An Etruscan start: temples of wood and clay
According to tradition, Rome expelled its last king in 509 BCE and became a res publica, a “public thing”, governed by elected magistrates and the Senate. Its art at first looked Etruscan, because Rome was in many ways an Etruscan city. The great temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, traditionally dedicated in the first year of the Republic, was built in the Etruscan way: a high platform, a deep porch of widely spaced columns, walls of tufa and timber, and a roof decorated with painted terracotta. Pliny the Elder says that its cult statue was made by Vulca, a sculptor from the Etruscan city of Veii.
That plan, with its front staircase and podium, became the model of the Roman temple, quite different from the Greek one you can walk around, as the guide to the Roman temple explains.
Roads, walls and water: an art of engineering
While Rome conquered Italy, between the fifth and third centuries BCE, its most ambitious works were practical. In 312 BCE the censor Appius Claudius Caecus began both the Via Appia, the road south to Capua, and the Aqua Appia, the city’s first aqueduct, which ran almost entirely underground. Paved roads, defensive walls and water channels were built to last, and they set the tone for a culture that admired usefulness and order. How the roads were laid, layer by layer, is in the guide to how Roman roads were built.
The flood of Greek art
Then Rome conquered the Greek world. When Marcus Claudius Marcellus took the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily in 211 BCE, he carried its statues and paintings back to Rome for his triumph. After the sack of Corinth in 146 BCE, the same year in which Greece came under Roman control, works of art arrived by the shipload. Some Romans welcomed them; others, like the elder Cato, warned that Greek luxury would soften Roman virtue.
With the art came marble and Greek architects. Ancient writers say that the first temple in Rome built entirely of marble was raised for the general Quintus Caecilius Metellus around 146 BCE. The oldest marble building that still stands in Rome is the round Temple of Hercules Victor in the Forum Boarium, by the Tiber, built in the late second century BCE of Pentelic marble from Athens. Next to it, the small Temple of Portunus shows the other Republican habit: Greek Ionic columns, but on a high Roman podium with steps only at the front.
Concrete: the Republic’s great invention
The most important change was invisible from the outside. During the third and second centuries BCE, Roman builders developed opus caementicium, that is, concrete: lime mortar mixed with volcanic ash and rubble. It could be poured into wooden forms and shaped into vaults, and it was cheap and strong. The chemistry behind its long life is explained in why Roman concrete has lasted.
Concrete changed what a building could be. The Porticus Aemilia, a warehouse by the Tiber begun in 193 BCE, was roofed with a long row of concrete vaults. At Praeneste (modern Palestrina), east of Rome, the late second century BCE Sanctuary of Fortuna climbed a hillside in a series of terraces, ramps and stairs, all held up by concrete. It is a landscape built as architecture, and its arches and vaults look forward to the great buildings of the emperors.
Old faces: why Republican portraits show every wrinkle
Republican portrait busts are easy to recognise: bald heads, sagging cheeks, deep lines around the eyes and mouth. This style is called verism (from the Latin verus, true). The usual explanation is a Roman custom. Noble families kept imagines, wax masks of their ancestors who had held high office, in cupboards in the atrium of the house, and at funerals actors wore them in procession. The Greek historian Polybius, who lived in Rome in the second century BCE, describes the scene. In a society where power came from ancestors and long service, an old, lined face was a mark of authority.
The faces may not be literal records, though. Many scholars point out that Greek sculptors of the Hellenistic period had already developed a realistic style for old age, and that Roman verism may be partly a fashion, a chosen look of severity rather than an exact likeness. Either way, the contrast with the idealised bodies of Greek art is one of the clearest ways to tell them apart, as the guide to Greek and Roman sculpture shows. Sometimes the two met in one statue: the “Tivoli General”, made around 75-50 BCE and now in Palazzo Massimo in Rome, has a lined Roman face on a heroic, half-naked Greek body.
Houses, paintings and the private life of the elite
The wealth of conquest also went into private houses. In the towns of Campania, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, you can still see Republican houses with an atrium and a peristyle garden, and walls painted to look like marble panels or like windows onto imaginary buildings. The great painted room of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, from around 60-50 BCE, belongs to these last years of the Republic.
The last generation: Pompey, Caesar and the road to empire
In the first century BCE, the great generals competed through buildings. In 55 BCE Pompey opened Rome’s first permanent stone theatre, with a temple to Venus at the top of the seating and a large garden portico behind. Julius Caesar answered with a new forum in his own name, dedicated in 46 BCE, with a temple to Venus Genetrix, the goddess his family claimed as its ancestor.
By the time Caesar’s adopted son Octavian became Augustus in 27 BCE, Rome had everything it needed for imperial art: concrete, marble, Greek sculptors, a habit of portraits and a taste for buildings as political messages. The emperors would turn it into imperial propaganda in stone, and how the same mix spread across the conquered lands is told in the guide to Roman provincial art.
Where to see it
In Rome, the Forum Boarium by the Tiber has the two Republican temples, and the Roman Forum and the remains of Caesar’s Forum show the political centre. Republican portraits are in the Capitoline Museums (and their annexe at the Centrale Montemartini), the Vatican Museums and Palazzo Massimo. Outside Rome, the sanctuary at Palestrina and its archaeological museum are a short trip east of the city.
Sources
- Polybius, Histories 6.53-54 (funerals and ancestor masks).
- Velleius Paterculus, Roman History 1.11 (Metellus and the first marble temple); Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.157 (Vulca of Veii).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, “Roman Republic”.
- F. Coarelli, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (Berkeley, 2nd ed. 2014).
- M. Beard and J. Henderson, Classical Art: From Greece to Rome (Oxford, 2001).
- Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, “Statua del Generale di Tivoli”.
