But it was in his Golden House that Nero wished to show off all of the advances which had been won in the period of late-republican luxuria
68 On all Julio-Claudian architecture and town-planning in Rome, see P. Gros, in Gros and Torelli 1988 (л 41) 179ff (with earlier bibliography).
and then frozen in the age of Augustus and Tiberius, and thus to make them live again in the light of a century of experience in building and technology. First we may compare the plan of the Domus Aurea with the general conceptions lying behind some of the great private buildings of the emperor Tiberius, that is, the Domus Tiberiana at Rome and the Tiberian villas at Sperlonga and Capri. Beginning with the palace at Rome, which has been revealed by recent excavation and study, Tiberian buildings show strong tendencies to centralize spaces and corridors. Functional areas dominate, while only very small separate complexes, intended to enjoy the best panoramic views, seem to be spread about in asymmetrical fashion: the imperial loggia at Capri, for example, or the grotto of Sperlonga. But the Domus Aurea, a true and proper villa urbana with a baroque taste for painted scenery, has no real centre to its design. It appears rather to be conceived as a cluster of complexes and pavilions of varying character and importance, made up of imperial properties old and new which are unified around an ideal centre, the pool (stagnum) of the villa, on the site later to be occupied by the Colosseum. Thus can we in fact reconstruct the immense urban villa of the emperor, even if much of the original conception was later destroyed by the superimpositions of the Flavians, Trajan and Hadrian, which intentionally obliterated the designs developed for the tyrant prince by his magistri et machinatores, Severus and Celer (Tac. Ann. xv.42). However the thinking behind the project also involved a direct connexion between 'wild' nature (water above all, but also gardens and woods) and separate parts of the villa, which are made to fit in with that nature. That this is so, is confirmed by the embryonic design of Caligula with his ships on the Lake of Nemi — where we see a dramatically astonishing inversion of relationships and values between lake and dwellings — or by Nero's villa at Subiaco. As to the many pavilions and parts of the Golden House, the baroque stamp appears in the famous description of the revolving banquet hall (cenatio rotunda), which was set in motion by an appropriate machine and which was rich in symbolic implications (Suet. Ner. 31). It is also clear in the layout of its various parts, the best preserved of which is now visible under the Baths of Trajan, in the tendency to break up symmetry and recdlinearity, from the trapezoidal central hallway to the famous nympheum known as the Octagonal Room, where the central structure with its side areas designed according to a mixed-line plan reproduces a cupola with pavilions for the first time since the days of the late Republic.
The taste for a residence laid out in relation to a lake is entirely Hellenistic and Alexandrian — in particular, Caligula's idea of the ships on the Lake of Nemi is very Alexandrian, derived from the well-known thalamegos ship of Ptolemy IV. This taste is echoed even in the dwellings of the emerging classes in the Italian cities, where the old traditional plan of the Pompeian domus, which was already clearly in decline in the suburban villas of the late Republic and under Augustus, atrophies and quite disappears, to the benefit of areas intended for the amoenitas of gardens, of views of the sea, and of dining-rooms under pergolas. With his descendants and successors, the luxury driven from the door by Augustus returns through the window of opulent private consumption.
The baroque and dramatic form was the idiom of this revived luxuria. Imperial portraits, soon imitated by private portraits which often followed them slavishly not only in style but even in iconography, reflect the general longing for pathos and effect, by enlivening surfaces which were once so frigid, creating contrasts between scarcely shaded faces and turbulent hairstyles, in a word replacing rigid Tiberian 'fine art' with treatments which were softer and more pathetic and yet which did not - here as in other artistic media - break with the Classicizing essence of the plastic arts. This is especially nodceable in the Medici-Della Valle reliefs,69 a splendid series of 'historical' reliefs from the early years of Claudius which were reworked in the Arcus Novus of Diocletian. The monument to which they had belonged was a 'copy' of the Ara Pacis and is generally identified with an Altar of Piety (Ara Pietads), which is known only from an inscription recorded in a manuscript, although some see it as the Altar of the Julian Gens (Ara Gentis Iuliae), which is mentioned in military diplomas as standing on the Capitoline Hill. The parts which survive, and which can be assigned to the enclosure, show processions of magistrates, priests, sacrificers and victims passing in front of certain monuments in Rome, the temple of Magna Mater on the Palatine, the temple of the Divine Augustus also on the Palatine - or, according to some, that of Mars Ultor - and perhaps the temple of Fides on the Capitol. Regardless of who the divinities may be and where the altar stood, the sacra certainly refer to the imperial cult, and celebrate the deification of Livia ordered by Claudius immediately after his accession. The imitation of the Augustan model is extremely clear. The surviving fragments all pertain to the procession and they essentially reflect the paratactic composition of the processional frieze of the Ara Pacis. At the same time, in comparison, they innovate with noticeable hints of movement in the figures and especially with the disappearance of the Classicizing neutral background of the frieze: this is replaced by an almost 'plebeian' insistence on the painstakingly architectural depictions of the temples, which are inserted into the picture in order to locate the event precisely. The rendering also of the draperies, of the texture of the hair, and of the surfaces in general shows signs of the new stylistic climate, which appears to have been already active and widespread in a.d. 42-3, according to the dating of the monument which is universally
M Torelli 1982 (f 196) 7off.
accepted. Comparison with Tiberian monuments, such as the so-called Altar of the Vicomagistri,[1147] and with Augustan, such as the figured frieze on the temple of Apollo Sosianus,[1148] shows the gradual abandonment by the Julio-Claudian figurative arts of the model created by Augustus. For the 'staccato' composition and the 'stiacciato' relief of the Augustan monument, we find substituted two finely distinguished planes of representation, with the precise appearance of 'natural perspective' in the full-bodied first plane of representation of the Tiberian altar, and with the rich chiaroscuro of the Claudian relief.