We also have evidence for what the
pediment, the sculpture in the pediment looked like.
And I want to turn to that now.
This is a, a relief that dates to a slightly later period,
that purports to represent the pediment of the temple of Mars Ultor.
And I show it to you here.
And we can tell it from this exactly what the
sculptural display was all about in the pediment of this temple.
You see here in the center not surprisingly, Mars Ultor himself.
Mars Ultor depicted with a bare chest.
Next to him, to his left, to his right excuse me, to
our left, we see a figure of a woman, this is Venus.
And Venus as you can see has a something on her left shoulder, it is a cupid.
So Venus with cupid.
Venus the consort of Mars.
And then over here a personification, that we believe depicts Fortuna.
Fortuna, the goddess of Fortune, who brought
fortune to Augustus in his battle.
And then over here, a seated figure of Roma, with her arms and armor.
Keep this figure in your mind, because I'm
going to show you another seated Roma very soon.
And then over here a reclining figure of the Tiber river.
The Tiber on, the river on which Rome was built.
Over here a seated figure we believe is Romulus, the founder
of Rome on the Palatine hill.
And over here a reclining personification of the Palatine.
So most important that the building honored of course Mars
Ultor, and that Mars Ultor was depicted in the pediment.
There was also a cult statue inside the temple of Mars.
And we believe we know what that looked like as well because we believe
we have a copy of it in a relief from Algiers that is still
preserved that depicts Mars in the center.
This Mars Ultor again and this time the warlike Mars Ultor
because you can see he's wearing his breastplate and his helmet.
His consort, Venus, is once again by his side.
Venus is leaning on a pedestal.
She's very seductive.
Her, her drapery is falling off her shoulder,
as you can see, as she looks toward Mars.
And then Cupid down here,
offering her a sword in a sheath, probably Mars' own sword.
And then over here, a figure that's very controversial, a youthful looking figure
with a bare chest, and you can see a full cap of hair.
And we think that he is actually the divinized Julius Caesar, very botoxed
compared to what is rejuvenated, compared to what he looked like in that green
diabase portrait that I showed you before. A very youthful divine Caesar,
which shows you what happens to people in Roman times, when they were divinized.
They were able to shed, a fair number of years
and were depicted in much younger versions in their divinized state.
So, this probably, a reflection, as you can see the figures stand on bases.
And figures that stand on bases in Roman relief
sculpture are usually meant to be statues.
And we believe that this is again, a rendition of what
that triple set of statues would have looked like inside the temple.
To return to the plan quickly, just
to make the point that the sculptural program,
we're concerned here primarily with architecture, but the
sculptural program was very complicated, but very interesting.
And the figures were very carefully aligned with
one another to get the message across.
So as you looked at the temple, you would
have seen Mars Ultor in the center of the pediment.
If you were allowed to walk into the temple, which usually only the priests
could do, you would see the cult statue with Mars Ultor in center there.
There was an equestrian statue that was put up of Augustus in two BC when he
was given the title Pater Patriae, The Father, of his country.
And then all along the colonnades are there would
have been statuary, including an image of, of, Aeneus
on the side, Romulus on this side and the
so called Sumi Weary the great man of Rome.
Both Augustus's colleagues and also his rivals in their portraits on either side.
A kind of giant picture gallery, a giant portrait gallery of,
of, of the, of Rome, of the great men of Rome, of the greatest
men of Rome, namely Augustus himself, and of his ancestry,
both divine and mythological, via Aeneas and also Venus.