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23.2 The Baths of Constantine in Rome and the Porta Nigra at Trier

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Roman Architecture

Yale University

4.9 (183 ratings) | 14K Students Enrolled

Roman Architecture is a course for people who love to travel and want to discover the power of architecture to shape politics, society, and culture.

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Jan 28, 2019

truly a really well structured course with very interesting content. exactly the kind of thing i wish i could have done at university!

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Nov 08, 2018

an excellent course on Roman Art and Architecture. The Professor is a great teacher and the illustrations are wonderful. Thank you.

From the lesson

Rome of Constantine and a New Rome

Constantine commissioned buildings linked to the pagan past (Baths of Constantine) and others (Aula Palatina,Trier) looking to the Christian future. New architectural ideas abound. The "Temple of Minerva Medica" is decagonal and the Basilica Nova modeled on the frigidaria of Roman imperial baths. The Arch of Constantine commemorates Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge and serves as a compendium of Constantine's accomplishments matching those of “good” second-century Roman emperors.

23.1 The End of the Tetrarchy and the Rise of Constantine the Great 15:25

23.2 The Baths of Constantine in Rome and the Porta Nigra at Trier 11:37

23.3 The Basilica or Aula Palatina at Trier 7:34

23.4 The Temple of Minerva Medica in Rome 8:04

23.5 The Basilica Nova in Rome 17:35

23.6 The Arch of Constantine and the Enduring Impact of Roman Architecture 15:24

Taught By

Diana E.E. Kleiner
Dunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University

Transcript

Constantine learned a lot, though, from the tetrarchs,

and one of the things that he continued on

was to build a great public architecture, public architecture

for the benefit of the Roman populace at large.

He follows the lead of Diocletian in this regard

and adds another very large imperial bath to Rome.

And I show you a plan of that imperial bath here.

It bears his name,

the Baths of Constantine, and dates to 320 A.D. It is located in Rome.

It is located on the Quirinal Hill.

The Quirinal Hill, and that should ring a bell for all

of you, because you'll remember, it was Trajan, Trajan, and remember,

Constantine is imaging himself as a Neo-Augustus with a Neo-Trajanic hair

style, Trajan who built, who had the, much, a good part

of the Quirinal Hill cut back to make way for his forum and

then placed his markets on part of what remained of the Quirinal Hill.

So the Quirinal Hill was, was associated in everybody's mind with Trajan.

Constantine wanted to associate himself with Trajan, so when he decides

where to place his new bath structure, he chooses the Quirinal Hill.

This is not coincidental.

It was very deliberative on his part.

He builds it in a manner that is completely

consistent with Imperial bath architecture in Rome, the Imperial bath

type of architecture in Rome that we've already studied, from

the time of Titus up through the time of Diocletian.

The, the baths on the Quirinal hill are no longer preserved but

we fortunately have some drawings that were made by the famous architect

Andrea Palladio, Andrea Palladio, who drew it

when it was in better shape and has, and his drawings of the Baths of Constantine

allow us to see exactly what these baths were like in their heyday.

And we can see although Palladio's drawing concentrates on

the bathing block you can see that he also includes

down here, and it's probably all that remained of

this particular part of the bath in Palladio's time.

You can see he includes here the great hemicycle that we've seen in so many

of these baths that are part of that

precinct that surrounds the bath the bath block.

So this suggests to us, and I think

very convincingly that this bath, this bathing block

was also placed in one of these very

large precincts that had all the seminar and lecture

rooms and libraries around the perimeter of it,

and that this was lined with seats and

probably used to, for people to watch athletic

contests or perhaps even plays of other kinds.

The bathing block, again we can see conforms extremely well to the other

baths that we've looked at, to the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, for example.

With a natatio rectangular in shape, with a frigidarium

that is also rectangular and has three, a triple

groin vault, as you can see designated in Palladio's drawing.

And down here, this is a reinterpretation, by the way, of Palladio's

drawing from Ward-Perkins, this plan that you see on the screen now.

A tepidarium over here that's somewhat more unusual

in shape than, than we than we tend to

see, where we have a series of lobes, four

lobes in fact, that have been, that have expanded

the space almost, sort of a circle trying to become an oval, I suppose.

But you can see the way in which they have expanded, and we call that

kind of space quadrilobate, quadrilobate and we see that here.

And then, we also see, this is most interesting, how the caldarium is treated.

Because as you've seen in the baths that we've looked at,

the imperial baths that we've looked at, if there's any room that's

different in each of these, it's the caldarium.

You'll recall that Diocletian had moved

to a rectangular caldarium with radiating alcoves.

But Constantine and his architects moved back to the

circular caldarium that we saw in the baths of Caracalla.

Uses the same sort of scheme here, with three radiating alcoves, all

of those screened from the outer space with columns and the rest of

the structure around these, these main rooms of

the bathing block that are related to one another.

Axial, axially we see the other rooms symmetrically disposed.

One other important point to make about the caldarium is

that we see that it too corresponds to a development

that we've already begun to see in some of the

other buildings that we looked at, especially in the last lecture.

And that is this move away from the oculus, for round

domed buildings.

