Fig. 7.11 Rome, Golden House, west wing.
(G. Lugli, Roma antica, p. 358)
Fig. 7.12 Rome, Golden House, east wing.
(G. Lugli, op. cit., p. 359)
Room 70 is a vaulted corridor 227 feet long, with sixteen windows opening to the north in the impost of the vault, which is painted sky-blue as a trompe d’oeil. Seabeasts, candelabra, and arabesques, sphinxes with shrubs growing out of their backs, griffins, centaurs, acanthus-leaves, Cupids, gorgons’ heads, lions’ heads with rings in their mouths, dolphins holding horns of plenty, winged horses, eagles, tritons, swags of flowers make up the riotous décor. In recesses in the walls landscapes and seascapes, impressionistically painted, attempt the illusion of the out-of-doors. Halfway down the corridor the vault is lowered. Here it supported a ramp which led to the gardens above.
Room 84 is octagonal, lighted by a hole in the roof, anticipating, as we shall see, Hadrian’s Pantheon. Perhaps this was the state dining room, described by ancient sources as hung on an axis and revolving like the world. Its ivory ceilings slid back and dropped flowers and perfumes on Nero’s guests.
The most controversial room of all is the apsidal number 80, decorated with scenes from the Trojan war: Hector and Andromache, Paris and Helen, Thetis bringing Achilles his shield. Nero was fascinated by the Trojan War: it was an epic of his own composition on the fall of Troy that he recited as Rome was burning. What was in the apse? Equivocal Renaissance reports place the finding of the Vatican Laocoön somewhere in this area, the apse is of a size to fit the statue, and the subject is appropriate to a room full of Trojan motifs. The statue’s baroque quality would have appealed strongly to Nero’s taste. This is the circumstantial evidence for room 80 as the findspot of one of the most notorious statues of antiquity. That this survey of the Julio-Claudian age should approach its end, as it began, with mention of the Laocoön, suggests how conventional was the repertory of Roman taste.
