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23.2 The Baths of Constantine in Rome and the Porta Nigra at Trier
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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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.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
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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