CULTURE 213praised for his civic sense by Vitruvius. In contrast, Nero’s Golden House
was a product of his own ambitious tastes rather than any public spirit. This
fantastic architectural concept involved a complete landscape setting with a
lake, and a complex building richly decorated with wall- paintings (which
fi nd parallels in some of the Campanian designs of the ‘fourth style’) and
housing a colossal statue of Nero as well as collected works of art. Domitian’s
huge Domus Augustana on the Palatine (dedicated in AD 92), which replaced
parts of the Golden House, stands in the same tradition of imperial self-
glorifi cation. In contrast, the Colosseum (opened by Titus in AD 80), on the
site lately occupied by Nero’s lake, and the baths of Trajan on the Esquiline
(opened in 109), which replaced another section of the Golden House, were
straightforward bids for popularity. Other buildings striking for their vigour
of form and imagination that were contributed to the city by imperial
architects from Vespasian to Trajan include Vespasian’s Temple of Peace
next to the Forum of Augustus (a large complex comprising porticoes,
temple and library), Trajan’s Market on the Quirinal and below it Trajan’s
Forum – a large colonnaded court, with a triumphal arch at the south end
and the Basilica Ulpia at the north, behind which stood Trajan’s Column,
and before long, Hadrian’s temple of the deifi ed Trajan. These building
programmes were designed to display the power, wealth and civic spirit of
the emperors.^10
In offi cial art from the second half of the fi rst century AD there was
increased use of standard motifs and scenes such as the imperial profectio
and adlocutio , that is, the departure of the emperor on a military expedition
and his address to the soldiers. This trend, and a parallel development, the
appearance of allegorical fi gures to back up the emperor, are well illustrated
in the Arch of Trajan at Benevento, the Trajanic Frieze and Trajan’s Column,
both of which represented Trajan’s Dacian war in continuous frieze.^11 Later
emperors, especially Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus, celebrated
their military triumphs with sculptured reliefs depicting now conventional
martial scenes on arch or column; but these monuments reveal signifi cant
new developments in imperial iconography that can be traced back to the
reign of Hadrian, or earlier.
The Hadrianic ‘classical revival’ was a product of the personal tastes and
patronage of this most cultivated of emperors.^12 Hadrian’s classicism was
not the bleak and academic traditionalism of his Antonine successors.
Received and novel artistic conceptions were creatively combined in the
architectural design and decoration of the brilliant and extravagant ‘villa’ at
Tivoli and of the Pantheon, rebuilt as a huge brick- faced concrete dome with
an elaborately decorated interior. Hadrian (‘the Greek’) introduced a new
style in imperial portraiture, the emperor as bearded Greek hero. More
signifi cant for the future development of Roman art was his active
encouragement of the importation of techniques of sculpture and artistic
representation that would gradually subvert the classical tradition. A
comparison between the Trajanic and Severan arches (and even the Trajanic