This article looks at the spatial dynamics in two poetic architectural descriptions and their relations to spatial aspects of two works of architecture. One description, Statius’ Silvae 4.2, is an explicit account of a contemporary building, the well-preserved Palace of Domitian on the Palatine in Rome, familiar to author and readers alike. The other, Lucan’s account of Cleopatra’s palace in Alexandria in his Bellum Civile, has a less obvious point of reference. While it purports to describe a foreign work of historical architecture, which the author had probably never seen, it evokes more closely a contemporary work in Rome, Nero’s Golden House, which was every bit as notorious as Domitian’s palace was in Statius’ time. Substantial archaeological remains of both buildings survive. They have individually been the object of extensive art-historical study, and each description has on its own stimulated substantial critical analysis.
Space does not allow a full consideration here of either the physical buildings or the descriptions. Instead, this article addresses the exceptional opportunity offered by their correspondences to confront the verbal accounts of these architectural spaces alongside their physical ‘realities’. As evident from previous studies, neither text is a straightforward work of praise or criticism that clearly represents the architecture to which it corresponds. This article, however, takes a new approach by considering both texts and buildings in relation to the visual and spatial aesthetics of the ‘Baroque’. It contends that both the reading of the verbal descriptions and the viewing of the physical ‘realities’ depend on an extensive use of fantasy and illusion, which goes beyond palace descriptions in earlier poetry and is characteristic of a ‘Baroque’ manner of spatial representation. It also argues that ‘Baroque’ entails not only the spatial and material features of a building, but also their possible impacts on the spectator. Poets and architects alike strive for visionary and illusionary qualities of architectural materials and space, employing strategies of early seventeenth-century Italian artists characterised by the term ‘Baroque’. As a result, in one case, even though the reader seems to recognise a familiar building in the text, they can never come close to it, while in the other case the description presents the illusion, not the reality, of the building’s design.
The article starts by surveying the history of the modern term ‘Baroque’ and its implications for understandings of space. It then considers ancient theories of viewing and cognition, highlighting the perceived role of the emotions in the experience of ancient architectural space and paying particular attention to the concept of ekplēxis as a response to the built environment and its similarity to Baroque strategies of vision. Finally, it explores these two case studies, which illustrate the interconnections between modern notions of the ‘Baroque’ and ancient theories of viewing. The article argues that, like the viewing of later ‘Baroque’ art and architecture, the experience of architecture in first-century Rome could be an exercise in negotiating the boundaries between the fictive and the real.
On the Baroque
A volume on space can hardly avoid the issue of ‘Baroque spatialities’ since no cultural phenomenon has prompted questions of spatiality more consistently than that known as the ‘Baroque’, which has come to imply the primacy of spatial depth. The term has moved beyond its initially distanced and pejorative use to denigrate irregularity and excessive exuberance in art.Footnote 1 That portrayal goes back particularly to Quatremère de Quincy, who, in the late eighteenth century, characterised the ‘Baroque’ as ‘a nuance of the bizarre’ bringing with it the idea ‘of the ridiculous pushed to excess’.Footnote 2 This negative identification of the ‘Baroque’ with ‘turgidity’ continued to be commonplace in twentieth-century descriptions of architecture.Footnote 3 For one scholar of seventeenth-century dress, for example, the wigs of the 1600s encompassed ‘all the features of the baroque: the turgidity, theatricality, the paradoxical exaggeration aimed at capturing attention and stirring up maraviglia’.Footnote 4 ‘Baroque’ received a more systematic definition in the set of formal principles identified by Heinrich Wölfflin a century later, partly prompted by stylistic comparisons with the recently rediscovered sculptures from the Pergamon Altar, as a distinctive characterisation of art and architecture in early seventeenth-century Italy.Footnote 5 On such a definition, in opposition to classically ordered arrangements characterised by perspectives and notional ‘vanishing points’, ‘Baroque’ representations involve shifting centres and complex spatial assemblages consisting of circles, angles, and planes unconstrained by the limits of a frame. Later art historians developed formal categorisations to recognise the ‘Baroque’ as distinctly concerned with the presentation and perception of space. As John Rupert Martin has theorised, the aim of the ‘Baroque’ artists of this period was ‘to break down the barrier between the work of art and the real world’. They did so by conceiving ‘of the subject represented as existing in a space coextensive with that of the observer’, so that ‘everything forms part of a continuous and unbroken totality’.Footnote 6 Such interpretations of the ‘Baroque’ rested on the notion of Raumgefühl, a feeling of spatial enclosure as body responds to body.Footnote 7
Continuing to dominate post-war accounts of early modern architecture and urbanism, this spatial conception of the ‘Baroque’ inspired modernist architects’ own efforts to mould space. The realisation that such modes of design can occur at other times, and that these are not the only features of early modern art, has led most art historians to reject ‘Baroque’ as a term of periodisation, being too limiting both conceptually and temporally. Instead, the application of characterisations such as Martin’s to wider contexts has allowed the notion of ‘Baroque’ to become a space for broader cultural reflection on the articulation of space.Footnote 8 Gilles Deleuze suggested that the ‘Baroque’ presents an ‘architecture of vision’, which places the viewer in a spatial relationship with the representation.Footnote 9 Beyond the realm of art history, social scientists and geographers over the last thirty years have devised the concepts of ‘agency’, ‘assemblage’, and ‘relationality’ from similar ideas. The epitome of this modern transcultural approach to Baroque is the work of Christine Buci-Glucksmann, who offers a wider framework for seeing architectural forms and spaces analogously to those in literature, music, and other arts.Footnote 10
In literary studies, Maurice Blanchot and Joseph Kestner have theorised the role that space plays in literary production and representation, highlighting the importance of the ‘spatial’ in a genre which privileges temporal aspects.Footnote 11 Despite its continued pejorative association with supposedly ‘turgid’ writing, ‘Baroque’ has also found more constructive use.Footnote 12 Robert Tally has applied Wölfflin’s polarised distinctions between Renaissance and Baroque architecture as ‘linear’ and ‘pictorial’ to what he calls ‘the literary cartography’ of the ‘baroque’ novelist Hermann Melville. Tally argues that the ‘real world’ mapping of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick exposes the imaginary places of Melville’s fictional universe, like Soja’s ‘real and imagined’ spaces of the world.Footnote 13 In short, ‘Baroque’ can challenge readers and viewers to rethink relations between the spaces they experience and those they imagine.
