11
An Emperor-Architect: Hadrian
About Trajan’s successor Hadrian (A.D. 117–138) archaeology and literature, interlocking, tell us so much that we can write his biography from his buildings, with an occasional assist from written sources. The buildings of his reign are numerous and brilliantly designed. We shall take as examples three from Rome and three from the unique complex of his Villa near Tivoli: the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Pantheon, and his mausoleum; the Teatro Marittimo, the Piazza d’Oro, and the Canopus. All can be dated with more precision than usual, because in Hadrian’s time the practice became general of stamping bricks with the names of the consuls of the year they were made. Professor Bloch’s accurate study of, and sound inference from, over 4600 stamps, most of them from Hadrian’s reign, have put all students of Roman archaeology deeply in his debt.
An attempt to understand Hadrian through his buildings rests upon the hypothesis that he was himself his own architect, inspired by the ferment of building activity in Rome in Domitian’s and Trajan’s reigns, when he was growing up. The hypothesis is perhaps justified by an inference from an anecdote recorded by Dio Cassius, a Roman senator and consul from Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor, who wrote in Greek a history of Rome from the beginning to A.D. 229. Dio’s story is that once when Trajan was in conference with his architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, Hadrian interrupted, and Apollodorus, angered, said, “Oh, go and design your pumpkins!” We infer that Apollodorus’ reference to “pumpkins” was intended to pour scorn on certain of Hadrian’s designs for vaults, involving pumpkin-like concave segments with re-entrant groins between, such as are still to be seen in Hadrian’s Villa, in the vestibule of the Piazza d’Oro, and in the Serapeum at the end of the Canopus ([Fig. 11.1]). The same anecdote records that Apollonius so piqued Hadrian, later, by his criticisms of the design of the Emperor’s Temple of Venus and Rome, that Hadrian had him first exiled and then put to death. This is how Hadrian is established as an architect, and a vindictive one at that.
Hadrian’s most baroque flights of architectural fancy are to be seen at his villa near Tivoli, where the various complexes of buildings are scattered over an area 1000 yards one way by 500 yards the other. The buildings, which far outdid Nero’s Golden House in extent and grandeur, include palaces, large and small, for manic and for depressive moods (plan [[Fig. 11.2]] A,G,R,S,T,U,V,W), guest-quarters (B), a pavilion (C), dining rooms (D,E,K), baths (F,O,P), a library (the apsed building to the right of G), porticoes (H,J), pools (between H and J, and northwest of X), slave quarters (J,N), a stadium (L), many cryptoporticoes (for example, M), firemen’s barracks (between A and M), a palaestra or wrestling ground (Q), and a vaulted temple of Serapis (X). Excavation, and the carrying off of statues, with which Roman museums are crammed, began as early as 1535, and continues to the present. It has been followed by reconstruction ([Fig. 11.3]) and general tidying up: the Italian authorities report the clearing away of 13,200 pounds of briers!
Fig. 11.1 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa. Serapeum at Canopus, showing “pumpkin” vaults. (Piranesi)
Fig. 11.2 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa. (H. Kähler, Hadrian und seine Villa bei Tivoli, Pl. 1)
