Art of the Western World
The Classical Ideal
Arichitecture, sculpture, painting,
even the landscape create a vision of the perfect place,
a place of fantasy and myth where the gods might walk with men,
Somewhere of course which has never existed in history
It is imagined.
Yet it has been created out of fragments of the half dreamt
half remembered ancient Greece and Rome.
The poet Shelley wrote at the beginning of 19th century,
"We are all Greeks.
"Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts,
"all have their roots in Greece.
"But for Greece we might still have been savages and idolaters."
The human form and the human mind attain to a perfection in Greece
which has impressed its image on those faultless productions
whose very fragments are the despair of modern art
and which can never cease to delight mankind until the extinction of the race.
In the 18th and 19th centuries,
Europeans surrounded themselves with the images of Greece and Rome.
They created for themselves personal museums
which displayed their wealth, taste and learning
and idealized the virtues of reason, liberty and justice.
In this way they elevated and even masked their mundane relationships
with land ownership and manufacture, trade and empire.
And they exported these ideas
and the visual language which expressed them all over the world
to the Americas, the Indies and beyond.
It is appropriate then,
that these are the first pictures we see in a series on the tradition of Western art.
We could have started in the caves of Lascaux or the temples of Luxor,
but if there is a beginning,
a source to which Western art and thought constantly refers,
it is in ancient Greece and Rome.
A Greece and Rome that are forever fantasized and idealized
but which are with us wherever we look.
More than two hundreds years ago
when the founding fathers of United States were building their new capital here in Washington
they searched for a visual style which would embody their democratic ideals
and they found it in Greece and Rome
in a style which for them, and still for us,
embodies harmony, order and freedom.
And from that day to this the West had built its temples to
liberty and justice and to money and power
in the Greece and Rome style.
You can see it in Trafalgar Square in London,
and in Leningrad in the Soviet Union.
At the root of the Western tradition,
in architecture, in painting and in sculpture
is the classical legacy.
It’s so ingrained in our way of seeing things
that most of the time we don't notice when we use it
in TV, in commercials, in magazines, in the coins in our pocket,
even in the a classical head on our credit card.
And many of the uses to which we put it no doubt would astonish people from the ancient world.
But if an ancient Greek could time travel down to our time and be here now,
he would recognize this around us,
he would surely feel that in some sense
the West is heir is to his civilization.
The power of this tradition and its hold over our imagination
make it difficult for us to see the Greeks as Romans as they really were.
The Athenians of the 5th century B.C., the builders of the temple at Sounion
are often portrayed as superheroes, the creaters of democracy and a perfect society.
We must be careful, though, not to idealize them.
Like all societies theirs was imperfect,
it was based on slavery, women had no rights,
they were imperialists,
and in their darkest moments as in the bitter Peloponnesian war with Sparta
the Athenians fell prey to irrationality, mass hysteria,
strange religious cults, pornography, urban violence,
and murderous and unjust acts of foreign policy against smaller states.
Things we're all too familiar with in the modern west.
But Greek artists and poets understood these things about human nature
and they made their art about those contradictions,
about the tragedies and the failures as well as the achievements.
The sculptures of the altar of Zeus from Pergamon
portray those contradictions in the dramatic manner of the second century B.C..
But like so much Greek art,
the originals have been dismembered and fragmented -
scattered around the museums of the world or buried deep and forgotten.
Some work are wonderfully preserved on the site of their origin,
but most have been broken and bleached by time.
It takes imagination and study to piece together these fragments
and try to see them again in the context of society in which they were produced.
Who made these images and objects?
For whom and why?
What was in the artist's mind and in the patron's,
and how were they seen by the surrounding society?
We shall be helped in answering these questions
by art historians like John Boardman, of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
This is the way we're used to looking at Greek art, in museums.
In this case in a cast gallery in the University of Cambridge,
where they've assembled these rather gaunt white figures,
plaster casts of the more important Greek and Roman status
which are present in many different museums in the world.
