As P. Davis correctly remarks, Difficult as it is to reconstruct the essential forms of many ancient buildings, there have been only limited attempts to penetrate their metaphorical role. Indeed, in the absence of the architect’s direct...
moreAs P. Davis correctly remarks, Difficult as it is to reconstruct the essential forms of many ancient buildings, there have been only limited attempts to penetrate their metaphorical role. Indeed, in the absence of the architect’s direct testimony, attempting to prove a symbolic value in a building, is really an uphill task. All the same, ancient authors make it abundantly clear that Romans were inclined to assign meaning to buildings with or without the architect’s encouragement.
Surprisingly enough little attention has been focused on the interaction between work of art and viewer in the Roman world; even though Frank Brown’s seminar text on Roman architecture begins by exhorting the reader to recognize that the architecture of the Romans was, from first to last, an art of shaping space around human beings, and even though scholars of ancient art and architecture admit movement within sculpture, or eccentricities in architectural form, they rarely afford a work of art an active role in manipulating a viewer or visitor. However, although Roman Villas “constitute a complete classical cultural and religious Pantheon, impressing on the contemporary observer through their sculptural and architectural program the significance of Rome as a powerful guardian of Greece’s ancient heritage”, Herodes’s Atticus Villa must be also introduced as a vehicle through which a complex and puzzling person as Herodes Atticus himself might be fully revealed. In Architecture the Romans never lacked bold imagination. The use of Apsis, the simple or complex vault, the clerestory roof, in other words the Enclosure of space-see the Great Basilica on the North side of the Villa- became a key feature of Roman Architecture., which could be both mystifying and physically overwhelming. Spaces covered by dome first appeared in palatial architecture during Nero’s reign. It is all the most extraordinary, then, that as soon as domes were introduced, so sophisticated a spatial composition as the octagonal room as the DOMUS AUREA should have been conceived, and soon developed in absolute perfection in Hadrianic times.
To gain an idea of how magnificent the interior of Roman buildings has actually been, we only need to look at one of the best preserved monument, the Pantheon in Rome, a monument which best exemplifies the importance of space in Roman architecture. With its hemispherical dome and orderly division of the interior walls into different levels, the Pantheon becomes a symbol of empire, harmony, eternity and Cosmos.. Nowhere was there better opportunity for cosmic expressions than in imperial and especially residential architecture. In building his house alongside Apollo’s Temple on the Palatine, for instance, cohabited with Apollo.,while Nero clearly saw himself as cosmocrator in the heart of a man-made microcosm, complete with an enormous pool, as an image of the sea, surrounded by buildings to resemble cities. Hadrian built up his Villa in an extraordinary way, applying to parts of it the renowned names of provinces and places, such as the Lyceum, the Academy, and so on. And, so as to omit nothing, he even fashioned “infernal regions”, says the HISTORIA AUGUSTA, indicating that Hadrian’s purpose, and the same applies to Herodes Atticus, was not simply to create structures in which to live. Rather, he recreated the lands he had visited and the places of his imagination in an architectural microcosm, over which he, like Nero in his Golden House, was actually a ruler.
One of these buildings is known as Teatro Maritimo or Island Enclosure, and is very similar to the one in the Villa of Herodes Atticus. It consists of a colonnaded portico, within which is a circular canal with an island at its center (In the Villa of Herodes Atticus, west of the Garden-Stadion, and above the Great Basilica we meet the central core of the Villa, the Atrium, which was skillfully adapted to the landscape configurations and served as an OPEN GARDEN.The Atrium, rectangular in shape, occupies the centre of the Villa and is surrounded by a deep channel cut in the native soil and smoothed externally. This artificial pool, an ingenious Impluvium, was certainly being filled with water, in order to create an allusion of a river. Hadrian's Villa at Tibur (Tivoli) comprised palaces large and small, a quest-hostel, Basilica, pavilion, dining-rooms, baths, a library, porticoes, pools, servants' quarters, a stadium, cryptoportici, a palaestra, a vaulted temple of Serapis, and a complex of elongated pool and triclinia, intended to recall Alexandria's Canopus with overtones of Antinous, his lost beloved. Neros villa at Sublaquenum (Subiaco) seems to be a bold forerunner of this scheme. It was designed as a villa maritima inland and the river was dammed to create an artificial lake).
