The last and most familiar of the monuments which follow the transfer of power from Rome to Constantinople is the Column of Phocas in the Forum, erected when three centuries of desolation had followed the grandeur of Constantine and his dynasty.

The Vatican Hill and the northern end of the Transtiberine district were not enclosed within walls till the time of Pope Leo IV. He undertook in A.D. 848 the enclosure of St. Peter’s and the Vatican Hill, thus forming that district into a separate town, which was named after the Pope Civitas Leoniana. The western wall of this enclosure may still be traced by its ruins in the garden of the Vatican palace. After the successive destructions and minor repairs of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, in 1527 the architect San Gallo was employed to erect huge bastions on the wall of Rome, which he placed chiefly between the Porta Ostiense and the Porta Appia. In 1628 Pope Urban VIII. restored the walls on the left bank, and subsequently in 1642 he proceeded to erect the walls which now stand between the Porta Portese and the Porta Cavallegieri, where the arms of that Pope are still affixed to the walls. This was the final important addition to the main walls of the city.

III.—Roman Building and Architecture.

The earliest form of Roman masonry, consisting of rectangular tufa blocks placed in layers alternately parallel to and across the line of the wall, so as to bind the mass together firmly, may be best seen in the ancient fragments of the Servian wall on the Aventine and the Quirinal Hills and in the ruins on the western slope of the Palatine. This kind of building is the natural product of the peculiar parallel cleavage in the tufaceous rocks of the Roman hills. In those parts of the Campagna where basalt rather than tufa becomes the usual material, as at Præneste, we find polygonal masonry. One specimen of a mode of construction anterior to the introduction of the arch into Roman masonry is left us at Rome. This is the vault of the old well-house near the Capitol called the Mamertine Prison, where we find overlapping horizontal blocks of stone which originally met in a conical roof, but are now truncated and capped by a mass of stones cramped together with iron. That the principle of the arch was known in the regal period of Rome is shown by the great arch of the Cloaca Maxima. But no arches remain of so early a date which are not subterranean, and it is not likely that the arch was used in the early temples at Rome. These were, as we learn from Vitruvius, constructed in the so-called Tuscan style, which was the Italian contemporary of the Greek Doric. It is possible that the columns in the walls of S. Maria in Cosmedin, which are placed at unusual distances from each other, may have been an imperial restoration of the Temple of Ceres, after the old Tuscan fashion (Fig. 1). The next modification of architectural style, which is usually called, from the general influence of the Greek colonists on Latin art, the Tusco-Doric order, may be seen in the lowest range of columns and bases in the Theatre of Marcellus. The shaft of these columns is much more slender than in the Grecian Doric, and only partially fluted, if at all; while a cima recta is substituted for the echinus of the capitals (Figs. 2 and 3). The position of the triglyphs and the proportions of the cornice were also much changed, and the whole effect became less massive and bold than that of the Tuscan temples.

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The ancient Tuscan arrangement of the interior of temples remained after this modification of their columns and capitals. The three ruins which now occupy the most prominent place at the northern end of the Forum, the Temples of Saturn, of Concord, and of Vespasian, all retain the plan called prostylos by Vitruvius. The Temple of Concord is especially remarkable for the union of a broad Tuscan cella with a narrow Greek portico. An alteration peculiarly Roman was made in the cella of the Greek temple. Instead of surrounding this part of a temple with rows of columns, the Romans clothed it with pilasters, thus introducing the mode of construction deservedly stigmatised by Vitruvius, under the name pseudoperipteral (Fig. 4). This may be seen in the ruin commonly called by the name of the Temple of Fortuna Virilis at Rome.

Fig. 1.

The Greek Ionic order became known and employed by the Romans early in the third century B.C. The Tomb of Scipio Barbatus shows the Ionic volute and dentil mixed with the Doric triglyph and gutta. The Roman alterations in the Ionic capital may be best seen in the pillars of the Temple of Saturn, and in the second range of columns surrounding the Theatre of Marcellus and the Coliseum. Specimens may also be seen in the basilica of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura, and in the church of S. Maria in Trastevere, which have been transferred from the ancient temples. The distinctive Roman modification was the position of the volutes diagonally instead of laterally (Figs. 5 and 6).