Now, the job of the art historian and archaeologists is to
try to work out what the original settings for these figures was,
what was in mind of the artist when he made them when he did,
and what the impact would have been on the society for which they were made.
There are a number of examples here which make the point rather easily of the difficulty
that we have in trying to make this adjustment.
This little figure, for instance, which was probably made in Crete about the middle of the 7th century B.C.,
isn't all that unlike figures which might have been made in a number of other cultures in antiquity,
in Syria or Egypt.
At least, only an expert would know the difference, it's not distinctively and obviously Greek.
There's another problem about it too which we have to adjust for.
There were traces of color on it,
and in this museum a duplicate cast has been colored up
with what they think to be more or less the colors of its original appearance,
and you can see it's really quite a striking difference
to the way in which we're used to seeing figures of this sort.
If we move on about 100 years, to another figure, and
and one of the important characteristics of Greek art is the extremely rapid development of style.
we find something which is considerably more realistic,
still very formal, rather stiff, but quite unmistakably Greek.
And this figure too can tell us a little bit more about her original appearance
because she was found with traces of color on her dress and on her face,
and again a duplicate cast here has been restored and painted up
to give us a idea of what she look like in antiquity.
The colors would probably have been muted somewhat by the bright Athenian sun.
But what we've got to do is to try to make these adjustments
to allow for these figures in their original setting, their original appearance,
try to understand their original function.
Because if we can't do this, we can't understand what Greek art's really about.
The art we recognize as Greek,
was produced in the millennium between two and three thousand years ago.
The temple of Sounion was built in the great classical period of Athenian triumph
but centuries before,
Greek society was already recognizably different from the other cultures of the ancient Near East.
Persia and Egypt were mighty empires,
ruled by dynasties that give themselves the status of gods.
The Greeks lived in small city states under the rule of petty kings.
The scale of the these small Greek communities, clinging to a rocky landscape,
never far from the sea, made them vulnerable to attack from larger forces
but also threw them back on their resources of fitness, strength, intelligence, calculation,
and above all, individual heroism.
The ideal of the individual, standing proudly independent,
is one of the most powerful and resilient ideas in human history.
The figure of the Kouros shows this ideal taking the center of the stage.
Andrew Stewart teacher at the University of California at Berkeley.
It's often said that statues like this are emblematics of early Greek culture.
I think they are, and I think they are for four reasons.
The sculptor has taken the statue's clothes off.
Convinced that man is the measure of all things,
he allows him to stand free and proud,
allows your eyes to roam unobstructed across his body.
He's autonomous,
the sculptor has stripped away the back pillar and the screen between the legs of
the Egyptian statues that were his predecessors,
and has allowed him to walk forward in three dimensional space.
He's beautiful.
He's also youthful.
The sculptor has chosen that period between eighteen and twenty-one
that the Greeks believed was the prime of one's life, the acme of one's existence on this earth.
As a result, the statue could serve one of two main functions.
It could be offered to the gods, particularly to Apollo,
the epitome of this youthful ideal projected upon the heavens,
or it could stand above the grave of a man of any age,
reminding his descendants of that time when he was in the prime of his life,
standing youthful, proud, autonomous,
beholden to no-one, the measure of all things.
The male figure, naked, proud, idealized,
did have a female equivalent in the Kore.
She too is beautiful, but she is serene rather than heroic.
She's clothed and static, not boldly striding forward like the male.
The turn of the 6th to the 5th century B.C.
saw one of the most dramatic transitions in history, political and social.
It coincided with an equally dramatic transition in art.
The Critian boy of the early 5th century B.C., is the Kouros come to life.
He has relaxed his body and come closer to the appearance of nature.
We can only speculate about and imagine the relationship
between the development of democracy and the Greek city states
and the development of an unprecedented realism in art,
but both, in their quite separate ways,
reveal a new excitement in the idea that individual human being
can take charge of their own destiny,
even they do so under the capricious gaze of man-like gods.