This article takes further this intersection of the ‘fictive’ and the ‘real’ to explore the relations between architectural and literary space. It compares the spatialities of Lucan’s and Statius’ verse descriptions of palaces to those of actual palatial complexes constructed in Rome during the same period, and compares the approaches of their authors and architects to the representation of space to the spatial modes of ‘Baroque’ culture. In particular, it argues that, because architecture and literature employ common strategies of spatial fantasy and visual illusion, the experience of ‘real’ architecture depends as much on literary descriptions as the reading of the verbal descriptions depends on the context of real architecture.
Phantasia versus verisimilitude
Crucial for understanding these mutually reinforcing spatial worlds is the notion of phantasia, which was central to both ancient and early modern understandings of literary ekphrasis and, in later periods too, helped to generate the illusionistic spatial properties seen as characteristic of the ‘Baroque’.Footnote 14 Aristotle characterises phantasia as an intermediate phase between perception and thought, with similarities to each of these. Phantasia receives and stores sensory data before their retrieval by the intellect and is therefore capable of producing illusions as well as realities; unlike perception, phantasia is not constrained by verisimilitude.Footnote 15 In later rhetorical theory of the Roman period, phantasia was strongly opposed to mimesis (Philostr. VA 6.19). As others have explored, when writers visualise a place or a work of art in prose or poetry, they establish its presence in the text through mechanisms of realism and verisimilitude, presenting an image before the reader’s or listener’s eyes, so that the object becomes in microcosm a means of inserting a ‘reality effect’ into the surrounding narrative.Footnote 16 A real space enters the literary work to become a literary space, which admits the reader or listener. As is well known, this was an effect of the rhetorical device of enargeia. Yet, as Ruth Webb has clarified, enargeia is not a mysterious power of words that somehow brings images to mind, but the result of a convergence between the speaker’s power to convey images verbally and the audience’s power to visualise what is represented. It does not simply make the audience see a lifelike illusion, but creates in the audience the illusion of seeing in the first place.Footnote 17 Thus enargeia does not simply create an impression of verisimilitude, as an image of the ‘real’, but has the potential to produce illusion and deception.Footnote 18 The phantasia invades the emotions and makes the reader or listener psychologically involved (Quint. Inst. 6.2.29).Footnote 19 Shadi Bartsch has highlighted this potential of phantasia to deceive.Footnote 20 Exactly this kind of deceptive illusionism is particularly characteristic of ‘Baroque’ art.
When the subject of ekphrasis is architectural, the environment described offers the writer the opportunity to seduce readers or listeners into an illusion of being situated within the same physical context as the protagonists. The extent of architectural detail presented and the realism of the space depicted help the reader to recognise their presence inside the narrative, more than the image of a painting, which a viewer only experiences from outside. Rather than simply representing a pause in narration or a key to interpret the narrative, an architectural setting imposes spatial involvement on the reader, and its success in ensuring this may depend on the recognisability of its architectural features.Footnote 21 If the enargeia of making a reader or listener ‘see’ an object gives them the power to confront it visually, enargeia applied to architectural spaces involves them in a wider, synaesthetic manner, giving powers to hear, feel, and smell the materiality of their surroundings. Architectural descriptions thus make a particular claim to help us to rediscover the sensuality of spatial experience.
Critics usually understand phantasia as an ‘impression’, a fleeting image or replica of a conceit imagined by the artist. It can also, perhaps better, be understood as not merely the ‘illusion’ of verisimilitude, but a complete product of the imagination or, in the modern sense, a ‘fantasy’.Footnote 22 A phantasia may not simply be an ‘impression’ or ‘illusion’ of the ‘real’, but that illusion may also be implausible and induced through a process of deception. This is the opposite of verisimilitude and questions the validity of the proposed relation between literary space and real space. For architecture, that is troubling because the effective visualisation of a space depends on its plausibility and on the ability of a reader or listener to believe themselves to be present in that environment. If the ‘impression’ is deceptive or implausible, it undermines and discomforts listeners or readers in their efforts to believe themselves to be part of the environment that purports to be a ‘reality’.
Ekplēxis: spaces that terrify
‘Pseudo-Longinus’, author of Περὶ ὕψους (On the Sublime), probably written in the later first century CE, saw phantasiai, or ‘image productions’ (eidôlopoiïai), as the go-to device for producing ‘swelling, grand speech, and competition’.Footnote 23 ‘The term’, he writes, ‘now prevails for those places where you seem to see the things that you describe through inspiration and emotion and to put them directly in your hearers’ vision’; rhetorical phantasia aims at visualisation (enargeia), poetical phantasia at ekplēxis, but ‘both types aim at the emotional and the excited’ ([Longinus], Subl. 15.1–2). Two centuries earlier, Polybius likewise differentiated between historical narratives aimed at vividness (enargeia), especially in battle scenes, and myth, which strives for pleasure (hēdonē) or shock (ekplēxis) (Polyb. 34.4.4 = Str. 1.2.17). Although the visual is prominent here, the term ekplēxis implies a synaesthetic rhetoric, which amounts to total immersion in a space.
