0 Roman Architecture Course by Diana EE Kleiner. Yale University ...

Professor Kleiner introduces the wide variety of Roman buildings covered in the course and links them with the theme of Roman urbanism. The lecture ranges from early Roman stone construction to such masterpieces of Roman concrete architecture as the Colosseum and Pantheon. Traveling from Rome and Pompeii across the vast Roman Empire, Professor Kleiner stops in such locales as North Africa and Jordan to explore the plans of cities and their individual edifices: temples, basilicas, theaters, amphitheaters, bath complexes, and tombs. The lecture features traditional Roman temple architecture as a synthesis of Etruscan and Greek temple types, early defensive wall building in Rome and environs, and a range of technologies and building practices that made this architecture possible. City planning in such early Roman colonies as Cosa and Ostia is also discussed, as are examples of the first uses of the arch and of concrete construction, two elements that came to dominate Roman architectural practice. She concludes by highlighting the suburban Villa of the Mysteries and notes the distinction between plans of Roman houses and those of Roman villas. Professor Kleiner discusses domestic architecture at Herculaneum and the First and Second Styles of Roman wall painting. Professor Kleiner then turns to the First or Masonry Style of Roman wall painting, which seeks to replicate the built architecture of Hellenistic kings and other elite patrons by using stucco and paint to imitate a real wall faced with marble. Third Style painting, as Professor Kleiner demonstrates, is characterized by departure from the perspectival vistas and panoramas of the Second Style toward an attenuation of architectural elements and a respect for the inherent flatness of the wall. Professor Kleiner characterizes the Fourth Style of Roman wall painting as a compendium of previous styles, with imitation marble veneer, framed mythological panels, and the introduction of fragments of architecture situated in an illogical space. Professor Kleiner discusses special subjects in Roman wall painting that do not fall within the four architectural styles but were nonetheless inserted into their wall schemes: mythological painting, landscape, genre, still life, history painting, and painted portraiture. Professor Kleiner also highlights two of Rome’s most unusual funerary structures: the pyramidal Tomb of Gaius Cestius, an aristocrat related to Marcus Agrippa, and the trapezoidal Tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, probably a former slave who made his fortune overseeing the baking and public distribution of bread for the Roman army. Finally, Professor Kleiner highlights the luxurious architecture of the infamous Nero, especially his Domus Aurea or Golden House and its octagonal room, one of the most important rooms in the history of Roman architecture. The lecture concludes with the colossal Baths of Caracalla, which awed the public by their size and by a decorative program that assimilated the emperor Caracalla to the hero Hercules Professor Kleiner discusses two Roman cities in North Africa: Timgad and Leptis Magna. Professor Kleiner features the baroque phenomenon in Roman architecture, in which the traditional vocabulary of architecture, consisting of columns and other conventional architectural elements, is manipulated to enliven building facades and inject them with dynamic motion. While some have dismissed the architecture of Roman Athens as derivative of its Classical and Hellenistic Greek past, Professor Kleiner demonstrates that the high quality of Greek marble and Greek stone carvers made these buildings consequential. After a brief introduction to the history of the city of Athens, Professor Kleiner presents the monuments erected by Augustus and Agrippa on the Acropolis and in the Greek and Roman Agoras, for example the Odeion of Agrippa. Professor Kleiner discusses the urban design of two Augustan towns before proceeding to an investigation of a variety of such established Roman building types as theaters, temples, and aqueducts. Professor Kleiner makes an impassioned case that some of the finest and most innovative Roman buildings date to the Constantinian period. In conclusion, Professor Kleiner asserts that the transfer of the Empire’s capital from Rome to Constantinople diminished Rome’s influence, at least temporarily, but not the impact of its architecture, which like the city of Rome itself, is eternal.