The Zeus recovered from the wreck of Artemisium,
shows the new freedom and confidence of sculptors modelling clay rather than carving stone
and translating the clay model by casting it in bronze.
The Zeus describes his power
by reaching his hand far out over his realm,
brandishing his thunderbolt,
gazing unwaveringly toward the horizon.
He stands like an icon of divine power.
It tells us that Zeus is king of the universe,
that his power is infinite,
that he is the supremely poised being
by comparison with the hubbub and turmoil of man's life on earth.
In fact that his physique is no different from that of an athlete or a hero of the same time
is simply a continuation of the standard Greek notion that the gods were made in human form,
that you project your own notions of male beauty onto the heavens.
The triumph of democracy, a more restricted matter than the mass democracies of today,
but nevertheless a dramatic change from tyranny,
coincided with the triumph of the Athens of Pericles.
Pericles was not a tyrant but a leader chosen by the Athenian citizens as their representative.
He led Athens through a period of reconstruction after the wars with the Persians,
wars which had left Athens in ruins but finally rid of its great enemy
and at the head of a league of Greek city states.
The mid-5th century B.C. was the period of Athens' greatest influence,
not only on the Greek world of that time but on subsequent history.
The most impressive and evocative monument to that influence
is the Acropolis, the citadel which still dominate Athens.
Pericles used the resources, or some contemporaries argued, abused them,
to rebuild the Acropolis and crown it with the Parthenon.
The bold simplicity of the building -
- with its strictly harmonized repetition of the most basic geometric shapes -
has had an unparalleled influence on the architecture of the world.
The Creators of the Parthenon -
- including the sculptor Pheidias and the architect Iktinos -
adapted the traditional temple form but refined it.
They created an impression of subtlety and lightness
despite the scale of the building and the massiveness of its marble surface.
The sculptural decorations employed the skills of hundreds of craftsmen
and set a new standard in art.
It took less than a decade to arise this monument to Athenian pride.
It was built on the ruins of temples destroyed by the Persians.
and in part glorified the victory of the Greeks over their greatest enemy.
but to their subsequent cost,
the Athenians took more than their share of the benefit of Persian defeat.
At home they may have been democratic
but to their fellow Greek, such as the Critians and Spartans,
they appeared arrogant and domineering
they thought that the protection of founding goddess - Athena have give them a special states
This special relationship was celebrated in a procession to honor the goddess.
Today, the Parthenon is most admired for the exquisite harmony of its architecture
and for the refinement of its freezers
But to the ancient Athenians,
it was admired for something rather different, what lay inside the temple.
And that was a statue of Athena nearly 40 feet high.
That's only five feet below the ceiling as we look at it today.
A statue armed, covered with gold,
in all its dress from head to foot,
the skin ivory, with monsters on its helmet and a great serpent by its side.
To us, that would seem garish, grandiose and unrestrained.
but that was the core of the building.
And if you put yourself in the position of an ancient Athenian,
perhaps coming from the Panathaneic procession,
in the broad daylight, the blue skies and dazzling light of an Attic August,
and then going inside that building,
we can imagine what it felt like to see that statue,
as the eye became accustomed to the gloom and saw the glitter of the gold,
the jeweled eyes reflected in the pool below the statue,
the effect must have been overwhelming.
We can only imagine the impact created by the goddess and her surroundings.
Our attempts to reconstruct the statue's appearance,
like this one from the nineteenth century,
can merely hint at the experience of seeing it in its dramatic context.
But it does remind us how vivid, how colorful, Greek art must have been in classical times.
Bleached by the centuries, and sterilized by the surrounding of the museum,
the reliefs of the Parthenon frieze appear cool and restrained,
But originally they would have been brightly colored,
and even more lifelike than they are now.
Their depiction of the Panathenaic procession would have been still more convincing -
art and nature coming closer together than ever before.
The frieze is generally regarded as representing the high point in the classical style.