Donald Russell and Richard Hunter infer that such ‘emotional amazement’ was a particular response from readers to fictional material (τὸ μυθῶδες).Footnote 24 Aristotle categorises ekplēxis as ‘an excess of wonderment (θαυμασιότης)’ (Arist. Top. 126b). It arose from sensual responses to the materiality of an object and its textures, colours, and brightness.Footnote 25 Yet Polybius mentions historians who employ ‘sensationalisms and theatricalities … to shock their listeners’ (Polyb. 15.34.1–2).Footnote 26 Zeno, for example, had such disregard for fact and reckless aversion to the plausible that his lavish siege and battle narratives were comparable to ‘works written for display to shock the masses’ (Zeno hist., fr. 3 = Polyb. 16.18.1–3). The impact of such works derived from sensory directness and unexpected immediacy that transported the audience into a space. A real space could shock as much as, or more than, a fictional one. The ekplēxis felt by devotees of the Mysteries at Eleusis consisted of a physical, sensory reaction within that space, ‘shock and shuddering as in darkness and at night’ (Demetr. Eloc. 99–101: ἔκπληξιν καὶ φρίκην, ὥσπερ ἐν σκότῳ καὶ νυκτί).
In architecture, ekplēxis arises from light, as well as dark. Yet this is not the clarifying light of enargeia, which captivates viewers by making space visible. Ekplēxis comes from an excess of brightness caused by dazzling light, orientation towards the sun, reflective materials, and open spaces extending to the horizon. The most prevalent emotion it aroused was not wonder but fear. Ekplēxis was the shock of being ‘knocked back’ (ἐκπλήττειν), a physical ‘impact’ with enervating consequences, or an intense emotional reaction, like the terror experienced by audiences of drama (Arist. Poet. 1.11; cf. Aesch. Pers. 606; Eur. Tro. 183; Pl. Ion 535b2). In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, it denotes extreme fear (Arist. Rhet. 1385b32 οἱ ἐλπεπληγμένοι = φοβούμενοι σφόδρα); for Thucydides, it was the mass panic of a group as opposed to the ‘fright’ (φόβῳ) of an individual (Thuc. 6.36.2; cf. 4.34.2 and 8.96.1).Footnote 27 If ekplēxis was mental shock at the unfamiliar, its cognate kataplēxis was sheer terror (Thuc. 7.42.2; 8.1.2; 8.66.2).Footnote 28 It prompted physiognomic responses: fever, vacant eyes, and speechlessness (Hippoc. Epid. 7.56 κατάπληξις ὀμμάτων, ἢ ἀφωνίη; cf. Gorg. fr. 11a.4, causing inevitable ἀπορεῖν). A Stoic understanding of the passions that prevailed in first-century Rome listed a catalogue of fear: ‘hesitation, agony, shock (ekplēxis), embarrassment, mental upheaval, superstition, alarm, and terror’ (Chrysipp. Stoic. fr. 394 = Stob. Ecl. 2.90, 7 W; cf. fr. 407, in Diog. Laert. 7.112). Of thirteen different varieties, ekplēxis was the fear that resulted ‘from an unfamiliar impression (phantasia) of danger’, while kataplēxis was ‘fear of a great impression’ (Chrysipp. Stoic. fr. 408 = Stob. Ecl. 2.92 W: ἔκπληξις δὲ φόβος ἐξ ἀσυνήθους φαντασίας).Footnote 29 To some, ekplēxis and phobos were almost indistinguishable.Footnote 30
For viewers standing before works of art, such ekplēxis could induce petrification or paralysis.Footnote 31 The Greek artists popular in Rome employed similar techniques to facilitate exaggeration, deception, and falsehood in their evocations of space, seeking to create illusions distanced from the real.Footnote 32 Some of these strategies, like amplification (auxēsis), big talk (makrologia), and grandeur (megaloprepeia), targeted exaggeration of proportions, like Piranesi’s Vedute in the early modern Baroque, whose tiny human figures make Roman ruins appear gigantic in scale and play on observers’ awareness of their own bodies.Footnote 33 Others, such as repetition (dilogia), recapitulation (palillogia), and opposition (antithesis), sought deluding or distorting practices of reordering. Others again, such as emotional magnification (deinōsis), produced debilitating psychological effects like shock (ekplēxis) or suffering (pathos). As Peter Schultz notes, all these artistic devices were ‘both aesthetic goals and the means by which these goals were achieved’, as artists pursued psychological persuasion (psychagōgia) of their viewers.Footnote 34
‘Baroque’ architecture and literature adopt similar rhetorical strategies to achieve an aesthetic goal of amazement. Aiming at the deception or terrorisation of the recipient – reader, listener, or viewer – who participates in a real or fictional space, they entail a shock factor resulting not just in pleasure but in fear, which derives from a capacity to evoke multi-sensory responses. As Giulio Argan has observed, the essence of ‘baroque’ art is persuasion, a desire ‘not to persuade the audience of this or that, but simply to persuade’.Footnote 35 His classic example is the Baldacchino in St Peter’s by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the ‘epitome of psychological illusionism’, which sought to persuade viewers to imagine a change in scale:
Fruitless efforts had been made to place a ciborium in architectural form, almost a small temple, under Michelangelo’s dome; but every architectural structure looked feeble beside the bulky frames of those gigantic pilasters. Bernini did not produce a piece of architecture, but a completely different category: he took a relatively small object, a processional baldachin, and enlarged it disproportionately, transforming its thin sides into bulky spiral columns of bronze. In this way, Bernini, a great designer of stage sets, created a mental illusion founded on the alteration of the usual ideas of the dimensions of objects. According to such ideas, a building and a baldachin belong to two orders of different sizes: reducing a building in size causes a process of reduction in the viewer’s mind, whereas enlarging it leads the viewer to relocate the values of the usual scale and expand them … the psychological illusion persuades one to imagine.Footnote 36
