The Domus Aurea
The Domus Aurea was the urban villa built by the Roman emperor Nero after the great fire that devastated Rome in 64 AD. The destruction of a good amount of the urban center allowed Nero to expropriate a total area of approximately 80 hectares and build a palace that extended between the Palatine, the Esquiline and the Caelian.
Contents
- The history and fame of the complex
- From Nero to Trajan
- The rediscovery at the end of the fifteenth century
- The architecture
- The decoration
- Excavations and discoveries
- The restoration - The reasons for the intervention
The history and fame of the complex
The Domus Aurea was built on the ashes of the terrible fire of 64 AD, which destroyed a large part of the city of Rome (ten of the fourteen Augustan regions) and which Nero saw when he intoned the fall of Troy from the Tower of Maecenas on the Esquiline.
The sumptuous residence of the prince, entrusted to the care of the architects Severo and Celere, came to occupy almost the entire center of Rome, obliterating houses and public buildings, in an area of approximately eighty hectares between the Palatine, the Esquiline, the Opium and the Caelian, including a vast lake "almost like a sea" (the stagnum Neronis) and "buildings as large as cities". Therefore the palace deserve the name of Aurea.
The impression made among contemporaries was such as to obscure the memory of the previous house (remembered by court biographers as the Domus Transitoria, indicating its function as a link between the Palatine, the official seat of the prince, and the imperial possessions of the Esquiline) and to inspire the famous satirical verses
"Rome is now only one house: migrate to Veii, O Quirites, if this house does not also occupy Veii".
Roman world had already acquired, in the years of the wars of conquest, the Hellenistic fashion of large colonnaded peristyles, regal reception rooms and lush exotic gardens, and introduced them from the end of the 1st century B.C. in the rich Roman's houses as well as in the luxurious country villas.
However the overall conception of the Domus Aurea was completely innovative, in the proportions and luxury of the ornaments, therefore comparable only to the oriental dynastic palaces and the court palaces of Alexandria in Egypt.
From these models, and from the ideologies that had inspired them, Nero derived the absolutist vision of imperial power, which pushed him to depict himself in the guise of the Sun god in the famous statue of the bronze Colossus.
The Colossus of Nero was more than thirty-five meters high and placed as an ornament of the vestibule of the new house, on the site where the Temple of Venus and Rome would later rise in the era of Hadrian.
From Nero to Trajan
Upon the death of Nero, his successors, eager to free themselves from such an inconvenient and unpopular legacy, returned the area occupied by the gigantic and irreverent palace to public use: the buildings of the Palatine were destroyed (incorporated into the new Imperial Palace of the Flavians) and in the valley between the Oppio and the Celio began the construction of the monumental stone amphitheatre, the Colosseum, in the space previously occupied by the stagnum Neronis, whose name preserves the memory of the Colossus of the last emperor of the Julian family.
Only the pavilion on the Oppio hill survived the urban renewal until 104 AD, when begin the construction of the Trajan thermal complex, designed by the architect Apollodorus of Damascus.
The ingenious idea of filling the Neronian building with earth after stripping its marbles and works of art, using it as an artificial substructure for the new baths, if on the one hand erased the memory of the Neronian building, on the other it allowed the conservation up to the present day of the residential nucleus of Colle Oppio.
On the ruins of the Baths of Trajan, which fell into abandonment after aqueducts where cutted by Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths, in 539 AD, vegetable gardens and vineyards arose in the Middle Ages, characterizing the new landscape of the hill that had hosted the Golden Palace of Nero.
The rediscovery at the end of the fifteenth century
The rediscovery of the Domus Aurea occurred by chance at the end of the fifteenth century by curious people and antiquity enthusiasts who, descending from above into underground caves, began to copy the decorative motifs of the vaults, promoting the fame and fortune of the vaults in the following century.
Very famous artists, such as Raphael, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Giovanni da Udine and others, whose signatures graffitied or traced in carbon black on the walls of the domus still bear witness to the memory of the visit today, drew inspiration from Nero's paintings and stuccos to decorate the loggias and stoves of Roman cardinals and aristocrats, in the Vatican Palaces, in Castel Sant'Angelo, in Villa Madama: at the beginning of the Renaissance, the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea marked the discovery of ancient painting, with a clamor comparable to that aroused two hundred and fifty years later by discoveries of frescoes in Herculaneum and Pompeii.
In 1506, while digging in a vineyard on the Oppio hill, the group of the Laocoön was unearthed, one of the most famous sculptural works of antiquity, which shares with the Farnese Bull the privilege of being cited in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, according to which the sculpture, depicting the extreme sacrifice of the Trojan priest and his sons, condemned by fate to a terrible end for having opposed the entry into his native Troy of the Achaean horse of deception. It was placed as an ornament of Titus' domus.
The presence of the famous group in the area of the Domus Aurea is not surprising if we consider that ancient sources repeatedly underline the obsessions of Nero for collecting. Nero carried out raids throughout Greece to adorn the halls of his palace, a true museum of classical and Hellenistic masterpieces, including probably the bronze statues of the defeated Galatians, later transferred to the Temple of Peace of Vespasian to be returned to public enjoyment.
The architecture
What remains of the Domus Aurea today is mainly the building core of the Oppio hill, made up of around 150 rooms, structured around the octagonal room, the true fulcrum of the whole complex, extending along the front for a length of around 400 metres.
The rooms, built in brick work, are mostly covered by barrel vaults of varying heights between 10 and 11 metres.
The plan of what is preserved allows us to distinguish two sectors: a western one, characterized by a rectangular courtyard-garden, surrounded by an Ionic order portico, along the sides of which the rooms are distributed which some believe to form the private sector of the Neronian residence.
