[Understanding Rome]

The Trojan Legacy

Julius Caesar claimed direct descent from the gens Iulius, the family line which takes its name from Ascanius Iulius, son of Aeneas, son of Venus and hero of Troy.

Claiming a lineage which began with Venus, the goddess of love, and which ran through Aeneas down to Romulus, founder of Rome, lent a certain kudos to Julius’ claims to power. After the power struggle which followed Julius’ murder, the subsequent victor, his nephew Augustus, continued the identification with illustrious ancestors.

It was for Augustus that Virgil wrote the Aeneid, the epic poem which describes Aeneas’ journey and arrival in Italy. When Augustus built his Altar to Augustan Peace, the ancestry of the Julian line was a fundamental part of its iconography.

The heroic tale of the fall of the city of Troy, an event which ultimately led to the foundation of Rome is one that recurs in Roman art from the reign of Augustus onwards.

On this tour we will visit the monuments which exploit the legendary origins of Rome.

Trajan, Hadrian, and the genius of the height of Empire.

Following the murder of Domitian, the deluded son of the general Vespasian who had been proclaimed Emperor following the death of the hated Nero, the senate elected the aristocratic conservative Nerva.

Already in his sixties upon election, and unmarried, Nerva adopted Trajan as his successor, having unwittingly becoming first in the line of what Machievelli, writing in the early 16th century, would term the “Five Good Emperors”.

In this period, for one reason or another, the Emperors did not produce surviving male heirs, and were forced therefore to elect a successor. The careful election of successors, means that this period of under-productivity of offspring sees the most successful period of the Empire’s history. It was under Trajan that the Empire reached its maximum territorial expansion, whilst in Rome he embarked upon a major building project, the Forum of Trajan, where Trajan’s Column still stands, a record of his triumphs in Dacia (modern-day Romania), and the so-called Trajan’s Markets.

By Trajan’s death, conquests he had made in southern Mesopotamia were already succumbing to insurgents, and upon his accession his adopted successor Hadrian set about consolidating the boundaries of the Empire.

Of the twenty years of his reign, Hadrian spent half travelling, visiting every province of his vast Empire, and especially the areas of Greece and Egypt which so appealed to his interest in the aesthetic. Ever fond of architecture, on these travels he is believed to have ‘borrowed’ ideas which he brought back with him to his Roman country estate, the villa at Tivoli.

Here he created a vast and eclectic complex of buildings, set within parkland, which echoed the Empire in miniature. Despite supposedly being mocked by Apollodorus of Damascus, architect to Trajan, for his ‘pumpkin-shaped’ domes, Hadrian is usually credited with the most spectacular of all Roman domes, the Pantheon.

Still today the largest free-standing concrete dome anywhere in the world, it is arguably the most influential building ever constructed. For all Hadrian’s borrowing from the Greek world, his greatest architectural achievement is a splendid exercise in unmistakably Roman design and technology.

Close by the Pantheon is the Temple of the Divine Hadrian, pushed for by his adopted successor Antoninus Pius, against the wishes of a reluctant senate.
Hadrian’s fondness of architecture naturally led to Hadrian designing himself a spectacular mausoleum on the west bank of the Tiber, what is now the Castel Sant’Angelo.

Caravaggio and the shock of humility

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a stormy character frequently in trouble with the Establishment as much for his fiery temper as for his tendency to represent the figures of holy figures with the features and dress of the contemporary Roman poor. Representing the Holy Family and saints in all of their bedraggled humanity was seen by many as deeply offensive and he was forced to repaint on more than one occasion.

In his paintings the realism of the figures is emphasised by a strong use of chiaroscuro (light and shade) which creates a striking immediacy to his humble settings.
Following a number of run-ins with the law, his career in Rome finally came to an abrupt halt after a fight in which he killed a man and was forced to flee the city.

Bernini, Borromini, and the spirit of the Baroque

Following the protestations levied against the papacy by Martin Luther in 1517, and the birth of the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Church responded with the austere diktats of the Counter-Reformation.

The threats posed by Luther’s undermining of the papacy’s divine right to rule in the Papal States were as dramatic as any the Church had faced in Her chequered history. The extravagance perceived in the art of the Renaissance was curbed, and painting became primarily a didactic tool, the Bible of the illiterate. This relative austerity began to give way to a spirit of celebration in the late 16th century.

Military victories and the discovery of untold wealth in the New World contributed to a spirit of optimism. This new mood, boosted by the creation of a number of new saints including St Ignatius, saw a new artistic impulse which sought to embody the mysticism embodied in his “Spiritual Exercises”.

The foremost figure of the new style, which was to be derogatively termed the ‘Baroque’, was Gianlorenzo Bernini, himself a follower of the “Spiritual Exercises”.
He employed sculpture, stucco, painting, sculpture, and architecture in spectacular creations which sought, with their hidden light sources and gilt, to evoke a sense of the divine. Bernini’s troubled contemporary, was the architect Francesco Borromini.

At the splendid San Carlo he created a complex subversion of the classical language of architecture which had been so venerated during the Renaissance.
Whilst the whiteness of the interior of San Carlo and the exuberant drama of the Cornaro Chapel appear to have very little in common, they are both splendid expressions of the spirit of 17th century Rome.

Bernini and Borromini’s creers come together at Palazzo Barberini, which also brings us into contact with Pope Urban VIII.
A vastly important patron he is central to 17th century Roman art, as is the great painter of the Baroque Pietro da Cortona whose spectacular ceiling painting in the palazzo is one of the triumphs of the Baroque.