Argan presents Bernini’s construction here as a scenic work, inspired by his personal experience of theatre design. Yet this was no theatrical background, recognised only from afar. Viewers also sensed the gigantic scale of the gaping dome above by standing in the object’s immediate presence. Its magnification beside the spectator allows the architect to manipulate the viewer into perceiving an illusion of distance upwards, in the same way as the poet persuades the reader to imagine a cosmic space. His transformation of an object from small-scale decoration into an element of a voluminous space is comparable to the conversion by the poet Marino of delicate precious commodities into solid structural masses. As Argan admits, such illusions of scale do not only come about from making an object larger than expected. Miniaturisation can have the same effect. A bronze or ivory statuette can have a momentous impact because of its subject matter, as Statius elsewhere evokes for the Hercules created by the sculptor Vindex (Stat. Silv. 4.6.44–9). Footnote 37
In early seventeenth-century ‘Baroque’ poetry, the ‘expansive, hyperbolic, sensuous’ works of Giambattista Marino sought wonderment through a phantasia that deceived the viewer.Footnote 38 The epigrams in his Galeria, modelled on Philostratus’ Imagines, create ‘sensual and mental confusion’.Footnote 39 Such strategies translated to palatial architecture. The initial view of the Palace of Venus in the second book of his epic, the Adone, fills Adonis’ heart with ‘infinite amazement’ (II.13.8), each arch of the flanking towers ‘so high and subtle’ that its ‘sublime burden hangs in the air by a divine miracle’. The materials are hyperbolic: an ‘adamantine wall’ (II.14), and precious gems, whose ‘curvature shines in different colours’, emulating a rainbow by a deception of light and colour (II.16). The palatial architecture is ‘not of porphyries and serpentines, but of oriental stones … Precious chrysoliths and rubies sawn instead of marbles and alabasters’. Ekplēxis is the idealised response to the archetypal palace of Plato’s Atlantis, constructed ‘to be looked at in shock (ekplēxis) for the size and beauty of its buildings’ (Pl. Criti. 115c–d ἕως εἰς ἔκπληξιν μεγέθεσι κάλλεσι τε ἔργων ἰδεῖν τὴν οἴκησιν ἀπειργάσαντο). In the Empire, a good monarch inspired respect rather than ekplēxis, because ‘those who fear inevitably hate and want to escape, while those who feel respect (αἰδουμένους) linger and admire’ (Dio Chrys. Or. 1.15). Cassius Dio’s Maecenas urges Augustus that the emperor’s buildings should arouse ‘respect (aidōs) in his allies and terror (kataplēxis) in his enemies’ (Dio Cass. 52.30.1 πρός τε τοὺς συμμάχους αἰδῶ καὶ πρὸς τοὺς πολεμίους κατάπληξιν). The ingredient of terror explains why ekplēxis was a typical reaction to both written descriptions of architecture and actual buildings, and why architects too played games of deception, shock, and persuasion in creating spaces.
The possibility of such responses motivated by either the spatial extent or physical height of a palace or the dazzling qualities of its materials is a consistent feature of architecture labelled as ‘Baroque’. Such buildings play not only with impressions of scale, but also with ideas of material and surface, as recent theorists have explained:
In its materiality and bodiliness, baroque undermines resolution, gropes towards fragmentation, overgrows, and exceeds. Baroque architecture may be seen as overflowing, an excess of ornamental exteriority and evasive proliferation. This brings to the fore the question of surface. Andrew Benjamin’s approach to surface as neither merely structural nor merely decoration in architecture is important here. … (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2006). Thus the pursuit is for a baroque vision of vision, a baroque audition of hearing, and a multitemporality. The question of materiality (not mere matter, materials, or technique) must also come into play.Footnote 40
The approach to surface as neither only structural nor merely decorative brings to mind the distinction between ‘body’ and ‘surface’ by Stoic philosophers, who disputed the very nature of matter.Footnote 41 Diogenes Laertius reports that Apollodorus, an orthodox follower of Chrysippus, considered surface as ‘a limit of a body, or what has length and breadth only, no depth’ (Diog. Laert. 7.135).Footnote 42 Posidonius’ alternative view, given by Diogenes, that surface exists ‘both in thought and in reality’ and is therefore itself a body, seems to imply an opposition to the usual Stoic belief that surfaces exist only in intellectu, ‘as mental constructs’ and a fiction created by geometers.Footnote 43 This conceptualisation of body and surface has two implications. On the one hand, materials have a creative capacity. They form the body that constitutes the reality of architecture and gives it solidity. Yet what ultimately realises the potentiality of matter is the secondary stage of creation, distinct from its body, the surface adornment that gives it meaning, which is not itself a ‘body’ but a defining ‘limit’. In the case of the supreme building, the cosmos, this exornatio mundi is the growth of plants and species that forms ‘the varied workmanship of wonder in any and every animal form’;Footnote 44 in palatial architecture, it is the added revetment that impresses the viewer, not the underlying structure. On the other hand, if such surfaces exist only in the mind, they cannot be appreciated by the senses because they lack the materiality of a body. So, the experience of physical surfaces of buildings through human touch is a conceptual illusion and deception. We will see the impact of this in the imperial palace descriptions.
