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21.4 The Pont du Gard and the Aqueduct at Segovia
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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
Now, one of the, one of the most
important elements of Rome, the Romanization of, the, empire.
Was the fact that as the Romans went in and built these new cities
in East and also in West, they supplied it with amenities that weren't there before.
And this was especially important in the Western provinces, where again
the civilization had not been all that high prior to this period.
So, the Romans
come in and they build aqueducts with a vengeance in the western provinces in the
south of France in Spain in order to provide these towns with a water supply.
And I want to show you a couple of examples of our best-preserved and most
spectacular Roman aqueducts anywhere in what was the ancient Roman empire.
I want to begin with perhaps,
with certainly the most famous of these. The so called Pont du Gard, also at Nimes.
And I show you first a map, which gives you a sense of what was going on here.
The patron by the way of the Pont du
Gard at Nimes was none other than Marcus Agrippa.
Marcus Agrippa whom we've talked about several times this semester.
The close friend, confidant, right-hand man,
son-in-law hoped for heir of Augustus, who we saw was building buildings in Rome.
He built the baths that bear his name the Baths of Agrippa.
And he also built that first Pantheon, that first
temple to all the gods with its Caryatid porch.
We saw that he was active as a builder in Athens where he
built the Odeon of Agrippa, and where he was honored with a statue
on top of a pier on the Acropolis in Athens.
He also was active in the south of France as
a great builder, and it was here that he was responsible
for commissioning an aqueduct that would bring water from 31 miles
away up in the mountains down to the city of Nimes.
And this map gives you a very good sense of exactly how this was done.
The source was up there at
the top.
The top pink circle up there made it's have
all the way down to the city of Nimes here.
Now the Romans were very clever about how they built aqueducts.
They let gravity and the change in terrain essentially do the work for them.
They tend, they, they placed terracotta pipes
underground, for the most part, on sloping
ground and allowed the water to come from
the hillside to the mountains, down into the city.
Just as they did here.
On occasion they allowed those terracotta
tubes to be, to be carried by low walls.
But sometimes they got to a point where they had to cross a body of water.
And that is exactly what happened here.
The River Gard
of the city of Nimes, of the area of
Nimes goes through, is, is located at this particular point.
And so the aqueduct system had to cross the river.
How did they do that? They couldn't tunnel it underground.
They couldn't place it on a low wall. So what they did was built a bridge.
They built a bridge to carry that water across the body
of water, and the result of that is what you see here.
This is the famous Pont du Gard at Nimes.
This is the bridge that serves to carry the water across.
They placed the terracotta pipes in the aqueduct
itself And that water is carried across that aqueduct.
Now what's particularly extraordinary about this monument besides that feat
of, of taking that that water across the river is
the fact that it is, well if you look at the building
technique, you can, you can tell that it is made of ashlar masonry.
Ashlar masonry that is local stone, in this particular case.
As much as we have seen is the case for the most
part in architecture in the south of France in the Roman period.
But what is amazing about this
particular aqueduct, besides this great engineering feat,
is the fact that the architects have paid enormous attention to the exact
measurements, not only of the arch itself, but of the arcuations.
They have worked up all kinds of elaborate
mathematical theorems in order to get to the
point where they play these shapes and the
sizes of these shapes well off against one another.
The larger arcuations below are perfectly mathematically, worked out, so
that they work well, with the smaller ones up above.
And we see in a building like this, I think,
something that is really impressive, not only a sign of Romanization.
I mean, this is, when you talk about Roman imperialism,
and the Romans taking over the world in ancient Roman times.
One could think about that in part, in,
in a negative way, I mean, imperialism in taking
over and creating an empire can, can be viewed negatively.
But one of the positive things that the
Romans brought, one of the many positive things
that the Romans brought to these under developed
parts of the world was what we call Romanization.
Bringing these amenities, bringing things like water to a city, so that it
could live at a higher level than it was able to live before.
But besides
that, when you look at an aqueduct like the Pont du Gard at Nimes, I think
you'll agree that although we would call this
a feat of Roman engineering, first and foremost,
the Romans have been adept enough, both through
paying attention to these mathematical considerations but also
to carving the stone to making the stone
really work aesthetically that they have essentially in
this aqueduct transformed engineering into architecture,
into what we would define as architecture. I
want to show you two other aqueducts the first both of them in Spain.
The first at Tarragona, and the other one at
Segovia. First a reminder of the fact that Spain,
as you'll recall, was extremely important in the Roman
period because two of Rome's emperors came from Spain.
I think Trajan, who was born of Spain, born in
Spain, and also Hadrian, whom we see here on the left.
A map of Spain showing the locations of Italica, where Hadrian was
born, but also the two sites that we're going to look at Tarragona, Tarraco which
was located very close to Barcelona near the sea,
as you can see here, and then further inland, Segovia.
Segovia, which is near Madrid.
The city of Madrid.
So very accessible for any of you traveling Spain.
These are sites that are extremely accessible
and especially Segovia Well worth looking at.
I just want to show you the aqueduct at Tarragona briefly.
You can see it here on the screen.
An aqueduct that dates to the Augustan period.
And it is a handsome work of architecture.
It has ashlar blocks, as you can see,
local stone but it doesn't have the finesse.
