory over the Dacians
being marked here, but she is also representing
the sacrifice that takes place in honor of that victory,
by being shown depicting killing a bull.
Back to the plan once again, just to remind you that when we
leave the Basilica Ulpia-- a doorway also in its long
side--we end up in this small plaza,
where the temple--where the Column of Trajan is located,
flanked by Greek and Latin libraries,
on axis with the entranceway, the equestrian statue of
Trajan, the other entranceway,
the column, and ultimately the temple,
at the very end: the temple ultimately to divine
Trajan.
This is a model of what we think the library may have
looked like, or both of the libraries may
have looked like from the outside --
fairly smallish square buildings with a portico in the
front, and then, most important,
a balcony over here.
Why a balcony?
So that you could come out and look at the Column of Trajan,
and read some of the scenes that encircled it.
This is a reconstruction, from Packer again,
showing what he thinks the interior of one of these
libraries might have looked like.
It looks larger here than it actually was.
But you can get a sense of it, with the reading tables,
with the scrolls inside these cabinets here,
with the statuary, and in this case he believes
that it had a vaulted roof, as you can see on top.
The Column of Trajan, you see it here in two views;
an extraordinary work of art, extremely well preserved.
Why so well preserved?
Well likely because Pope Sixtus V, in the Renaissance,
used this column, and also the column of the
later emperor, Marcus Aurelius,
as important nodes in his reconstruction of the city of
Rome.
What he did, however, at that time,
was that he took the statues of Trajan that would've stood on
this one, and Marcus Aurelius on the
other, and replaced them with statues of Peter and Paul.
And it's Peter who's on the Column of Trajan,
and Paul who is on the Column of Marcus Aurelius.
But you can see how well preserved they are here.
The column shaft rests on a base, decorated with arms and
armor, Dacian arms and armor,
with a statue of Trajan up at the--
a bronze statue of Trajan at the uppermost part.
But what's particularly interesting is the sculpture--
I'm not going to go into that in great detail,
but I want you to know about it, because it does tell us
something about architecture, as we'll see.
It's a spiral frieze, done all in marble,
of course, that wraps from the base of the column,
all the way up to the top.
And it tells, in documentary form,
the exploits, the military exploits of
Trajan, in his two Dacian military
campaigns-- those two campaigns that I've
already mentioned-- divided in the center by a
Victory writing on a shield.
There's been a lot of speculation;
there's nothing like this earlier in Roman art quite like
this.
And so it is a new innovation, probably at the behest
of--possibly out of the mind, the creative mind,
of Apollodorus of Damascus.
And some scholars have suggested, and I think very
convincingly, it's an intriguing idea,
that because this was located between two libraries,
the likelihood--and that the Romans had scrolls--
the likelihood is what we are dealing with here is one of
these scrolls, sort of wrapped around the
column, from base to top, unfurled and wrapped around the
column from base to top, with the text removed,
with images instead of text.
And that makes a lot of sense, again given that you could view
it best from the two libraries on either side.
A detail of the base, just to show you how very well
preserved the sculptural decoration is.
This is not a course in sculpture.
I'm not going to go into this in detail,
but I want to quickly show you some of the scenes,
because again they can be revealing,
from the point of view of architecture.
This is at the very base.
We see a personification of the Danube River,
in that area up north, in Dacia, where the Romans went
to conquer those tribes.
And this is very important, because we know that
Apollodorus of Damascus was responsible for building a
bridge over the Danube River.
It was one of his great engineering feats.
And you actually see that bridge located here,
which even increases the likelihood that Apollodorus of
Damascus was the designer of this particular structure.
You see the Roman soldiers have gotten off boats.
They're walking through an archway.
Here you see the Roman soldiers.
The Roman soldiers did not only do battle, but they also
Romanized the areas that they went.
We've talked about this a lot: the colonization of the Roman
world, Trajan extending the borders to their furthest most
points.
The Romans get there, what do they do?
They start to build architecture.
They start to build walls with headers and stretchers.
They start to build forts and city walls, in which they put
buildings with Roman amenities.
Remember, after the war is over, they're often given land
by the general, or the emperor -- it becomes
theirs, and where they can live from
that point on.
So they had every reason to want to fill these towns with
Roman amenities.
And we see the Roman soldiers building cities in many of these
scenes.
This is the most famous scene from the column,
in which we see a battle between the Romans,
inside one of these forts that they've built.
They are all with helmets and shields.
They have their hands around something;
we think these were probably spears that were added in metal,
originally.
The Dacians down below.
You can identify them by their leggings and tunics and scraggly
hair and beards, here.
They are attacking the camp.
