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13.4 Domitian as Dominus et Deus in the Palatine Palace
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The Prince and the Palace: Human Made Divine on the Palatine Hill
The Domitianic Arch (and Tomb) of Titus celebrating the Flavian victory in the Jewish Wars; the Stadium of Domitian, its shape now preserved in Rome's Piazza Navona, the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill, designed by Rabirius and featuring Domitian as dominus et deus, and the Forum Transitorium, a narrow space with undulating columnar bays announcing the beginning of a "baroque" phase in Roman architecture. First Quiz is located here!
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
I want to move from Domitian's Stadium to the building that
we're going to concentrate on today because again, it is so extensive.
And that is Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill.
We usually refer to it as Domitian's Palace
on the Palatine Hill or the Imperial Palace.
On the Palatine hill, but the nomenclature
is, is, is complex because it, in antiquity
it was referred to as the Domus, the Domus Augustana.
Like the Domus Aurea, golden house of Nero.
The Domus Augustana, Augustus' house, essentially.
Because by this point the word Augustus had become
synonymous with emperor, so every emperor was the Augustus.
So this is the Domus Augustana which again, continues construction.
We talked about the fact that Tiberius
had begun a palace on the Palatine Hill, on the slope of the Palatine Hill.
But Caligula had added to that his successors Claudius
was not that interested in palatial architecture as you'll remember.
Nero had other plans for the Domus Transitoria and for the Domus Aurea.
So it was left to the Flavian's,
specifically to Domitian, to complete the Imperial Palace
which he does and then it is dedicated, as you can see from the monument list,
in A.D. 92. We also know the architect of the Domus
Augustana, and that was a man by the name of Rabirius, R-a-b-i-r-i-u-s,
very important. Roman architect by the name of Rabirius.
To get back to the nomenclature for a moment.
So, the actual
name of the palace was the Domus Augustana.
But here's where it gets complicated.
There's also a public wing of the house and a private wing of the house.
The public wing, and you can see it in this Google Earth image from the air.
The public wing is on one story and and we see that over here.
And that was referred to in ancient times as the Flavian House.
The Domus Flavia.
The Domus Flavia. The private wing was on two stories.
Or part of it was on two stories. You can see it here.
It's even larger and more extensive.
And that was called, in ancient times, also the Domus Augustana.
So the, this word, the Domus Augustana, referred both to the private wing,
as opposed to the Domus Flavia, but also to the palace as a whole.
So I just wanted
you to be aware of that because as you do your reading in the textbooks and so on.
You might find that a little bit confusing.
But we can make, we can simplify it completely and
just call it the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill.
Which is what I suggest we do.
So once again, we can see quite good in this view from the air.
The way in which this this Domitianic structure was planned and built.
We see over here for example.
And I'm going to show you these in plan. And also the remains shortly.
We can see on the upper left what is basilica next to that a, an audience hall.
A great fountain port over here. A triclinium or dining room.
Over here, and then fountains on either side that belong to the Domus Flavia,
or the public room, public's area of the palace, public section of the palace.
And then over here the private area, as I said,
larger on two stories right here with a court in
the center and a whole host of small rooms surrounding
that living quarters and so on for Domitian and others.
A peristyle court another peristyle court and then a great sunken stadium over here
on the right, this was a far cry from Romulus' huts as you see them the Romulus'
village of the 8th century B.C..
That I remind you of over here and show you what,
what has happened in the inter, inter, in the interlude, but what's
extremely important, I think, given Domitian's view of himself as lord and
god, as Dominus et deus it's interesting to see what he builds.
And he certainly felt that he was very much in the tradition of Romulus.
He wants to associate
himself with Romulus and also, of course, with Augustus, who lived.
As you know, on the Palatine hill, but at the
same time, he wants to inject his living space with the
kind of grandeur that had not been, that was certainly true
under Nero, and his Domus Aurea, but had not been true.
For any of the other, earlier Roman emperors.
So the Domus Aurea, the impact of the Domus Aurea, once again.
Is something we should think about as we look at
this incredible palace.
This is a, a plan from the Ward-Perkins textbook that perhaps shows you
better than the view from the air exactly what this, this structure was all about.
We see the the public wing on the left-hand side, the Domus Flavia
Of the, palace on the Palatine hill and it includes as you can see in the upper
left corner a basilica.
A basilica, a room with a central space divided by two side aisles by columns.
And that was a basilica that, that Domitian himself
sat in and tried cases in, as the judge.
Then next to that an audience hall or an aula, a-u-l-a.
That was the place where the Domitian met with visiting dignitaries.
Then on axis with the, that up in the upper right a
lararium, which was a place where they kept household gods and so on.
Then of, on axis with the audience hall, the peristyle, the peristyle and if you,
and if you look at that in plan, it's got columns, of course, as peristyle's do.
But look at what's in the center of it, it actually is a fountain.
And it is the fountain that is octagonal
in shape, so the impact of Nero's Domus Aurea,
immediately clear.
The impact of that remarkable octagonal room on the
architecture of the Domitian and on the architect Liberius.
So a, an octagonal fountain.
