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Street Theater: Building Monumental Avenues in Roman Ephesus and Renaissance Florence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 December 2018
Abstract
Between the late first and the mid-third century CE, local elites in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire lined the formerly utilitarian streets of their cities with honorific statues, colonnades, and ornamental buildings. The monumental avenues thus created have usually been interpreted as unplanned products of competitive munificence. This article, by contrast, suggests that the new streets had real political significance. It compares the monumental avenues of Roman Ephesus with a formal analogue from a better-documented historical context: the long, colonnaded courtyard of Florence's Uffizi complex, constructed by Duke Cosimo I in the mid-sixteenth century. Comparison with the Uffizi courtyard illuminates the prominence of “democratic” architectural conventions in Ephesian monumental avenues, the elite-centric vision of civic history implicit in their sculptural displays, and the degree to which public ceremonies reinforced their political messages.
Keywords
- Type
- History Gathers in Trees and Streets
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2018
References
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80 Around the time the Nymphaeum was begun, Pliny wrote a letter (Epistle 6.31.3) mentioning Aristion's local preeminence and connections with Rome.
81 IvE #424: “[Ἀ]ρτέμιδι Ἐϕ[ε]σίᾳ κα[ὶ] Αὐ[τοκράτορι] Νέρουᾳ Τρα[ιανῶι Κα]ίσα[ρι Σεβαστῶ]ι Γερμ̣[ανικ]ῷ Δακικῶι καὶ τῇ πατρίδι….”
82 Compare Low, Setha, On the Plaza: the Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin, 2000), 84–101Google Scholar; and Inomata, Takeshi, “Plazas, Performers, and Spectators: Political Theaters of the Classic Maya,” Current Anthropology 47 (2006): 805–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83 I borrow the term “cue” from Amos Rapoport. According to him, environmental cues “communicate identity, status, and the like and through this they establish a context and define a situation. The subjects read the cues, identify the situation and the context, and act accordingly.” The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach (London, 1982), 56Google Scholar.
84 On the significance of the ruler's body in Early Modern Europe, see the useful survey in Smuts, Malcolm and Gorse, George, “Introduction,” in Fantoni, Marcello, Gorse, George, and Smuts, Malcolm. eds., The Politics of Space: European Courts, ca. 1500–1700 (Rome, 2009), 16–35Google Scholar.
85 It has been suggested, for example, that the Strada Nuova of Genoa was designed as a permanent setting for increasingly elaborate ceremonies of welcome; see Gorse, George, “Between Empire and Republic: Triumphal Entries into Genoa during the Sixteenth Century,” in “All the World's a Stage…”: Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque (University Park, Penn., 1990), 203Google Scholar. Compare the route of the papal possesso in Rome, gradually monumentalized to complement the ceremony; Nuti, Lucia, “Re-Moulding the City: The Roman Possessi in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Mulryne, J. R., ed., Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power (Burlington, 2015), 113–34Google Scholar.
86 Barbaro, I Dieci Libri dell' Architettura, 129: “é necessario, bello & commodo nella città che oltra le strade & le vie ci siano delle piazza … egli si ha questo commodo, che iui si runano le genti a passeggiare … & si dà luogo a molti spettacoli.” On Barbaro's association of orderly architecture with an orderly society, see Tafuri, Manfredo, “La norma e il programma,” in Morresi, Manuela, ed., I dieci libri dell'architettura tradotti e commentati da Daniele Barbaro (Milan, 1987)Google Scholar, XVIIf.
87 Hart and Hicks, Serlio on Architecture, 88–91; see Onians, John, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988), 284–85Google Scholar.
88 De conscribenda vita Magni Ducis Hetruriae Cosmi Medices V, F. 79: “Et modo Magnus Dux aedes iudicalis fori sumptu articioque maximo farbrefactas et foro Civium proximas constituens declaravit: Cum publicae potestatis magna ubique authoritas augustiore conspecta loco … illorum qui muneri eiusmodi administrando preaesint plurimum interesse credatur, si oculis omnium, et principis praesertim expositi….”
89 Earlier Medici had contemplated broadly similar projects. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, Lorenzo the Magnificent planned, but never executed, a major construction program centered on the creation of two new avenues and the erection of colonnades on the Piazza dell’ Annunziata. The new streets and embellished piazza were probably intended to frame a projected Medici palace, and movement to and from it. See Elam, Caroline, “Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Urban Development of Renaissance Florence,” Art History 1 (1978): 43–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tafuri, Manfredo, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, Sherer, D., trans. (New Haven, 2006), 60–67Google Scholar. Compare Brunelleschi's earlier plan for a plaza in front of the Medici palazzo (Milanesi, Le Opere, II, 371–72).
90 Giorgio Vasari il Giovane, La città ideale: Piante di chiese (palazzi e ville) di Toscana e d'Italia. A cura di Virginia Stefanelli (Rome, 1970), 98–99Google Scholar.
91 Sansoni, Diario Fiorentino, 301.
92 See Lessmann, Studien zu einer Baumonographie, 166–67 on the ritual functions of the Uffizi courtyard.
93 Sansoni, G. C., ed., Diario Fiorentino di Agostino Lapini (Florence, 1900), 231Google Scholar.
94 Cosimo's funeral: Sansoni, Diario Fiorentino, 185; see also Borsook, Eve, “Art and Politics at the Medici Court I: The Funeral of Cosimo I de' Medici,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 12 (1965): 31–54Google Scholar, 37–38. The evidence for Fransceso's funeral derives from the diary of an anonymous Florentine cited by Lessmann, Studien zu einer Baumonographie, 448 n716.
