Academic literature on the topic 'Temple of Quirinus (Rome, Italy)'

In archaic societies the idea of the spatial organisation was embodied in the cosmogony and was accompanied by a complicated ritual. The Romans embraced the principles of spatial thinking from the Etruscans inherited from them also ritual. In ancient traditions, it is this ritual which have obscured the main ideas on division of space. Reconstruction of the heavenly temple on earth made by the priest largely depended on his individual perception of this task. Adapting the projection of the celestial temple to the spatial division, the Romans gradually began to get rid of the undefined elements of the ritual. Now it was focused on conducting of the principal axes, namely on their orientation towards the four cardinal points. First one held the line designating the East-West, then the perpendicular line North-South. Thus was created the cross of divisors with confined spaces, i.e. coordinate system. The main element of the theory of the Roman spatial division was the limit - a straight line, just held on geographical areas. All limits (main and parallel) precisely defined section of land. In practice, the Roman surveyors carefully spaced and accurately divided areas with limits. These principles are used by the Romans in the organization of the lands in Italy and in the provinces.

The article analyzes the part of the Nicholas’ I artistic program in Rome that was previously insufficiently studied (acquisitions in Italy of works of modern painting, orders for copies from Italian and other masterpieces of classical painting, etc.). Based on documents stored in domestic and foreign archives, the author characterizes the artistic preferences of the Russian emperor, his contribution to the formation of the museum fund of St. Petersburg and Russia; establishes the relationship between the visit of the emperor to Rome and the creation of the artistic and architectural appearance of St. Petersburg and its main temple – St. Isaac’s Cathedral, as well as the revival of the mosaic case in Russia.

This article studies the adoption of the nickname Malleolus (“little hammer”) by members of the gens Publicia in mid-republican Rome to illustrate the importance of grounding cultural history in the lives of seemingly minor political players and the mundane objects with which they came to be associated. After reviewing the occupational significance of hammers during the First Punic War (Part I), I scrutinize the ritual and cultic intersignifications of hammers in fourth- and third-century BCE central Italy (II) in order to set up a comprehensive reconstruction of the social and semiotic networks that structured and mediated the dedication of a temple to the goddess Flora by the brothers Publicii Malleoli at a time of internal political crisis and external conflict (III). Central to the political and intercultural contests of mid-republican Rome was the generative force of the polyvalent and object-centered cognomen in establishing and promoting individual and collective identities.

AbstractCapitolia, temples to the triad of divinities Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Iuno Regina and Minerva Augusta, are often considered part of the standard urban ‘kit’ of Roman colonies. Their placement at one end of the forum is sometimes seen as schematizing and replicating in miniature the relationship between the Capitolium at Rome and the Forum Romanum below it. Reliably attested Capitolia are, however, rarer in the provinces than this widespread view assumes and there seems to be no relationship between civic status and the erection of a Capitolium. Indeed, outside Italy there are very few Capitolia other than in the African provinces, where nearly all known examples belong to the second or early third century a.d., mostly in the Antonine period. This regional and chronological clustering demands explanation, and since it comes too late to be associated with the foundation of colonies, and there is no pattern of correlation with upgrades in civic status, we propose that the explanation has to do with the growing power and influence of North African élites, who introduced the phenomenon from Rome. Rather than being a form of temple imposed from the centre on the provinces, Capitolia were adopted by provincial élites on the basis of their relationship with Rome.

Studies of design principles of Roman temples typically have been based on Vitruvius, which inspired a belief that the colonnade was at the core of the geometric framework of every temple and that the lower column diameter (D) was used as a module to plan all other aspects, both horizontally and vertically. Archaeological evidence, however, shows that most extant temples do not match the Vitruvian model.1 Scholars have tried to explain the discrepancies in different ways: for example, by claiming that Vitruvius did not describe the actual state of Roman architecture but “what it should be”,2 that architects had to make “adjustments” to the “Vitruvian ideal” to create a particular effect, or that they had to make on-site corrections.3 A few studies have shown that also other design principles must have been at play. P. Barresi, based on the geometric analyses of several temple-podia of the 5th to 1st c. B.C. in central Italy, argued that they were designed and built relative to a square grid.4 He derived the size of each grid-module from the proportions of the rectangles of the temples' bases. He later reached the same conclusion for the temples of the Capitolium at Sufetula,5 while J.-N. Bonneville presented a similar theory for temples at Baelo Claudia.6 M. Wilson Jones observed that the principal parts of the façades of the Temple of Portunus at Rome and the Maison Carrée at Nîmes formed square contours,7 which he considered a reason for the “irregularities” (relative to Vitruvian principles) in the intercolumniations. He also presented other examples of simple geometric shapes in the compositions of the façades of Roman buildings.

