Paul Lachlan MacKendrick

“ Here, on this hill of dreams, as Miss Scherer calls it, one can imagine Domitian’s palace rich with many-colored marbles, bright with paintings and gold. One can wander in the dappled light among oleander and orange-trees, golden broom and scarlet poppies, and admire how the mellow brick glows rose-colored in the afternoon sunlight. One can appreciate the mood of the Romantics for whom, a century247 and a half ago, all Rome had this dream-like quality. One can argue that their attitude may not have been scientific, but it produced the classical revival in architecture. ”

“ All is indirection, schizophrenia, avoidance of forthrightness. As an architectural exercise, it is uniquely abstract, a proposition of Euclid in brick and marble, at one moment seeming to involve nothing but circles, at another, nothing but squares. It is probably no accident that its total diameter is almost exactly the same as the Pantheon’s. It would have suited the complexity of Hadrian’s mind to design a grandiose habitation for all the gods to the self-same dimensions as this splendid toy, the habitation of a restless, schizophrenic man whom his subjects worshipped as a god. ”

“ Etruscan equality of sexes foreshadows the independence of Roman women; the brutality of Etruscan games is to strike an answering chord in sadistic Roman breasts. Etruria has its own intrinsic fascination, yet for the Western world its major interest must lie in its legacy to Home. When Etruscan culture was at its brilliant, golden height, Rome was a primitive village of wattle-and-daub huts. Archaeology has been able to trace the metamorphosis of those huts into palaces, with all the concomitant story of grandeur and barbarity ”

“ In them the whole Roman state is portrayed as asking of the founder of the Flavian dynasty and of his son the peace and prosperity which the Julio-Claudians had failed to give. Like the fresco of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, the relief is not great art but a great document, a measure of the distance Roman sculpture had travelled in the scant century since the Altar of Peace. It is a courtier’s exaltation of a monarch; a solemn, highly rhetorical affirmation of Imperial sovereignty and pride in Rome’s dominion. ”

“ In its left hand the demon holds a hammer handle. An inscription identifies him as Charun, the ferryman of the dead; it is to pay this monster that the skeletons of Spina clutch their bronze small change in their right hands. The contrast between the gaiety of the scenes in the Tomb of Hunting and the gloomy prospect of the lovely lady—her name is Velcha—in the clutches of this grisly demon has been held to epitomize the contrast between the views of an after life entertained by a prosperous and by an economically depressed people. ”

“ Everyone remembers that Augustus left Rome a city of marble, but too few people recall that he found it a city of brick. The picture of Rome in most people’s minds is of a marble metropolis, proud mistress of a Mediterranean Empire. This to be sure she eventually became, but the archaeological evidence is that until the end of the third century B.C. Rome looked tawdry, with patched temples and winding, unpaved streets. To trace the development is fascinating, and archaeology is our chief guide. ”

“ The Forum nowadays is an austere, even at first sight a forbidding place. It looks much more attractive in a painting by Claude Lorraine or a print by Piranesi, with a double row of olives planted down the middle, romantic broken columns, oxen and peasants scattered about the flowered greensward in picturesque confusion, and the Arch of Septimius Severus buried up to its middle. But picturesqueness is not everything. The Forum is history, stark history; every stone is soaked in blood. ”

“ But Etruscan spectator sports were not always so innocent. On the right wall of the Tomb of the Augurs in Tarquinia, a masked figure, in a false beard, a blood-red tunic, and a conical cap, is portrayed inciting a fierce hound to attack a hairy-chested figure, nude but for a loin-cloth and carrying a club; his eyes are blinded by a sack tied over his head, and his movements are impeded by a cord held by a bystander. The victim is already bleeding from several savage bites. Unless, handicapped as he is, he can club the dog to death, he will surely be torn to bits. ”

