Ancient Rome: A look at its Architecture and Interior Elements

The Romans wanted their art and architecture to be useful. They planned their cities and built bridges, aqueducts, public baths, and marketplaces, apartment houses, and harbors. When a Roman official ordered sculpture for a public square, he wanted it to tell future generations of the greatness of Rome. Although the practical uses of art were distinctly Roman, the art forms themselves were influenced by the ancient Greeks and Etruscans.


In the late 600's B.C., the most powerful people in Italy were the Etruscans, who had come from Asia Minor and settled in Tuscany, an area north of Rome. Although the Etruscans imported Greek styles of art, they achieved much by themselves. They developed a very realistic type of portrait sculpture. They were also the first to introduce the use of the stone arch into architecture.






Architecture


The Romans put the lessons of the Etruscans to practical use. The baths and arenas are tributes to the skill of Rome's great builders. Because of the use of the arch, the Romans could build on a greater scale than the Greeks, who used the post and lintel (a beam supported by two columns). The arch can support much more weight than the post and lintel. Roman aqueducts were often three levels of arches piled one on top of another. And their buildings, such as the Baths of Caracalla, enclosed huge open areas.


In the 1st century B.C. the Romans developed the use of concrete. It could be poured into any shape for arches, vaults, or domes. Concrete enabled architects to build structures of immense size. One such gigantic construction was the Temple of Fortune at Praeneste, built by the ruler Sulla about 80 B.C. The architect used concrete to support terraces and to build what was in effect a skyscraper. To build their open-air theaters, the Greeks had scooped out the sides of hills, using the hills to support the sloping tiers of seats. But the Roman engineers used concrete to support the three gigantic tiers of the Colosseum, their main stadium for public entertainment. The tiers held seats for more than 45,000 spectators.






Sculpture


The Romans used a great deal of sculpted decoration to embellish their architecture. Columns were often placed on the walls of buildings as part of the decoration. (They actually supported no weight themselves.) Many of these decorations were copied from Greek styles. In fact, many Greek forms were simply placed on the facades of Roman buildings without any practical reason for being there.


In portraying their gods, the Greeks had been influenced by their ideas of form and beauty. Roman sculptors were greatly influenced by the Greeks. But the Romans showed their skill and originality in their portraits. They portrayed their emperors, generals, and senators with a degree of realism unknown to the Greeks. Thinning hair, double chins, crooked noses--all the physical traits that make one person look different from another--can be found in Roman portraiture.



Painting


In A.D. 79, an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius destroyed the city of Pompeii, covering it with layers of lava that hardened into rock. The wall paintings preserved in this rock tell us nearly everything we know about Roman painting.


Painting was usually done as a form of decoration. In Pompeii, for example, paintings were executed on the inside walls of the houses in fresco (painting on wet plaster). Often these murals were used to make the room seem larger, by giving the illusion of depth, or to create a pastoral landscape where there was no window or view.


Columns and other forms of architecture were often painted into the compositions or used to frame the murals and add to the feeling of depth. A system of perspective was known and used by the Romans. Red, black, and cream-white were among the most popular colors.


Roman painting achieved a high degree of naturalism through the artists' understanding of perspective and use of light and shade. The Romans painted many charming scenes from nature and portraits of children and beautiful young men and women. Religion, too, inspired their art.


Building Techniques


The Romans absorbed some important architectural techniques from the Etruscans before Greek influence was decisively felt. This included the arch and the vault, which were destined to carry Roman engineering into a development directly away from that of ancient Greece, who preferred "post-and-lintel" building methods to arches and domes. Thus was laid the foundation of the art in which the Italic peoples were to surpass the Hellenes: structural engineering. The vaulting techniques used by the Romans were the simple geometric forms: the semicircular barrel vault, the groin vault, and the segmental vault. The vault surfaces were typically covered with stucco or tiles. An excellent example of Roman vaulting is the Basilica of Constantine and Maxentius in Rome. A natural development of the vault was the dome, which enabled the construction of vaulted ceilings and the roofing of large public spaces such as the public baths and basilicas. The Romans relied heavily on the dome for much of their architecture, such as Hadrian's Pantheon, the Baths of Diocletian and the Baths of Caracalla. Characteristic of Roman architectural design was the construction of complex forms of domes to suit multilobed ground plans.

