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11.5 Nero and the Domus Transitoria in Rome
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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From the lesson
Notorious Nero and His Amazing Architectural Legacy
Architecture under the Julio-Claudian emperors: Tiberius' Villa Jovis on Capri, and, in Rome and at Portus, the eccentric architecture of Claudius with its unique combination of finished and rusticated masonry. The culminating masterwork is Nero’s Domus Aurea with its octagonal room, one of the most important rooms in the history of Roman architecture.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
From Claudius I want to turn to the notorious Nero and
his amazing architectural legacy.
And you see a portrait of Nero here on the right-hand side of the screen.
And a coin with his mother on the left.
The mother of Nero was Agrippina the Younger.
Agrippina the Younger was the last wife of Claudius, and it was rumored that
Agrippina the Younger murdered Claudius with a bowl of poisoned mushrooms.
We don't know if that's true or not, it may be just rumor mongering, but
it's perfectly conceivable, because she certainly had a motive, and that is, she
thought she would have more power if her teenage son, because he was only about 17
years old at the time, was on the throne of Rome instead of her older husband.
And this coin that you see on the left-hand side of the screen
of the young Nero and Agrippina, I think says it all.
I mean, mother and son almost nose to nose.
This gives real meaning to being in your face.
As you can see here,
Agrippina is certainly in the face of Nero on this coin, and she was,
with regard to his life, dominating him in the very early years of his reign.
Nero was born in AD 37.
He was emperor between 54 and 68.
At his death, his murder, he was forced to commit suicide,
actually, in 68, he suffered a damnatio memoriae,
which was a condemnation by the senate of him, a damnation of his memory.
And an attempt to destroy his portraits and
also his architectural monuments followed that damnatio memoriae.
Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors.
He was the adoptive son of Claudius, and as I've already mentioned,
the real son of Claudius last wife, Agrippina the Elder.
I mentioned already, or I gave you the sense that Agrippina was a quite
aggressive woman who aggravated Claudius and Nero both.
We talked about the poison mushroom stories and the fact that when her son
became emperor, she received, at least for a while, enhanced power in Rome.
But Nero eventually paid his mother back by having her murdered in AD 59.
He also got rid of his wife Octavia, a beautiful young girl,
whom he had murdered in 62.
So by the age of 25,
Nero had gotten rid of the two women who had dominated his youth.
And his much touted madness, he was not unlike Caligula in some of the wild
things that he did, his much touted madness began to appear.
That said, despite his madness, he was absolutely adored by the populace.
It was a great show to watch Nero, and people liked seeing what he would do next.
He was adored by the populace, he was, however, hated by the aristocracy.
And in 68, he was hunted down by his enemies and
he was forced to commit suicide.
I would call Nero a patron of architecture extraordinaire.
His contribution to the development of Roman architecture
is indeed extraordinary.
He had a passion for
the arts which undoubtedly led to his devotion to building.
He wrote and he sang poems.
Nero was a musician.
He collected Greek works of art.
He traveled to Greece to participate in the Olympics.
Whenever he did that, they were always fixed in his favor.
He stole, when he traveled around Greece and Asia Minor, he stole, if he saw a work
of art he liked, he stole it and he brought it back to Rome to display.
He interwove his life with his art in the same manner as Claudius did.
He took advantage of that very famous fire in Rome, which took place in
64 AD to, legend has it that he fiddled while Rome burned.
He wasn't fiddling, actually, but
he was participating in some sort of musical performance, we know that.
And after the fire raged through the city and
caused incredible havoc and great destruction, what Nero did was,
instead of rebuilding the land for the people of Rome,
he just expropriated 300 to 350 acres of prime real estate in downtown Rome.
And he used it to build his own villa, his own palace, in the center of Rome,
the famous Domus Aurea or Golden House because it had a gilded facade.
Nero's architecture was intimately bound up with the vicissitudes of his life and
his distinctive, if not warped, personality, as we shall see.
Nero built two palaces in Rome, and
I'd like to deal with those in consecutive order.
The first of these, as you can see from the monument list, is the so-called
Domus Transitoria, the less well-known one and less well-preserved one.
The Domus Transitoria in Rome that was built some time before the fire, before AD
64, because it was very significantly destroyed in that fire of AD 64.
I'm showing you a Google Earth image of
the part of Rome in which this building found itself.
We are looking down, we've seen this one before, we are looking down at the Roman
forum, the Coliseum in the uppermost part there, the Palatine Hill over here.
And if we follow the Roman Forum toward the Coliseum and
toward the later Arch of Constantine, we will see that there is a spur hill
over here and that spur hill is located between the Palatine Hill and
one of Rome's other hills, the Esquiline, E-S-Q-U-I-L-I-N-E, the Esquiline Hill.
Nero's dream was to link the buildings that were going up on the Palatine,
we've already talked about the imperial palace begun by Tiberius, continued
by Caligula, Claudius had no interest in that, but then Nero returns to it.
And he's continuing to build this palace on the Palatine, but
his dream is to link that with property that he also owns on the Esquiline Hill,
and to make one truly grandiose palace that links
those two hills across a spur hill called the Velia, V-E-L-I-A,
which is in this uppermost part of the Roman Forum, closest to the Coliseum.