“ The wood would have been revetted or faced with terracotta, and in fact enough fragments of terracotta revetments were found on the site to establish this temple as decorated in the typical Etruscan style. If its sculptures were as striking as the Apollo of Veii, they were masterpieces indeed. The temple, repeatedly and ever more grandiosely rebuilt—in one phase it was roofed with gilded bronze, and the cult statue was gold and ivory—was the center and symbol of Rome’s religious life. ”

“ The inspiration does not stop here: it is to be found on the Palatine, in Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli, Diocletian’s Baths in Rome, and his palace at Spalato, and the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum.
From his building, from which the history of Roman architecture really begins, we can reconstruct the personality of the architect. It makes the whole history of Roman architecture come alive, when we really know one complex. The architect was a master of the manipulation of surface, of light and shade, of counterthrust, controlled views, the unitary plan, of space both full and empty. ”

“ The buildings we have studied present a partial portrait of the man. Hadrian the hunter, the soldier, the statesman comes out clearly in reliefs, coins, and inscriptions we have not room to treat. But the buildings reflect the dilettante Hadrian, uneasy, moody, whimsical, formal, distant, unapproachable, tense, self-conscious, cold. They show many facets of his character: in the Teatro Marittimo, his love of privacy, and his restlessness; in the Temple of Venus and Rome, the neat, abstract quality of his mind, his sense of humor, his self-conscious pairing of himself with Augustus ”

“ But they do prove a point all the same. Tiberius’ al fresco dining room, with its monstrous and tortured statuary (even though some of it be later in date) ; Caligula’s houseboats, with their incredibly heavy profusion of work in colored marble, mosaic, and bronze; Nero’s Golden House, with its labyrinth of gaudy and over-decorated rooms of state, all testify to a decadent extravagance beyond Hollywood’s wildest aspirations. By comparison, the cool, quiet taste of the subterranean basilica is an oasis and a relief, but even this is a commentary on Claudius’ intolerance. ”

“ The essence of the plan is two apses back to back, one for Venus and one for the goddess Roma. They may be interpreted as a colossal architectural pun. Venus is a goddess of love, Love is AMOR, and AMOR is ROMA spelled backward. The symbolism does not stop here. Hadrian is Caesar: his is the heritage, if not the blood, of the Julian line, and the temple is a reminder of the greatness of Rome, firmly established by Augustus, and smiled upon by Augustus’ ancestress, Venus. ”

“ Here the cities ape Rome, with arches, columned temples, theaters, and amphitheaters. The citizens turn out in a body, leading their children by the hand, to greet their Emperor with upraised right arms, as in a Fascist salute, and to offer sacrifice. The Danube is crossed on a great bridge, the work of Apollodorus, with masonry piers and wooden superstructure. Then one is in wild country, with exotic flora and fauna, including an especially bloodthirsty wild boar. The natives live in straw huts, and wear trousers: this last, to a Roman, sure proof of barbarism. ”

“ The headquarters of the various guilds grew, in the second and third centuries, very luxurious, with airy courtyards and temples in imported marble, testifying to the power and prosperity of these ancient labor unions. Perhaps, then as now, the labor leaders were more prosperous than the rank and file, for in Ostia as in Pompeii, the multitude of small shops, of fishmongers, fullers, and millers, and the omnipresent thermopolia or bars, are humble enough, often with dark, cramped living quarters behind or on a mezzanine. ”

“ Indeed archaeology, by revealing these middlebrows to us in three dimensions, their shops and artifacts, inns and bars, street signs and graffiti, loves licit and illicit, tools and equipment, their tastes and pleasures, has given us, especially in Pompeii, a truer picture of the average, ordinary ancient Italian man than Latin literature provides. ”

“ The main north-south street, the cardo, began at the Porta Laurentina on the south—Ostia’s triplicity of gates is an Etruscan heritage—and ran, shaded and porticoed, northwestward to the dazzling whiteness of the colonnaded, marble-enriched Forum. Then it split in two on either side of Hadrian’s Capitolium and passed north between balconied houses to the river. Sixteen per cent of Ostia’s total area, exactly the same proportion as a modern city such as Madison, Wisconsin, was devoted to streets. ”

