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13.5 Rabirius' Architectural Innovations
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The Prince and the Palace: Human Made Divine on the Palatine Hill
The Domitianic Arch (and Tomb) of Titus celebrating the Flavian victory in the Jewish Wars; the Stadium of Domitian, its shape now preserved in Rome's Piazza Navona, the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill, designed by Rabirius and featuring Domitian as dominus et deus, and the Forum Transitorium, a narrow space with undulating columnar bays announcing the beginning of a "baroque" phase in Roman architecture. First Quiz is located here!
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
What do you think this is, just from looking at it?
The remains, you can see the remains are not as extensive as one
wishes they were, but enough is there to allow a reconstruction of the whole.
What are we looking at here?
>> [Student: The octagonal fountain.]
>> The, the octagonal fountain, the
octagonal fountain of the peristyle court. Excellent.
It's really, it, you, most,
most people who wander around these remains would,
will not be able to figure out for the life of themselves what this was,
but you'll be glad when you go up on the Palatine Hill to to know as
you stand here that this was once an
octagonal fountain with a spectacular water display undoubtedly.
This is the triclinium, or what survives. Sad.
What survives of Domitian's triclinium.
This is his apse, the very apse in which Domitian would have sat enthroned
as he ate with special, invited guests as he held a state dinner in Rome.
And you can see, if you look very
carefully again, the construction is brick-based, concrete construction.
We talked about the fact that after the fire of 64, a decision
was made to begin to to use brick as
a facing, because brick was more fireproof than stone.
And we see that borne out the entire imperial palace,
on the Palatine Hill was made of brick faced concrete
construction, but if you look very carefully you will see
some stucco and you will also see some marble revetment.
So, in this case, that brick was covered over with marble
to give it a much more luxurious look for the dominus et deus.
Also interesting here actually, there's a, there's a tarp on top
of preserved mosaic and I'll show you that mosaic in a moment.
But what's interesting here is the that the pavement rests on something that
should remind you of something we saw earlier in this semester, which is what?
Wendy, you're nodding so. [Student: The hypocaust.]
It's a hypocaust system just as we saw in the Stabian Baths
In Pompeii, they have raised the pavement up on these piles of brick, and then
in between them would have placed terracotta pipes
and also braziers with hot, hot coals, and
so on and so forth, to heat the floor of the triclinium, so that
Domitian could not only sit in his apse, but could have his feet warm while he ate.
This gives you, again, I think a really good window into the kind of man we
are dealing with here and what he was
trying to achieve, once again, through architecture, through architecture.
This is another view of the apse in which Domitian sat, and here we do see,
you know, without the tarp, we can see
that the mosaic is actually pretty well preserved.
And it is the colors that we so often find in Roman mosaics, especially in major
public buildings and in private palaces. This combination of green, maroon
and white as you see here with a variety of very attractive geometric shapes.
Again, you can see the concrete construction faced with brick
and you can see the remains of some of the
marble revetment that would have covered the walls and made
this all that much more ostentatious in ancient Roman times.
This fountain
is a marvel. I love this fountain.
This is the fountain that you see, or one of the two that you
would see through the panoramic windows of
the pal-, of the Triclinium in Domitian's palace.
and, this is where I think the ge-, the genius of Rabirius shows through,
and Rabirius shows, in a sense himself, to be the Frank Gehry of his day.
I mean, somebody who really enjoyed undulating,
undulating forms and the way in the which concavity and
convexity can be played off against one another to great result.
It's an elliptical fountain.
It's fairly small in scale.
It's elliptical, as you can see here.
And the, the convexity of that ellipse played off and you see it repeated again
here, played off against these interesting undulating walls; all of this created
again out of concrete and faced with brick.
So you imagine the bricks have to be very cut carefully
molded to fit, where they need to fit into this incredible scheme.
And of course in antiquity this would have been stuccoed over and
probably have some marble revetment on it and so on and so forth.
But the shape is absolutely marvelous.
And I think we are definitely in the presence
of a great architectural genius in the person of
Rabirius who was working for for Domitian.
The private wing of the palace equally spectacular in its own way.
I mentioned to you already that it's more, it's larger
and in the space that it covers than the Domus Flavia.
