I mentioned already that most of our best examples of Roman, Ancient Roman Baroque architecture can be found in the eastern part of the empire. And I'd like to concentrate on those today, although we'll look, we won't look at those exclusively. I do have a, a couple of examples from the west as well. I'm going to actually start in the west at a place called Santa Maria Capua Vetere. And I show it to you on the map here, it is close to all the sites in Campania that we've been talking about this semester. You see Pompeii and Herculaneum and Oplontis and Baia for example, and Benevento, and over here, Naples. And you can see the proximity of Santa Maria Capua Vetere to all of those that we've already covered. And in Santa Maria Copua Vetere has been found an extremely well preserved Roman tomb, and you see it here in the center of the screen. A Roman Tomb that dates to the late first century A.D. It is very clear that it is made of concrete construction and that it is faced with opus incertum work, which you can see here very clearly. But you can also see that some brick has been used around the niches and as a molding. Both for these cylinders, and for the tholos above. This has confused scholars. They don't know when to date this. Also because of the so called Baroque characteristics where you see this undulating facade. With the use of, well they're not really columns. They're more like cylinders and in that sense, similar to the cylinders that we saw in the Tomb of the Baker. The cylinders with the undulating facade, the use of architectural elements, the interest in deck to declaration, and the cylinders have, have confused scholars as I said, and they have been the tweaks in between when to date this thing. And some have said that it dates at the time of the of such buildings as the Sanctuary of the Fortuna Primigenia Palestrina because of the opus incertum. Others have said because of the use of brick here, which we actually think in this case was stuccoed over. That it might be later second century A.D.. But I think, but this is actually more like the tile brick that we saw in Pompeii rather than the kind of brick that we see in Ostea. So I favor the first century date, first century, the late first century A.D. date. But what we have to think it is, as very prescience of what is to come. Experimenting as did some of those other buildings that I just showed you, the Forum Transitorium. For example, with the sort of thing that is going to become particularly popular in the second and third centuries A.D.. Now I juxtaposed this tomb, and by the way, this tomb, the nickname of this tomb, as you can see from your monument list, is La Conocchia. La Conocchia means the distaff. And a distaff is used in spinning and weaving. so, a spinning thread, primarily. So, and it looks like an ancient distaff. So some, some, so that's when it, that's how it got its nickname, La Conocchia. Whether that means that, that was intended by the designers, and that this was a tomb of [LAUGH] perhaps a woman who was, you know, or, or a man working, in factory, who, who spun thread. I think that's very far-fetched; I think it's highly unlikely, but I just throw it out there. but, that is what its nickname is. But you can see by the juxtaposition of it with the Tomb of the Baker, on the right. And with the monument of the Juli-i and San Romi in the south of France, which we haven't looked at, but which we will look at, in a lecture next week on, Roman architecture in, in the south of France, primarily. You will see that it makes a reference to both of these. Both of these are earlier. This is, as you know, Augustan. The one on the left is from the late, the time, the time of Julius Caesar. And you can see that it takes elements, I'm not saying it looked at these in particular but just that these kinds of elements were already in, in the air when this building was built in the late first century A.D.. The great cylinders in the Tomb of Aristiches. But it is more similar actually to this one because the Juli-i monument and also La Pinoccia are examples of what we call the tower tomb type. The tower tomb type is taller than it is, is wide. It has a series of stories, in this case a plain story then a central story with the cylinders and then the tholos at the top. And we see the same sort of thing in the Julliard Monuments, stepped base sothel here with sculptural decoration, a quadra-fronse and then a tholos at the very apex. But it's interesting to see the differences between the two because what we see in this monument again is much more what we would call baroque in the sense that we have the undulating facade. We have the use of what looked like in, in a general way the original, the traditional vocabulary of architecture with these cylinders, with the niches, with the pediments. But look at the way the tholos is treated. When you look at the tholos in the Juli-i monument, you see that it really does look like a shrine. And it has statues inside like a shrine would. This one has blind windows, as you can see. You can't see into it. There's nothing inside. So they're treating the tholos more as a decorative motif, than they are treating it as something that can have, that has a purpose of holding some, some either religious, items or statues or honorific statues, as it does in this particular case. Another view of La Conocchia, a detail which I