The Romans are, of course, going to be
victorious, but the Dacians are shown as
heroic and valiant, and enemies who are pretty much
the equals of the Romans in strength,
which only underscores that the Romans were stronger still,
to have conquered them.
And then over here, if you've ever wondered where
the term 'battering ram' came from,
you can see it right here--I told you the Romans invented
everything-- you can see it right here:
this pole, with a ram's head at the end,
which is serving again as a battering ram,
as they try to tear down the walls of the Roman fort.
Perhaps the most poignant and interesting scene happens way up
at the top of the column, where the leader of the
Dacians, Decebalus, D-e-c-e-b-a-l-u-s,
is shown kneeling, almost like one of those
Victories, on the bull.
He has a knife in his hand.
What is he doing?
He is kneeling here.
He has decided--you can see the Romans;
he's got Romans to the left of him, Romans to the right of him.
He's about to be taken prisoner by them and paraded in a
triumphal procession in Rome, in honor of Trajan.
He doesn't want to do that, so he heroically,
valiantly, takes his own life.
He is about to plunge that knife into his heart,
so that he doesn't have to be taken by the Romans.
It's very interesting to see them depicting,
the Romans depicting, the Dacians in such a heroic
way on this column.
I mentioned the museum in Rome that is located in EUR,
the Museo della Civiltà Romana,
the Museum of Roman Civilization,
that has casts and models.
I mentioned that they had casts of all the scenes from the
Column of Trajan.
I show you a view that I took in that museum,
just to give you a sense of how one can see those,
and how one can see those at eye's level,
to get a good sense of them.
In antiquity they would have been harder to read.
But I should point out that the background was likely painted
blue, and there probably would have
been some additions, like the metal spears,
that might have made it easier to read--
almost like Wedgwood--might have made it easier to read in
antiquity.
And I also thought I would mention--
I'm sure all of you have been down to Ground Zero,
but if you go a block or two away from Ground Zero itself,
there's the Fireman's Memorial there,
that was put up to many of the fireman who sadly lost their
lives fighting those fires in the Twin Towers.
We see this here: "Dedicated to those who
fell and to those who carry on" here.
And what's interesting about this,
if you look, if you Google this and look at
the website for the Fireman's Memorial in New York,
you will find out that the designer for this talks
unabashedly of his admiration for the Column of Trajan in
Rome, and that he used,
as an artistic model, for the way in which he massed
figures here, showing them in relationship to
buildings, he used, as his model,
the figures on the Column of Trajan,
in Rome.
At the end again, the column, surrounded by the
Greek and Latin libraries, the temple over here at the
end.
You can see it's a conventional Roman temple:
deep porch, freestanding columns,
staircase, one staircase, façade orientation,
just as we saw elsewhere.
Here we see an engraving showing the spiral staircase
that leads from bottom to top.
And over here, that the staircase also goes
down below, into a burial chamber.
Two urns were found in that burial chamber;
the urns of Trajan and Plotina, which tells us,
of course, that this also served as Trajan's tomb.
So a victory, not only one of his great
victories, military victories, but also victory over death.
And then at the apex, we see a good view of the top,
with a statue of St.
Peter; but we have coins depicting
Trajan on-- depicting the original
statue--the base, the shaft, a portrait of
Trajan, a naked portrait of Trajan,
a heroicized portrait of Trajan, depicted after death,
divinized at the apex of the column.
And if you read the inscription on the coin, you see it refers
to Trajan as Optimus Princeps.
Trajan received many titles.
One was Dacicus, D-a-c-i-c-u-s,
for his victories over the Dacians;
but at the end of his life Optimus Princeps,
the greatest princeps of all time.
The implication: greater than Augustus.
And it is arguable, I think probably correct,
that Trajan was the even greater of the two.
This is a restored view, a spectacular restored view,
of the building complex, where you can see again the
entranceway over here, the equestrian statue,
everything that we've described.
But I think it's interesting, if you think of yourself having
entered into this forum, standing here,
looking back at the basilica bearing Trajan's name,
looking toward the column and the temple.
What you would have likely seen when you stood here was only the
uppermost part of the column; because most of it would have
been blocked by the very tall Basilica Ulpia.
So it's a very theatrical representation,
in the sense that you would be standing here with Trajan,
during life, looking back toward that
column, looking back at the
divinization of Trajan, a bronze statue,
which would have seemed as if it was floating on top of the
Basilica Ulpia.
This is a very dramatic tableau, created here by
Apollodorus of Damascus.
And I think it was not equaled until the seventeenth century by
architects like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who also created such
spectacular tableaus.
Just to show you again the location of the Markets of
Trajan, in relationship to the Forum of Trajan.
While the forum was the Romans imposing a rectangular plan on
nature-- remember, they have to cut back
the hill, to make way for it--the markets
are something quite different.