Composition is still rather formal, almost mechanical,
but it's enlivened by a great many realistic details of gesture and posture.
The figures are perhaps rather unemotional but highly idealized.
The whole seems to represent a balance between
that Greek preoccupation with composition, proportion and a growing sense of realism.
The illusion of reality is created even more impressively in the massive sculptures of the pediments -
the gables at each end of the building.
What seems to happen is that they were creating so far as they could
more successful images of man by varying the representation of details.
There was, as it were, a sort of natural selection of forms
and the forms that were eventually adopted naturally tended to be the more realistic ones.
Add to it, remember,
the coloring of the hair and eyes, which would add to this realistic effect.
And as soon as they succeeded in understanding
how the human figure worked, that it was not simply an assemblage of patterns and volumes,
they moved very rapidly to the point at which they could create
a human figure in two dimensions or in three dimensions
which realistically portrayed
quite subtle poses, postures and actions.
This was the major breakthrough, this is the thing which
marked out Greek art from that of all contemporary cultures.
This, at least in sculpture,
was the point at which Greek art took off in a totally new direction
and informed the whole Western tradition.
The Athenian ascendancy did not survive the 5th century B.C..
Athenian democracy itself was always vulnerable.
But Athenian culture - its philosophy, literature and drama,
as much as its architecture, sculpture and painting, -
maintained a hold over the Greek and the Western imagination.
5th century Athens created a classical ideal against which all subsequent art could be measured.
Here the sculpture has refocused the youthful ideal of the Kouros
and the Parthenon frieze and the Getty bronze behind me
onto the person of one man: Alexander the Great.
What he's doing here is to appropriate the ideals of Periclean Athens
and to show Alexander as the logical successor of
all those young men who fought in the Peloponnesian war for Athens' greater glory
and who tried to establish her empire ever further and wider.
No individual had ever achieved so much in the history of mankind,
at least as far as the Greeks remembered it.
No individual had incorporated within himself qualities which were so conspicuously heroic.
So we have here a image that
derives its authority from the past, the human, the heroic, the divine,
but at the same time looks very definitely towards the future.
The future that Alexander promised
was an empire that would spread across two million square miles.
Greek towns and Greek language and culture
were established deep into Asia, some as far from their source as India.
Alexander died when he was only 33,
and his monumental project could not sustain itself,
but the model of the Greek state he exported,
of a civilized city in a barbarian landscape,
became the model of the Greek city states for the next three hundred years.
One such city was Pergamon,
built in what is now Turkey in the 2nd Century B.C..
The Pergamine rulers were neither democratic nor especially heroic,
but they borrowed the heroic forms of Alexander's time
and of classical Athens to express their ideals and values.
But in their art, like the carvings on the great altar of Zeus,
the Pergamines depicted the struggle between the gods, heroes and giants,
between the rational and the irrational,
with a violence and passion that the classical Athenian never permitted themselves.
You can feel the drill ripping into that stone
to create that writhing hair of the giants,
you can feel the chisel cutting away to create
feathers or skin or scales or muscles or drapery or whatever.
You can feel the rasp
making those immense range of surface textures together with the polish.
So, here the sculptor is foregrounding his own technique.
There's a notion of creativity going on here
which is quite different from anything that we've seen in the past.
The technique of the Parthenon frieze is self effacement.
Here the emphasis is on artistic creation.
The creative force of Greek art after Alexander has been reproduced ever since,
in the direct copies of the Roman period,
in the rediscoveries and recreations of the Renaissance,
and in heroic art up to today.
The great altar of Pergamon
is one of the most impressive and characteristic monuments from ancient Greek culture,
and yet at the time it was finished, about 170 B.C.,
the ages of these independent Greek city states and kingdoms like Pergamon
was near its end.
As a new power pushed its order across the Mediterranean:
Rome.
The Romans conquered Greece in the middle of the 2nd Century B.C..
They would surpass the Greeks in political power,
in military might, in technological innovation.