This round, this caldarium does not have a oculus, as

so many caldaria did in the past, think back to

the, well, or so many bathing rooms did, think back

to the frigidarium in Pompeii, for example, with their oculus.

The oculus is no longer used here, and instead we see windows in the base of the

dome that are very similar to the windows

that we saw in a couple of tetrarchic buildings.

We're going to see it elsewhere

today, and I'll reiterate that point then. Constantine, like so many Roman emperors

before him, did complete buildings that had been begun by his predecessors.

And he did this, for, some of the

tetrarchs, including his father, not surprisingly, Constantius Chlorus.

We know that Constantius Chlorus had chosen, as his capital,

the city of Trier.

The city of Trier in, what was Gaul, but was, but, but now is Germany.

And I show you the location of Trier, this is

a map showing the locations, as we've discussed so many

times this term, of many of the, of all of

the places that we've looked at in the Western Empire.

And you can see the French cities that we looked at just last time in Gaul and

then up there, Trier, in what is now

Germany, located near the modern city of Cologne.

This was the chosen capital for Constantius Chlorus.

Even before Constantius Chlorus began to build a palace for

himself at Trier, as the other tetrarchs had done elsewhere

in the Roman provinces, there was quite a bit of

building activity going on with regard to one project in Trier

in the third century.

And not surprisingly that, too, was a defensive wall.

That part of the empire was being attacked on a regular basis by Germanic tribes, by

the Franks and by the Alemanni, were coming

in, wreaking havoc in that part of the world.

And a decision was taken not surprisingly in 275 and 276,

because, you'll remember, that's exactly when the Aurelian walls were dedicated

in Rome, 275 to build a major wall in this part of the empire as well.

And we have some part of that wall still preserved, especially a gate in that wall

called the Porta Nigra, which I show you here on the right hand side of the screen.

The Porta Nigra which, although the walls were begun in

the 270s, so the walls date primarily in the third century,

this particular gate was not added to the walls until the early fourth century AD,

during the time of Constantius Chlorus. And Constantine

completes this this gateway in the, those baths.

If we compare the gate at the Porta Nigra in Trier to the gate

that we looked at from the Aurelian, walls the so-called Porta Appia, that does

date to around 275, and you see it again in this

restored view from Ward-Perkins on the left-hand side of the screen.

You will see the close resemblance of the Porta Nigra to the Porta Maggiore in Rome.

By that I mean, both of them have two arcuated entranceways.

Both of them have round towers as you can see here.

Both of them have arcuated,

arcuated windows or blind windows, as you can see in the case of the Porta Nigra.

They have columns between them, which is not the case in the Porta Appia.

The main difference between the two, between these

two contempt, between these two, is that the Porta

Appia in Rome, you'll recall, was made out of

concrete faced with brick, the most contemporary building material.

Whereas you can clearly see, by looking at the Port Nigra, that

the Port Nigra is made out of stone, out of cut stone construction.

Extremely old fashioned at this particular time.

But I think it is very likely that

they wanted, by choosing this for this particular

part of the world, and it is, it is, this cut stone construction is local stone.

By choosing this they wanted to reassert a relationship

between the early fourth century A.D. and

earlier Rome and especially earlier Roman imperial power.

The very symbols of Roman power.

Buildings like the Theater of Marcellus, and especially the Colosseum in Rome.

We've talked about that as the very icon of Rome.

Its ability to impress and to awe.

And I think they wanted to take advantage

of that kind of awe-inspiring rhetoric you know,

visual rhetoric that such a choice could make.

And I think it's an example of the fact, you know, just as Constantine reaches

back to emperors like Trajan and Augustus, to associate

himself within his portraiture, I think that there was, they

had reason to look back to some of the great buildings of the Roman past.

to, and to use

that, that kind of visual imagery to reassert that Rome, despite the

fact that they were being attacked by barbarians, all was well in Rome.

All, [COUGH] all continued to be well in the capital as well as on the frontiers.

And this kind of image I think worked in that regard.

Well, one hopes that, that, well they thought it would work, at

any rate in that regard, even into the early fourth century AD.

Here's another view

the same view of the Porta Nigra, and I compare it also to a

detail from the Porta Maggiore in Rome, which you'll recall was built by Claudius.

There is an interesting resemblance between the two,

and many scholars have called attention to that.

Because the stone of the Porta Nigra is not as smoothed

over as the stone of the Colosseum or the theater of Marcellus.

It's left in a much more rough state, a rough state that reminds one of

the rusticated masonry of Claudius's Porta Maggiore.

But remember that in the case of the Porta Maggiore, there was

a deliberate, deliberate disjunction between the

rusticated masonry and the finished masonry.

The finished capitals and also the finished pediments above.

And we talked about the fact that we believe that

that has a lot to do with the particular personality and

antiquarian interests of Claudius, who liked the intellectual exercise

and idea of playing off one against the other.

We don't see that same combination here.

We don't see the rough and, and the finished.

In the case of the Porta, of the Porta Nigra in Trier.

And it has been suggested, and I think correctly so, that the reason that the

Porta Nigra looks the way it does is not deliberate, the way the Porta Maggiore

is, but rather because it really was unfinished.

The blocks were never fully smoothed over.

But it makes a very attractive appearance, even still today, despite that.

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