#imperial fora

[thecityofmarble]

[simpletecture]

I'm in a "Trust the Process" flow right now as I build out the Domus Aurea area. (Say Domus Aurea Area 5 times fast GO)

For scale I'm thinking of making the domus shorter. I recently found floor plans that show a "completed" version of the section of the Domus Aurea on the Oppian. You can see my picture cuts it off, but it would just be mirrored on that side. I'm thinking I'll just make another optional lot.

I'm still not sure how filled in this world will be, but I think I'm in the 70s in number of lots. I plan to do hotspots, their surrounding area, and a path back to the forum.

Also not doing aesthetics because you can curropt a whole lot if you need to reshape the hill under it. Back to only outlines!

[jg-sims-build]

The city of Rome as depicted in Latium so far, There are 18 lots that have been built up from the outside, plus another 6 lots that are empty and a previous build that hasn’t been added yet, for a total of 25 lots.

The districts shown are the Capitoline, the Forum (and the first of the build’s 2 Imperial Fora), and Subura.

The Capitoline Hill has been sculpted and will receive a few more edits (terrain paints and routing, more buildings, rocks and foliage) to complete it. As for the forum, only the Regia, residence of the Pontifex Maximus, hasn’t been built yet. With the right amount of lots, this place could look convincingly like the Eternal City in its heyday under Augustus and his dynasty, even if it’s in actuality several times smaller.

[ancientsstudies]

Forum of Nerva.

[thecrankyprofessor]

[books0977]

Ivy Nicholson poses at the Imperial Fora, Rome, 1954. Photograph by Federico Garolla.  

Nicholson is wearing a dress by Gattinoni at the Imperial Fora (Fori Imperiali in Italian), a series of monumental fora (public squares), constructed in Rome over a period of one and a half centuries, between 46 BC and 113 AD. The forums were the center of the Roman Republic and of the Roman Empire.

[dererumgestarum]

TRAJAN’S COLUMN

Part I

Architect and civil engineer Apollodorus of Damascus designed and supervised the construction of the forum of Trajan over the years AD 106/112. The conceptual and visual centerpiece of the complex is the monumental, Doric column sheathed in relief sculpture and originally surmounted by a gilded bronze statue of the emperor.

Based on his close connection to Trajan and the forum project, Apollodorus is assumed to have been responsible for the column’s design and/or creation. There is, however, no evidence supporting that assumption. Apollodorus was not a sculptor and the Senate, not Trajan, appears to have commissioned and donated the column.

That said, the column of Trajan is a tour de force of engineering and construction. Rising 39m from the ground, it is composed of 29 blocks of Luna (Carrara) marble, 19 of which are colossal drums, each weighing approximately 30 tons. The shaft of the column is fluted, as one clearly sees in the uppermost drum. The 56-ton capital had to be hoisted 35m to be set in place. A spiral staircase of 185 steps inside the shaft provides access to the viewing platform above the capital. The chamber inside the pedestal served as the mausoleum of Trajan and his wife, Plotina.

Although the commemorative column had been an estsblished genre of honorific monument since the Republic, its donors feared that its purpose would not be understood by future viewers. To clarifiy the column’s function, a dedicatory inscription was placed over the door to the pedestal:

SENATVS POPVLVSQUE ROMANVS / IMP(ERATORI) CAESARI DIVI NERVAE F(ILIO) NERVAE / TRAIANO AVG(VSTO) GERM(ANICO) DACICO PONTIF(ICI) MAXIMO TRIB(VNICIA) POT(ESTATE XVII IMP(ERATORI) VI CO(N)S(VLI) VI P(ATER) P(ATRIAE) AD DECLARANDVM QVANTAE ALTITVDINIS / MONS ET LOCVS TAN[TIS OPER)IBVS SIT EGESTVS.

According to the inscription, the column was erected in recognition of Trajan’s victory not over Dacia, but over the Quirinal Hill.

Cassius Dio states that elaborates on the inscription:

[Trajan] set up in the Forum an enormous column to serve at once as a monument to himself and as a memorial of the work in the Forum. For that entire section had been hilly and he had cut it down for a distance equal to the height of the column, thus making the Forum level.

The column therefore is a measuring device that records the height of the hill at that location prior to the construction of the Forum.

Both architect and patron appreciated the propagandistic value of the emperor reshaping the physical topography of his realm, exemplified by the extraordinary feat of removing part of Quirinal Hill. That great feat was self-effacing and would not be known to subsequent viewers who had no personal memory of the hill prior to its excavation. The column makes the accomplishment of leveling the land to accommodate the Forum visible again.

Trajan’s column is therefore a monument to the emperor’s greatest domestic achievement, the building of the forum. The column, of course, also commemorates his greatest success abroad, the two Dacian campaigns (AD 101-102; 105-106). The 200 meters of narrative relief sculpture that chronicle both campaigns in great detail are, however, strikingly light on depictions of warfare.

Instead, images of the construction (and some destruction) of buildings dominate the column. The legions build bridges (designed by Apollodorus) across the Danube, construct fortified camps, erect houses, dismantle barbarian huts and villages. To be sure, the army fulfills its military function when called upon to do so, but the designer of the frieze clearly wished to emphasize the constructive, civilizing, non-violent aspects of Trajan’s actions in Dacia.

If the column’s narrative cycle is based on Trajan’s written account of the Dacian wars, the Commentarii (of which only a single line survives), then it seems likely that the emperor wanted to be remembered as a builder at home and abroad, rather than as a soldier.

This is consistent with the the scanty historical record. We know that in late antiquity, Trajan had acquired a reputation for building. Apart from his own forum, markets, and baths, he reprised the efforts of Claudius to improve the port of Rome and he rebuilt the Temple of the Vestals, the Forum of Caesar (and the Temple of Venus Genetrix) prior to building his own.

As the most basic ancient building element, the column was therefore a most apt choice for a monument honoring the memory of an architecturally-inclined emperor.

It should also be noted that the column was sited not in the grandiose peristyle courtyard of the forum, which abounded in sculptural references to the the conquest of Dacia but in between the bibliotecae ulpiae. Trajan was the author of the frieze’s source text and the narrative reliefs unfurl in a manner that recalls a scroll. Placed in this contemplative and literary context, the column of Trajan functions less as a triumphant monument to a bellicose general and more as a thoughtful, intellectual dissection of a winning strategy.

Monuments commemorating Trajan’s military achievements, like the arch in Benevento make it clear that if the job required triumphalism, Apollodorus was more than capable of delivering it. The makes its relative absence on the column more conspicuous and, by extension, more polemical.

Like the majority of ancient sculpture, the column of Trajan was polychromed to a large extent. The images above and below reconstruct the color based on microscopic traces of the original pigments. Color was clearly meant to aid legibility.

The second part of this post consists of images of architecture and building from the Column of Trajan.

[echiromani]

The columns of the Temple of Venus Genetrix, dedicated by Julius Caesar in 46 BC.