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21.2 Urban Planning in North Italy and the South of France
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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From the lesson
Making Mini Romes on the Western Frontier
Romanization was meant to provide amenities to Rome’s new colonies while, at the same time, transforming them into miniature versions of Rome. The focus here is on western frontier sites in what are now North Italy, France, Spain, and Croatia. Highlights include: the Theater at Orange, the Maison Carrée and the Pont-du-Gard at Nîmes, and the Trophy of Augustus at La Turbie.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
I want to go from Aosta in the north of Italy to the south of France, to Provence,
to take a look at the original town plan
of the city of Arles, the well-known city of Arles.
And those of you who know it or have been there
know it probably primarily as the city of Vincent Van Gogh.
It's in the city of Arles he spent a good deal of time.
He went to this particular cafe
so often that it bears, has bear, borne his name for some time, the Cafe Van Gogh.
And you see another view of a lovely piazza in
the city of, or plaza, in the city of of Arles.
And then the famous painting of Van Gogh, the painting that he made
of this particular cafe that he used to spend so much time in.
A cafe, again as you see here, it is still there.
And when you,
where you can yourselves go and sip an apéritif or whatever.
This part, the city of Arles, wonderful place to go.
It has, I'm not going to show it to you in any detail.
Just a glimpse here of its famous amphitheater.
It has a very well preserved Roman amphitheater.
And the fact that France is so close, as you can
see in that map I showed you before to Spain has,
has lead to quite a bit of Spanish
influence coming in to this particular part of France.
And this amphitheater is used today not only for other
kinds of performances but even for bullfights as you see.
This is actually a bull fight in Madrid, not in, not in Arles.
But nonetheless it's the sort of thing that
has been performed even in the amphitheater at Arles.
Here's the map again.
Before I show you the city plan of Aural as it would have looked,
I just wanted to remind you of these towns in relationship to one another.
So we've, we've come up from Rome, we've looked at Aosta in the north
of Italy in the Alps, we're making our way now into the south of France.
And I wanted to point out the proximity of northern Italy with
the south of France, because we do believe that, that a lot of
the impact of Rome was felt through the int, on south of France, or what is now
the south of France was, was felt through, was
passed through the intermediary of the north of Italy.
That there were certain kinds of architectural forms
that were developed in the north of Italy
that were transferred into the south of France,
because of the proximity of one to the other.
We're going to be looking at Arles. We're going to
be looking at Nîmes.
We're going to look at a building in La Turbie.
We'll be looking at Saint-Rémy.
And at Orange, the great theater at Orange, as well as a temple at Vienne.
So all of those sites. We're going to dip into Spain.
We're going to look at a famous, famous, spectacular aqueduct at
Segovia and a less spectacular but very well preserved aqueduct at Tarragona.
And then we're also going
to make our way, as I mentioned before, into Istria part of what was formerly
Yugoslavia, to the site called Pola that is now in, as you know, Croatia.
I want to begin with the city plan
of Arles, as it would've looked in ancient times.
And I show you here the city plan of the,
excuse me, not the city planning, I want to show you
the forum, to give you a sense of what fora looked
like in the western provinces during this period, especially in Gaul.
I want to show you the forum plan of the city of Arles.
And I
show it to you here with the modern streets superimposed on top of it.
Because much of it is underground, you can't see too much of it today.
But it has been explored underground enough where scholars have
been able, archaeologists have been able to Reconstruct the fact
that it was a large open rectangular space surrounded by
columns, as we have seen is characteristic of all Roman forum
design from the time of, from the Forum in Pompeii that
we looked at very, at the very beginning of this semester.
And although you can't see it on this particular plan, there was also a temple
on one short end as well as a basilica that was part of this plan.
And I think it's interesting to think back especially as you review from the what
we've done since from the midterm through the
second midterm, it's interesting to think about basilican
architecture, and, because it was usually a part of forums.
And when it was a part of, and, and
in what buildings, in what fora it was incorporated.
Think back to Pompeii think to the Forum of Trajan in Rome.
