Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

After the great fire, Nero asked Severusand Celer,two brilliant
architect-engineers, to construct a grand new palace for him on a
huge confiscated plot of fire-ravaged land near the Forum Romanum
(see “The Golden House of Nero,” above). Nero’s Domus Aurea had
scores of rooms, many adorned with frescoes (FIG. 10-22) in the
Fourth Style, others with marble paneling or painted and gilded
stucco reliefs. Structurally, most of these rooms, although built of
concrete, are unremarkable. One octagonal hall (FIG. 10-35), how-
ever, stands apart from the rest and testifies to Severus and Celer’s en-
tirely new approach to architectural design.
The ceiling of the octagonal room is a dome that modulates
from an eight-sided to a hemispherical form as it rises toward the
oculus—the circular opening that admitted light to the room. Radi-
ating outward from the five inner sides (the other three, directly or
indirectly, face the outside) are smaller, rectangular rooms, three
covered by barrel vaults, two others (marked by a broken-line Xon
the plan;FIG. 10-35,right) by the earliest known concrete groin

N

ero’s Domus Aurea (FIG. 10-35), or Golden House, was a
vast and notoriously extravagant country villa in the heart
of Rome. The second-century CERoman biographer Suetonius de-
scribed it vividly:

The entrance-hall was large enough to contain a huge statue [of

Nero in the guise of Sol, the sun god, by Zenodorus;FIG. 10-2,

no. 16], 120 feet high; and the pillared arcade ran for a whole mile.

An enormous pool, like a sea, was surrounded by buildings made

to resemble cities, and by a landscape garden consisting of ploughed

fields, vineyards, pastures, and woodlands—where every variety of

domestic and wild animal roamed about. Parts of the house were

overlaid with gold and studded with precious stones and mother-of-

pearl. All the dining-rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory, the panels

of which could slide back and let a rain of flowers, or of perfume

from hidden sprinklers, shower upon [Nero’s] guests. The main

dining-room was circular, and its roof revolved, day and night, in

time with the sky. Sea water, or sulphur water, was always on tap in

the baths. When the palace had been decorated throughout in this

lavish style, Nero dedicated it, and condescended to remark: “Good,

now I can at last begin to live like a human being!”*

Suetonius’s description is a welcome reminder that the Roman

ruins tourists flock to see are but a dim reflection of the magnificence

of the original structures. Only in rare instances, such as the Pan-

theon, with its marble-faced walls and floors (FIG. 10-51), can visi-

tors experience anything approaching the architects’ intended ef-

fects. Even there, much of the marble paneling is of later date, and

the gilding is missing from the dome.

*Suetonius,Nero,31. Translated by Robert Graves,Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars

(New York: Penguin, 1957; illustrated edition, 1980), 197–198.

❚WRITTEN SOURCES:The Golden House of Nero

WRITTEN SOURCES

10-35Severusand Celer,section (left) and plan (right) of the
octagonal hall of the Domus Aurea (Golden House) of Nero, Rome,
Italy, 64–68 ce.

Nero’s architects illuminated this octagonal room by placing an oculus
in its concrete dome, and ingeniously lit the rooms around it by leaving
spaces between their vaults and the dome’s exterior.

N

0 15 30 feet

051 0 meters

Oculus

Light

Early Empire 259

vaults. Severus and Celer ingeniously lit these satellite rooms by leav-

ing spaces between their vaulted ceilings and the central dome’s ex-

terior. But the most significant aspect of the design is that here, for

the first time, the architects appear to have thought of the walls and

vaults not as limiting space but as shaping it.

Today, the octagonal hall no longer has its stucco decoration and

marble incrustation (veneer). The concrete shell stands bare, but this

serves to focus the visitor’s attention on the design’s spatial complex-

ity. Anyone walking through the rooms sees that the central domed

octagon is defined not by walls but by eight angled piers. The wide

square openings between the piers are so large that the rooms beyond

look like extensions of the central hall. The grouping of spatial units

of different sizes and proportions under a variety of vaults creates a

dynamic three-dimensional composition that is both complex and

unified. Nero’s architects were not only inventive but also progressive

in their recognition of the malleable nature of concrete, a material

not limited to the rectilinear forms of traditional architecture.