And then on axis with the aula, or audience
hall, the peristyle is the triclinium, or dining room
of the house, a very large dining room, with
panoramic windows through which one could see a very interestingly
elliptically-shaped fountain, one on either side.
Now as you look at that plan of the Domus
Flavia, and especially at the basilica, the audience hall, and the
triclinium, there is one feature that all three of those
have in common that I haven't yet mentioned which is what?
[Students thinking]
All three of them have what?
[Students thinking]
Student: A half circle.
A half circle, okay, exactly an apse, an apse on one end.
And all of those apses face in the same direction.
The basilica has an apse, the audience hall has an apse.
The triclinium has an apse.
Those were Domitian's apses. That's were Domitian sat.
Domunis Deus.
He wanted to be honored, in fact worshiped as lord and god and
he needed a space to do it in and he wanted to sit on a throne.
Underneath the Dome of Heaven in a sense.
So the Dome of Heaven was a vault made out of concrete and decorated in some way
in antiquity, probably with mosaic or whatever to
give it the sense of a Dome of Heaven.
He wanted to sit in that space in everyone of those rooms.
So whether he was trying a law case,
court case there, is welcoming/visiting dignitaries or eating
in his triclinium.
He wanted to sit beneath, at least a semidome of heaven.
And that's indeed with he did as he was again, worshiped
as Dominus Deus, this is a very important, I think, phenomenon
in this particular monument and one that is well worth thinking
about in terms of the way in which architecture is used.
By given individuals to define
themselves, to define their lives, and to define their era.
Over here, again, the private wing.
I'm going to hold on that for a moment, we'll come back to that shortly.
This is a detail of the basilica.
Where we see the plan of the basilica
and also the cross section of the same structure.
And you can see it is, it is completely
in heaping with other basilican architecture we looked at in
both civic locations and elsewhere.
A central nave with an apse one end you can imagine Domitian sitting over here the
central nave divided from the side isles by columns fairly simple.
But very interesting structure and the context of this particular palace.
Over here an outstanding restored view that probably gives you a better
sense of almost anything I can show you of
the Domus Flavia or the public space of Domitian's palace.
here's, of course, the basilica over here, and you can see that this
room, like all of the rooms in this palace were done in marble.
And that marble was of various colors, as you can see here,
and it was marble that was brought from all over the world.
We talked about the fact that the Flavians did this.
We talked
about this As the case for the Templum Pacis, for example, bringing marble from
Egypt and Asia Minor and Greece and elsewhere in the Roman world.
Bringing it all here and using it, using that variegated marble
to make, to, to get to, to ornament, obviously, this palace.
In Rome.
Over here, the aula, or the great audience hall.
The aula regia, we call it, over here, also with
the marble on the floor as well as on the walls.
You can see that this particular room, and it was apparent in
plan as well, has scalloping on either, around the edge, around the perimeter
of the room, a series of niches as you can see with with
statuary in them surrounded by columns, two tiers with other windows up
above as you can see and here you get a sense
of that, of that space in which the Domitian would have sat.
The apse of the room, the curvature of the wall made, of course, out
of concrete as this entire structure was made out of concrete with a semi-dome.
And you have to again imagine Domitian sitting beneath
that or inside that apse and beneath that semi-dome here.
The peristyle court opened to the sky.
Columns all around. Covered colonnade.
Two stories and then in the center this octagonal fountain.
Leave it to Domitian, leave it to Rabirius to transform Nero's
octagonal room into a fountain, in the context of this palace.
And then, on axis again with the aula regia and with the peristyle, is the
triclinium, and this restored view, again, gives you a very good sense of that apse
in which Domitian would have sat enthroned with the semi-dome above his head.
Two tiers again, the walls decorated with variegated marbles brought from
all different parts of the world, as well as with columns, and
then picture windows through which you would see these very interesting
elliptical fountains as you dined, one on either side of the structure.
There's a lot of controversy as to how the, the rooms
that were roofed, were roofed. Whether they had barrel vaults or not.
You can see this particular restored view shows
one flat roof and one barrel vaulted roof,
we're not absolutely sure about that and again
scholars continue to argue which was the case here.
I mentioned statuary in the aula regia and
we have some evidence for what that statuary might
have been like and the way in which it
was used by Domitian, I showed you two examples.
These are two statues one representing Hercules on the
left, and the other on the right representing Apollo.
And you can, and these are truly colossal in scale.
And they are made of beautiful
materials, again imported materials, in this case a kind of
maroon-colored stone, in this case a green Greenish colored stone.
Again, they're very large in scale, colossal in scale, and
you can see the exaggerated musculature of both of these figures.
And I think they are very telling in terms of, you know, as
we, as we think about Domitian sitting in rooms like the aula regia greeting.
visitors.
And, when you think about what this man who wanted
to be worshiped as lord and god thought of himself and
you see the kind of statuary that he surrounded himself
with, this is a very different man than his predecessor Claudius.
The kind of imagery that he associated himself with is a
way of pumping himself up I think by having himself surrounded.
By these very athletic figures of Hercules and also of Apollo.
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