Roman Architecture is a course for people who love to travel and want to discover the power of architecture to shape politics, society, and culture.
4.5 Bath Complexes at Pompeii
Loading...
來自 Yale University 的課程
Roman Architecture
140 個評分
從本節課中
Civic Life interrupted: Nightmare and Destiny on August 24, A.D. 79
Civic, commercial, and religious buildings of Pompeii buried by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and later rediscovered. Daily life in Pompeii is illustrated through its bakeries and fast food stands and a moving account dramatizes what happened when disaster struck.
與講師見面
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
I want to turn to an extremely important building.
And one that I am going to come back
to on a number of occasions during this semester.
So put an asterisk next to this one as a, a particularly important building, and one
that is almost certain I'll find some way of incorporating into the first midterm.
Because I think it's so significant, and it will, it will
turn up again and again and again, in the course of the
term, especially when we talk about later bath architecture.
It is a Stabian Baths of Pompeii.
It dates to the second half of the second century B.C., and
it was remodeled in the first half of the first century B.C..
The Stabian Baths are one of several bath buildings that Pompeii, I mentioned in
the introductory lecture that these, these houses
in Pompeii did not have running water.
And so access to bathing and
to water for daily use was obviously critical, and the bath
served that purpose the place where one could go and bathe.
But they were also, they also became
great social centers, great places where you really
wanted to go and hang out with your
friends, while you were sitting in the sauna.
And and so they take on a very, they are
a very important piece of life in cities like Pompeii.
The Stabian Baths, as their date indicate
are very early.
They begun already under the Samnites,
and they have some extremely interesting features.
And once again, I'm going to have to go over some of the bath terminology.
You can see here that if you walk along the street you
just see a series of cubicles which served as shops, so fairly unprepossessing.
But there is an entrance way through those shops into
a very large open space surrounded by columns on three
sides, that is called the palaestra of the baths.
The palaestra was the exercise courts, where you jogged
and, and, you know, and ran around and so on,
and after you exerted yourself and got all sweaty, you
could jump into the pool, that was located over here.
This was not a place to do laps, it was pretty
much a soaking pool, a pool where you could cool off.
But the technical term for that is either a piscina, which is what's
on the monument list for you, or a natatio, n-a-t-a-t-i-o.
A little pool where you could slash yourself
after exerting yourself by exercising in the palaestra.
The build at the bath block itself, the bathing room themselves, are located on
the other side of the plan, on the right side, as you see it here.
The northern side actually of the plan and we see two sets
of spaces.
This set of four down here, this one, this one, this one and this one.
And then the set of a comparable number of rooms up there.
These early Roman baths there was a separation between the men's
section of the baths, and the women's section of the baths.
And I'm sorry ladies but, we'll have to accept the fact
that at least in ancient Pompeii, the women's section was quite nondescript.
It was much
smaller than the men's, at least they had one, thank goodness.
But it was smaller than the men's,
and the rooms had no architectural distinction whatsoever.
All of the designer's effort went into creating
a wonderful set of rooms for the men.
We see the men's rooms again over here, these four, and the women's at the top.
Consequently, the only ones that have any merit,
architecturally, in my showing you today, are the ones
for the men's baths down here.
The four rooms, the four key rooms to both the men's and women's sections
were the apodyterium, and again these words are on the monument list for you.
The apodyterium, which was the dressing room.
It's a fairly, again it's large, but a fairly non-descript
rectangular room here, you can see it right down here.
And the way it was designed, was that
you went in, and there were no lockers, no
private lockers but there were benches where you could, when
you got undressed you can just take your clothes
and put them in a little pile, on that bench.
You had to just take on faith that no one was going to steal any of your belongings.
And if you were very well-to-do, some of the
very well-to-do Romans, men and women, brought slaves with
them, their slave, their private slave to watch their
stuff, while they were in the sauna with their friends.
From the apodyterium, you go into the so-called tepidarium
of the baths, also usually a plain rectangular room,
even in the men's section, which served as the
warm room, where you started to warm yourself up.
You went from the tepidarium into the caldarium of the bath, which was the
a hot room, the where you really, it was the sauna essentially of the bath.
And consequentially there was, a, a basin over
here with cold water, so if you got too hot,
you could go and splash yourself with that cold water.
So apodyterium, tepidarium, caldarium.
By then you're really heated up, and you can make your way back
into this room over here, which is called the frigidarium, or the cold room.
The frigidarium was a place that you could really cool off.
And I think you can see by looking
at these the two most important rooms architecturally,
you can see this even in plan.
Are the caldarium which has a, an apse or
curved element at the end, and this room in particular,
the frigidarium, because it is a round structure with
radiating alcoves and we are going to see that it's domed.
This is a particularly again star, star, star, star.
One of the most important rooms that I have shown you, probably
the most important room I have you shown you thus far this
semester, in that it is going to have a very long future architecturally.
What you see here basically ends up as the Pantheon someday.
This round space, round structure with radiating alcoves,
and as we'll see, a dome, and not
only a dome, but a hole in the
ceiling, an oculus, that allows light into the structure.
How were these baths, heated, how were the hot rooms heated?
