19 - Baroque Extravaganzas: Rock Tombs, Fountains, and Sanctuaries in Jordan, Lebanon, and Libya
Listen now
Description
Professor Kleiner features the baroque phenomenon in Roman architecture, in which the traditional vocabulary of architecture (columns and other traditional architectural elements) is manipulated to enliven building facades and inject them with dynamic motion. This baroque trend is often conspicuously ornamental and began to be deployed on the walls of forums and tombs in Italy already in the late first century A.D. But baroque architecture in Roman antiquity was foremost in the Greek East where high-quality marble and expert marble carvers made it the architectural mode of choice. At Petra in Jordan, tomb chambers were cut into cliffs and elaborate facades carved out of the living rock. The cities of Miletus and Ephesus in Asia Minor were adorned with gates and fountains and libraries and stage buildings that consisted of multi-storied columnar screens. The lecture culminates with the Sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus, a massive temple complex at Baalbek in Lebanon, with Temples of Jupiter and Bacchus in enormous scale and with extreme embellishment, and the Temple of Venus with an undulating lintel that foreshadows the curvilinear flourishes of Francesco Borromini's S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in seventeenth-century Rome.
More Episodes
Professor Kleiner presents the three options for the course's term paper, which fall into two main categories: a research paper or a project to design a Roman city. For the research paper, she suggests cities and monuments not covered or mentioned briefly in the lectures, which embody some of...
Published 10/27/09
Professor Kleiner discusses domestic architecture at Pompeii from its beginnings in the fourth and third centuries B.C. to the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. She describes the plan of the ideal domus italica and features two residences that conform to that layout. She then presents the...
Published 10/14/09
Professor Kleiner presents the architecture of Constantine the Great, the last pagan and first Christian emperor of Rome, who founded Constantinople as the "New Rome" in A.D. 324. She notes that Constantine began with commissions that were tied to the pagan past (the Baths of Constantine in Rome)...
Published 10/05/09