AP Art History - Ancient Rome (Part 1 of 2)

so our final part of the ancient mediterranean unit will be in ancient rome so the legendary founding of rome was said to have been in 753 bce um there were two brothers romulus and remus who were suckled by a she-wolf eventually romulus and remus ended up having a fight and romulus killed remus and then romulus became the first kind of like ruler and founder of rome so the city of rome itself um started as a village atop seven hills it was the central location of the empire so it's right around the it's on the west

coast of what is now modern modern-day italy um just below where the etruscans occupied this part of the continent so in its early years the city-state of rome was very much etruscan in terms of its culture and politics which we can expect because of its proximity to ancient naturia culturally speaking men of great intellect physique and military might were revered in roman society oftentimes roman emperors would have themselves deified or made into godlike figures in art and public opinion to basically secure their legacy so this map over here on the bottom right hand corner is

showing the growth expansion and then eventual kind of like sectioning off of the um roman republic and roman empire over the course of several hundred years so again at the very beginning we see roma's this very small settlement that is quickly gaining traction and taking over larger and larger swaths of the ancient mediterranean over the course of time so the city of rome itself eventually expanded to house more than one million people and the empire itself um which spanned across the entire mediterranean as well as surrounding territories would house tens of millions of people um

the ancient romans were known for having a democratic society so they had senators um similar to what we have in the united states they had magistrates and then later on an emperor to govern the land and the people and then maintain order so similarly to what we're seeing in ancient greece um typically it's wealthy um highly intellectual men that are running things women don't really have a say in politics an agent room at least on the surface so interestingly this word senate which we currently use at least in the united states is actually derived from

the word senex so cenex is a word in latin meaning elderly man so basically the senate was composed of um these wealthy landowners these wealthy old dudes that would pass their senate seats down from father to son so these were not elected positions they were usually passed down um hereditarily so there are typically two periods that we talk about um when we discuss um ancient rome um at least in the time before antiquity so we have the roman republic um it's at this point in time that we do not have an emperor um often times

a lot of the the information that is communicated about ancient rome really emphasizes the role of the emperor but he is not really having a position in roman politics at least to the degree that he does at this point in time as he is in earlier times the emperor imperator used to be an emergency position that was only appointed um in times of strife when they couldn't reach consensus in the senate so at the very beginning of the roman republic the last etruscan king is overthrown and replaced by constitutional government as we can see in

this map here and as we saw on the previous map rome is very quickly and aggressively expanding its borders um rome was a very militaristic society oftentimes um people in charge were valued for their military might and the achievements of the emperors later would be often times linked to the lands and the people that they conquered so the roman republic dissolved after julius caesar was murdered and there was this massive civil war that broke out um and lasted for several years it was this period of turmoil and then um after this period of turmoil we

had a reunification under augustus caesar also known as octavian and 27bce so it's at this point in time that we see the establishment of what is called pax romana or roman peace so the rule of emperor or imperator begins with octavian and continues to around 410 bc or 410 ce at this point in time we're seeing architecture really expand in terms of its scale and its use of materials particularly important is the invention of concrete which is this fabulous material that we use to take up lots of space and we can use it to fill

molds i'm going to be talking a little bit more about it later we also have this cataclysmic event in pompeii which is one of these territories that's just south of rome so the eruption of mount vesuvius this volcano very quickly and efficiently covers the city of pompei and ash around 79 a.d so most of what we know about roman culture and lifestyles and housing in terms of like the things that they painted and so on comes from the ruins of pompeii it's a very famous architectural site the ancient roman empire reached its greatest extent under

the emperor trajan in 117 a.d so basically everything on this map that is green or yellow was under roman control under trajan he basically made the empire as large as it possibly got he was very well loved by the people who could actually be covering a monument devoted to him later in the curriculum in 410 ce rome is officially sacked and the byzantine empire emerges so what happens is that rome kind of moves over to what is now istanbul modern in modern day turkey at that point in time it was called byzantium and it's at

that point that we see the byzantine empire emerging so a lot of people that live in the byzantine empire identify as romans um and have a lot of roman traditions but they are actually christian so we're going to be talking about them in the next unit so in terms of architecture um the roman republic is very heavily influenced by their neighbors so we're talking namely the greeks and etruscans we're seeing these motifs like the pediment as well as columns in their construction but there's also going to be a lot of additions that we're seeing when