Paper palaces
Fantasy plays a large role in representations of palatial architecture in Greek and Roman epic, sometimes with and sometimes without invoking the deception or fantasy characteristic of the Baroque (Hom. Od. 7.81–132: Palace of Alcinous; Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3.213–46: Palace of Aeëtes; Virg. Aen. 7.170–1: Palace of Picus; Ov. Met. 2.1–7: Palace of the Sun). No one doubts the fantastical element in Plato’s account of Atlantis or in the mythical palaces of earlier epic. These descriptions encourage the disbelieving amazement of the narrative spectator, which stands for and incites the amazement of the listener to the surrounding poem, but they do not necessarily invoke the Baroque. In Hellenistic epic, for example, the stone entablature set on bronze capitals in Aeëtes’ palace evokes a physical reaction arising from the contrasting materials (Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3.218).Footnote 45 This earlier poetic focus on materiality and its effect on the senses and emotions through the cultivation of the implausible rarely invites spatial involvement from either protagonist or reader. Virgil’s Palace of Picus is almost two-dimensional, a forbidding backdrop, its tectonics little more than a metaphorical presence that hints undisguisedly at the House of Augustus on the Palatine (Verg. Aen. 7.170–1), as Servius recognised (ad loc.).Footnote 46 The real tectum Augustum, or domus Augusta, overshadowed Virgil and his readers intimidatingly, inspiring dread both through the dark, still partially forested slopes of the hill and from the unnerving mood of ancestral religio emanating from the walls. Even the materiality of Picus’ complex is absent until the reader reaches the royal statues of cedar wood that become the real focus of the ekphrasis. The surrounding architecture is lifeless; behind its imposing façade, its spatial extent is imperceptible and inaccessible. Ovid honours this tradition of the scenic palace with audible repetitions from Virgil (sublimibus alta columnis, Ov. Met. 2.1), extending the palace’s role as backdrop by highlighting its materials: ‘high with columns sublime, bright with flickering gold and bronze imitating fire, glossy ivory covering its highest pediments, and double doors radiating with the light of silver’. Yet, as soon as he intimates that hyperbolic materiality, he rapidly isolates it with the gnomic materiam superabat opus (‘the material was surpassed by the work’, Ov. Met. 2.5) and retreats from spatiality, to focus, like Virgil, on a work of art, the cosmic silver reliefs on the doors, rather than the enveloping space.Footnote 47 These palaces amaze, but they do not deceive.
The two imperial architectural descriptions considered here, however, spatialise the fantastic more fully and entangle it with deceptive evocations of real architectural space. Lucan and Statius present spatially aware descriptions that employ a ‘baroque’ manner and betray their inspiration from spatial experience of contemporary architecture, which also has much in common with the ‘Baroque’. Yet, as Vernon Hyde Minor has written of baroque visual rhetoric in general, the rhetoric of these descriptions does not ‘abandon the phenomenal world’ altogether, but ‘places it in a more dynamic relationship with human self-knowledge and imagination or fantasia’.Footnote 48 These texts create synaesthetic impressions of imagined architecture, focusing on its spatiality and materiality. By playing on tensions between three-dimensional tectonic mass and the illusory shallowness of architectural surface, tensions accentuated to the reader by sensory awareness, the writers highlight the deception and illusion in the real architectures that they insinuate. They adopt rhetorical devices that aim at the emotional impact of an ekplēxis seeking the psychagōgia of readers and lead their phantasia towards an unreality that produces sensual, mental, and physiognomic responses to the familiar.
Cleopatra’s palace
ipse locus templi, quod vix corruptior aetas
extruat, instar erat; laqueataque tecta ferebant
divitias, crassumque trabes absconderat aurum.
nec summis crustata domus sectisque nitebat
marmoribus, stabatque sibi non segnis achates 115
purpureusque lapis, totaque effusus in aula
calcabatur onyx; hebenus Meroitica vastos
non operit postes, sed stat pro robore vili,
auxilium non forma domus. ebur atria vestit,
et suffecta manu foribus testudinis Indae 120
terga sedent, crebro maculas distincta zmaragdo.
fulget gemma toris, et iaspide fulva supellex
{stat mensas onerans, variaque triclinia veste}
strata micant, Tyrio cuius pars maxima fuco
cocta diu virus non uno duxit aeno,
pars auro plumata nitet, pars ignea cocco, 125
ut mos est Phariis miscendi licia telis.
tum famulae numerus turbae populusque minister.
discolor hos sanguis, alios distinxerat aetas;
haec Libycos, pars tam flavos gerit altera crines,
ut nullis Caesar Rheni se dicat in arvis 130
tam rutilas vidisse comas; pars sanguinis usti
torta caput refugosque gerens a fronte capillos;
nec non infelix ferro mollita iuventus
atque exsecta virum: stat contra fortior aetas
vix ulla fuscante tamen lanugine mala. 135
Luc. 10.111–35
The site itself was the semblance of a sacred place which a more corrupt age could scarcely construct; panelled ceilings carried riches, and beams had been concealed by thick gold. Not revetted with surface or cut marbles did the house shine; and no sluggish agate stood there for its own sake, and porphyry stone, and onyx spread within the whole palace was trod underfoot; ebony from Meroe does not cover the vast doorjambs but replaces cheap timber as a reinforcement of the house, not its façade. Ivory clothes the atria, and the backs of Indian turtle sit, laid under the doors by hand, differentiated with frequent speckles of emerald. Jewellery shines on the couches, and tableware yellow with jasper {stands burdening the tables, while dining couches} laid {with robes of different colours} flicker, most of which, long baked in Tyrian dye, has drawn its juices from not just one cauldron; some shine feathered with gold, others with fiery scarlet, as is the custom of mixing leashes for webs from Pharos. Then, the number of a slave crowd and an attendant multitude. Some had been distinguished by blood of different colours, others by age. Some wear the hair of Africa, others hair so fair that in no Rhineland fields could Caesar say that he had seen such ruddy locks; some had dark skins and woolly heads, with hair receding from the forehead. There too an unfortunate adolescence softened by the knife, manhood excised; opposite them stands a stronger age, yet cheeks darkened by hardly any down.