They are the Romans accepting the shape of the remaining
Quirinal Hill, and allowing the shape of that
hill to determine the irregular shape of the markets.
The markets, unlike the forum that is made
out of marble, for the most part--as we've
seen, variegated marble-- the markets are made out of
concrete, faced with brick:
a very different material, but a material that is
absolutely appropriate, when you want to cover a
hillside with tiered buildings, looking back very much to the
spa at Baia, looking back to Fortuna
Primigenia, at Palestrina.
The same idea, to turn this hill,
what remained of the Quirinal Hill, into essentially the
precursor of the modern shopping mall.
You have shopping--there are 150 shops in the Markets of
Trajan.
All of these things date, by the way, to the same period,
around A.D.
113, the forum and also the markets.
We see 150 shops here, on a variety of levels.
This is the bottom level, that is located where the
exedra, the first exedra is, on the right side.
A great hemicycle, with shops.
Here, a street, called the Via Biberatica;
that name is on your Monument List.
And then a covered bazaar up here.
All of this on different levels; all of this done in a very
innovative way, with concrete faced with brick.
You can also see here the very large windows;
the semi-dome, that I'll show you in detail in
a moment.
These large windows indicate to us that the architects are real
masters of the concrete medium here,
able to de-materialize the wall, by putting up these very,
very large windows.
That's how good they were in building this,
at this point.
The building block here is essentially the taberna:
not unlike what we saw in Pompeii,
this small space with a barrel vault,
an attic window above, and in this case with a post
and lintel scheme, made out of travertine,
to mark the entranceway into the shop.
They took this individual motif, and they replicated it
throughout this building, over and over and over again,
offering 150 possibilities.
Here you see a series of these in a row,
a series of these tabernae,
with their attic windows, with their travertine
decoration, with their sidewalks --
a kind of mini city within a city.
And then over here the polygonal masonry of the
streets, looking very much like streets in Rome.
Here is a view of the great hemicycle, down on the first
story.
We see the shops again.
What's interesting here is in the second story you see
arcuated elements.
You can see the facing with--the brick facing,
although we do believe this was stuccoed over,
in this case.
Here, pilasters.
But look very carefully.
You'll see these pilasters support,
in the center, an arcuated pediment,
and then on either side these broken triangular pediments,
as if the pediment has broken, been broken,
to allow the arcuated pediment to show through.
We have never seen that before.
Yes, we saw it in the paper topics, but that stuff is later.
We have not seen that, up to this point
chronologically, in built architecture.
We have seen it in painting--Cubiculum at the Met,
over here, for example--this breaking the triangular pediment
to allow something else to show through.
This is the beginning of this experimentation that ultimately
leads to this baroque element in Roman architecture that I'm
going to talk about.
Behind the hemicycle, annular vault,
with an additional set of shops, and attic windows there
as well.
This is the most famous street, from the Markets of Trajan.
It's an incredible place to wander, by the way.
And they have just recently, in the last couple of years,
opened an entirely new museum here,
which has a lot of remains from the forum,
from the markets, and a great deal of very useful
information: an absolute must-see for anyone going to
Rome.
This is the famous Via Biberatica of the Markets of
Trajan, where again you get the sense,
once you're in here that you're in a kind of city within a city,
but with all these wonderful shops.
You can see how skilled they are in using ramps,
with polygonal masonry, as well as sidewalks and
stairs, so that you can make your way
up with either alternative here.
Again, the tabernae on either side;
the opening up of the walls, with these incredible windows
throughout.
A restored view of what the whole thing looked like in
antiquity: the hemicycle; the decoration here of the
central arcuated pediment; broken triangular pediments
over here-- a very interesting space,
that I'm going to show you in a second--
vaulted with a semi-dome, done out of concrete,
with very large windows opening up the space.
The Via Biberatica, that we already saw here,
and then the covered bazaar up there.
A quick view of the semi-dome, made out of concrete.
It doesn't have an oculus,
but otherwise it looks kind of like the dome of the Temple of
Mercury at Baia, as you can see.
And over here, this wall that I've already
described, that shows you how well the
Romans can work concrete, now enabling them to open up
the wall, much more than they've been
able to do so before, and allow even more light into
the structure.
The greatest part, perhaps, of the Markets of
Trajan is this building here.
It's the covered bazaar, and it really is a market
bazaar, on two tiers.
You can see in this restored view, this series of
tabernae down below; the attic up above.
You can see that groin vaults are used here,
in an incredible way.
I'll show you in a moment how.
A second story up here, with additional
tabernae, opened almost completely to the
sky, an incredible feat on the part
of Apollodorus of Damascus, assuming he also designed these
markets.