95 On the theatrical qualities of the Uffizi courtyard, see Fleming, Alison, “Presenting the Spectators as the Show: The Piazza degli Uffizi as Theater and Stage,” Sixteenth Century Journal 37 (2006): 701–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the general evolution and significance of stage setting in this period, see Strong, Roy, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Berkeley, 1984), 32–35Google Scholar.
96 For a useful survey, see the contributions in Fagiolo, Marcello, ed., La città efimera e l'universo artificiale del giardino: la Firenze dei Medici e l'Italia del '500 (Rome, 1980)Google Scholar.
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99 The fullest account is P. Ginori Conti, L'apparato per le nozze di Francesco de' Medici e di Giovanna d'Austria (Florence, 1936). Useful studies include: Scorza, R. A., “Vincenzo Borghini and Invenzione: The Florentine Apparato of 1565,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 57–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Veen, Henk, “Republicanism in the Visual Propaganda of Cosimo I de' Medici,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 200–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 151–89. Compare Saslow, James M., The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven, 1996)Google Scholar.
100 Several recent studies have examined the interrelations of public movement and setting in the Classical world. See Laurence, Ray and Newsome, David J., eds., Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laurence, Ray, “Streets and Facades,” in Ulrich, Roger B., and Quenemoen, Caroline K., eds., A Companion to Roman Architecture (Malden, Mass., 2014), 399–411Google Scholar; and Östenberg, Ida, Malmberg, Simon, and Bjørnebye, Jonas, eds., The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome (London, 2015)Google Scholar.
101 On the one hand, they were degraded by their association with busybodies, the indigent, and the idle; on the other, they were sanctified by the practice of politics. See Christopher Dickenson, On the Agora: Power and Public Space in Hellenistic and Roman Greece (PhD thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2012), 315–62. For a useful list of terms imperial Greeks associated with the agora, see Pollux, Onomastikon 3: 126–27.
102 Buildings for the performance of plays, speeches, and other products of Hellenic elite culture proliferated on agoras in the early imperial era; see Dickenson, Christopher, On the Agora. The Evolution of a Public Space in Hellenistic and Roman Greece (Boston, 2017), 370–77Google Scholar. The agora of Thasos provides a particularly well-documented example of the formalization and monumentalization that transformed so many agoras in the early imperial era. See Marc, Jean-Yves, “L'agora de Thasos du IIe siècle av. J.-C. au Ier siècle ap. J.-C.: état des recherches,” in Marc, J. and Moretti, J., eds., Constructions publiques et programmes édilitaires en Grèce entre le IIe siècle av. J.-C. et le Ier siècle ap. J.-C (Athens, 2001), 495–516Google Scholar.
103 De vitioso pudore 16 (Moralia 535B). Compare Dio Chrysostom, Oration 7.133–34; Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.76.53; and Apuleius, Metamorphoses 2.2.
104 Greek declamations of the imperial era habitually describe both streets and agoras as possessions of the people; see Russell, Donald, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983), 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 212f, and Libanius, Oration 11.213–17.
105 Östenberg, Malmberg, and Bjørnebye, Moving City; Hartnett, Jeremy, The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome (Cambridge, 2017), 84–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
106 On walking, see Hoyland, Robert, “The Leiden Polemon,” in Swain, Simon, ed., Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul (Oxford, 2007), 439–43Google Scholar; and O'Sullivan, Timothy, Walking in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Revell, Roman Imperialism, 150–90. See more generally de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Rendall, Steven, trans. (Berkeley, 1984), 91–110Google Scholar.
107 Wealthy men in the mid-imperial east often commissioned sarcophagi decorated with stylized arcades, on which they and their families appeared as statues, or suspended walkers, on a colonnaded street. See Thomas, Edmund, “Houses of the Dead? Columnar Sarcophagi as Micro-Architecture,” in Elsner, Jas and Huskinson, Janet, eds., Life, Death and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi (Berlin, 2011), 387–435Google Scholar.
108 A useful summary of civic ritual in imperial Greek cities is provided by Fritz Graf, Roman Festivals in the Greek East (Cambridge, 2015), 11–60. The influence of ritual in encouraging the development of formalized built environments is discussed in a late antique context by Dey, Hendrik, The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2015)Google Scholar.
109 It has been suggested, for example, that a statue of a satyr erected in a prominent place near the Nymphaeum of Trajan was referenced, or played some role in, Dionysiac processions along the Embolos. Helmut Englemann, “Statue und Standort (IvE 507),” in Ekkehard Weber and Gerhard Dobesch, eds., Römische Geschichte, Altertumskunde und Epigraphik: Festschrift für Artur Betz zur Vollendung seines 80. Lebensjahres (Vienna, 1985), 249–55.
110 Cavalier, Laurence and Courtils, Jacques Des, “Degrés et Gradins en Bordure de Rue: Aménagements pour les Pompai?” in Ballet, Pascale, Saliou, Catherine, and Dieudonné-Glad, Nadine, eds., La rue dans l'Antiquité: définition, aménagement et devenir de l'Orient méditerranéen à la Gaule (Rennes, 2008), 83–92Google Scholar.
111 Bérenger, Agnes, “L’ Adventus des Gouverneurs de Province,” in Bérenger, A. and Perrin-Saminadayar, E., eds., Les entrées royales et impériales: histoire, représentation et diffusion d'une cérémonie publique, de l'Orient ancien à Byzance (Paris, 2009), 123–38Google Scholar.
112 See especially Hamon, Patrice, “Le Conseil et la participation des citoyens: mutations de la basse époque hellénistique,” in Fröhlich, Pierre and Müller, Christel, eds., Citoyenneté et participation à la basse époque hellénistique (Droz, 2005), 121–44Google Scholar.
113 Rogers, Guy, The Sacred Identity of Ephesos: Foundation Myths of a Roman City (New York, 1991), 80–126Google Scholar.