Through a system called a hypocaust again I've put
the mon-, I put the word on the monument
list for you. A hypocaust, H-Y-P, H-Y-P-O-C-A-U-S-T.
What was a hypocaust system?
A hypocaust system was a system by which they put
terracotta terracotta tubes in the floor and behind the walls.
They blew hot air into those, and they also raised up the pavement of
the floor, on a series of stacked tiles, and you can see that extremely well.
It's a very well preserved hypocaust from the Stabian Baths, placed
these tiles on stacks, stacks of tiles, let, leaving space in
between them, and put braziers between those, tin, tin you know,
metal braziers metal bowls that held hot coals and so on.
And that, from those hot coals, obviously it's slaves
who have to, you know, keep those coals hot.
But coals that were placed
in these pans that that helped also to heat the pavement that was located above.
The, this very important room, the frigidarium of the Stabian Baths,
you see it here as it looks today, a small, round space.
It has a, it would have had a pool in the
center, a round pool, radiating alcoves, a dome, a dome, that is
open to the sky, with an oculus that allows light into it.
You can see the remains of paint, stucco, and then paint,
blue and red, paint, probably some kind of marine scene included here.
But this, I can't under, underscore enough the importance of this
particular room and the future that this design has for Roman architecture.
I'd like to show you another bath at Pompeii,
the so-called Forum Baths.
The Forum Baths are interesting because they're later.
They date too, as you can see from your
monument list, to 80 B.C., so this is what the
Romans did when they came in and took over
Pompeii, and were making it into one of those mini-Romes.
Those cities in the, in the, in the in the model of Rome.
And you can see it is very, very similar to what was going on in the Stabian Baths,
in the earlier Samnite baths with the same palaestra,
we see a palaestra up at 2, the exercise court.
We don't seem to have an natatio in this particular plan.
We see the men's section over here at 3, 4, 5
and 6, and the women's section over here, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Again, the women's section off to the
side, of no arch, architectural distinction whatsoever.
The men's
over here, and you could enter the men's either through
the palaestra or from an opening over here at 1.
We see the same set of rooms that we saw at the Stabian Baths.
We see the apodyterium or dressing, undressing
and dressing room over here at 3.
The tepidarium at 5, the caldarium at 6, and the caldarium at 6 is
of the same shape as the caldarium in the Stabian Baths, a rectangular
room with an apse at the end and a, basin for cold water splashes.
And then you go back again to the frigidarium, and you
can see the frigidarium in the baths, Forum Baths of Pompeii.
The same shape as that in the Stabian Baths at
Pompeii, a round, a small round room with radiating alcoves.
I can show you views both of the tepidarium of the Forum Baths,
extremely well preserved, as you can see here.
You can also see they've used a great barrel vault for this room.
It isn't as large as it looks here, but it's a sizable room.
And this is a very good place to show you by the
way, to give you a sense of how these things were decorated.
How so many of rooms, Roman buildings today,
Roman buildings today are stripped of their original decoration.
But that decoration was often
quite beautiful and ostentatious, and we can see here
a, we can get here a sense of that.
You can see the wall has been stuccoed over, and then also in stucco these
great, flowering acanthus plants and creatures flying above,
animals, human feature, Gods and Goddesses flying above.
Paint was, you know, they use paint as well, red
and blue and white and other colors, to accentuate the design.
This gives you some sense of the flavor
of these.
And then this wonderful detail below of these Atlas figures
who are shown holding up, the vault of this particular room.
It gives you some sense of why Romans flocked to these places.
Not only because it was the only place
they could bathe themselves, but also because it
was just a wonderful place to be in, and to enjoy again the company of friends.
This is a view of what room.
In the Forum Baths?
The caldarium, excellent Neal.
The caldarium ah,over here, with its rectangular shape, and then
its apse and its cold water basin for cold water splashes.
And then look at the ceiling, how wonderful.
In that, in that, apse you see a semi-dome a, a round
hole, or an oculus in that semi-dome, to allow light into it.
So here we see them exploring oculi and semi-domes, as well as in domes.
And then the square and rectangular spaces, holes in the ceiling.
Openings in the ceilings that have been placed there also to allow light
into the system, so that you could use the room, but also to
create the kind of wonderful light effects that it does, when you have
rays of sunshine coming in on you while you are in your sauna.
This is couple of more views of, this is
couple of views of the frigidarium of the Forum Baths.
You can see the dome up above, the oculus in that dome.
You can see some of the stucco decoration still preserved.
You can see the alcoves here, the radiating
alcoves, and some of the stucco decoration here.
Sea creatures against a red background.
And this is a restored view of what the frigidarium would have
looked like with the pool in the center; a nice place to relax.
The radiating apses over here, and then the dome
with the oculus and with the light streaming in.
Again, I can't underscore enough the importance of both
of these frigidaria, for the future of Roman architecture.
The other importance of the Forum Baths is the
Forum Baths is today where you can eat and if
your there for the full day, as I recommend
you be, you're going to want to eat at some point.
And there is a cafeteria,
which doesn't look like much, but actually the food is not bad.
The Italians have a very hard time making bad pasta.
So you can always get some good pasta at the
snack bar, and you will want to make your way,
there's a few views of it, make your way to
the Forum Baths, if you're there for any length of time.
