This lecture that I'm going to deliver this morning, has been an inspiration to students who have selected option three for their paper topic, how to design a Roman city, because this lecture has it all. It has great architecture. It has an extraordinary patron, a man who, travelled the empire to all kinds of exotic places that we'll, some of which we'll be talking about today, and some of which we'll be talking about in the future. A love triangle, some of the best buildings that we'll see in the course of sem-, this semester, including the Pantheon and also Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. The patron, Hadrian, whom I show you in a portrait from Rome, now on the left hand side of the screen. at, it, it was an extraordinary man. He became, he was born in 76 AD. And he became emperor at the age of 41 after having served with Trajan for a number of years. He was born like Trajan before him in Spain, not in Italy, and he also was the most educated, one of the most educated and most intellectual of the Roman Emperors. We'll talk about the impact that the intellect had on his architecture. I mentioned that he already, he also liked to travel. He traveled extensively during his reign, had three major major trips that had an enormous impact on his architecture and also on architecture around the empire. And it's also important, I think, to know that he reversed Trajan's policy. You'll remember that Trajan's major political policy had to do with, military conquest. Trajan was involved in a number of very important wars. And he celebrated those wars. And he, he extended the empire to it's furthest reaches, reaches that were never gone beyond for the rest of the Roman Empire. Hadrian reversed that policy. He was a peace loving man, he had no interest in being involved in these kinds of military exploits although he had served with Trajan in some of them in earlier years. He had no desire to continue that on. And he was much more concerned with, consolidating and preserving the empire as expanded by Trajan, and so one of his greatest claims to fame is the great wall, the famous Wall of Hadrian, that he built, in order to separate the Roman Empire, the Greco-Roman Empire, from the rest of the Empire. This great wall that divided Greco-Roman civilization from the Barbarian world that lay outside. And there are fragments of that wall, a quite extensive part of that wall, that's still survives in, in, in Europe today. You can see it in Britain. And I show you an example of some of those, remains here on the right hand side of the screen that is of Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian, was also a great Philhellene and you notice in that portrait that I just showed you that he wore a beard. And in fact he's the first Roman emperor to wear a beard. Beards were not worn by Romans up to this time, but they were worn by Greeks. And we believe that he wore that beard in large part to look more Greek. We also know that although he wore a toga in public he was known for wearing the Greek himation in private. And he did that we think in large part because of his love for Greece and for Greek culture. He was so Philhellenic in his leanings that he received the nickname, The Greekling and we'll see as we look at his architecture, the impact that his love of Greece had on that architecture. In fact what I'd like to do today is to begin with the most Greek of Hadrian's buildings. A building that we think he may have designed himself, because we also know that Hadrian was an amateur architect. Hadrian himself was an amateur architect. And we think he designed this very building, this so called Temple of Venus and Roma. He was also particularly interested, by the way, in religious architecture. Most of his public building was religious architecture. Temples, this being one of them, the Temple of Venus and Roma, a temple put up to Roma as the patron goddess of the city of Rome, and to Venus as the patron goddess of the Roman family. And you'll remember that Venus was a special favorite of Julius Caesar and of Augustus. and, they, and those two thought of her as their, as the special patron of the Julian family. So we also see Hadrian here, conjuring up his connections to, the earlier dictators and emperor, Julius Caesar and Augustus by his emphasis on Venus. So, this temple to Venus en Roma, you'll see that we don't have a precise date for this monument. We think it was put up sometime between 121 and 135. We know it was dedicated in 135. It seems to have been long in the making. So it's hard to, to categorize it as either an early or a mid or a late Hadrianic building, because it does seem to have been in production for quite some time. I show you two plans of the Temple of Venus and Roma because there's controversy about which plan most accurately reflects the original Hadrianic temple. Because we know the temple was well it was built under Hadrian and dedicated in 135. We know that it burned down in a very serious fire in Rome in the late third century AD, and then was renovated by an emperor whom we'll talk about later in the semester by the name of Maxentius, M-A-X-E-N-T-I-U-S. It was renovated by Maxentius in 307 AD. And we think Maxentius kept quite closely to the original Hadrianic plan. But we're not absolutely sure about that, so the some of the discrepancies that you see between these two plans may have to do with the discrepancies between the original building and the eventual renovation. But you will see that in the main these two plans and the one on the left-hand side of the screen is the one that's on your monument list that you have in front of you. The one on the right-hand side of the screen is the one in your Ward Perkins textbook. But if you look at its most outstanding features, you will see that most of them are similar to one another. That the main features of these two buildings, of these two plans, are, are the same. And that is, and you should be immediately struck by these plans, both of these plans, and how different they are from what we have characterized as the typical Roman temple, that typical Roman temple with, usually with a single cella, with a deep court, with freestanding columns in that court, with a facade orientation. This is very different indeed, no matter which of these two plans you look at, because you will see that this large temple has a double cella, two cellas back to back. And you see it in both plans, two cellas back to back. Well the reason for that is obvious because it commemorates two divinities, Venus and Roma. And each one needed to have a cella, but these are not cellas side by side, these are not cellas within a larger cella located side by side as in the Capitoline Triad Temple but rather two that are back to