think shows you what I mean about motion being, being introduced into monuments like this. This, in this case we are dealing with concrete, and that is somewhat different. The use of concrete to create undulation than the use of of the traditional vocabulary of architecture. But here we see a combination. The concrete wall, faced with the opus incertum, the great cylinders on the edge and then the idicula here, with the pediment and the niche below. And you can also see very well, the cylinders that are located between the blind windows, as well as this combination of opus incertum work, and also the tile brick that is used to represent the moldings and the like. I want to compare the central zone of La Conocchia with a seventeenth century Baroque building in Rome. This is Francesco Borromini's Sant Ivo in Rome taken from an angle that accentuates the curvature of the facade. And the contrast between the concavity of that curvature and the convexity of the outside of the dome, that you see up above. The same sort of thing here. So once again, architects of the seventeenth century, very much inspired by these these, these kinds of motifs that survived from a Roman antiquity. On the left hand side of the screen, you all remember this, this is the elliptical fountain from the palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill that was located, that he could see through his window out of the triclinium when he dined. And you'll remember here also in this case, made out of concrete construction, designed by Riberius. You see the eliptical wall, and the convexity of that elipitical wall, the central element also convex. But with these interesting concavities, scallops, that Roberius has created through concrete faced with brick around the structure. So, in that case, you know, all I'm trying to do here is show you that you can create similar effects either in concrete or through columnar architecture. But what separates concrete con, the revolutionary concrete architecture, as we've discussed it today, and Baroque architecture, as I'm going to define this morning, is that in Baroque architecture they're relying on the traditional voca, not on concrete, but the traditional vocabulary of architecture. Namely of course columns, pediments and the like to create their effects. And in a place where it all comes together you'll recall is at Hadrian's Villa. At Tivoli. We're looking here at the Piazzo Doro, a plan of the Piazza Doro. The octagonal vestibule, the great open rectangular space that you can see here, and then the aula, or the audience hall on the far right. And you'll remember the aula had these wonderful undulating walls. But what separated the aula from other undulating walls that we had seen earlier, is that it was not done with concrete but was done with columns. You'll remember the columns were placed in such a way that they followed the curved shape and then they supported a concrete dome. So this wonderful combination of the use of traditional language of architecture along an undulating form. And then with the concrete at the top. So we can see already in the Hadriatic period further exploration of this kind of thing. I also want to show you a very interesting painting, a painted room. And this is in the house of the labyrinth at Pompeii. It's early en-dated. Dates to 50 B.C.. But it's an extraordinary room. It's the atrium of the house. And we talked about several different kinds of atria. We talked about the atrium that had no columns at all. And we talked about the tetrastyle atrium, which had four columns around the central basin. What you see here are a, a host of columns surrounding that central base. And then when you have a number of columns like this, more than four, we call it a a Corinthian atrium. Corinthian atrium with lots of columns. And what you can see the artist and patron have done here is to orchestrate the relationship of those real columns with the fictive architecture that is painted on the wall. And to play them up in a such a way that as you're standing in the room, you're, you're looking through the real columns to see this view that lies behind the tholos, which you can view through the broken triangular pediments. I show it to you for a couple of reasons, one just to remind you that we saw these kind of thing in painting very early on, this is again 50 B.C. in the, in the Republic, still. As we, as we see the architects taking the traditional vocabulary of architecture and playing with it. Breaking it up, opening it and revealing something that lies behind. In this case, the tholos. But look also at the way in which the tholos looks like it's in the distance. You get the sense that you are looking through an opening in the wall, a window. In which you can see that tholos, it seems to lie behind the broken triangular pediment. The pediment has been broken open to allow you to see a vista, that lies behind, and you get the sense, as you look at this painting. That the tholos is surrounded by a parastyle. And that there's also some greenery, and so, so on, out there. And then to accentuate this idea of the view through the wall, they have then added the columns here. So that you're looking through the col, through real columns, to fictive columns, to broken triangular pattern, to the tholos that lies behind. You'll see the relevance of this when we look at some additional monuments.