It is conventional to interpret Lucan’s description as a Stoic attack on luxury architecture, like his uncle Seneca’s tirade against contemporary baths.Footnote 49 Yet, although informed by Stoic ideas, this is no diatribe. Lucan carries the lavish materiality decried by Seneca to a new dimension. Lucan’s object is not real architecture, but the unreality that ambitious architecture envisions. Presented as an ekphrasis of a set-piece locus, the passage’s intense opening hyperbole not only compares the palace in Alexandria with religious architecture, but also highlights how it exceeds that of ‘a more corrupt age’ (111). This is no reality, but the ‘semblance’ (instar, 112) of a temple, a sacred space (templum) normally open and palpable. The pretence and illusion in its beams concealed by gold question the building’s tectonics and privilege deceptive surface over real body. The qualities of this poetic construct resonate with the ‘extreme lack of clarity’ and ‘restless allure’ of Baroque architecture, which, as conceived by Wölfflin’s student Paul Frankl, ‘discards tectonic clarity since the new subject is the eye and the artwork maintains an ambiguous relationship with its own perception’.Footnote 50 While Seneca complained of the arrogant luxury of marble revetment in Roman baths, the viewer created by Lucan’s ekphrasis starts to feel an even more precious gilded decor, only to discover an illusion of surface as the gold recedes into the structure itself. This is the aesthetic of early modern Baroque buildings encrusted with abundant New World gold, such as Puebla cathedral in Mexico, its walls and ceilings, as José Limón enthused, ‘all covered with gold leaf, each elaborate surface at once source and mirror of golden radiance’.Footnote 51
In On Benefits, integrating ethics and physics, Seneca presents a moralising contrast between the surfaces of architectural materials, a deceptive human vanity concealing a different reality, and the bodies of natural ones. He belittles contemporary houses with gilded ceilings and ‘slender marble slabs (crustas) more delicate than even the blade by which they are cut’, in contrast with the ‘tiny fragments’ of nature’s ‘untouched mountains (moles) of the most precious stone, complete masses of unique, multi-coloured material causing amazement’; the sky above is ‘a ceiling that glitters in one way at night and differently by day’ (Sen. Ben. 4.6.2). He reverses a trope in which the coffered ceilings (laquearia) of temples are ‘a new heaven’ (Man. 5.289) emulated in ambitious private residences.Footnote 52 Lucan denies the mere surface of marble revetment but does not join this chorus of disapproval of regal ambition. Instead, he pursues the illusion and deceit to create a vision of unreality. He transforms the material’s tectonic and symbolic potential, presenting the revetment not as shallow surface ornament but as thick blocks (113–14). His ‘Baroque’ hyperrealism provides a more solidly tangible, three-dimensional materiality. Nonetheless, for all its supposed solidity, it remains a deception that ‘had concealed’ (absconderat) the beams beneath. When Lucan writes non segnis achates (‘no sluggish agate’), playing on the name of Aeneas’ companion, idle presence of Virgil’s Aeneid, he points to a philosophical tradition that even the most gratuitous substances such as precious gems are ‘not inactive’, but agents.Footnote 53 The insistence that this precious material of decorative art is ‘a support, not ornament’ (Luc. 10.119) touches on an ambiguity in architectural literature, on the status of materials as structure or surface, auxilium or forma.Footnote 54 Vitruvius’ theory of the architectural orders rests on a definition of ornamenta as imago, with Doric triglyphs and Ionic dentils representing beam-ends and purlins, which, despite their indistinguishability, suggests the separation of architecture and ornament.Footnote 55 Lucan’s language points to the materials’ structural role as agents;Footnote 56 yet the materials that play these roles are not travertine or concrete, nor even marble or granite, but treasured agate and porphyry normally reserved for portable vessels or objets d’art.Footnote 57
Reading Cleopatra’s palace, we see a structure built, appropriately, from Egyptian materials, but precious ones: blocks of agate and porphyry, and floors of onyx. The lavish materiality and illusory surface of onyx – not a true marble, but compact stalagmitic calcium carbonate, or limestone (calx) – is a physical, sensual experience, represented by the emphatic, punning calcabatur (‘was trodden’, Luc. 10.117);Footnote 58 the juxtaposition of this word with the material onyx is both aetiological and oxymoronic for a material of decorative art. This is Andrea Fulvio’s ‘yellow onyx coruscating with glassy brilliance’, a mainstay of exuberant Baroque church interiors.Footnote 59 Onyx floors, however, belong to no real ancient complexes, but to neo-baroque fantasy, such as Robin and Bruce Stevenson’s Time Machine 18: Sword of Caesar, where, as Nero’s singing voice cracks on a high note, ‘your silver dish of goose liver falls to the onyx floor!’.Footnote 60 More ‘solid’ uses of the material occur only in miniature architectural objects or in the fictional, faux-marbre world of decorative illusion, painted to simulate columns or revetment.Footnote 61 Lucan vividly materialises the exaggerated Stoic critique of modern life that ‘we have become so luxurious that we want to walk on nothing but precious stones’ (Sen. Ep. 86.7).
