Fig. 11.3 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, model. The round building (left center) is the Teatro Marittimo; the Piazza d’Oro is at the upper left; the Canopus, with colonnade, pool, and Serapeum, is near the center of the upper right quadrant. (MPI)
The setting of Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli takes full advantage of landscape: the view embraces mountains in one direction, distant Rome and the sea in the other. There is the color of pines, olives, ripe grain, pasture, and vineyard, the sound of cicadas by day and nightingales at twilight. And when the villa was new, everywhere was the sound of water and the color of marble. For this enormous Folly, this Roman Versailles, the immensity of all this space devoted to the whims of one man, untrammelled by any limitations of technique or money, is the perfected product of 200 years of Roman experience in elegant country living. Its builder occupied it but little. Eleven of the twenty-one restless years of his reign were spent in foreign travel. He named parts of his villa for famous buildings and places he had seen in the Greek East: the Academy and the Painted Porch (Stoa Poecile) in Athens, the Canopus near Alexandria. He even created a mile of cryptoporticoes which he called a “Hell” (Inferi, the Lower Regions): in his tortured life he had been there, too, as we shall see. But the buildings are idiosyncratic, not imitative, except in the creative Roman way. Hadrian, the Spaniard, was quick to learn. He always spoke Latin with an accent (his Greek was better), but his architecture was pure Graeco-Roman, using the architectural vocabulary of the past to create a new architectural language of his own.
His earliest architectural essay at the villa, to judge from the brick stamps, is the so-called “Teatro Marittimo” (the round complex at G; see also [Fig. 11.4]). Its earliest bricks date from the first year of his reign. (Of course the bricks need not have been used in the year they were made, and indeed will often have been put aside for several years to season.) Some bricks in the fabric of the Teatro Marittimo are dated A.D. 123, an annus mirabilis in Roman brick production, to meet the vast requirements of Hadrian’s many projects, some ready to build, some still on the drawing-board. These bricks point to later restorations of the original plan, but the point here is that the fundamental design, very characteristic of Hadrian, must have been laid down early. Much light on this complex, and on the villa as a whole, has been cast by the sensitive, perceptive work of the German Heinz Kähler, who, undaunted by the burning of all his carefully drawn plans in World War II, redid and published them in 1950, illuminating as never before our picture of Hadrian as man and architect.
Fig. 11.4 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Teatro Marittimo, air view. (H. Kähler, Rom und seine Welt, Pl. 188)
The entrance to the Teatro Marittimo was through a portico to the north (at the bottom of the air photograph) which approached a door in a high circular brick wall, insuring complete privacy from the rest of the villa. Inside the wall was a circular portico, concentric with the portico a moat. The Teatro Marittimo is now restored (through the philanthropy of an Italian tire manufacturer, impressed by the likeness of its plan to his product), and the moat is filled with water. When it was dry, its floor showed a pair of grooves in an arc, one on either side of the main axis. The grooves were made by the rollers of a drawbridge worked from a small room on the edge of the inner circle. On the site of one of the drawbridges there is now a permanent foot-bridge, visible in the air photograph. On the circular island, the columned arc between the drawbridges is a vestibule where the Emperor might receive his friends. Beyond it is a diamond-shaped peristyle, originally with a fountain in the middle: its sides are segments of circles which if projected would be tangent to the outer wall of the moat. Beyond the peristyle is an apsidal room; the apse has the same arc as the vestibule. This would be a pleasant place for intimate dinner parties. The rooms on either side might be bedrooms. A broad window opens from the dining room onto the moat, with a view directly on an alcove let into the circular wall on the axis of the far side. From the alcove the view leads through eleven differently shaped and differently lighted spaces back to the entrance portico and a far-distant fountain to the north.
It remains to describe the rooms east and west of the peristyle. The central apsidal room of the three on the west (to the right of the peristyle in the air photograph) is a deep bath with a window over the moat. Steps lead up to the low sill: Hadrian could choose between tub and moat for bathing. To the south is the dressing room, to the north the steam bath and furnace room. East of the peristyle is a circular room whose interior cross-walls form a double T, creating two alcoves for reading. Each would be appropriate to its season: the eastern for winter mornings and summer afternoons, the western for summer mornings and winter afternoons. The two adjoining rooms would be just right for a small library, of some 1500 rolls, half Greek and half Latin; the main library lay conveniently to the southwest (right center in the air photograph). It is tempting to see in this suite of rooms the study where the Emperor wrote his resigned, sentimental, mannered little poem to his soul (or is it to the soul of his beloved Antinous?):
“Little soul, gentle and drifting,
Guest and companion of my body,
Now you will dwell below in pallid places,
Stark and bare;
There you will abandon your play of yore.”
The remaining odd corners would house latrines, little conservatories, cupboards, and pantries.
This earliest Hadrianic building perfectly expresses one aspect of the man: his genius, his moodiness, his striving for form, his restlessness. With its wall, its moat, and its drawbridge, it is all designed for privacy and quiet. From any room one gets a view of variously lighted sections of space: chiaroscuro to match moods grave and gay. In the midst of axial symmetry, unrest is everywhere: in the curved forms, in the abrupt switches from light to dark, from roofed to open spaces, from horizontal architraves to the vertical play of the central fountain. The unrest is central: the midpoint is water and inaccessible. Tension and split are expressed in the divided bridge approach. All is indirection, schizophrenia, avoidance of forthrightness. As an architectural exercise, it is uniquely abstract, a proposition of Euclid in brick and marble, at one moment seeming to involve nothing but circles, at another, nothing but squares. It is probably no accident that its total diameter is almost exactly the same as the Pantheon’s. It would have suited the complexity of Hadrian’s mind to design a grandiose habitation for all the gods to the self-same dimensions as this splendid toy, the habitation of a restless, schizophrenic man whom his subjects worshipped as a god. The gods had made Hadrian in their own image; seconded by flattering courtiers, he was returning the compliment.