And part of it is on two stories. The part that you see over here.
There's a fountain court in the center and then two stories of rooms around that.
Another peristyle back here.
And then a stadium once again, a hairpin shape, with a
curved side and a flat side, just like his stadium in Rome.
But he already had a stadium where he can, a public stadium,
where, one could watch race horses at, at, at races and the like.
He used this instead and it, it is actually sunken.
because remember this part is two stories.
This is a sunken, a sunken stadium next to it.
It was used as
a place for pleasurable walks. As a kind of outdoor garden where
Domitian and, again, special visitors, could, could spend some, some time.
A pleasant place to walk within the city.
We see here another, an axonometric view from Ward-Perkins where we can also
get a very good sense, not only of the Domus Flavia, as we've already described
it, The basilica and the aula on one end, the octagonal fountain in the center,
and then, over here, the dining hall with
the two elliptical fountains, one on either side.
Here we see again the private area with the sunken stadium
over here with the peristyle court with a fountain in the center.
Two stories around that. And then over here
another couple of other peristyle courts.
There are actually three peristyle courts in total here.
What's interesting I think when you look at this axonometric view,
I think it's interesting to see that kind of cut away
view, that to see from the outside a lot of these
spaces didn't look as interesting as they did from the inside.
We are definitely moving.
I mean we've seen that to be the case for a while.
Vis a vis Roman architecture.
Think back to some of the early
residences in Pompeii where they were very plain
and severe on the outside, but when you went
inside and saw the atrium and the impluvium and
the compluvium and the garden, it was something else.
Again, this whole element of surprise.
And that's true even here, I think, in this palace, where the structures are
less interesting from the outside and more interesting from the interiors of them.
Here's the Google Earth image again
of just the private part of the
palace where we see this interesting peristyle court.
The other two peristyle courts behind it.
These rooms placed on two stories and then once again, the sunken
stadium, sunken stadium, is actually quite well preserved, as you can see here.
It's one of the better preserved parts of the villa today.
You can get a very good sense, not only of its shape, and also of its scale.
It's enormous.
A huge
stadium.
And again, you have to imagine Domitian wandering around here.
And you can see the curved end on one side, but most importantly
the concrete construction faced with brick
and including columns and other marble revetment.
This is a view of that first court, the
one that has rooms on two stories around it.
Once again, Rabirius has had a great deal of fun with
this fountain.
He seems to have taken particular pleasure in designing fountains, and
in letting his imagination run free, with regard to fountain design.
You see, you see here again he's playing off convex against concave.
He's done all of this out of, out of concrete.
These shapes are done in concrete faced with brick.
And again, the bricks have to be molded very specially to fit the space
within that they need to accommodate themselves, too.
And if any of you know anything about those female warriors called the Amazons,
they carry shields called peltas, P-E-L-T-A, as
these should remind you, don't they look?
like Peltae?
They look very much like that's probably coincidental.
I'm not implying here that there's any
any particular iconography to this particular fountain.
But who knows?
But they do look very much
like shields that are carried by Amazonian women.
But at any rate, this playing off of convex against concave.
Rabirius is clearly enjoying himself with this monument.
Then the rooms on two stories.
And you see, just as we saw quite, quite some time
ago in the second phase of the Villa of the Mysteries,
where they were beginning to open up the exterior and create
bay windows and more windows and make it less severe than
it had been in the original domus Italica. We see that sort of thing here.
Many more windows used. The wall being opened up.
They've gotten so sophisticated in their use of concrete.
That they are able to to open the, the
walls up more with these rectangular windows of different
shapes as you can see some large, some smaller,
some on the ground, some higher sort of like windows.
And then above, additional openings
that are, that are arcuated on the top.
So clearly he's again having enjoying opening up this wall and creating
interesting, interesting views from one part of the structure to another.
Two more, two more images of that wonderful
fountain, where I think you can see even
better the way in which this has all been done out of concrete phased with brick.
And you have to imagine, of course, the spectacular water display.
the, the actual water jets that would've come up,
make, the Bellagio it may not have been, but
it was probably something you know, sort of a,
the ancient version of the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
The fountains at the Bellagio.