But the Romans would be forever in Greece's debt
in the fields of philosophy, science, literature and the arts.
As the Roman poet said, "Captive Greece made Rome captive."
The visual language devised by the Greeks
would be adopted by the Romans and subsequently by the entire Western tradition.
Indeed, it would become the preeminent means
of portraying order, rationality, harmony and power,
whether in dictatorships, despotisms or democracies.
Ironically, though, the lesson which the Greeks understood
and which their artists expressed in great work like this and in the Parthenon sculptures,
namely that the disruptive and frightening forces of the irrational
will always threaten to burst out in human history,
that lesson would have to learned again and again.
Rome began here,
a cluster of little villages strung over these hills above the marshy valley of the River Tiber.
Founded according to legend in the 8th Century, B.C.,
at his heyday in the 2nd Century, A.D.,
it ruled an empire
whose soldiers stood guard from the windy hills of Hadrian's Wall in Scotland
to the Persian Gulf and whose merchants travelled as far afield as India and China.
The culmination and the unifying of the old cultures of the Mediterranean world and Western Europe.
From that day to this, Rome would be the greatest single influence
on the Western culture tradition.
Indeed, it could be said that Rome is that tradition.
It's not merely the Rome gave the West
the Latin language, Roman law, Roman ideal on statecraft and on society
It was Rome which passed on to the West
the artistic, philosophical and spiritual legacy of Ancient Greece
which Rome had conquered, looted, and then learned from.
And it was Rome which was be the agency
of transmission to the West of an obscure Near Eastern religious cult
which became the dynamic motive force in Western society and spiritual life.
Christianity.
But Rome also gave the West a practical legacy.
It's a legacy which Western people see every day of their lives
from Washington Square to Trafalgar Square
and that legacy lies in the realm of architecture, civil engineering, building, town planning.
These were the Roman arts par excellence.
And Roman thinkers came to view the goal of their empire
as providing a peace in which those arts could flourish.
It was Ceasar Augustus
who brought the first real peace to a Rome weary of continual war and internal strife.
In 13 B.C.
the Senate celebrated his triumphant return from Spain
by dedicating to him an Altar of Augustan Peace.
On the outer walls,
is a sculpted representation of that dedication ceremony -
- procession of priests, officials, and members of the imperial family.
This is to Roman art what the Parthenon frieze is to Greek art,
A sense of order and serenity pervades the scene.
At the head of the procession, between his two consuls,
is the damaged but recognizable image of Augustus himself,
dignified though not yet deified.
All the other figures are portraits too,
such as Augustus's daughter Julia (later banished for immoral conduct)
and her first husband, Augustus's minister, Marcus Agrippa.
Other reliefs celebrate the joy and fertility of nature in this time of peace.
The universal harmony of the natural world
is represented by the full-breasted, reassuring figure of Mother Earth Herself.
The hundred-foot-high column commemorating Trajan's victory over the Dacians
shows the force required to keep the peace.
It's unique spiral frieze tells of the discipline and resourcefulness of the Roman legions.
moving by sea,
assembling to hear their orders,
building fortifications,
raiding an enemy town,
and crossing the Danube in small boats.
The army is shown to be an awesome fighting machine,
but there is no glorification of war itself,
which is necessarily brutal and remorseless.
The victory column and triumphal arch through which the returning army marched,
dragging slaves and spoils of war,
were forceful forms of propaganda for the righteousness of imperial power.
Guided by the Emperor, the Senate, and the People of Rome.
And it was the arch that was the basis of a revolutionary new architecture.
The post-and lintel system of the ancient world
was limited in the space it could span, and the weight it could bear.
The Romans soon recognized the strength and versatility of the arch
and elaborated it into an art form of grandeur and utility.
Roman stone arches,
like the one supporting this bridge built across the Tiber in 62 B.C.
were constructed of wedge-shaped blocks.
The blocks, wider at the top than at the bottom,
are locked in place by a central keystone.
