Roman Art and Architecture The Grandeur That Was Rome

For a people who ruled and civilised an appreciable

part of the world, those ancient Romans were a modest folk.

In the matter of art they were rather like the British

in the matter of music.

Like us, they had something of an inferiority complex.

We are for ever protesting that the British are not a musical

nation but all I can say is that if such be the case we put up with a

great deal of musical noise and turn out a remarkable lot of composers.

And so the Romans, what did the great Virgil say about them?

"Others can be artists, your job, my good Roman, is to govern an Empire."

And yet, those same good Romans managed to produce Virgil

himself and a whole host of poets, philosophers

and historians whose works are still read today by millions.

In the visual arts,

they were the authors of the first romantic movement.

They invented a brand-new functional architecture

on a scale which the Greeks before them had never thought of.

Not that the Greeks and Romans were in competition on the matter,

of course they weren't.

Any more that Chaucer was in competition with Pope.

It isn't necessary to depreciate the glory that was

Greece in order to proclaim the grandeur that was Rome.

And the converse is equally true.

Rome 13BC, the Altar of Peace set up by the Emperor Augustus.

Let's join the crowd around it, no Greek abstractions these

but living men and women.

Look at these creators of the Roman Empire, calm, conscious of their

high destiny, successful but free as yet from the vulgarities of success.

The flesh and blood of Rome.

The stern features shine out from the marble.

Vital intelligent, proudly individual,

the great Roman art of portraiture at its early best.

Their names are mostly known to us.

Agrippa, Emperor Regent, son-in-law of Augustus, garbed as a priest.

Maecenas, prototype of wealthy patronage

and incongruously that child, none other than the father of Nero.

Senators, wives, magistrates, priests,

pass before us in grave tranquillity.

As sure of themselves as the artist of his own accomplishment.

Man as an individual had arrived.

Greek sculpture at its best has sought to glorify the god in us.

Roman sculpture came to earth. It immortalised man himself.

Ordinary men and women in their infinite variety.

In politics as in art, Imperial Rome was governed by talent

and opportunity, by successful individuals.

If you had talent, you could reach the top.

How they peer at us, risen from the dead.

It was the prowess of the individual that counted.

Even an Arabian brigand, Philip the Arab, once became emperor of Rome.

Flesh and blood. But when you are a Roman and went abstract,

this happened, Nero as Apollo.

Utter failure, the individual finally triumphed,

when a witless or witty emperor made his horse a consul.

Individuality had taken the bit in its teeth.

At its best the truthfulness of his art can't be much improved.

I don't know any starker piece of realism than this Greco-Roman boxer.

Bitterless truth, flattened nose and cauliflower ear.

At the same time, the Roman artist, having got his man, tried to

rescue him from the studio and set him in the landscape.

Not always a very good landscape but a revolutionary attempt.

Here's an example of on the Arch of Titus in Rome.

The loot of captured Jerusalem sweeps past us in triumph.

Procession and arch are shown in a crude perspective.

It's the actual scene as it happened, here in the forum.

It's real, it's new.

It breathes...

almost as the canvases of Velazquez breathed 15 centuries later.

Yes, in his modest way the old Roman succeeded in bringing

his people out into open-air.

Aesthetically he was on the threshold of a new world.

On the threshold but not further.

Ultimately the Romans failed to achieve the essential

element of perspective and Leptis Magna in Libya,

look at the local heroes at Septimius Severus,

a complete tangle.

Emperor one way, horses another. Monumental confusion.

At the same time a sculptor was ever trying new devices to

bring his marble to life.

Deep shadows drilled and grooved in the stone to give dramatic

light and shadow in the African sun.

Near the dazzling sea at Leptis, the most successful

example of his art still sparkles

The adventures of Hercules and the god of wine, the background

cut away and in shadow is in vivid contrast with the hero of the story.

See how the figures shine like marble lacework

against the blackness.

The sculptor is all the while conscious of environment.

He often fails to express it but at least he tries

and the attempt is new and significant.

He's conscious of background.

Yes, one of the great discoveries of Greco-Roman art was landscape.

Look at this country scene from the wall of a Roman

house on the Moselle.

It might almost come from 19th century France.

Here, gathered from the museums of Western Europe

and Libya is the pick of Roman landscape in painting and mosaic.

Much of it has a romantic, artificial taste to it.

Even a touch of theatre.

It isn't so much nature as a vision of nature seen through

a window from a comfortable armchair with a sentimental book at hand.

It's all rather like what we call today the romantic

movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Yes, the Romans contrived the first romantic

movement in the history of art.

Another Roman contribution was naive but scarcely less enduring.

It's a sort of petrified ancestor of our strip-cartoon and news-reel.

Continuous historical journalism.

Here's a report of the Emperor Trajan's war in Hungary in AD 113,

wrapped spirally around his column in Rome.

