Captioning made possible by the annenberg/cpb project
Architecture, sculpture, painting,
Even the landscape,
Create a vision of a perfect place,
A place of fantasy and myth
Where 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 half-dreamt, half-remembered ancient greece and rome.
The poet shelley
Wrote at the beginning of the 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
Attained 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 ideals
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 source
To which western art and thought constantly refers,
It's in ancient greece and rome,
Which are forever fantasized and idealized,
But are with us wherever we look.
More than 200 years ago,
When the founding fathers of the 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, as still for us,
Embodies harmony, order, and freedom.
The west has built its temples to liberty and justice
And to money and power in the greek and roman style.
You see it in trafalgar square in london
And in leningrad in the soviet union.
At the root of the western tradition--
In architecture, painting, and sculpture--
Is the classical legacy.
It's so ingrained in our way of seeing things
That we don't notice when we use it
In tv, commercials, magazines, coins,
Even on our credit card.
Many of our uses for it
No doubt would astonish people from the ancient world.
But if an ancient greek could be here now,
He would recognize this around us
And feel that, in some sense,
The west is heir to his civilization.
The power of this tradition
And its hold over our imagination
Make it difficult for us to see the greeks and romans
As they really were.
The athenians of the fifth century b.c.,
The builders of the temple at sounion,
Are often portrayed as superheroes,
The creators of democracy and a perfect society.
We must be careful 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 failures as well as the achievements.
The sculptures of the altar of zeus from pergamum
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 works 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 in the context
Of the society in which they were produced.
Who made these images and objects?
For whom? And why?
What was in the artist's mind? The patron's?
How were they seen by the surrounding society?
We'll be helped in answering these questions
By art historians like john boardman
Of the ashmolean museum, oxford.
We're used to looking at greek art this way, in museums,
In this case, in a cast gallery,
University of cambridge,
Where they've assembled these figures--
Plaster casts of the more important
Greek and roman statues
Present in many museums in the world.
The art historian and archaeologist
Try to work out the original settings
Of these figures--
What was in the artist's mind when he made them
And the impact on the society
For which they were made.
There are several examples here
Which show the difficulty we have
In making this adjustment.
This figure, probably made in crete
In the seventh century b.c,
Isn't unlike figures which might have been made
In other cultures in antiquity, syria or egypt.
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 a duplicate cast has been colored up
With what they think to be its original color
It's a striking difference has been colored up
To the way we're used to seeing such figures.
We move on about 100 years
To another figure--
One important characteristic 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.
This figure, too, can tell us a little more
About her original appearance
Because she was found with traces of color
On her dress and face,
And again, a duplicate cast
Has been restored and painted up
To show what she looked like in antiquity.
The colors would probably have been muted somewhat
By the bright athenian sun.
We've got to try to make these adjustments
To allow for these figures in their original setting,
Their original appearance,
Try to understand their original function.
If we can't,
We can't understand what greek art's about.
The art we recognize as greek
Was produced in the millennium
Between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.
The temple at sounion was built
In the great classical period of athenian triumph,
But centuries before,
Greek society was already recognizably different
From other near-east cultures.
Persia and egypt were mighty empires,
Ruled by dynasties
That gave themselves the status of gods.
The greeks lived in city-states
Under the rule of petty kings.
The scale of these greek communities,
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 idea 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 idea taking the center of the stage.
Andrew stewart teaches at the university of california
At berkeley.
It's often said that statues like this
Are emblematic of early greek culture.
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 18 and 21
That the greeks believed
Was the prime of one's life,
The acme of one's existence on 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,
Or it could stand above the grave
Of a man of any age,
Reminding his descendants
Of when he was in his prime,
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 sixth century to the fifth 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 krition boy of the early fifth 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
The relationship between the development of democracy
In the greek city-states
And the development of an unprecedented realism in art.
But both, in their separate ways,
Reveal a new excitement
In the idea that individual human beings
Can take charge of their own destiny,
Even though they do so under the capricious gaze
Of manlike gods.
The zeus recovered from the wreck of artemisium
Shows the new freedom and confidence of sculptors
Modeling 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 thunderbolts,
Gazing unwaveringly towards the horizon.
He stands like an icon with divine power.
It tells us that zeus is king of the universe,
That his power is infinite,
That he is a supremely poised being
By comparison with the turmoil of man's life on earth.
The 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 known 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 left athens in ruins,
But finally rid of its great enemy
And at the head of a league of greek city-states.
The mid-fifth century b.c.
Was the period of athens' greatest influence,
Not only on the greek world at that time,
But on subsequent history.
The most impressive monument to that influence
Is the acropolis, the citadel which still dominates 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 world's architecture.
The creators of the parthenon,
Including the sculptor phidias and the architect ictinus,
Adapted the traditional temple form,
But refined it.
They created an impression of subtlety and lightness,
Despite the building's scale
And the massiveness of its marble surface.
The sculptural decorations
Employed the skills of hundreds of craftsmen,
Setting a new standard in art.
It took less than a decade
To erect this monument to athenian pride.
It was built on the ruins
Of a temple destroyed by the persians,
Partly glorifying the greeks' victory
Over their greatest enemy.
To their subsequent cost,
The athenians took more than their share
Of the benefits of persian defeat.
They may have been democratic,
But to fellow greeks like the corinthians and spartans,
They appeared arrogant and domineering.
They felt that protection of their founding goddess, athena,
Had given them a special status,
Celebrated in a procession to honor the goddess.