I think you can see here now how great
the Pont du Gard is because it doesn't subtract
it, it does the job, it's a great engineering
feat, but it doesn't have the aesthetic, the aesthetic
values that the Pont du Gard does, with it's you
know arches that are the same size on the lower story
and then in the upper story does, it doesn't have the
the, the appeal, aesthetically, visually, that the Pont du Gard does.
But it does its job.
However the art, the Aqueduct at Segovia is quite another story.
The Aqueduct at Segovia is right up
there with the Pont du Gard at Nimes as one
of the great works of Roman engineering and a Roman architecture.
And what makes it all the more spectacular is how much of it is preserved.
And I think you can see that extremely well here in this amazing view of the
aqueduct marching, you know, making its way across
the centre of the city of modern Segovia in
this truly spectacular image.
As you can see from your monument list, the
date of the aqueduct at Segovia is very controversial.
There are some people that think it's first
century, there's some people that think it's second century.
I think it is most likely, to be, second
century, and probably put up during the time of Trajan.
The emperor Trajan, but we're not sure about that.
Whenever it
was put up, it is an incredible
example of aqueduct engineering and aqueduct architecture.
And it, it does allow us to see a couple
of things that we, it's very distinctive in its own right.
It's beautiful, but beautiful in a very different
way as we'll see from the Pont du Gard.
But it does allow us to look at a couple of other features
of Roman aqueduct planning and design that I think are worth talking about.
I show you here another view of the aqueduct at Segovia.
And you're see, you see here that it is
for the most part a two tiered aqueduct system.
But what they've done here to vary it and make it much more interesting
aesthetically than the aqueduct at Tarragona is
to make those two stories different in height.
So the lower story is much higher as you
can see, with much more attenuated arches, and then the upper
tier is lower with with, with much smaller arches.
The other thing that they've done, using local stone,
they have left the stone in a somewhat rougher state.
It isn't quite as rough, perhaps, as Claudius's buildings, but left
in a fairly rough state, which gives it a, a really sense,
as you look at it, of the texture of that stone, stone, of the materiality
of that stone, in a way that
makes this particular building extremely attractive and impressive.
And you can see here this, this view
is also very helpful because you can see people
standing below, which give, gives you some sense of
the very large scale of, of this particular aqueduct.
Here's another view. This is one of my favorite
views of the aqueduct at Segovia. Because I think here you can really get a
sense of the coloration of the stone, of the texture of this slightly rough stone.
And of the way, even in the architecture of aqueducts.
Again, mainly, an aqueduct is built mainly for practical purpose, to bring
water from one part of, of, of one place to another place.
And to
provide an amenity as we talked about in,
a, a significant and important day to day amenity.
But even with that, even with, even though it is essentially
a practical building, aesthetics are never far from the Romans' minds.
And when this particular aqueduct was designed, not only
did the designer have in mind the texture of
the stone and the way in which the light
of Spain, this particular part of Spain hits that stone
at any given time of day, but the whole concept of vista, again.
When you, when you wonder along this particular aqueduct, because
it goes on for quite a while you can do that.
And you're not on top of a body of water, as well, so you can walk
along it down below and see what you see as you, as you meander through it.
And it is amazing aesthetically, again, how they have
set up a series of views and vistas from one
part of this aqueduct to another.
As you stand here and, and you look at it
look at it making its way, almost marching its way back.
I like to think its Trajanic, it's almost like Trajan's
army marching through the city of Segovia off to you know
some military exploit in, in the far reaches because, the
way it marches through the city as you can see here.
But all these wonderful views and, and, and vistas and
panoramas that one can see depending on where one
stands in the city, where one stands beneath the
arches themselves is really spectacular and clearly was very
much in the minds of the architect who designed this.
Here's another very good view where if you stand below the aqueduct
and look up, this is the sort of view that you'll see.
With the rough stones, even in the bulks of the arches themselves an
incredible work.
And again the fact that it is well, as well
preserved as it is is really something to be grateful for.
Here's a very interesting view, because it also shows
you what happens with aqueduct design when the terrain changes.
So, in the center of the city, in the views that we just looked at before they
were able to build, the ground level was
low enough that they were able to build the
aqueduct and two stories with that very high
first story, and then the lower second story.
But what happens when the terrain shifts?
When you go, because again, they're taking advantage of a
source that is located higher up with the hope that
gravity will do the work for them, and allow that
water to to flow from that source down into the city.
And that is exactly what they did here. The source is farther away and
it's high.
So the, so the water has to be piped in to this
structure, and make its way down from the hillside to the city.
So you see the ground rising here to go up that hill.
And what happens is that they have to
adjust the aqueduct according to the changing terrain.
So if you look at this particular section you
will see that the bottom story is just an arch.
The arch rests on the ground so that they, because it
has to be much shorter at this juncture than anywhere else.
And you see this same, well you see
it changing somewhat here as it makes its way.
But you see it rounding the corner.
And the way they have had to make this adjustments and made them so well without
losing the, the, the impressive aesthetic quality of this particular structure.
Once again, a, a tribute to the fact that these Roman architects
were not only great engineers but
also without any question, world class architects.
There's an interesting monument that is located, you can
see the aqueduct of Segovia in the back left there.
There's an interesting monument that was put up to celebrate
the bi-millennium of the aqueduct in Segovia, and it's interesting
to see what [LAUGH], what they've put at the top.
This she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus to underscore, the close
connections between, Ancient Roman Segovia and, Rome.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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