The Emperor appears in scene after scene as hero.

The Hungarians as gallant victims,

18 centuries before their modern martyrdom.

Reel one, the Emperor Trajan leads his legions across the Danube.

Reel two, Trajan holds a council of war.

Reel three, prayer before battle.

Reel four, pep talk to the troops.

Reel five, battle is joined ferociously.

A Roman soldier holds head of his enemy between his teeth as

he goes on fighting.

Reel six, triumph.

The heads of victims are trailed before the Emperor.

Last reel, the enemy village is razed to the ground.

This device was new in art.

The beholder is carried forward with a headlong speed of actuality.

Epic sculpture and as Roman as Virgil's Aeneid.

Portraiture, scenery, narrative,

three debts we owe to the Roman sculptor and painter.

Three achievements that have expressed

the mentality of a people which had its feet firmly on the ground,

was conscious of purpose

and environment but was not over-burdened with ideas.

In another sense the Roman Empire was rather like a successful man,

who's made good from humble beginnings

and in his latter years is preoccupied with his autobiography.

Much of it is pedestrian stuff.

But it has its moments and at its best is very good indeed,

within its set limits. It is naively factual.

Even when most dazzled by the glamour of empire,

it allows the truth to filter through.

Take this portrait of that censure, weak-minded fiend,

the Emperor Commodus.

Contrast the weak, shrinking face

with the lion skin of the virile Hercules.

In that forthright imperialist Vespasian,

the honest sculpture had a worthier subject.

Regard his modern counterpart, Cecil Rhodes of the earth, earthy.

Same empire builders, different empires.

The Roman sculptor disguised nothing.

But what if all this artistic output on the ultimate

frontiers of the Roman world.

Do we in Britain know much of our art through Romans?

They gave us our first civil service,

gave us baths and drains, but when it comes to art it's a sad story.

We did our best but we shuffled along pretty lamely.

After all, this isn't the sunny Mediterranean.

Up here in the north we'd buffled ourselves up to the ears

in an age-long battle with influenza.

Not for us the undisguised beauty of clean humanity.

What thrived in the Mediterranean sun shivered up here.

The result was hoods and mufflers.

What meaning had the human form divine in those drear circumstances.

Our own artists in the Celtic world certainly hammered out

a glorious decorative art.

Mirrors, brooches, shields,

were covered with gorgeous swaying patterns.

But the human face and form were nowhere.

Then suddenly, the Romans with their accomplished artistry,

marble portraits in a Roman country house in Kent.

A river god, perhaps Father Thames himself,

from some Mediterranean workshop. We provincials struggled to confer.

Here we are... Venus having a bath in Northumberland.

What a Venus, what a bath!

Or these Tyneside nymphs - very high class.

Or these heads again from Northumberland, mercy on us.

When the poor provincial sculptor left mankind behind,

he was a little happier.

Very rarely the Romano-British artist achieved something.

This pop-eyed fellow from Gloucester,

is perhaps the summit of our achievement.

But if it weren't for Picasso and our modern

taste for abstraction, would we still get excited over this head?

No, the remoter parts of the Empire were buying

civilization off the peg, in Africa it's the same story.

Look at these precious heads from Roman Libya.

Far easier is it to acclaim the Romans as engineers and architects.

The Empire was after all itself a vast political engine.

Flinging itself across nations like the great aqueducts which it

hurled across countless landscapes to supply endless cities with

extravagant baths.

In the presence of such engineering as this towering bridge,

the Pont du Gard, which carried water to Nimes

and Provence were at the inner most core of the Roman mind.

What plumbers they were, those Romans. Just look at it.

But after all, they were much more than that.

They were, first and foremost, great constructors.

And as great functional constructors

their approach was often extraordinarily modern.

I remember years ago in London

passing a big, new government building,

which was to all intents and purposes complete.

It was also completely banal!

But no, as I watched along came a train of large lorries laden

with columns and architraves.

Architecture was on the way.

Shortly a fine Neo-Edwardian classical facade was stuck on

the substantially complete building,

which was now nine parts engineering and one part art.

Mixed to taste...and what taste.

Our Stonehenge, 1,500 years before the Romans

but not a bad place to see in principle where the Romans

started from structurally and how far they eventually got.

This is stone piled upon stone.

Static architecture in its extreme and simplest form.

The Parthenon of Athens shows this principle,

polished by civilization, vitalised by genius.

Here is static architecture to perfection.

Perfect balance, perfect tranquillity.

The Roman added new and courageous flights of fantasy and science.

He learned to fling vast vaults across wide spaces

on an imperial scale.

His domes challenged the skies.

This mighty dome, The Pantheon,

in Rome is the ancestor of St Peter's or St Paul's in London.

Built by the Emperor Hadrian,

The Pantheon is the very symbol of Rome.

Here the painter Raphael lies buried.