A nimble shift in tense (operit, 118) takes the reader from the historical past to the experience of the present, leading them directly inside the palace. Here the materiality of the surrounds makes itself even more directly sensed as the reader feels their touch on these polished surfaces. The inclusion of ebony (117) raises questions about the levels of ‘reality’ and ‘unreality’ in Lucan’s description. The Byzantine Alexander Romance recasts it as the Palace of Porus, with ‘royal chambers of white ivory and ceilings covered with ebony’, ‘rooms of cypress wood’, and ‘four hundred golden columns with golden capitals’.Footnote 62 However, in limiting the thickness of the gold panels to a finger’s depth, this description underwhelmingly loses the ‘Baroque’ impression of mass and the shift from ornament to structure in Lucan’s account. Like that writer, scholars of Alexandrian architecture try to rationalise the details of Lucan’s ekphrasis, seeing in it a clue, however poetical, to the actual appearance of Cleopatra’s palace.Footnote 63 The reality is more sobering. The use of ebony, for example, in ancient Egyptian buildings is questionable. Handbooks talk of ebony fittings, but the evidence is sparse.Footnote 64 This was the precious commodity exhibited by Pompey in 63 BCE and noted by Pliny for its ‘black splendour, very pleasing even without the aid of art’ (HN 12.20).Footnote 65
The ivory that ‘clothes the doors’ is a visionary architecture, like the ivory propylaeum of the fabulous pavilion of Ptolemy Philadelphus or the ivory fixtures on the twenty doors of citron wood in the porch of its dining hall (Athen. 5, 205a–c).Footnote 66 The gold and ivory ceiling panels, beams of Hymettan marble, and (ebony) columns ‘cut in darkest Africa’, absent from Horace’s house (Carm. 2.18.1–6), are no commonplaces of Roman luxury, as critics sometimes infer, but a wondrous conceit of material architectural marvels that could be divined from Ennius’ Trojan palace or imagined as inherited by a long-lost heir to the Attalid palace at Pergamon.Footnote 67 The surfaces of ivory and tortoise shell are no reality of domestic décor, but components of the fictional house of Herse described by Ovid (Met. 2.737–9, pars secreta domus ebore et testudine cultos | tres habuit thalamos).Footnote 68 They represent a fictive conceit, an unattainable vision not ‘gaped at’ in amazement by Virgil’s ‘too fortunate’ farmers (G. 2.463, nec varios inhiant pulchra testudine postis), or among the symbolic precious surfaces that astonish Juvenal’s Licinius (14.307–8, attonitus pro electro signisque suis Phrygiaque columna atque ebore et lata testudine).Footnote 69 The image suggests Renaissance ‘bijouterie’ or precious Baroque furniture inlaid with these exotic materials and gilding, serving only to amaze.Footnote 70
Cleopatra’s palace is not entirely a fictive conceit, but analogies to Lucan’s literary spaces lie closer at hand than ancient Egyptian or Ptolemaic architecture. Lucan's description builds on a major contemporary landmark. The poem was most likely written in Rome in the 60s CE, where the dominant visual phenomenon was the erection of the fabulous Domus Aurea of Nero. This work, extending the imperial palace from the Palatine to the Esquiline, is assumed to have begun around 60 CE, following the death of Agrippina, known first as the House of Passage (Domus Transitoria), but after the fire on 18 July 64 CE it became radically transformed into the project subsequently known as the Golden House (Suet. Nero 31, domum … quam primo transitoriam … mox incendio absumptam restitutamque auream nominavit).Footnote 71 The first Neronian phase of the surviving Esquiline wing, identified by its ‘Type E’ masonry, and corresponding to the phase known from Suetonius as the House of Passage, was ‘completed, exactly as designed, up to and including the vaults’.Footnote 72 Although the final project as rebuilt after the fire was incomplete when Lucan died less than a year later, in February 65 CE, the young poet had already formed sufficient idea of the project conceived in 60 CE to sense its impact and novelty.Footnote 73 Other passages in his poem suggest that Lucan was writing in the aftermath of the fire.Footnote 74 The image of a palace encrusted with thick gold finds no more obvious resonance than in that phantasia of a ‘Golden House’, which was widely apparent. Another text written during its construction commented on the practice of ‘building with gold’, ‘sending homes to the stars’, the expulsion of ‘waters with stones’, the birth of ‘the sea in the fields’, and, in general, the ‘transformation of the state of the world’ (Petron. Sat. 120.87–9, aedificant auro sedesque ad sidera mittunt, expelluntur aquae saxis, mare nascitur arvis, et permutata rerum statione rebellant, ‘They build with gold and release houses to the stars; waters are driven away by stones; a sea rises in the fields; and with the state of the world transformed they rebel’). The relevance of Nero’s new estate to Lucan’s ekphrasis too has not gone without notice, but critics have found little direct correspondence.Footnote 75 Yet, although the description of the site as the ‘semblance of a temple’ may hint at the incorporation within the estate of the Temple of Claudius begun a few years earlier by Agrippina, we should not expect Lucan’s description to evoke the spatial extent and architectural features of Nero’s palace realistically. Rather, it conveys the ‘baroque’ sense of vision and material fantasy of Nero’s palatial estate by the hyperbolic conceits of what it aimed at and might become. The place where Nero finally felt he could ‘live like a human being’ seems to inspire the Petronian description phantasia, non homo (Petr. Sat. 38.16: cf. Suet. Nero 31).Footnote 76 The decoration of the Oppian wing presents the same ‘Baroque’ illusionism and hyper-realistic materiality as Lucan’s description. Its paintings combine representation with illusion and picture a fabulous un-reality. Its grottesche ‘function by hybridisation and metamorphosis, oscillating between ground and figure and between ornament and representation’.Footnote 77 Examining the Vatican grottesche inspired by these ancient frescoes, Giovanni Battista Armenini (1530–1609) could later discern ‘various fantasies and new forms of extravagant things which do not exist as such but are the fruit of our mind’.Footnote 78 The presence of illusion and phantasia in the Third and Fourth Style paintings of the Esquiline Wing would be a fruitful subject for examination, but their likely completion after Lucan’s death makes them separate from the focus of this article.
