CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Roman Art and Architecture
Art and building of ancient Rome: veristic portraits, imperial reliefs and bronzes, and engineering in concrete, arch and vault.
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About
Roman art served a state that had to govern, persuade and commemorate across a vast territory. In the late Republic, patrician families favoured portraits with sagging cheeks and furrowed brows, a look of hard-won experience known as verism. Augustus, who became the first emperor in 27 BC, changed the tone: the Prima Porta statue gives him a calm, youthful body on a Greek model, and the Ara Pacis (13–9 BC) shows his family processing in marble relief.
Engineering was Rome's great contribution. Builders combined concrete, the arch and the vault in aqueducts such as the Pont du Gard, and in triumphal arches carved with campaign scenes, like the Arch of Titus with its relief of spoils from Jerusalem. Bronze casters made the equestrian Marcus Aurelius (about 175 AD). By around 300, the porphyry group of the Tetrarchs shows squat, blocky figures with staring eyes, a turn towards the abstraction of late antique and Byzantine art.