The weight of the structure above compresses the stone blocks
and is transmitted evenly from one to another on either side down into the ground.
From the arch, came a new conception of interior architecture.
Extending the arch form through space in a straight line creates a tunnel or barrel vault.
Curving the arch through space,
Roman engineers created an annular or ring vault.
Two identical barrel vaults crossing at right angles form a groin vault.
These dramatic intersections would find lasting expression in the great Romanesque churches of the Middle Ages.
By rotating the arch around a fixed center-point,
they could describe a dome
or an apse with half-dome ceiling.
But the arch was only part of the story,
It was an extraordinary new building material which made these fluid designs possible
Twenty miles from Rome, in the hill town of Palestrina,
stand the remains of one of the first great Roman building project
- the Sanctuary of Fortuna, the Goddess of Fortune.
Much of it was hidden until a World War II bombing raid sheared away the later housing,
revealing this gigantic conception,
A series of seven immense terraces
rising 400 feet up from the grotto below
where the fortune-telling lots were cast for pilgrims,
all the way up to a colonnaded rotunda on top
where the 17th Century palace of the Barberini now stands.
And the whole complex was aligned to look out over a breathtaking vista of plain and mountain.
and with axial symmetry,
the sea framed by the foothills of the Apennines.
Here Roman architects began to play with the new curvilinear forms
such as this graceful hemicycle with its colonnade supporting an annular barrel vault
inset with coffers that were once richly decorated.
This amazing architecture was made possible by something which to us in the 20th Century
seem so commonplace it would hardly deserve comment.
Concrete.
Concrete had been used before this time.
A simple mixture of three parts sand, one part lime, broken stone and water.
But among its problems for builders was that it dried very swiftly
so it could be only really be used for layering courses, never for building entire structures.
But in the 1st Century B.C., the Romans discovered the almost magical properties
of a reddish volcanic sand called pozzolana which comes from Pozzuoli near Naples.
Concrete made with pozzolana has a very different quality.
It's very strong, it can be used in wet conditions.
It dries slowly so entire structure could be build,
bonded from top to bottom as one,
even including domes.
So this simply discovery marks a revolution in Roman and in Western architecture.
It made possible all the greatness which would follow.
At the height of its imperial power,
Rome was a sprawling city, crowded with millions citizens and slaves.
to keep them occupied, there were public baths, race course like the Circus Maximus,
and the great amphitheater decreed by the Emperor Vespasian in 75 A.D.
With its massive facade of superimposed arches,
the Colosseum seems to express in stone the grandiose dreams of all Empire-builders.
But it was a most functional building,
its gates numbered for ticket -holders,
its concentric vaulted corridors designed to funnel 50,000 spectators to their seats with maximum efficiency.
Built of stone, brick, and concrete,
the colosseum's huge oval interior offered every Roman
an unobstructed view of the slaughter in the arena below -
arena being the Latin word for sand that covered the wood floor and absorbed the blood.
Today, the Colosseum impresses us more as an amazing feat of architecture than as a work of art.
though it strongly influenced the design of both Renaissance palaces and modern sports arenas.
This three-dimensional scale model depicts Rome in the 4th Century,
virtually at the end of its spectacular imperial building program.
Of all the great constructions throughout the Empire,
one stands above all others as the crowning achievement of Roman architecture -
the Pantheon
Fittingly, it is a work that express not the ugliness of our baser instincts,
but our sense of wonder about worlds beyond our own.
Who built the Pantheon, and when, was long a mystery.
The Lation dedication tells us
that it was built by Marcus Aprippa, Augustus's son-in-law and consul.
This, it turned out, refers to the first Pantheon on this site,
a much more conventional temple.
The answer lay hidden for centuries
in the brick facing of the Pantheon's 25-foot-thick concrete rotunda.