The debate on the relationships between Rome, Italy, and the Mediterranean world in the Archaic and mid-Republican periods remains very lively. Complementing the most recent discoveries and interpretations, I present two unknown mid-Republican documents from the Arx, the N summit of the Capitoline hill (fig. 1). Excavations for the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II brought to light after 1887 many walls and artifacts, which have been studied almost exclusively to produce archaeological maps or catalogues of objects, but the structures sealed beneath the basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli toward the end of the 13th c., rediscovered in the 1980s and surveyed by the present author since 2001, shed new light on a number of religious, historical, topographical, architectural and art-historical issues.The new archaeological evidence may be summarized as follows. In the 1st c. B.C., an aristocratic domus set on three levels occupied the NW sector of the Arx; it was remodeled in the Flavian and Severan periods (figs. 2-3). Apparently a location of the temple of Juno Moneta on the site of the Aracoeli must be ruled out. Among the structures still preserved beneath the basilica, which include an Imperial-era wall with huge curvilinear spurs that can be associated with the Iseum Capitolinum, we may mention an ashlar wall in blocks of Grotta Oscura tuff (a stone available after the defeat of Veii in 397 B.C.) that constituted the façade of a monument with a false arch dating from the 4th c. B.C. (fig. 2).

Early one bright afternoon, seventeen centuries ago, Constantine stood staring at the sun. According to his self-appointed biographer Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, who claimed to have heard the story from Constantine himself, the emperor was on campaign, when, ‘around midday, as the day was declining’ he saw a shining cross of light over the sun, with the attached text ‘By this conquer’. The understandably startled ruler slept on the matter, whereupon Christ appeared in a dream and instructed him to fashion himself a copy of the holy sign, which would protect him against his enemies. He did as he had been told, took Christian clerics as his advisers and, not long afterwards, set off for Italy to fight his rival, Maxentius. The rhetorician Lactantius, writing about twenty years before Eusebius, presented a different tale in hisDe mortibus persecutorum: Constantine, on the eve of his decisive battle against Maxentius ina.d. 312, at the Milvian Bridge to the north of Rome, was instructed in a dream to ‘mark the heavenly sign of God’ on his shields. Constantine's moment of epiphany, sometimes equated with his ‘conversion’, has traditionally been seen both as one of history's great turning-points and as one of its most enduring enigmas. The interpretation of Constantine's vision(s) is further complicated by an anecdote that appears in an anonymous panegyric of the emperor, delivered ina.d. 310. Having turned off from the road to visit ‘the most beautiful temple in the world’, Constantine was greeted by a remarkable sight: ‘For you saw, I believe, Constantine, your Apollo, accompanied by Victory, offering you laurel crowns, which each brought an omen of thirty years [of life or rule]’.