we look at buildings like the flavian amphitheater or the coliseum as well as the pantheon which is this building right here during the roman empire we see the development of concrete um it's a favorite construction material it is relatively easy to use it's quite a bit different than carving large stones out of quarries and then hauling them over several miles to get them to where you need them to be it's a relatively more versatile material that really revolutionized architecture um oftentimes it wasn't just like concrete that was used it tends to be kind of ugly

so it was oftentimes faced or covered in a prettier material like marble we have the development of domes as well so domes are gigantic hemispherical structures just so just take a sphere and cut it in half that's a hemisphere and these domes are used to create these very large interior spaces we also have the incredibly important invention of the arch so arches are like domes facilitating the creation of these large and open interior spaces that don't have to have so many columns to keep them up so you remember that with previous artworks from the ancient

mediterranean we're seeing lots of high pastel halls so high pastel halls are these long corridors that have tons of columns in them and they're really tightly spaced together we're not really getting a sense of openness inside of these buildings with roofs so this is why the arch and the dome are so important it's that they're allowing the creation of these interior spaces these structures would come to be extremely essential in basically all um architecture that comes after this point in time so arches are also used to create um these structures called barrel vaults which are

basically these tunnels as well as groin vaults so basically a barrel vault is what happens when you build a bunch of arches next to each other to create a tunnel and a groin vault is what happens when you intersect two pair two barrel vaults perpendicularly to create these intersecting tunnels so um the ancient romans um conquered lots of land and they also had lots of like famously useful and fantastic innovations in their architecture so not only concrete but they used concrete in these other building materials to create aqueducts so aqueducts were these structures that were

built over the course of several dozen or even several hundred miles and they ferried water from the mountains at a very gradual decline down into the city of rome itself so this is basically an ancient pipeline and they still work even more than 2 000 years later which is absolutely remarkable it's really a testament to the the engineering ability and the worksmanship and craftsmanship of the ancient romans in terms of painting we don't know much about roman painting what we do know comes down to us through mosaics like we saw with ancient greece as i

mentioned previously the ancient romans took a lot of their art and stylistic motifs from the greeks so you'll oftentimes see work that is ancient greek represented in their paintings so most painting that comes down to us uh is through wall murals that were found in pompeii which if you remember is that city that was buried under ash and the artwork of pompeii that we've seen has allowed us to define four pompeian styles you don't really need to know all of them the only one that you need to know is the fourth which is basically a

combination of the other three um so basically there's lots of these painted rectangular squares um relatively simple and then there's also these mythological scenes and landscapes often times these little like spot illustrations that are um narratives of a specific element of mythology or history um and then oftentimes these small scenes that are framed by border motifs so there's some images on here that are suggesting kind of like false windows like you're looking out and you're seeing a structure so we see in these kinds of images and understanding of linear perspective which is the ability to

create um images of objects in space on a two-dimensional surface this is something that we won't see again until about the italian renaissance around 1500 years later so a lot of these elements of like style and innovation were actually lost for a very long time um let's see um most surviving paintings outside of pompeii exist as mosaic originals or copies oftentimes people painted on wooden surfaces which do not do well in the mediterranean climate which tends to have lots of moisture so we don't really have paintings that were made on those more perishable surfaces in

terms of sculpture we see a couple of differences throughout time when it comes to sculpture during the roman republic we see varistic portraits very commonly depicting members of the roman senate so a veristic portrait is basically a portrait that is intended to emphasize the quote-unquote realism of the figure's features oftentimes veristic portraits show images that are emphasizing features that show age and therefore wisdom so um oftentimes the men that sat for these portraits were a lot younger than they are depicted but the sculptor was asked to emphasize those features to make them look older and

therefore more wisened portraits are oftentimes busts as well so basically a bust is a portrait of the head the neck and then some of the collarbone and maybe some of the shoulders one of my favorite things about ancient roman culture is that there are some sculptures of roman senate members carrying busts of their ancestors to basically brag about the aristocratic lineage the resulting image is this very silly looking kind of like image of a man and he's basically holding two heads so here's some other examples of busts right here during the roman empire we see

somewhat of a departure from this veristic portraiture a lot of the emperors particularly after octavian are embracing this um sense of infallibility and having themselves appear godlike often times the emperor would deify himself through art and basically show himself as this kind of like immortal classic timeless person so we see lots of heroic bodies during this period stoic expressions and idealized proportions as the empire begins to fall we see a pretty interesting transition in terms of how realism is used so um as the empire is falling you can see that there's a building premonition and