That was his dream, and he began to try to realize it prior to 64 AD.
The building is called the Domus Transitoria because it served as
a point of transit between those two hills, between the Palatine and
the Esquiline Hills.
Again, because it was so seriously destroyed in fire and
also because it was deliberately destroyed by later emperors who
were following the damnation, the damnatio memoriae, the damnation of Nero's memory,
and felt that it was their right, in a sense, to destroy his buildings.
So those two things together, deliberate destruction plus the fire,
essentially destroyed most of the Domus Transitoria, but
a couple of sections are preserved underground.
And they're very important for us to look at,
because they give us insight into the later Golden House or Domus Aurea.
I want to show you the two sections that are still preserved in restored views
that you will find in your textbook and Ward-Perkins.
One of these is located beneath the, while this is still on the screen, if you
look at the Palatine Palace here just a little bit up beyond where my finger is,
there is the dining hall of the later first century AD palace that we'll look at
soon, next week.
You see it there.
And one of the buildings, a fountain of Nero's Domus Transitoria,
is located under that.
And then over here, this temple that you see right
close to the Coliseum is a later Hadrianic temple of Venus and Roma.
The domed room that I'm going to show you is under that.
So both of these are underground, beneath later structures.
This is a restored view from Ward-Perkins of the fountain
court of Nero's Domus Transitoria.
And we see a number of important features.
We see an open court with a pool, with columns around it.
On the northern wall over here, we see the fountain itself.
We see that what the architects have done is use a niche,
a place in that niche, a series of other niches, that served as
the location of the actual water from which the fountain emerged.
And the water would cascade over this wall down here and
then end up in a long basin in front of it.
The wall is what's most interesting.
If you look at it, you will see that it is essentially scalloped with columns in
the front and then additional columns in the receding bay is creating a kind of
in and out effect, very similar to theater architecture.
And I show you a restored view of a typical theater of earlier date,
but just to give you a sense of what this is based on.
You can also see that opening up off this central court,
screened by columns, are barrel vaulted rooms on either side.
These were used as special dining areas
with beautiful views out onto this fountain court on either side.
[COUGH] And then this restored view also gives you a sense that
the pavements were variegated, were done in different designs.
And we know that these pavements were made out of marble and
that the walls were embedded with marble.
This isn't the faux marble of the first style.
This is real marble.
And it's our first example in Rome of
a room that was revetted with marble brought from all parts of the world.
Marble brought from Africa, marble brought from Egypt,
marble brought from Asia Minor, and also from Greece, in various colors
to decorate the fountain court of Nero's Domus Transitoria.
The other room and perhaps the more important of the two is the domed room,
definitely more important of the two,
the domed room in the Domus Transitoria of Nero.
And you see a restored view of it here.
What are we dealing with?
We are dealing with a structure that is clearly based on
the thermal bath at Baia and the frigidaria of Pompeii.
It is a concrete structure.
It looks as if it's round, in fact,
you can see a circle inscribed in the pavement down here below.
The structure is made out of concrete.
It has a dome and an oculus.
But even though it is inscribed in a circle,
if you look carefully at the walls, you will see that although they are curved,
they follow the curvature of the circle, there are eight sides to this wall.
So the architect is starting to explore the idea of an octagon.
This is not an octagon, it's a circle inscribed in an octagon in a sense.
But it is an exploration into an eight-sided form that we're going to see
is very, very important for a later development in the Golden House of Nero.
Also, what we see here that's very interesting,
that's a further development of the frigidarium and
thermal bath idea is instead of this circular structure in an octagon ending
with these radiating apses, the four radiating apses that we saw at Baia,
for example, we see that they extend into corridors on either side,
which expands the space in a way that we have not seen before.
You see, they don't end on either side with these apses with walls,
they expand into these long corridors, as you can see, creating a kind
of cross shape and certainly adding to the interesting spatial relationships and
spatial possibilities and the use again of vista and panorama as we've seen.
We see here also on either side here
a series of columns with metal grills on top.
So wonderful views through those columns to what lies beyond.
And then on this side, [COUGH] a small pool that had white marble and
then colored marbles around that.
So you have to imagine again the overall appearance of this in antiquity
when light would have streamed through the dome of the central space
onto the walls that probably had mosaic on them, through the grilles and
the columns onto the water of the white pool here, which was also surrounded
with variegated marbles, these same marbles brought from all over the world.
The view must have been quite spectacular.
This is certainly, again, a form of ostentatious palatial
architecture that Augustus eschewed, but was becoming of increasing
interest to the likes of Tiberius, Caligula, and ultimately Nero.
And just to make the same point again,
that we can trace this back to the experiments of the frigidaria at Pompeii,
that's the Stabian baths too, the thermal bath at Temple of Mercury at Baia.
But look at the difference that it makes when you extend those apses into
corridors, creating a much freer spatial situation and
adding to the vista and panorama [COUGH] idea that has been so
popular as we've long seen with the Romans.
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