Porta Palatina At Turin, one of the monumental gateways of the Augustan colony founded c.25 B.C., and an early instance of brickwork on the
grand scale. In form it belongs to a familiar North Italian and Gaulish type of the early-imperial period, with projecting towers at the sides and an
arcaded corridor above. Originally there would have been a rectangular inner courtyard.
The marriage of Greek skills and traditions with Roman taste and demands is nowhere more clearly documented than in the two monuments -which
mark the culmination of the Augustan programme, the Ara Pacis Augustae (dedicated in 9bc), and the Forum of Augustus (2 B.C.). The forum in
concept and planning is quintessentially Roman: the great Italic-style temple of Luna marble on a lofty podium dominates an open space flanked by
porticoes, a formal, axial layout following the strict principles already established in Republican architecture. Roman too is the use of the forum as a
portrait gallery of the great trail-blazers of Roman history, including Augustus himself, identified as just another hero in a long line of Republicans.
As an ingenious and disingenuous piece of imperial propaganda and as a blueprint for architectural planning, the forum of Augustus was
unmistakably Roman; yet its detail was no less unmistakably Greek: the textbook Corinthian capitals, the zoomorphic pilaster capitals with figures
of Pegasus at the corners, most obviously of all the line of Caryatids above the colonnades, are closely matched in the Classical or late-Hellenistic
architecture of Attica.