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.