Archaeologists had found that many Roman bricks were stamped with the name of the consul in office when they were made
Almost all the Pantheon's brick were made around 120 A.D.,
revealing that its builder was the Emperor Hadrian,
a man of passionately artistic sensibility and a particular love for architecture.
The Pantheon's rotunda and classical temple porch
have inspired more western architecture than any other building.
Each massive column is carved from a single block of Egyptian granite
and toppled by the flourishing acanthus leaves of the Corinthian order favored by the Romans
Impressive though it is,
it isn't the exterior that gives this building its lofty place in western art,
but what lies behind its great bronze doors.
With its opening to the sky,
this was the world's largest dome for more than 18 centuries -
5000 tons of carefully molded concrete
stretching across nearly 150 feet of a space.
The Greeks had created exteriors of exquisite harmony.
It was the Romans who gave the West the grandly conceived interior.
Now, a church,
this is the only major Roman building that survives intact.
Pantheon means "temple of all the gods"
and their statues must have been placed in these temple-like niches
where Christian saints now stand,
richly decorated with the colored marble brought by sea from quarries throughout the Empire.
Professor Richard Brilliant of Columbia University
In the Fifth Century
when the barbarians took Rome
they entered this building
to despoil it of its treasures.
The splendor of the interior
stop them in their tracks
and thus preserved this glorious structures,
this magnificent space until our own time.
Space gives content and form to this great building.
What we see on the ground level is a great cylinder.
The cylinder fuses or merges into the hemispherical dome that lies upon it.
That fusion is so complete
Because the architect has shaped this interior both vertically and horizontally.
in such a way as to suggest that the building interior contains a perfect form.
that perfect form known as the sphere.
The paradox encountered this structure
is that space so ordinarily thought of as being defined by architecture
instead defines the architectures.
The true substance of the building is space.
As you can see the coffers
meant solely to organize, to structure our visual experience
recede toward the oculus,
culminating in that passage not an escape but a kind of communication
between the interior space defined by this extraordinary building
and the space of the cosmos that lied beyond.
That cosmos is perfection,
perfection in the form of a sphere.
A sphere which has no beginning and no end.
Pagan temple, Christian church,
bold and original work of art
the Pantheon remains a symbol of universal significance
for all the ages.
Hadrian's restless intelligence
was also at work in the immense and inspired villa complex he built for himself near Tivoli.
Like other Emperors,
he used the shaping power of concrete and vaulted architecture
to enclose space in dramatic ways,
to sculpt interior that expanded rather than limited human activity
with an echo here and there of his enduring masterwork.
Everywhere in the Villa there were statues,
many of them in the Greek tradition he so passionately admired.
In this, Hadrian was typical of well-to-do Romans throughout the imperial age.
Roman sculpture, it's such a rich subject.
The Romans, their artists, Roman patrons
delighted in their collection of sculpture in the round,
sculpture which they displayed in their public places,
sculpture which they used to decorate the fora,
palaces, gardens, variety of situations.
Sculpture, which I may add, they also put into museums
because indeed the delight in works of art
were something that gave enormous pleasure
both to the Romans and also to their friends.
Indeed, it has become clear
that much of Greek art has in fact survived not in original
but in Roman copies.
much like the copies in this room
in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.
Such a special work is this statue in marble
from Hadrian's Villa of a tormented centaur.
The statue in dark marble,
comes close to the bronze original of the Hellenistic period
and one can see what effort the sculptor expended
in attempting to reproduce as closely as possible the ancient original
Hadrian who we must imagine collected this sculpture and enjoyed it
could appreciate a certain moral content in the work itself.
The centaur is tormented by lust.
At one time, now missing unfortunately,
there was a Cupid on his back,
a Cupid thrusting the arrows of sexual passion
into the centaur whose arms are bound behind him.
The moral lesson to be derived from this work
and not just from the enjoyment of it
is to be found in the necessity of imposing reason on passion.
The Romans themselves live on in their vast legacy of portrait sculpture
We have Marcus Aurelius as an idealistic young man
and has the weary philosopher-emperor who was to die on a lonely frontier.
