While the Pantheon was being built, an activity unexampled in the history of Roman architecture was going on at the villa. To the fruitful years after 125 belongs the uniquely inspired plan ([Fig. 11.12]) of the most important palace in the villa complex, called the Piazza d’Oro, the Golden Square. Its “pumpkin” vestibule (K in the plan) has already been mentioned. In many of its features, including the hole in the roof, the eight supporting piers, and the alternation of curved and rectilinear niches, it is a quarter-scale Pantheon, but there is greater frankness in the display of the structure, both internally, in the groined vault, and externally, where the octagonal plan is left clearly visible, instead of being concealed by the skin of the drum, as in the Pantheon. Except perhaps for the cross-vaulted passages N,N, the portico is conventional; excavation in the summer of 1958 revealed footings for formal flower beds, as in the portico of Pompey’s theater, and in Vespasian’s Forum of Peace.
Fig. 11.12 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Piazza d’Oro. (H. Winnefeld)
The part of the complex which shows Hadrian’s full genius is the palace-block, south of the portico (plan A-I). Here the vastness, sweep, and richness of the Piazza d’Oro comes to its climax in a design which has been called lyrical, feminine, and even Mozartian. Here, if anywhere, can be detected the influence of Antinous. The frieze-motif, for example, is Cupids (riding sea-monsters), but since this theme is borrowed from the Teatro Marittimo, which, at least in its earliest phase, antedates Antinous, too much should not be made of it. The center of the composition is the four-leaf-clover room at A, with a fountain in the middle. Its walls sweep in and out, with a sinuous, wave-like movement, as though the room were alive, and breathing. The outswinging arcs open into light-wells (C,C; B is a curved nymphaeum, with statue-niches alternately curved and rectilinear, from beneath which the water flowed down steps into a reflecting pool; the fourth side is the entrance). The inswinging arcs open into bell-shaped rooms (a,a,a,a). These serve to counter the thrust of the centrally-pierced cupola (see the reconstruction, [Fig. 11.13]), which may have successfully solved the problem of transition from octagonal ground-plan to circular dome. The cupola was supported (none too well, for it has fallen and left no trace) on eight delicate piers, in what we now see to be Hadrian’s standard but ever-varied manner. The six tiny apsidal rooms (b) are latrines; their water-supply came from fountains at the back of the bell-shaped diagonal rooms, yet another example of the Roman combination of the useful with the ornamental.
Off the central clover-leaf open on each side five rectangular rooms (I is a late addition), all but one barrel-vaulted; the exception (G) had a cross-vault. Each set opens onto a light well. At the back of the central room (E) in each set is a statue-niche. The view from the back of these rooms runs, as in the Teatro Marittimo, through variegated light and shade. E was diagonally lit from the light-well; the light-well itself, a variant on the conventional atrium, had probably a square compluvium, or open skylight; the central room was lit by the round cupola-aperture, and so on. The whole design, with its indirect lighting, plays of water, and works of art, is light and gay, reflecting the Emperor’s brief years of pleasure with his inamorato; what the Empress Sabina thought is not recorded. But here again is the tension that comes from an inaccessible midpoint. And whose statues were in the niches? Whatever may have been the case in Antinous’ lifetime, after his death Hadrian deified him, identifying him with Apollo, Dionysus, Hermes, Silvanus, Osiris, and other gods, and surrounded himself with reminders of him in marble. Of the statues of Antinous in Roman museums, a number variously estimated at from sixteen to thirty comes from the villa.
Hadrian’s happiness was short-lived. In A.D. 128 he set out again on his travels, accompanied by Antinous. They wintered at Athens, which Hadrian enriched with monuments, passed over into Asia Minor, and down through Syria into Egypt. Here, in 130, Antinous died, probably a suicide, to please his master or to avoid his passion. Hadrian’s grief was more baroque than any of his buildings. From this point his life becomes one long death-wish. The most massive symbol of this is his mausoleum, whose great concrete drum, approached by Hadrian’s bridge, the Pons Aelius (nowadays the Ponte Sant’ Angelo) still dominates the right bank of the Tiber near St. Peter’s. The latest Hadrianic bricks in it are dated A.D. 134; it must have become an important part of the Emperor’s plans when he returned to Rome, mourning Antinous, in 132 or 133. Its plan goes back to Etruscan tumuli, via the Mausoleum of Augustus—creative imitation again. The square block on which the drum rests has almost exactly the dimensions of the Augustan monument’s diameter. A spiral ramp leads up to the tomb chamber in the very center of the drum. The top was spread with earth and planted with cypresses, the trees of death ([Fig. 11.14]), and the whole surmounted by a colossal group in bronze, perhaps of Hadrian in a four-horse chariot, now replaced by the archangel Michael, who gives the mausoleum its present name, Castel Sant’ Angelo. When the death he longed for agonizingly came, from dropsy, in A.D. 138, Hadrian’s ashes were laid beside those of the wife he had never loved, in the core of the monument which symbolized his despair at the death of the only creature to whom this strange man had ever given his affection. The great pile has been successively fortress, prison (immuring, among others, the great Renaissance scientist Giordano Bruno), and, since 1934, military museum.
Fig. 11.13
Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Piazza d’Oro, reconstruction.
(H. Kähler, Hadrian, Pl. 16)