In the history of architecture this is a watershed.

Man had discovered a new and grandiose way

to put a roof over his head.

That was merely a beginning. As time went on the Roman engineer

and architect became ever bolder

and more original in his use of concrete.

Towering over the Roman forum,

stands the immense Basilica of Constantine,

built in the last days of pre-Christian Rome.

A fragment now, but once it was roofed

with a concrete vault

70ft in span and 120ft above the ground.

The grandeur of empire had a last found full scale expression.

Yet, even more imposing are the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian.

It's in character with the Roman genius that this triumphant

use of concrete vaulting arose from purely secular enterprise.

From public baths, godless you might be, but at least as a Roman citizen

you were expected to be cleanly and you bathed in the grand style.

Conjure up the fourth century.

In the 16th century, Michelangelo transformed a wing of the same

Baths of Diocletian into a church.

Rome's grandest triumph in the secular building was

transmuted to serve the Christian tradition.

In lesser ways too the Roman architect was already

building the future.

Amidst the volcanic mud of Herculaneum

our columns carrying arches,

which already in the first century AD,

are the shape of things to come in Medieval Europe.

Today the Roman landscape bares these astonishing buildings

with the air of a decayed nobleman.

"If only you could see what I once saw!" It seems to say.

"Look at this magnificence." And then points to a ragged ruin.

The ruins are magnificent. The effort was prodigious.

For what imagination it needs to conjure it all up.

Immense shelves of brick and concrete.

Here and there with surviving scraps of delicate plaster

stuck on like postage stamps on an envelope.

Ornament and concrete never did take kindly to one another.

They don't today.

But this frail plasterwork breathed a little life

and grace into all that massive engineering.

Paintings too came to the rescue.

They've sometime weathered the centuries better.

The baths of Leptis Magna in Libya,

they've been preserved to perfection.

Hunting scenes and bloodshed sprawled with bold assurance

across the bolts and domes of the Roman architect.

It's all a little hard and uncompromising.

Yet it's all alive in a fearsome, finite fashion.

Here in Africa amidst these quiet sands,

Rome seems a long way off and yet is all around me.

In a way it speaks more eloquently here

than in the noisy streets of the capital.

It proclaims our greatest extrovert civilization.

So then in architecture,

the Roman world stretching from Europe into Asia and Africa,

contrived new devices and idioms which are still alive today.

If I were quarrelling with the Greeks, which I'm not,

I might observe that for us today that the famous Parthenon is dead,

in so far as Greek work can never die.

Whilst the Roman Pantheon is still living.

I wouldn't dare to say that

but the idle thought it passed through my mind.

And then there's the literature.

How well the literature of the Romans fits in

with what I've been trying to say about their art and architecture.

This is not the time and place for me to sit

and read to you from Virgil's grand epic on the origins of Rome.

Or his quiet, Miltonic verses of the Italian countryside,

or the Roman historians acid etching of the Imperial Court.

But in the written word as in painting and sculpture,

we have on the one hand the elements

of what I've called a romantic movement

and on the other the biographical urge of a successful empire.

We have too, the beginnings of the novel,

which is in a measure a mingling of the two streams.

The modern novel, I suppose,

goes back more or less in a direct line

to that Roman-African Apuleius whose gay story, The Golden Asse,

so delighted the Renaissance and was retold by La Fontaine.

The Apuleius, who on his travels

captured the affections of a rich widow at Tripoli

and was prosecuted for witchcraft by her exasperated relations.

Probably here in this very building in the Sabratha sun.

Or there's that other Roman story-teller Petronius,

whose satirical account of a Roman dinner party

is still such good robust reading.

And puts him into the company of Rabelais and Fielding

and Smollett and even Anatole France.

All these things helped to bring the Roman world alive.

Yes, they could be astonishingly like us, those old Romans...

So like us sometimes as to be almost unlikeable.

At every turning in the forum or in Tacitus

we can without prodigious effort see ourselves

amongst our own ruins and our own errors.

Now and then too we may see our own triumphs,

although with foreknowledge of their brevity.

The Roman poet Virgil, exercised the poet's privilege

and looked into the future.

"When you have learned..." he said,

"..to read the praises of the great and come to understand what

"manhood is, the waving corn will slowly flood the planes with gold.

"Grapes hang in ruby clusters on the thorn.

"Yet even so, traces of our wickedness will linger on,

"to make us venture on the sea and ships

"and build walls around our cities.

"Wars will repeat themselves...

"and the great Achilles be despatched to Troy once more.

"The Fates have spoken, the unalterable decree of destiny.

"This is the pattern of the age to come."

There spoke the Roman poet,

who above all others sang of the grandeur that was Rome.

But he was not dazzled by the brightness of its glory.

He retains a cosmic and prophetic sense.

For him, as for our own Shelley,

faiths and empires gleam like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

That dream does not end with Rome.

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