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12.6 The Imperial Baths of Titus
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從本節課中
The Creation of an Icon: The Colosseum and Contemporary Architecture in Rome
The Flavian dynasty of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. Vespasian linked himself to Divus Claudius by completing the Claudianum, distanced himself from Nero by destroying part of the Domus Aurea, filling in the artificial lake and replacing it with the Colosseum. Titus commissioned Rome's first preserved example of the "imperial bath type," characterized by grand scale, axiality, and symmetry.
與講師見面
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
The last monument that I want to show you
today is, in many respects, the most important.
That seems like a strange thing to say, because what
could be more important than the icon of Rome, the Colosseum.
But, when we think about it, the
Colosseum was actually a fairly conservative building, right?
I mean, it goes back to the
the amphitheater at Pompeii in its general plan,
and it is quite similar to, in fact very similar to, the theatre of Marcellus,
which was done at the time of Augustus, and Augustus was trying to
connect his reign to that of Periclean Athens and was using stone construction.
And the Colosseum is of stone construction, although
it also, of course, makes use of, of,
of, of angular vaults made out of concrete,
and also innovates with the new groin vaults.
But for, for all intents and purposes, a
relatively conservative building at this time, the Colosseum was.
The building that I am now going to show you was not that way at
all, even though it's a building that is much less well known than the Colosseum.
And it also doesn't exist any longer unfortunately, and that, and
those are the Baths of Titus, a very important structure for us.
The Baths of Titus, the Thermae Titi, the Baths of Titus, that date to
A.D. 80, right smack in the middle of Titus's brief reign of 79 to 81.
They were put up in Rome, and they were
put up in Rome, not surprisingly, you know the,
you know, you know the narrative here not surprisingly,
on that land that had earlier been expropriated by Nero.
Another instance of the Flavian emperors giving back to the people.
You've given them a museum, they, you've given them a, an amphitheater.
Now you're going to give them the bath.
Next to an amphitheater, the bath is what they want most of all, a place where they
can go to bathe but also hang out with their family and friends.
So again, giving back to the people what they wanted.
Wise, shrewd political move on the part of
Vespasian, being followed by his equally shrewd son, Titus.
The location of the Baths of Titus was next to,
actually, what you see here on top of the Golden House,
is actually the plan of a later bath, the baths
of the emperor Trajan, which we'll look at in the future.
But the smaller Baths of Titus were put to the I believe
it was, yeah, the west of the Esquiline Wing of the Golden House.
Right, right just between the Golden House and where you see
"Esquiline" written up there, was the location of the Baths of Titus.
All that survives of the Baths of Titus is part
of one wall, a brick-faced, concrete wall with some engaged columns.
That's all we have.
But the building was still standing, the building was
still much better preserved in the 16th century when it
was drawn by Renaissance architects, most specifically by Andrea Palladio,
whose name I put on the monument list for you.
Andrea Palladio drew a very complete plan of it, and it is on the basis
of that plan that modern plans are made of the Baths of Titus, and I show
it to you here.
And we believe this is a very accurate plan of the Baths of Titus.
And I compare it to you, for you with?
Again, those of you studying for the midterm, what's this?
This Stabian Baths, Stabian Baths, in Pompeii.
Second century BC, very good.
And we talked about as the typical, the typical earlier bath structure.
And just a very quick
review to remind ourselves of its major features.
It had the palestra over here, surrounded by columns on three sides.
The piscina or the natatio, swimming pool, at the left, and then
most importantly, the bathing block on the right side of the structure.
A men's section and a women's section.
With that sequence of rooms, the apodyterium, or the dressing room.
The tepedarium,
rectangular, or the warm room, the caldareum, hot room,
with a, an apse and a cold water splash
pool cold water splash basin and then most importantly
the frigidarium, that small round building with radiating alcoves.
That was the typical Roman bath structure until we begin to see or,
our first example in Rome of this so called imperial bath structure.
The type, the plan that is used by the
emperors for the baths that they build in Rome.
It is possible that Titus's was not the first.
There's been some speculation, we know that Nero had built a bath.
There has been some speculation that Nero's bath may have been the
first example of the imperial plan, but we don't know for sure.
But, Titus's, of the ones that we know, have
the specifics about, we know that Titus's was definitely
an example of this imperial bath structure.
And the features that are outstanding here, that we
need to focus on, are the fact that this imperial
bath structure had a very elaborate entranceway that consisted either
of columns on square bases or piers in the front.