anxiety um in the artwork often times the sculptural groupings become more crowded and chaotic and artists seem to forget about realistic proportions for example this dude is pretty large on this horse typically like if you were to ride a horse you would have to be a bit smaller than this or else you're going to break the horses back also when you're looking at the proportions in terms of the size of the hand versus the size of the head or the length of the arm this is not like typical human proportions so this is really reflecting

the anxiety of the time our first artwork for the rome curriculum is the house of the vetti so um the house of the vedio is one of the larger domiciles um excavated in pompei which is again the city that was buried under ash it was said to have been owned by two brothers who were freed men and had likely made all of their money as merchants in this little port town of pompei so the house lacked any exterior windows there were two entrances one from the front this is where the street is and then there's

one from the side and there weren't really any windows on the outside this is because pompeii was a very busy city and it probably wouldn't have contributed to the ambiance of this building to have um air that was air and sound that was coming in from the street so one of the ways that romans got around this was by creating peristyles so peristyles were basically these open air atriums um that were located somewhere in the house where there was an um an open space to the air there are oftentimes gardens with fountains and statues inside

of these peristyle courtyards there's also light and water coming in through the impluvium which is this hole in the wall right or hole in the ceiling right here and rain water would often times fall into these little recesses to be used for washing cooking etc the entrance was relatively narrow for this house in comparison to the size you can imagine like again you want to minimize exposure to outsourcing outside noise smells etc a lot of evidence suggests that pompeii was also a very smelly city as well um there are also several cubicula or bedrooms within

the residence four in total um there were also like spaces that were kind of like kitchenettes and servants quarters and lots of space for storage so this was a particularly lavish and large roman house in pompeii it's one of the larger domiciles that's been unearthed thus far and fortunately a lot of the frescoes and images on the wall have been really well preserved so we're able to get a really good sense of what painting looked like at this time at least in terms of decorative painting so this is in the interior of the pantheous room

of the house of the vetti right here you can see that most of these murals on the wall have been beautifully preserved so the frescoes in this room are so called because they depict the the greek uh myth of about about the hero pentheus who basically opposed the cult of bacchus and was torn to pieces by women including his own mother in a backhand frenzy so i think it's it's particularly illustrative of kind of like the romans love of kind of like these these cautionary tales and kind of like stories of violence this isn't this

was a triclinium so this was a place where people were eating so they have these images of like a man being torn apart by a bunch of drunk women and then there's also a scene right here of baby hercules fighting um two serpents that were sent down to kill him by hera so it's it's just very interesting to see like the cultural standards that are leading to the kinds of imagery that people are having in their houses here is a view of the pear style from the garden right here so you can see that there's

some vegetation that's naturally taken place um since this has all been unearthed and there are lots of benches and fountains and statues which i'll talk about in a moment so the murals from the interior of the house are painted in what is commonly referred to as the fourth style of roman painting which i talked about a little bit earlier it's basically a combination of the other three styles that's all you need to know interestingly um one of the things that people frequently mention about pompeii is that there are images of phalluses everywhere so you see

them on the streets you see them in the walls and in the house of the vetti we have two images of the greek god preappus who is oftentimes associated with fertility so in this first image this is a fresco so again an image that's painted onto wet plaster and this is at the entrance of the house so again this is an example of the kinds of tastes and stylistic conventions that are being emphasized in this particular facet of roman culture that are very different from what we're used to today so in each of these images

um priapus is weighing his unusually large genitals on a set of scales so this is not the only time that we're seeing this kind of imagery even in pompeii there have been several frescoes throughout the city that replicate the same imagery so in this one house we have priapus at the front doing the genital weighing thing and then on the inside i think it was in the peristyle courtyard there was this other like marble image that's life-size of the same event so a lot of modern historians theorize that these images um indicate a society that

vi that valued male virility and that these images might have even been intended to ward off eel evil so they're everywhere and a lot of people have said oh like they're pointing towards the brothels and a lot of like historians say that's not really a valid thing and it's not really rooted in truth whereas a lot of texts and kind of like other observations have led to a more apotropaic purpose for these images of phalluses everywhere in pompei so if you've ever wondered why that's why our next artwork is the head of a roman patrician

so you might have recalled this term patrician from your ancient history classes typically there were two classes that were described in these courses there were the patricians and the plebian so the patricians were the members of the more ruling class they were usually more educated and there are fewer of them and then the plebeians were essentially the peasants so this is an image of a particularly like wealthy individual so this is a theoristic portrait basically again this word is meaning something that is more natural and real quote-unquote um this realism was likely influenced by hellenistic