Meštrović’s political activity, reflected in his sculpture and architecture, was closely tied to the idea of a political union of the South Slavs which culminated on the eve of and during the First World War. As a political idealist and a person who always emphasized that he was first and foremost an artist, Meštrović had no inclination for classic political activism which meant that he was not interested in belonging to any contemporary political faction. Since his political activism was not tied to a specific political party and since, unlike the politicians with whom he socialized, he did not have a prior political life, Meštrović cannot be defined either as a supporter Ante Starčević and an HSS man, or as a unionist Yugoslav and royalist. He was passionate about politics, especially during the time when the idea about a single South Slavic state took centre stage in politics, and he actively promoted this idea through his contacts with politicians, kings, cultural workers, and artists. He never acted as a classic politician or a political negotiator on behalf of a political party but as an artist who used his numerous local, regional and international acquaintances for the promotion of a political interest, that is, of a universal political platform of the entire Croatian nation as part of a Slavic ethno-political framework. Even within the political organization he himself founded, the Yugoslav Committee, Meštrović did not present a developed political manifesto but, being an artist and an intellectual, ‘encouraged the ideology behind the idea of unification through his activism and especially through his works’ (N. Machiedo Mladinić). The very fact that he was not a professional politician enabled him to ‘learn directly about some of the intentions of the political decision makers at informal occasions he attended as a distinguished artist, particularly in those situations when a direct involvement of political figures would have been impossible due to diplomatic concerns’ (D. Hammer Tomić). For example, he was the first to learn from the report of the French ambassador to Italy Camillo Barrera that Italy would be rewarded for joining the Entente forces by territorial expansion in Dalmatia. Equally known is Meštrović’s attitude towards the name of the committee because, unlike Trumbić and Supilo, he did not hesitate to use the word ‘Yugoslav’ in the name. He believed that a joint Yugoslav platform would render Croatian interests stronger in the international arena and that this would not happen had the committee featured ‘Croatian’ in its name and even less so if it started acting under the name of wider Serbia as Pašić suggested. Meštrović’s political disappointment in the idea of Yugoslavia went hand in hand with the distancing of Croatian and Serbian politics which followed the political unification. The increasing rift between him and the Yugoslav idea was becoming more and more obvious after the assassinations of Stjepan Radić and Aleksandar Karađorđević between the two Wars. His reserve towards the Republic of Yugoslavia, augmented by his political hatred of communism, was such that Meštrović never seriously considered going back to his native country and after his death, he did not leave his art works to the state but to the Croatian people. This article focuses on the most politicized phase in Meštrović’s work when he even changed the titles of the art works between displays at two different exhibitions: the works that bore the neutral names, such as ‘a shrine’, ‘a girl’, or ‘a hero’, at the 1910 exhibition of the Secession Group in Vienna were given the names of the heroes of the Battle of Kosovo the very next year and displayed as such in the pavilion of the Kingdom of Serbia at the exhibition in Rome. Special attention was given to the idea of the Vidovdan shrine, a secular temple to the Yugoslav idea, and the so-called Kosovo fragments intended to decorate it. The heightened controversy surrounds the sculpture and architectural projects Meštrović created during the period in which his political activism in the Yugoslav political and cultural arena was at its peak and he himself did not hide the intention to contribute to the political programme with his art works. This is why critical remarks which were expressed against or in favour of Meštrović’s sculpture during the early twentieth century are inseparable from the contrasting opinions about the political ideas from the turbulent time surrounding the First World War, and all of this, being a consequence of Meštrović’s political engagement, pulled him as a person into the political arena of the Croatian, Serbian and Yugoslav cause. The closest connection between Meštrović’s sculpture, architecture and politics occurred during his work on the Vidovdan shrine and the so-called Kosovo fragments. At the same time, there was a marked difference between Meštrović’s architecture which is eclectic and referential in its style and bears no political message, and sculpture which strongly personified the political programme based on the Battle of Kosovo and expressed in monumental athletic figures. Meštrović opposed the desire of the political establishment to depict his figures in national costumes so that they may witness ‘historical truth’ and, instead, continued with his idea of universal values and not historical and political particularism. Believing that only the passage of time could assess the historical protagonists best, he deemed that some of them would vanish while the others would remain, ‘so to speak, naked’ and acquire ‘supernatural dimensions’ (I.Meštrović). By depicting his figures as having torsos stripped of any sign of national identity, Meštrović wanted to provide them with a ‘general human meaning and not a specific one of this or that tribe’ (I.Meštrović). Aside from the Vidovdan Shrine and the Kosovo Fragments, the article discusses a number of other works onto which Meštrović grafted a political programme such as the Mausoleum of Njegoš on Mount Lovćen, the funerary chapel of Our Lady of the Angels at Cavtat, the equestrian reliefs of King Petar Karađorđević and ban Petar Berislavić, and the sculptures of the Indians at Chicago as ‘ahistorical’ pinnacles of his monumental Art Deco sculpture. The article argues that, based on the consideration of Meštrović’s ‘political’ sculpture, it can be said that the best achievements are found in the works in which political agendas and historical evocations (for example the caryatids, kings and bans, and even the portraits of Nikola Tesla and Ruđer Bošković) gave way to the naked ahistorical physis of a number of Kosovo heroes, female allegorical figures and, most of all, the pinnacle of the Art Deco equestrian sculptures of the Chicago Indians. What matters in the Chicago statues is the contraction of the muscles which accompany the movements of the Bowman and the Spearman and not the type of their weapons which are absent anyway, because this feature indicates that Meštrović focused on what he was best at: the naked human body relieved of the burden of costume, signs of civilization, and the pomp of political, ideological and historical attributes. This is why the politics of Meštrović’s sculpture is at its strongest when it is at its most general or, in other words, when it embodies an ideal and not a political pragmatism or a specific historical reality.

States anxious to wrest power from religious authorities viewed their courts of law as quasi-sacred spaces, often characterizing them as a form of ‘temple’ to signal the reverential emotional style required within. Foregrounding the emotional overlap between religious and legal spaces, this chapter portrays Rome’s Court of Assizes during the Fadda murder trial as both secular temple and emotional arena with great symbolic value for Liberal Italy. The argument is contextualized against analysis of the symbolic role of law at crucial stages in the development of other states, particularly England and France. After unification, Italian courts were opened to the public, in some cases for the first time. The civic audience in legal hearings, especially in criminal cases, was a fundamental tenet of Italy’s liberal ideology. The chapter analyses public participation in the Fadda trial against the background of a state’s need to engage its citizens in spaces and rituals that were unmistakably identified with the nation. The Fadda trial’s fascination both helped and hindered the state’s cause, drawing great crowds but provoking emotions that threatened to blur the line between dignified court and popular arena. The trial lasted a month and dominated the nation’s newspapers, drawing Italians from all over the peninsula into the drama in Rome. Ultimately the event was an opportunity to establish the contours of a new type of social space, a new emotional arena, for a new nation.