“ The station plan (Fig. 12.6) shows how creatively McKim imitated Roman architecture. The succession of portico, vestibule, arcade, vestibule, staircase, which leads to what before remodelling of 1958 was the climax in the great central concourse, is noble architectural language, beautiful ordering of space, which Hadrian would have understood, and so is the balance in the façade, the alternating rhythms throughout the building of open and closed, big and little, wide and narrow. ”

“ Peter’s shrine the historical cycle returns to the simplicity of primitive Rome. But it is not simply a matter of returning to beginnings and starting over again; the new culture stands351 upon the shoulders of the old. The Christian shrine has the look of a pagan tomb-monument in the Isola Sacra necropolis; Constantine’s church has the look of a pagan Roman basilica. The language of the Mass is still Latin; the Pope is Pontifex Maximus. The striking thing is the continuity, and this is the most important lesson that archaeology has to teach. ”

“ The young architectural fellows of McKim’s Academy in Rome are impatient with what it stands for, but perhaps they are letting their understandable and proper scorn of soulless copying—of which there is far too much in American monumental architecture—stand in the way of their appreciation of a building which has worn well, and earned accolades—especially by contrast with recent tawdry and misguided additions in plastic—from such emancipated critics, friendly to modern trends in architecture, as Talbot Hamlin and Lewis Mumford. ”

“ The roof’s peak and corner ornaments, called acroteria, have spikes set in the clay to discourage birds from perching and committing nuisances. This temple and its three later fellows are still a long way from the grandiose marble and gold of the Augustan Age, but they are an equally long way from the primitive wattle-and-daub huts of the Palatine village. They mark a stage in the painstakingly unravelled archaeological story of Rome’s expansion, which we shall follow at various newly-excavated sites in Italy. ”

“ Cosa is clearly the fruit of long practice and Etrusco-Italic tradition, untouched by Hellenism (no Greek architectural language in sculptural or ornamental marble) or by new-fangled techniques (no brick or concrete in the early phases) . When we carry down Cosa’s architectural history to the early Empire, we infer the death of freedom of speech from the remodelling of the basilica into a theater. And when freedom of speech and public life died, the colony lost its sense of community. Its thirty-three acres would have held 3000 to 3500 settlers comfortably. ”

“ They are many: from the Sanctuary of Fortune contemporary and later architects learned much. An example of this influence is the Temple of Jupiter Anxur at Tarracina, above the Via Appia where it touches the coast sixty-seven miles south of Rome. Here the use of concrete, of opus incertum, of arch and vault, of setting and landscape, is in the unmistakable idiom of Sulla’s architect. It is an architectural complex and a seascape which mediates, as Palestrina does, between man and nature. ”

“ A dig is not a treasure hunt. Naturally an archaeologist is pleased if he turns up gold or precious stones, but he knows in advance that an old stone age site will produce neither, but rather something infinitely more valuable, an intimate knowledge of man’s past, gained from ordinary humble objects of daily household use. To find these was Bradford’s object when he began to dig. ”

“ But Vespasian’s Forum, famous as it was, and valuable as its restored plan is to illustrate archaeological inference at work, is overshadowed by his mightiest monument, which has survived to become the very symbol of pagan Rome to modern times: the Flavian Amphitheater or Coliseum. More perhaps than any other classical monument, its stones are steeped in blood and memories ”

“ With its wall, its moat, and its drawbridge, it is all designed for privacy and quiet. From any room one gets a view of variously lighted sections of space: chiaroscuro to match moods grave and gay. In the midst of axial symmetry, unrest is everywhere: in the curved forms, in the abrupt switches from light to dark, from roofed to open spaces, from horizontal architraves to the vertical play of the central fountain. The unrest is central: the midpoint is water and inaccessible. ”