Here is the market hall, as it looks today.
What is its ancestor?
The Ferentino Market Hall that we saw way back when,
with its single barrel vault; or some of the
cryptoporticuses that we also saw, with their barrel
vaults.
It's that idea, that market hall idea.
But look how sophisticated the Romans have become in their use
of concrete faced with brick.
They have realized that they don't even need a wall,
to support vaults.
They can lift their vault on top of individual piers,
as they have done so spectacularly here;
lift them up.
I described this, I think, in the introductory
lecture as in a sense opening up a series of umbrellas over the
space.
They have opened it up so that light can flow in from the
sides; light can flow in from either
long end, just flooding the whole system with light.
Down below, again, the typical markets,
with their attic windows above.
But this is a real tour de force, probably the greatest --
certainly the greatest vaulting that we have seen thus far,
and again a test to just how far the Romans have come from
this to this, by the time of the emperor
Trajan.
And any of you headed to San Francisco,
if you go to the Marketplace there,
you will see that that owes so much to Roman antiquity,
with all the tabernae-like structures
on either side; the vaulting.
I mean, this sort of thing absolutely presupposes this kind
of architectural development.
In the one minute that remains--and that's all I need
for this-- I just want to show you one
last monument, and make one basic point about
it, that really has more to do with the transition from Trajan
to Hadrian, than anything else.
An arch went up, not in Rome,
but in a place called Benevento, which is about an
hour's drive from Naples, in the south of Italy,
in Campania; a place called Benevento.
An arch went up between 114 to 118, honoring Trajan,
and all of Trajan's accomplishments.
You can see it's covered with sculpture, and each of those
scenes represents one of the accomplishments of Trajan.
It was put up on the so-called Via Traiana,
taking Trajan's name, a road that was built from Rome
to Benevento, and was opened during Trajan's
reign, and again, a compendium of all
his accomplishments.
You can see very clearly that it is based in general form on
the Arch of Titus in Rome: a single central arcuated bay;
the pedestals supporting double columns on either side;
the inscription at the top; the receding panels on either
side of that inscription.
The major difference, of course, between the two,
that this has sculpture only on the inside,
and sparingly in the center and around the frieze,
and this has much more sculpture, again telling us in
much greater detail a list-- or describing a list of the
great accomplishments of Trajan.
The main reason that I show it to you today,
besides to show that the Flavians again served--
Flavian architecture served as an important model for Trajanic
architecture, is that a couple of the scenes
in the attic above are very interesting,
and tell us something about the succession.
Hadrian does not appear in the lower part of the arch,
in any of the scenes, but he appears in two of the
scenes in the uppermost part, which has led scholars,
I think rightly, to conclude that the arch was
finished up to the attic before Trajan's death,
and that Hadrian finished it.
And what did he do?
He put his own portrait up there, with Trajan's.
Why was he motivated to do that?
Well he had an ego, as we'll see when we talk about
Hadrian's architecture.
But more than that, it had something to do with the
succession.
We know that Trajan died on August 8^(th) in 117 A.D.
We know that on August 8^(th) he had no successor officially
chosen.
Plotina, his wife, was--she had no children of her
own; she was crazy about Hadrian,
very much his sponsor, and wanted to see him succeed
Trajan.
It's likely that Trajan had the same idea in mind,
but it's a little strange, because wouldn't he then have
adopted him before his death?
Why would he have waited?
But Plotina decides--she consults with advisors.
She says: "We're not going to announce Trajan's death.
We're going to keep it a secret.
Tomorrow we're going to announce that Trajan has adopted
Hadrian."
That happens on August 9^(th).
And then it was only on the 11^(th), the 11^(th) of August
that Trajan's death was announced to the public.
So some hanky-panky was going on behind the scenes.
But whoever made the choice, whether it was Trajan himself
or Plotina, they made a great choice: Hadrian,
an extraordinary emperor as well.
And the one point that I want you to hold,
and keep with you over break, and bring back when we get back
together and talk, when we get back together,
about the Pantheon and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli,
the main point that I want you to keep in mind is what we
learned from the Forum of Trajan,
and that is that Trajan combined, in an incredible way,
with the help of Apollodorus, traditional architecture in the
form of the Forum, with its marble columns and the
like, and innovative Roman
architecture, in the form of the brick-faced
concrete market, brought those together in one
building, in a way that is very different
from anything we've seen up to this point.
And we're going to see that Hadrian keeps that tradition
alive, not only in the Pantheon, but also in his Villa of
Tivoli.
Take care.
Good Spring Break to everybody.
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B1 Intermediate US

14. The Mother of All Forums: Civic Architecture in Rome under Trajan

8774 Folder Collection
Sofi published on January 18, 2015

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