34 - Art and architecture

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Augustus and his Julio-Claudian successors had moulded the variegated architecture and art of the empire in ways that blended old with new, metropolitan with provincial. Patterns of practice had been created which would serve as a basis upon which future generations could build. Chief arbiters were naturally the ruler, his family and senior ministers, as controllers of policy and finance. Theirs were the fundamental choices about artistic direction. But a host of other factors, constantly varying, were ever present to influence what they might do, such as public opinion, resources, metropolitan and regional tradition, transport, technological skills, medium, receptivity, competence, pride, enthusiasm, or the particular needs of visual propaganda. Metropolitan traditions had arisen at Rome, certainly, but everywhere else there flourished multitudinous local traditions which interacted constantly with these. There was the Italian of north and central Italy, derived from and recalling Roman and Italian sources, whose influence spread far into Dalmatian and Danubian regions. There was the Celtic, in a great band from nearer Spain across France and Germany northwards to Britain, with its rectangular and circular temples often surrounded by a porticoed verandah, and its abstract, curvilinear art. There was the Punic of North Africa, the culture of the Semitic Phoenician settlers, derived from a hotchpotch of eastern and Greek elements, with its liking for cut-stone architecture in local forms of house, temple and tomb, and its unrealistic, ‘conceptual’ art. There was the unique culture of Egypt, flourishing still after more than three millennia. There were the further oriental cultures of the Near East, with their mixtures of Mesopotamian, Persian, Syrian, Greek and (in Palestine) Jewish elements, and their linear and ‘conceptual’ arts.