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.