There seem to have been a series of groin vaults.
Any time you see an X in plan, that means a groin vault.
An elaborate stairway, some more columns or piers here,
and, and more groin vaults, and another stairway leading into
a double palestra, in the sense or you could
call it a combined palestra here, on the southern side.
And then most, and then you can see the cistern on the outside of
the precinct, you can see the cistern that fed water into this bath structure.
It's roughly rectangular, as you can see.
And unlike the Stabian Baths at Pompeii, where you have the bath
complex on the right side, you can see that the bath, the rooms
of bath, the bath, the rooms that are used for bathing are
at the center of the plan, which makes sense from the Roman standpoint.
You know the Romans thought, were very, focused on
axiality and symmetry, and that's exactly what they've done here.
They've placed the bathing block in the center,
they've lined the rooms up axially with
one another, they've placed rooms on either
side, symmetrical rooms, it's the same on the left as it is on the right.
Symmet, rooms are symmetrically disposed around that central bathing block.
And they've taken the frigidarium, which was the smallest,
albeit the most interesting, architecturally, but the smallest room
in the bath, and they've made it the largest
room in the bath, because you can see, at F,
a very large, cross-shaped room with an apse on
one end, a groin vault over the center, a
single, large groin vault over the center, flanked by
and buttressed by, two barrel vaults, one on either side.
And then opening off those barrel vaults,
a series of rectangular alcoves with, as you
can see, with walls that are scalloped,
and then with columns that screen those alcoves
from the central groin vaulted space.
So an entirely different way of thinking about the frigidarium.
Then that, into the tepidarium from the frigidarium, again through a screen
of columns, that's fairly conventional, rectangular
and then into, we see here double
caldaria, two caldaria, they also in a kind of cross shape, although a
cross shape that appears a little bit more rounded then the case of
the frigidarium.
They too screened by columns on three sides, very
open, very open, allowing a free flow of space in
a way that was not true of the Pompeian baths
where the entrances were tiny from one room to another.
Here a great deal of emphasis on the free flow of space.
So what's most, what's very important here?
The way I want to end today is essentially where I began.
What innovations of Nero's architecture lived on despite his damnatio memoriae and
despite the fact that his buildings were destroyed, his buildings no longer stood.
The Domus Aurea no longer stood, to be studied.
And yet what we see is some of the innovations did live on.
And the ones that did include, and let me just compare as the last image.
Compare the octagonal room, an axonometric view of
the octagonal room, with the Baths of Titus in Rome.
What we, what we see are some of the
experimentations that were taking place in private architecture, palace architecture.
And I, I should make the point that just as we've said that tomb architecture
was often very eccentric and very experimental, the
same was true for private architecture, not surprisingly.
These are buildings that people make personal decisions about.
How do
I want to live, and what kind of spaces do I want to live?
And where do I, in what kind of building do I want to be buried?
That's a, those are very personal decisions, and
they were much more likely to be experimental.
Decisions where public architecture had to toe the line to a certain
extent, and had to be more closely allied with what had gone before.
And, and it was also more referential in terms
of looking back to other emperors, and so on.
So we see experiments in private palace and tomb architecture, villa
architecture, that we don't tend to see as much in public architecture.
But what we see happening here is act, is
very momentous, and that is the lessons that were
explored first in private architecture are being adopted in
the most public of all Roman buildings, a bath building.
And and it's being done in a very different way from
the Colosseum.
Most important the most important adoptions, innovations,
that were in Nero's Domus Aurea that are
also included in the Baths of Titus,
are axiality, symmetry, and I've described both of
those already, new vaulted shapes, which we also did see in the Colosseum, the use
of the groin vault extensively here, and then
perhaps most importantly this free flow of space.
The free flow of space, the vistas, the panoramas,
from one part of this bath structure to another
that is very different from the bath structure of
the past, from the bath structures, for example, of Pompeii.
So what we see in some is the
fact that despite Nero's damnatio memoriae, despite the
fact that that allowed authorities and in fact
the, the new emperor to destroy the portraits of
Nero, to raze his palace to the ground, which Vespasian did after all.
Despite that, the the architectural innovations
of Nero's Domus Aurea lived on.
They lived on in the baths of Titus,
and we're going to see, they lived on in perpetuity.
And we're going to see them continuing to have
a huge impact on the evolution of Roman architecture.
Thank you.