But think of the fact that both the, the forums of Julius Caesar and
the Forum of Augustus in Rome did not have a basilicas as part of them.
Here already, in the Augustan Period, In, because that's
when this dates.
In the Augustan period, we see a basilica incorporated
into the forum plan, in what was ancient Gaul.
I mentioned that there's a well-preserved, there's a
well-preserved cryptoporticus, an underground
storage area, around the colonnade.
And you see a view of it here, extremely well-preserved.
And it should remind you of those cryptoportici that
we looked at very early in the semester at the
sanctuaries that we explored.
The sanctuaries, you know, at Tivoli and Hercules Victor.
Hercules Victor, Tivoli and Jupiter Anxur at Terracina,
for example, very similar with its barrel-vaulted corridors.
This one was used for storage within the forum.
So they would store salt and fuel and
other items that they would need for daily use.
But it also became eventually, and
you can get an inkling of that from this
view on the left, it eventually became a dump for
architectural members that were no longer needed, as you
can see here, columns and capitals, but also for sculpture.
And one of the most famous portraits of
the emperor Augustus was found in this cryptoporticus,
dumped there at some later period, and it's
now on display in the Archaeological Museum in Arles.
I want to turn now to the theater at Orange, which is
one of the most spectacular monuments I'm going to show you today.
And you see it is this extraordinary view from the air.
a, a building that you can see from your Monument List was put up in the
late first century B.C., early first century A.D.,
and it is really something special, not only
in it's own right but also because of how well preserved it is.
And you can see in this view not only the typical, the typical
scheme that we have seen as, we become accustomed to, for Roman theater design.
The semicircular orchestra, the semi-circular cavea, the division into
these wedge-shaped sections or cunei, the the outer wall
of the structure.
And you should be immediately struck by this outer
wall of the structure, because the outer wall of
the structure is better preserved than any other outer
wall that we've seen in the course of this semester.
It's preserved to its full height.
It is very severe but that severity would have been lessened in antiquity by
the incorporation of a colonnade on the front of the structure.
So this very important building in that regard
because we, again, have this very well-preserved wall,
which gives us a good sense of what these walls would have looked like in antiquity.
And you have to imagine here, the, again, that, that,
alleviation of, of this, of this severity by that portico.
You can also see here, though,
something very interesting about this particular theater,
that, that makes it connected, although it's Roman in every
way, that connects it also to earlier Greek theatrical architecture.
Because you'll remember that the major difference between Roman
theaters and Greek theaters was that Romans built their
theaters on their own hill, made of concrete, but
the Greeks built their theaters on hill, actual natural hillsides.
And if you look very carefully at this excellent view from the air
you will see the way in which this particular
theater, at Orange, is actually built into a hillside.
They happened to have a natural hillside perfect for this
kind of construction, right where they wanted it to be.
So they took advantage of that hillside and they placed, they supported
the cavea of this structure by that hillside as you can see extremely well.
The interior
of the Theater at Orange is also extremely well preserved, as
you can see here. You can see the stage.
You can see the semicircular orchestra.
You can see the stone seats of the cavea, and you can also see that the stage
building, and because the wall, the outside retaining wall
is so well preserved, you could also see that
the interior of the wall still stands, obviously.
And this wall had one giant niche in the center, with a projecting element also in
the center, and then would of had three
tiers of columns, one on top of one another.
Most of those are unfortunately no longer there, but you can see one set
of two pairs here, one, the, the lowest tier with two columns, the upper tier
with two partial columns above that, which gives you some
sense of what this would have looked like in antiquity.
Again, we think the tiers, the columns, were on three stories.
Remember the date of this, late first century B.C. probably.
and, so this does postdate some of the 60 to 50 to 40 B.C. paintings that we looked
at, that show these kinds of multi-storied scaenae frontes with columns.
We speculated about the fact that some of those may have been based
on actual theatrical architecture, but that it didn't survive from that
early on, but it may have been made out of wood.
But here we see a fairly early example in the Augustan period,
in the south of France, and it is very important in that regard.
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