The next building in Hadrian’s architectural biography is his Temple of Venus and Rome, built facing the Coliseum to rival the most splendid buildings of Athens and the Greek East. Literary sources give its foundation date as Rome’s birthday, April 21, A.D. 121; the brick-stamps, of 123, 134, and the fourth century, tell the story of long years of building and late restoration. The restoration probably followed Hadrianic lines; at any rate the proportion of straight to curved profiles in the apses—exactly half and half—is Hadrianic language, repeated in the Pantheon. The essence of the plan is two apses back to back, one for Venus and one for the goddess Roma. They may be interpreted as a colossal architectural pun. Venus is a goddess of love, Love is AMOR, and AMOR is ROMA spelled backward. The symbolism does not stop here. Hadrian is Caesar: his is the heritage, if not the blood, of the Julian line, and the temple is a reminder of the greatness of Rome, firmly established by Augustus, and smiled upon by Augustus’ ancestress, Venus. The plan ([Fig. 11.5] and 11.6) was ingenious and devious, in Hadrian’s manner. The exterior is foursquare and conventional: the interior, with its vaults and apses, was novel and emphasized curves: compare the interplay of the square and the round in the Teatro Marittimo. Daring as it was, the design was the butt of the criticisms which cost Apollodorus his life. He had said that the temple should have been set on a high podium, which could have housed various paraphernalia useful in the Coliseum opposite, and that the vaulted apses had been designed too low for the statues in them: “If the goddesses wish to get up and go out, they will be unable to do so.” The first half of Apollodorus’ criticism is unjustified: Hadrian was designing a Greek temple, not an Italic one. About the second half we cannot judge, for certain, for brick stamps show the apses to belong to the fourth century reconstruction, but the proportions, as we saw, are Hadrianic ([Fig. 11.7]). The temple was set in the midst of a forest of sixty-six columns of grey granite. When it was re-excavated in 1932, some of the columns were re-erected; the positions of others were ingeniously marked by clumps of shrubbery trimmed to the proper shape. The excavators found under the pavement an octagonal room interesting in itself, and significant for its place in Roman architecture. The level at which it was found is lower than that of Nero’s Golden House. (Hadrian’s temple was built in the grounds of what had once been the Golden House; the reader will recall the twenty-four elephants needed to move the colossal statue of Nero and make room for the temple.) The octagonal shape appears in the dining room of the Golden House itself, in Domitian’s palace on the Palatine, and in a room in the Small Baths at Hadrian’s villa (O on the plan, [Fig. 11.2]). The cupola of Nero’s octagonal dining room, together with its lighting through a hole in the roof, reappears on a grand scale in the Pantheon. This is what we mean by saying that Hadrian adapted to his own new architectural language the vocabulary of pre-Neronian, Neronian, and Domitianic buildings. Here once again modern archaeology illuminates the development of Roman architecture by demonstrating and dating the classical use of new things in old ways, and old things in new.
Fig. 11.5 Rome, Temple of Venus and Rome, Gismondi model. (F. Castagnoli, Roma antica, Pl. 27.2)
Fig. 11.6 Rome, Temple of Venus and Rome. (Castagnoli, op. cit., p. 85, Fig. 2)
Shortly after the consecration of the Temple of Venus and Rome, Hadrian set out on the first of his great tours of his Empire. He visited the western provinces, making arrangements, among other things, for the building of the great wall bearing his name that runs from Tyne to Solway in the north of England. He visited the provinces of Africa, Cyrene and Crete. Finally, in A.D. 123, he reached Bithynia, and there met Antinous ([Fig. 11.8]), the sulky, langorous, adolescent boy who, for the remaining seven years of his short life, and even more after his tragic death by drowning—perhaps suicide—in the suburb of Alexandria called Canopus, was to dominate Hadrian’s existence and inspire his whole creative activity. It is not surprising that the Emperor, childless and unhappily married, should find deep satisfaction in the company of this boy. The psychological aspects of the affair, and the possible effect of Hadrian’s infatuation upon his architecture have been treated with delicacy and understanding by Marguerite Yourcenar and Eleanor Clark.
Fig. 11.7 Rome, Temple of Venus and Rome, apse (note size of scale figure). (Paul MacKendrick photo)
Fig. 11.8 Antinous. (Alinari)