The mastery by Roman architects and engineers of the arch, vault and dome - further enhanced by their development of concrete - helped them to solve the first problem of monumental architecture, which is to bridge space. Roofing a great area means carrying heavy materials across spaces impossible to span with the Greeks' simple post-and-lintel system. In the arch, and the vault that grew out of it, the Romans had a means of thrusting the massive Colosseum walls story above story, of covering a luxurious bathing hall that could accommodate three thousand persons, and of creating the majestic form of the Pantheon.






Florence | Duomo, the Basilica di Santa Maria dell Fiore








The Secrets of Ancient Rome’s Buildings
What is it about Roman concrete that keeps the Pantheon and the Colosseum still standing?
The Romans started making concrete more than 2,000 years ago, but it wasn’t quite like today’s concrete. They had a different formula, which resulted in a substance that was not as strong as the modern product. Yet structures like the Pantheon and the Colosseum have survived for centuries, often with little to no maintenance. Geologists, archaeologists and engineers are studying the properties of ancient Roman concrete to solve the mystery of its longevity


“Roman concrete is . . . considerably weaker than modern concretes. It’s approximately ten times weaker,” says Renato Perucchio, a mechanical engineer at the University of Rochester in New York. “What this material is assumed to have is phenomenal resistance over time.”

That resistance, or durability against the elements, may be due to one of the concrete’s key ingredients: volcanic ash. Modern concrete is a mix of a lime-based cement, water, sand and so-called aggregates such as fine gravel. The formula for Roman concrete also starts with limestone: builders burned it to produce quicklime and then added water to create a paste. Next they mixed in volcanic ash—usually three parts volcanic ash to one part lime, according to the writings of Vitruvius, a first-century B.C. architect and engineer. The volcanic ash reacted with the lime paste to create a durable mortar that was combined with fist-size chunks of bricks or volcanic rocks called tuff, and then packed into place to form structures like walls or vaults.


By the beginning of the second century B.C., the Romans were already using this concrete in large-scale construction projects, suggesting their experimentation with the building material began even earlier. Other ancient societies such as the Greeks probably also used lime-based mortars (in ancient China, sticky rice was added for increased strength). But combining a mortar with an aggregate like brick to make concrete was likely a Roman invention, Perucchio says.


In the earliest concretes, Romans mined ash from a variety of ancient volcanic deposits. But builders got picky around the time Augustus became the first Roman emperor, in 27 B.C. At that time, Augustus initiated an extensive citywide program to repair old monuments and erect new ones, and builders exclusively used volcanic ash from a deposit called Pozzolane Rosse, an ash flow that erupted 456,000 years ago from the Alban Hills volcano, 12 miles southeast of Rome.


“Emperor Augustus was the driving force behind the systemization, standardization of mortar mixes with Pozzolane Rosse,” says Marie Jackson, a geologist and research engineer at the University of California at Berkeley. Roman builders likely favored the ash deposit because of the durability of concrete made with it, she adds. “This was the secret to concretes that were very well bonded, coherent, robust materials.”


Jackson and her colleagues have been studying the chemical composition of concretes made with Pozzolane Rosse. The ash’s unique mix of minerals appears to have helped the concrete withstand chemical decay and damage.


The Romans favored another specific volcanic ash when making concrete harbor structures that were submerged in the salty waters of the Mediterranean. Pulvis Puteolanus was mined from deposits near the Bay of Naples. “The Romans shipped thousands and thousands of tons of that volcanic ash around the Mediterranean to build harbors from the coast of Italy to Israel to Alexandria in Egypt to Pompeiopolis in Turkey,” Jackson says.


Seawater is very damaging to modern concrete. But in Roman concrete, the Pulvis Puteolanus “actually plays a role in mitigating deterioration when water percolates through it,” Jackson says. Although the exact mechanism is unknown, it appears that chemical reactions among the lime paste, volcanic ash and seawater created microscopic structures within the concrete that trapped molecules like chlorides and sulfates that harm concrete today.


Despite the success of Roman concrete, the use of the material disappeared along with the Roman Empire. Concrete structures were seldom built during the Middle Ages, suggesting volcanic ash wasn’t the only secret to the durability of Roman concrete, Perucchio says. “These really large projects could only be done with the appropriate bureaucracy, with the proper organization that the Roman Empire would provide."


Ancient Rome Inspires Modern Designs

























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