back, two that are back to back. Now what this does is take away the facade orientation of the building, and give us two facades in the sense, one on either side. That is also a, so we see that in both of these. We also see that the columns go all the way around the structure, and so does the staircase go all the way around the structure. We see that in both plans. And then there is a large precinct that also has columns around it. I can also tell you, you can take on faith that this building also has a low podium. So what we see here is a temple that looks much more Greek than it looks Roman. In fact, as I said, it doesn't look anything like the typical Roman temples that we've been talking about today. Why is this? This has to do with the fact that Hadrian was a philhellene, that he was enamoured of Greek architecture, and that he opted in this case when he himself appears to have been the architect of this building, Hadrian, amateur architect, seems to have designed this building himself. We see that when he was left entirely to his own devices, he wanted to build a Greek temple in Rome, and that is exactly what he did. Now, also important this temple is location, location, location. This building is located, on the, at the edge of the Roman forum, closest to the Colosseum, and on the Vilia, you'll remember the Vilia, where the arch of Titus is located. The arch of Titus, and you'll remember that, that was the area that the Flavian dynast word chose to build their buildings on in order to raise to the ground Nero's earlier Dome, Domus Transatoria, and build their own buildings in its place. So, we see Hadrian continuing on in that same tradition. Returning to the Roman people land that had originally been theirs, that had been stolen by Nero, by building, in this case a religious structure, on that site instead. So that's also extremely important. To get back for a moment to the plan, we see again the major difference between these two versions is that in this case, there is a flat back wall for each of the individual cellas. For this one, a niche on either side, niches back to back, almost kissing as you can see here. And then, you can also see another difference is the walls are very elaborately scalloped, in this plan, which we can see in the Maxentian renovation which still exists, and I'll show it to you in a moment. But again we're not sure if that was a Maxentian innovation in the early fourth century AD, those back to back apses and scalloped walls. Or whether they come from the original Hadrian that they re-, restore what was in the original Hadrianic building. I tend to prefer the one on the left because there is every evidence that we already have all of these features in Roman architecture. Think to the Flavian palace on the Palentine palace, where we saw the scalloped walls and the and where we certainly saw, these niches with vaults of heaven, semi-dome, semi-vaults up above them. So everything was in place, to have that kind of structure, so it's certainly not inconceivable, in the Hadrianic period. Here's a view of the temple of Venus in Roma, as it looks as if you were standing atop the colosseum and taking a picture back toward it. And this is very useful because it shows you, this is not a high podium. This is just, the, the difference in ground level, once again, ancient ground level being lower than modern ground level and some of the the, the, the, the structures that lay below originally of Nero's Domus Transitoria, for example, that this building was built on. Here you can actually see the podium of the temple, and you can see that it is very low, compared to what we're used to. We're looking back at one of those niches. You can see the semi dome here, as well as the relationship of it to the art of Titus, which, and the Vilia, which one again, once again points out the fact that we are dealing here with a building that was put on property that had originally been the location of Nero's Domus Transitoria. Here are three very useful views. One showing that same niche closer up, from the, taken from the colosseum, one of those back-to-back niches as it looks today. And then this one over here, which is the other niche, which is preserved inside a later building that was transformed into a museum of the Forum Romanum at one point. We see it here. And you can see, in both cases, the semi-dome, you can see the concrete construction faced with brick. In this one, which is better preserved in large part because it was in, in, in part in doors, we can see the columns on either side of the niche, and we also see that scalloped wall that I described before, just like the isle of ridge with niches, flanked by columns and you can see the beginning of a crawford vault. We're not absolutely sure it was barrel vaulted but we think the building was barrel vaulted. We also see on the left, I remind you of the octagonal room designed by Roberius for the Domitian's palace on the Palatine. To underscore again the kinds of experiments that Roberius was making that had such an impact as we shall today on Hadrian and his own architectural designs. You'll remember that room, you'll remember that it has a segmented vault you will remember that it's treated very much like sculpture, that it has niches, that it has niches within niches, windows within niches, doorways within niches. All of them done in an asymmetrical way, that makes the design particularly interesting. Roberius and his architecture are very influential on Hadrian. Keep in mind that Hadrian, once Domitian, I mentioned this to you when we talked about Domitian's palace, once Domitian built that palace it was the palace of all the emperors from that time to the end late antiquity, lived in Hadrian was no exception. When he was in Rome, he lived in that palace. And he was there for seeing and experiencing the shapes of the architectural shapes designed by Roberius on a daily basis. He liked that octagonal room in particular and the others like it in the villa, in the palace and he was clearly, it, it clearly had an impact on him as we shall see. The last point I want to make about the Temple of Venus in Roma, by the way, has to do with materials. We have been talking about the increasing use of marble in Roman architecture. Under Augustus, marble from Luna or Carrara. Under Nero and the Flavians, marble from all over the world, from Asia Minor, from Africa, of all different colors. Hadrian the Philhelene returns to using Greek marble, for his buildings. The Temple of Venus in Roma, is made of proconnesian marble. P-R-O-C-O-N-N, E-S-I-A-N, I think I got that right, proconnesian marble, that, that comes from Greece, it's a blue veined marble. He was particularly fond of it and he used it for the Temple of Venus and Roma.
