Art in the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

Author:Michael Grant [Grant, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, General
ISBN: 9781135634049
Google: d0L4n-_pv5gC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-04-15T01:17:38+00:00

As one walks around and observes the immense Basilica of Maxentius–although ancient literary soruces are almost silent on the subject – one is inspired by its lofty spaciousness, which conveys a very different impression from the spatial limits imposed by the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the temples that stood nearby in the Roman Forum. Any visitor is ‘strangely subdued by a feeling of his [or her] own small insignificance and … the greater unity into which he [or she] has entered and of which he [or she] now becomes more thoroughly a part’.6

For this was one of the architectural marvels of the Roman world. Breaking with classical tradition, its plan eclipses all earlier basilicas in grandeur and brilliance. The interior must have seemed to soar upwards without weight: for every wall-space was excavated into windows or niches; the coffering of the ceiling was made to look like trellis open to the sky; and the octagons and lozenges at the pavement reinforce this illusion, by seeming like a reflection of that coffering. Moreover, there was a novel, creative relationship between wall and window. And there was a new, conscious rhythm in the continuous series of arches.7

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