Here you see a restored view of this fountain court where you get a sense that
once you add a bunch of statuaries, some
water jets, which you don't see actually working here.
And paint the walls, the whole thing
would've been even more spectacular still and
I think that gives you some general sense of the original appearance of the palace.
Around the the court, the fountain court, and the private wing
that we've just looked at there were a series of rooms.
And if you look at some of those rooms in
detail, I think you'll be amazed by what you see.
Some fantastically-shaped rooms. Some of them cruciform, cross-shaped.
Some of them going way back to the
frigidaria with their circular rooms with radiating alcoves.
And not surprisingly, again given what, what Severus and
Celer were able to achieve at Nero's Domus Aurea, given
the fact that the octagon is clearly also in the
mind of Ribirius in this building, we see him creating
small octagonal, octagonal rooms, and exploring
and experimenting with those octagonal rooms.
And you see a couple of them in plan, on
the side, on one of the sides of this fountain court.
I show you here a view from, or
several views from the Ward-Perkins textbook, where we see
a cross-section, a plan, and also an axonometric view
of one of these octagonal rooms that we believe
was designed by Rabirius for the Palatine palace.
And I compare it down here to the octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aria, which
was clearly the model for Rabirius's foray into into, to designing octagons.
It's a much smaller room, than Nero's octagonal room,
but he takes the whole concept a step further.
It's an
octagon, yes, it's eight sided, just like the Domus Aurea it has radiating alcoves.
Some of them are rectangular, some of them
are, are, are circular, as you can see here.
And if you look at the axonometric view, you
will see two interesting things that are a step forward.
One of them is the fact that although in the Domus
Aurea, the eight sided room, although the room was eight sided they,
the, the dome was itself essentially a, a curved, it’s a traditional dome.
What we see happening here though, is they take the eight sides.
And continue that segmented feel into the dome.
So we have an eight-sided segmented dome in this octagonal room
in the Palatine Palace, which is different than the Domus Aurea.
And the other
thing, and perhaps even more significant, is the
fact that if we look at the individual niches,
we will see that they are envelopes of space,
in the same way that Nero's Domus Aurea was.
And that they have, and just like Nero's Domus,
just like Nero's Domus Aurea, they have niches within niches.
But what Rabirius has done here is something really quite extraordinary
and very different from anything we've seen earlier in Roman architecture, and
that is he's placed some of these additional niches
or windows or doorways off axis with the niche itself.
Now we have seen that the Romans cared above
all about axiality and symmetry, and yet we see
here, and this is why I call him the
Frank Gehry of the Roman, of, you know, Roman architects.
He is willing to try something entirely different.
He is clearly enamored
of, circles and rectangles and domes and the
like, but he's also willing to dispense with
the usual axiality of Roman architecture, and explore,
placing things off axis in a quite inventive way.
And I can show you that even better by looking quickly at the two views
of one of these octagonal rooms from the private wing of the Palatine Palace
where you can see not only, and I hope you can see
it from where you are, you can see not only the segment.
Can you see segmented dome, I think quite clearly here?
You can see these envelopes at space. You can see these openings.
This whole idea of creating vistas from one one building to another.
But and you can see that the way in
which these vary, that some are doorways, some are windows.
But I think you can also see the way in which he is beginning to place.
Here is
the window.
Displaced completely off axis with the niche.
This is even more apparent in this other view,
where you can see one of these radiating niches.
And in that radiating niche there's an opening that starts at the floor
and then there's another opening to the left of it that's higher up.
And again, you get this sense of asymmetry rather than symmetry in this.
And this is again very, very experimental,
very different.
It really is different than almost anything I can show you
not only before but even after this great work of architecture.
And it gives us some insight into the creativity of Rabirius
and the way in which Domitian was allowing him to be.
Because I think this goes above and beyond.
Clearly, Domitian is imaging himself, I think,
especially in the public realm of this building.
He's very concerned with
how he's presenting himself. To his public.
Over here I have the sense that he has really let Rabirius be Rabirius.
That he let Rabirius do what he wanted to do
to create an interesting, architecturally exciting space in which he
could live and could enjoy some of what, some of the interesting architectural
motifs that Rabirius instills in this extraordinary structure.
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