We have the portrait of this aristocratic beauty of the Flavian period
whose slave-girl must have been constantly busy with the curling iron.
And by contrast, the flaccid hair and careworn expression
of a woman in her declining years.
Decius rules an Empire more and more threatened by barbarians at its borders
and by civil strife within.
Looking for scapegoats,
he ordered the first systematic persecution of Christians.
A vision of the Christian cross was said to have
inspired the military victory of Constantine over his rival for the imperial crown
in the year 312.
This colossal head
is a portrait not of Constantine the individual
but his divinely inspired power.
The Senate honored him with the last triumphal arch built in Rome.
Nervous about Constantine's interest in Christianity,
the senators decorated it not only with new reliefs,
but also with earlier works of Trajan, Hadrain, and Marcus Aurelius -
- reminders of the glorious and Pagan-Roman tradition.
They reveal a remarkable change in Roman art.
The dynamic compositions and ideally proportioned bodies are the relief from the time of Hadrian
- whose head has been replaced by Constantine's -
give way in the new reliefs to rows of puppet-like figures,
static and without identity.
Squeezed together as if for security,
they seem to express the anxiety and authoritarianism of a troubled Empire.
While his arch was still being built,
Constantine legalized the practice of Christianity.
Its art could now rise from the darkness of the catacombs
to celebrate the Son of God and his promise of life everlasting.
Junius Bassus, Prefect of Rome,
was baptized on his deathbed and buried in this marble sarcophagus
A masterwork of early Christian art,
it depicts the expulsion of Adam and Eve,
the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem,
Daniel in the lion’s den,
the arrest of Saint Paul
and other scenes which became icons of the faith.
The central figure is Christ the Giver of Law,
seated on the Throne of Heaven, flanked by Peter and Paul,
But elements of the pagan part remain.
Coelus, the Roman god of the skies, supports the floor of Heaven,
Christ wears the robe of a Greek philosopher.
And his beardless, youthful face
bears more than a passing resemblance to pagan images of Apollo.
The first great churches
were variations of the Roman assembly hall known as a basilica,
with a central nave often ending in a semi-circular apse,
and side aisles screened by colonnades.
Santa Sabina, finished in 432,
is a particularly fine example
of these simple, but elegant early Christian basilica.
The Roman arch appears here in yet another form,
spring directly from the column capitals.
The insignia of the new, Christianized Empire -
whose capital is no longer Rome but Constantinople -
are placed with perhaps unconscious symbolism,
atop the Corinthian column taken from a pagan building.
Once reviled and persecuted,
Christianity is triumphant.
Historians have argued about the cause of the fall of the Rome Empire
ever since it happened,
when Saint Augustine wrote that the empire had been part of God's divine plan
for the furtherance of Christianity through the world
and that the empire had new fulfilled its historical purpose.
Modern scholars have found the political, material, economic and social reasons for the decline
but have been most impressed by the great spiritual crisis
which swept through all classes of Roman society in the 4th Century
and is marked by the breakdown of the social, ethical, and religious concepts
which had bound the old classical world view together.
The Roman Empire had brought to its rulers inconceivable wealth,
as we can still see today in its vast building projects,
but the rights of individual people to moral fulfillment had never been met.
So the rise of Christianity,
the superseding of the great pagan temples of Rome like this one of Antoninus Pius,
by Christian churches,
marked a fundamental shift in the Western story
into the inner life, towards personal salvation.
The successors of the Roman Empire,
would be the barbarians, Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths,
third world immigrants attracted to the fading splendors as to a gold rush.
They received the Latin language and the Christian faith from Rome
and assimilated Roman ideal of government to their own customary law,
and there lies the key to the synthesis which will became the Western tradition.
A synthesis, of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Germanic,
and that synthesis would be achieved during the long struggles of the Dark Ages
which followed on the fall of the Roman Empire.
By 小綿貓HD