Today, the parthenon is admired
For the harmony of its architecture
And the refinement of its friezes,
But to the ancient athenians,
It was admired for something rather different--
what lay inside the temple.
That was a statue of athena nearly 40 feet high.
That's only 5 feet below the ceiling.
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 panathenaic procession
In the 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 eyes became accustomed to the gloom
And saw the glittering gold,
The jeweled eyes reflected in the pool below,
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 19th century,
Can merely hint at the experience of seeing it
In its dramatic context.
But it reminds us how vivid, how colorful
Greek art must have been in classical times.
Bleached by the centuries
And sterilized by museum surroundings,
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.
Figures are perhaps rather unemotional,
But highly idealized.
The whole thing 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 hair and eyes,
Which add to this realistic effect.
As soon as they understood how the human figure worked,
That it wasn't simply an assemblage
Of patterns and volumes,
They moved 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
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 fifth century b.c.
Athenian democracy itself was always vulnerable,
But athenian culture--
Its philosophy, literature, drama,
As much as its architecture, sculpture, and painting--
Maintained a hold over the greek
And the western imagination.
Fifth-century athens created a classical ideal
Against which all subsequent art
Could be measured.
Here the sculptor 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 those young men who fought in the peloponnesian war
For athens' greater glory
And who tried to establish her empire 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 an 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 2 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 for the greek city-states
For the next 300 years.
One such city was pergamum,
Built in what's now turkey in the second century b.c.
Pergamene 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 carvings on the great altar of zeus,
The pergamenes depicted the struggle between the gods,
Between the rational and the irrational,
With a violence and passion
That the classical athenians 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,
Muscles or drapery-- 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 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 pergamum
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 age of these independent greek city-states
And kingdoms, like pergamum,
Was nearing its end
As a new power pushed its order across the mediterranean--
Rome.
The romans conquered greece
In the middle of the second 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 pre-eminent 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 these works 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 be 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 eighth century b.c.,
At its heyday in the second 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 traveled 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 cultural tradition.
indeed, it could be said that rome is that tradition.
It's not merely that rome gave the west the latin language,
Roman law, roman ideas on state craft 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.
It was rome which would 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,
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 caesar 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--
A 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' daughter julia--
Later banished for immoral conduct--
And her first husband,
Augustus' 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 100-foot-high column
Commemorating trajan's victory over the dacians
Shows the force required to keep the peace.
Its 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 the 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.
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 arch's strength and versatility
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 into place by a central keystone.
The weight of the structure compresses the 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 form 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 a half-domed ceiling.
But the arch was only part of the story.
It was an extraordinary new building material
Which made these fluid designs possible.
20 miles from rome,
In the hill town of palestrina,
Stand the remains
Of one of the first great roman building projects--
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
Seems 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 only really be used for layering courses,
Never for building entire structures.
But in the first century b.c.,
The romans discovered the almost magical properties
Of a reddish volcanic sand called pozzuolana,
Which comes from pozzuoli near naples.
Concrete made with pozzuolana has a very different quality.
It's very strong.
It can be used in wet conditions.
It dries slowly,
so entire structures could be built,
Bonded from top to bottom as one,
Even including domes.
So this simple 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 a million citizens and slaves.
To keep them occupied, there were public baths,
Racecourses 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 the sand that covered the wooden 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 fourth 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 expresses
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 latin dedication tells us it was built by marcus agrippa,
Augustus' 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 bricks 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 topped 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--
5,000 tons of carefully molded concrete,
Stretching across nearly 150 feet of 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.
Their statues must have been placed
In these templelike niches where christian saints now stand,
Richly decorated with 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 stopped them in their tracks
And thus preserved this glorious structure,
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.
This 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 in this structure is
That space so ordinarily thought of
As being defined by architecture
Instead defines architecture.
The true substance of the building is space.
As you can see,
The coffers, meant solely to organize,
To structure our visual experience,
Recede towards 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 lies 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 interiors 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 the collection of sculpture in the round--
Sculpture which they displayed in their public places,
Sculpture which they used to decorate the fora,
Palaces, gardens-- a variety of situations--
Sculpture, which i may add, they put into museums
Because, indeed, the delight in works of art
Was 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 originals, 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's 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,
Cupid thrusting the arrows of sexual passion
Into the centaur,
Whose arms are bound behind him.
The moral lesson to be derived from such a 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 as 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 girls 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 ruled 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 of 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, hadrian, 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 of the reliefs
From hadrian's time--
Whose head has been replaced by constantine's--
Give way in the new reliefs to rows of puppetlike 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 that have become 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 past remain.
Calais, 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 semicircular apse
And side aisles screened by colonnades.
Santa sabina, finished in 432,
Is a particularly fine example
Of these simple but elegant early christian basilicas.
The roman arch appears here in yet another form,
Springing 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 columns taken from a pagan building.
Once reviled and persecuted,
Christianity is triumphant.
Historians have argued about the causes
Of the fall of the roman 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,
That it had now fulfilled its historical purpose.
Modern scholars have found political, material,
Economic, social reasons for the decline,
But have been most impressed by the spiritual crisis
Which swept through all roman classes in the fourth century
And is marked by the breakdown
Of the social, ethical, and religious concepts
Which had bound the 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,
Marks 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 ideas of government
To their own customary law.
And there lies the key to the synthesis
Which will become 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.
Captioning performed by the national captioning institute, inc.
Captions copyright 1989 educational broadcasting corporation
Annenberg media
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