The association of the Villa and its garden-ATRIUM- with philosophical and intellectual pursuits is widespread in Greek and roman literature. Many of the features of the Athenian gymnasia, gardens and parks, which were associated with the major philosophical schools, were adopted by the Romans in their domestic architecture. Cicero sets many of his philosophical discourses at villas and specifically in gardens and at his estate at Tusculum he had built an Academy and Lyceum. By means of such garden pavilions with such culturally ostentatious names, these Romans sought to recreate at their estates the philosophical gardens of Athens, which symbolized an ideal of self-sufficiency and frugal contentment. Fish, birds and plant life completed the cosmic image, and over this miniature Cosmos, defined by his environment, Herodes Atticus ruled supreme, dominating the elements at will and mastering time.
The west side of the Atrium- In fact we have here a three-sided portico (porticus triplex) and a panoramic view of the Gulf of Astros (see f. ex. the Villas maritimae of Julio-Claudian and Flavian date , like the famous Villas at Castellamare di Stabiae, and the Villa San Marco with a porticus triplex and a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples (Varro, De Re Rustica I, 13, 3.) Multi - level villas of the porticus style are also known to have been part of the Neapolitan repertoire. All share the predilection for space, light, air and vistas and the porticus, provided for all of these in a uniquely successful fashion- was occupied by a Nymphaion and an Exedra erected upon it, an architectural construction ingeniously adapted to the whole setting of the Villa’s main compartments, which can be restored as having a façade of rows of niches decorated with portraits of Herodes Atticus, his friends and companions, as well as with those of the imperial family.
In the years between 165-170 A.D. Herodes repeatedly lost members of his family, his wife and beloved foster sons(trophimoi). Having been overwhelmed with grief upon the death of each one of them and in order to memorialize them in death, he had statues and portraits of them erected, inscribed with curses against anyone who might damage them, declared them Heroes, and acting like a Homeric Hero himself, he organized feasts and even founded games, that took place in the sanctuary of Antinous. With the Romans, as with the Etruscans, the survival of the soul after death was an ancient, deep-seated belief. It is true that during the first centuries BC and AD the skeptical attitude to immortality of the Epicurean and Stoic systems had its repercussions in Rome and Italy. Among the great majority of people of the Roman period there persisted and prevailed the conviction that some kind of conscious existence is in store for the soul after death and that the dead and living can affect one another mutually. Human life is not just an interlude of being between nothingness and nothingness. Grave reliefs, banquet reliefs, marble Kline, the Marathon Stele, a supreme monument to the heroized dead, replaced the initial and beautiful sculptural program of the Villa.
The old warm glow of this huge build manifesto, the power and refreshing vitality of the architecture and the vibrant, overwhelming energy, which emanated from the amalgamation of sculpture and architecture and the innumerable configurations, were no longer felt, as the whole Villa was transformed into a Mausoleum. Unlike the Etruscans, who had been brought down by their increasing idleness and hedonistic self-indulgence, for the Romans the pursuit of Otium meant indulging in philosophical speculation and time well spent. Indeed the creation of an environment in which the study of Greek and Roman literature and philosophy could be practiced, gave birth to the classic Roman Villa. That Otium that was instinctively felt by anyone who entered the site without any need for prior reflection, was no longer there as the whole place was transformed into a dark Mausoleum.
The Villa of Herodes Atticus is being proved a magnificent monument, the best of its kind on Greek soil, as a result of major building activity. It was Herodes Atticus, the wealthy sophist and admirer of Greek and Roman art, who managed to build a Villa so nicely and so richly decorated thus celebrating the invigorating vision of the Graeco-Roman world. Everything was executed with meticulous care, finess and delicacy, with symmetry and grace. In this way his Villa was not only a pleasant place for him but also proved a vigorous contribution to the History of Art.When Herodes Atticus assembled these installations of poetry and marble, he was certainly not engaged in pure self-advertisement, nor in purely disinterested retrospection, but in a form of meditation about his own multi-cultural identity (CORPUS HERMETICUM-GETTY PUBLICATIONS). His idiosyncratic monuments served many purposes, one of which was to create spaces that could be read simultaneously according to MULTI-CULTURALcodes, spaces where CROSS-CULTURAL ENNCOUNTERS would eventually make sense.