greek sculpture as well as these roman ideals of power and prestige so again like the idea here is that the older you look the more wisdom that you have you've had more experience and time in the world the features were very likely enhanced to make the sitter appear older so it's likely that the guy that this was supposed to represent whose name has since been lost did not actually look this old and that his wrinkles were not this deeply set but the sculptor made them deeper to make the figure seem wiser what you also noticed

in a lot of these portraits is that the faces are not always neutral at a first glance like they they typically are quite neutral but when you look closer you can see a pinching in the brows right here this furrowing and then you can also see these frown lines um emphasized along the cheeks and then the slightly protruding lower lip right here so a lot of art historians have equated this sort of expression with tenacity with being persistent and like not bowing down to pressure which of course are features that we're seeing as idealized when

you're in a position of power so many aristocratic romans commissioned busts to be made of themselves and then displayed in their home for posterity so basically instead of having a family photo because photography wasn't developed until much later no pun intended you would basically have a sculptural rendition of your ancestor in your house sometimes the heads were placed on classically idealized bodies or carried by statues of the sitter's descendant so there's a couple of really funny examples of like old man heads on these like super buff herculean bodies here are some other bust portraits right

here so the work that we just covered um occurred during what is typically referred to as the republican period from 509 to 27 bce we are now moving to the roman empire so this is the age of the emperors our first work coincidentally is about the first roman emperor augustus also known as octavian of prima porta so this statue is slightly larger than life size so he's two meters tall so around a little bit over six feet tall this is much taller than the average man at this time in the ancient world so at this

point in time a lot of people in power have realized that art can be used as propaganda it can be used as a tool to sway public opinion and to gain favor with the people which is important because if you don't have the people's favor then you get people that will betray you and you get assassins so when you look at this figure you can see that he's pretty highly idealized he is relatively well muscled um his face is stoic which we see a lot in the ancient world and is oftentimes associated with like being

able to keep calm and there's also elements of masculinity in there he's also bearing judges robes so this is a bit of context that is not always immediately apparent but these are judges robes right here so that's showing an element of mental filness a mental fitness as well as physical fitness as you're seeing in his physique um he's also raised in this pose right here he's in contrappostos remember that shifting alternating weight on the legs and in the hips where we have one hand extended outward so this is called an orator's pose it oftentimes is

a pose that is shown to indicate an intent to speak so the face um indicates some influence of verism from earlier portrait styles and there's some individual recognizable features this is one of the fun things about portraiture during the roman empire is that oftentimes there is a there are features that are idealized but at the same time you can kind of tell the different roman emperors apart because like one has wider ears or one's eyes are closer together like there's definitely um a an acknowledgement of the different physical features that make people look like who

they are another particularly interesting feature of the statue is this little grouping on the bottom this little baby figure that's riding a dolphin clinging to his leg so um this is heralding augustus's claim to define dissent so he said that he was a descendant of the goddess venus um and there's also a pretty significant naval victory during his military career um that he used to basically flex and talk about his achievements and tell the roman people like i'm a big deal the figure is also barefoot so this is oftentimes suggesting that he's standing on hollowed

ground so there's a reference here too that he is a good patron to the gods and that they respect him there are also details on the breastplate which i'm going to get into that show this god endorsement so he has brains he has brawn he has the endorsement of the gods and a godly lineage so he's basically saying with the statue i am a big deal and you should respect me so interestingly um this statue like many others from the ancient world um was originally painted this is a reconstruction of how the original statue might

have been painted based off of paint remains that have been found on the augusta supremo porta so this is the breastplate close-up right here so there are sphanxes on the fibulae which we and we've seen that sphinxes are oftentimes associated with ancient egypt so this is likely a reference to the defeat of cleopatra who pulled over egypt there are also several gods on the pectorals right here these symbolize divine order so basically if the gods are shown with you then there's kind of like an association of like the gods of proof of me the lower

portion is a little bit more difficult and nuanced and not all historians can kind of agree on what this means so there are two figures here this figure on the left is oftentimes assumed to be augustus or roman soldier and then this figure over here is holding a pole with this little eagle on the top so this is um interpreted to be a military standard of crassus who was a roman um general i believe and this king is basically returning the standards to the roman people um so this would have been pretty significant to the

romans um they were a people that had profound cultural connections to the military and this scene right here was also oftentimes used in images that augustus put out to show that he was a good diplomat a good diplomat as well as a good general