Some of the most famous rooms belong to this sector are: the Room of the Vault of the Owls, so called from the decorative motifs of the vault, reproduced in eighteenth-century drawings and engravings; the Nymphaeum of Ulysses and Polyphemus, which takes its name from the mosaic subject reproduced in the center of the vault, known from other nymphaeums of imperial villas in Baia, Castel Gandolfo and Tivoli.
The eastern sector of the domus is much more complex, centered on the octagonal room and the two large polygonal courtyards open to the sides of it. Some scholars, without much foundation, have wanted to recognize the circular hall, which continuously rotated like the earth, mentioned by Suetonius.
In this sector of the Palace the Hall of the Golden Vault is preserved, with its sumptuous polychrome stucco decoration; the Hall of Achilles on Skyros, from the subject of the central painting of the vault, which takes up the well-known Homeric episode of the Achaean hero hidden by Thetis on the island of Skyros, among the daughters of King Lycomedes, to escape the dangers of the Trojan War; the Hall of Hector and Andromache, also inspired by the Homeric epic, with the scene of Hector's farewell to his wife and son Astyanax.
The lack of doors, latrines, service areas and heating systems would exclude the residential character of the pavilion on the Oppio hill, probably reserved only for the leisure and leisure of the emperor and his guests, in a setting full of natural beauty and works of art.
The decoration
The fame of the stuccos and paintings of the Domus Aurea remains linked to the name of Fabullo, the artist remembered by Pliny the Elder for his severe style, which made use of colors such as cinnabar, blue, dark red, indigo, green, and for the mania of painting in toga even on construction site scaffolding.
The painted decorations, stuccoes and some mosaic fragments are what remains of the original luxury and richness. The frescoes, which cover entire walls of the corridors and passageways, giving way in the main rooms to coverings in precious imported marble, are all attributable to the so-called fourth Pompeian style, the decorative system that characterizes the last phase of the life of the Vesuvian city and which, taking inspiration from theatrical sets, punctuates the walls with slender and fake architecture, superimposed on multiple registers, populated by fantastic figures and animals.
The restorations have documented an abundant use of gold leaf and confirm what the sources testify: the use of gems and precious stones, as Seneca describes in the phrase a "house shining with the glitter of gold".
The preserved figurative subjects reveal a clear predilection for the characters and episodes of the Trojan saga, perhaps a tribute from Nero to the city that gave rise to Rome and to the Julio-Claudian family.
Excavations and discoveries
16th century: artists and antiquity enthusiasts descend from the gardens of Trajan's baths, into Nero's "caves", to copy the fresco and stucco decorative motifs of the vaults; among others, Raphael, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio.
17th century: in the second half of the century, Pietro Sante Bartoli freed some rooms of the Neronian complex from the ground and published a series of drawings taken from ancient pictorial decorations.
18th century: in the years between 1758 and 1769 Pope Clement XIII carried out the first regular excavations in the Domus Aurea, entrusted to the direction of the English architect O. Cameron. In 1774 the Roman antiquarian Mirri had sixteen rooms cleared from the ground, publishing an album of sixty engravings taken from the drawings of the decorations made by various artists.
19th century: In the years 1811-1814, excavations were carried out by the architect Antonio De Romanis, who explored and freed about fifty rooms from the ground, immediately afterwards publishing a plan and a report of the discoveries.
20th century: A century later, the research was resumed by Antonio Munoz, director of the Royal Superintendency of Monuments of Lazio and Abruzzi. The same man was responsible for the construction of the Colle Oppio Park, in which the ruins of the Baths of Trajan were set, with Piranesian taste, within the gardens, completely neglecting the underlying Neronian structures.
Excavations in the Domus Aurea resumed in 1939, under the direction of the Superintendency of Monuments of Lazio, and subsequently in the years 1954-1957.
In 1969 the Archaeological Superintendency of Rome promoted the exploration of the upper floor and started a program to waterproof the vaults.
At the beginning of the 1980s the Domus Aurea was closed to the public to allow restoration and conservation work on the structures and frescoes.
The restoration - The reasons for the intervention
From the beginning of the 1980s, the Domus Aurea, until then only partially open to visits by scholars and specialists, was definitively closed for safety and conservation reasons.
It was urgent to carry out immediate and accurate checks on the static safety of the wall structures, on the state of degradation of the paints and stuccos, on the dangers deriving from rainwater: a complex research program was therefore started, carried out by the Archaeological Superintendence of Rome and the Central Institute for Restoration, aimed above all at identifying the guiding criteria to be placed at the basis of the conservative interventions and the creation of systems for the safety and lighting of the rooms.
The specialists, architects, archaeologists, art historians, restorers, found themselves having to face numerous and complex problems, including:
- the paintings, which appeared covered with a compact white patina of salts, mainly caused by the infiltration of external water; to this were added layers of earth, calcareous sedimentation and damage caused by various microorganisms;
- the wall structures, visibly damaged by the infiltration of rainwater, the roots of the trees and the soil of the garden above.
- Added to this was the exceptional size of the ancient complex, made up of 150 rooms mostly covered by barrel vaults between 10 and 11 meters high, which appeared extraordinary in the eyes of Nero's contemporaries and which still appears extraordinary today we.
The direct experiments carried out by the Central Institute for Restoration and the Archaeological Superintendence of Rome between 1983 and 1986, relating to the confinement of the environments, the new type of artificial lighting and the control of the dynamics of the degradation phenomena, have allowed the acquisition of certain data, which were the basis for subsequent restoration interventions.