A closer look at the materials of Cleopatra’s palace reveals their Neronian fascination. Lucan takes the Stoic idea of surface as mental concept and extends it into an image of three-dimensional depth as if to challenge Nero’s architecture. Nero filled the theatre of his gardens across the Tiber with myrrhine bowls and cups, an eastern material identified with agate or, more probably, fluorspar (Plin. HN 37.20); in Lucan’s palace, agate is ‘not idle’ but structurally engaged.Footnote 79 The ebony from Meroe, whose rare trees were a highlight of the map of Ethiopia brought to Nero and a prestigious component of tribute to Rome (Plin. HN 12.19, cf. 6.184), formed doors in Lucan’s palace, in an exaggerated conceit that profited from the plantings of the Golden House for architectural design.Footnote 80
While evoking Nero’s palace, Lucan’s description gives little hint of its spatial extent, its vast sprawl over fifty hectares in the centre of the city not yet fully realised by the time of his death in 65 CE, or the articulation of individual structures within the complex. What mattered to him were its materials, imaginable from its first phase as the House of Passage. Suetonius’ later account of the estate presents these features as common to the project in both its guises. Dismissed as superfluous and missing the point by historians seeking details of its component elements,Footnote 81 his description employs a rhetoric that emphasises shimmering surface, rather than voluminous mass. The revelation that ‘all the surfaces were smeared with gold and set off with precious stones and shells of pearl’, the dining halls ‘coffered with movable ivory panels’ (Suet. Nero 31.2), is almost an echo of Lucan’s account of Cleopatra’s palace. For Tacitus, by contrast, ‘the wonder was not so much the gold and gems … as the fields and lakes’ (Ann. 15.42.1). Yet he gives little idea of the layout of the estate. This was partly because the Golden House did not invite viewers to absorb it easily. Its principal surviving block, the east wing, exposed itself to a total blaze of light. Sited on a natural slope and skilfully orientated to the cardinal points, it offered ‘an extraordinary accessibility to light’, dazzling the viewer.Footnote 82 This impression is comparable to the quintessential ‘Baroque’ royal residence, Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, with a hall of mirrors reflecting the gilt decoration, a skylight to admit the sun like the octagon in Nero’s east wing, and, outside, its glittering luminosity exposed to the sun by day or lit up at night to dazzle guests.Footnote 83 As with the Golden House, the Baroque radiance of its reality saw its reflection in the fictional palaces of Catherine d’Aulnoy, made of gold, gems, glass, and crystal, and with ‘a throne carved out of a carbuncle, shining brighter than the sun’.Footnote 84 A Baroque space evoked, and merited, only a Baroque description.
It was inevitable that Lucan should have chosen this new estate as a model for Cleopatra’s residence. Its Egyptianising decoration and suggestions of cosmic reach offered echoes of Alexander’s royal quarter in Alexandria, inherited by the Ptolemies and Cleopatra.Footnote 85 His description shows how an idealising viewer might have seen Nero’s expansive palace, believing its deceptions, reading its shimmering surface as voluminous body, and following its visions into a series of hyperbolic and allegorical conceits which produce an ekplēxis that does not just astound but terrifies. In this semblance of palatial luxury, Lucan confuses tectonic body and ornamental surface, replacing the familiar shallow revetment with unimagined structural depth. This is not just the ornament that, for Leon Battista Alberti, adds ‘auxiliary brightness’ to architectural beauty and complements its intensity with its light.Footnote 86 It is the very structure. Lucan creates illusions of surface and replaces regular building materials, even costly marbles, with materials of personal adornment, agate, porphyry, and onyx, of appropriately Egyptian origin. The precious interior of ebony, ivory, and solid gold beams transcends spatial verisimilitude with material hyperrealism.
We are not alone in Lucan’s palace. The space is populated with a mass of peoples of diverse heritage, some ‘distinguished by blood of different colours, others by age’ (128). Their varied physiognomies and complexions provide an animate landscape as rich in colour as the gold or onyx minerals of the structure or the ebony or ivory or plant dyes and fabrics that cover the tables. Lucan’s hyperreality embraces the full dynamics and diversity of the natural world. Even more importantly, these crowds add volume to the space by filling it, and their widely varying appearances reinforce the palace as cosmic landscape. This is a palace on a global scale, and its literary evocation mirrors the sense of celestial distance suggested by the architecture and planning of Nero cosmocrator and his architects.Footnote 87
Domitian’s palace
tectum augustum, ingens, non centum insigne columnis,
sed quantae superos caelumque Atlante remisso
sustentare queant. stupet hoc vicina Tonantis 20
regia, teque pari laetantur sede locatum
numina (nec magnum properes excedere caelum).
tanta patet moles effusique impetus aulae
liberior Campi multumque amplexus operti
aetheros et tantum domino minor; ille penates 25
implet et ingenti genio gravat. aemulus illic
mons Libys Iliacusque nitet, <si>mul atra Syene
et Chios et glaucae certantia Doridi saxa
Lunaque portandis tantum suffecta columnis.
longa supra species: fessis vix culmina prendas 30
visibus auratique putes laquearia caeli.
hic cum Romuleos proceres trabeataque Caesar
agmina mille simul iussit discumbere mensis,
ipsa sinus accincta Ceres Bacchusque laborat
sufficere. aetherii felix sic orbita fluxit 35
Triptolemi, sic uvifero sub palmite nudos
umbravit colles et sobria rura Lyaeus.
sed mihi non epulas Indisque innixa columnis
robora Maurorum famulasque ex ordine turmas,
ipsum, ipsum cupido tantum spectare vacavit, 40
tranquillum vultus et maiestate serena
mulcentem radios summittentemque modeste
fortunae vexilla suae; tamen ore nitebat
dissimulatus honos. talem quoque barbarus hostis
posset et ignotae conspectum agnoscere gentes. 45
Stat. Silv. 4.2.18–45
A house august, enormous, famed not for a hundred columns, but for as many as can support the gods and heaven once Atlas is released. The Thunderer’s palace nearby is amazed at it, and the deities are happy you are settled in an equal seat (and you should not hurry to exceed the great heaven); so great a mass lies open, and the thrust of the hall spread out, freer than the Plain, embracing much of heaven within its shelter, and lesser only than its master; he fills the household and weighs it down with his enormous being. Here contend the mountains of Libya and the gleaming stone of Ilium, dark Syene too and Chios, and rocks that rival the grey-green sea, and Luna, substituted only to support the columns. Far above is the spectacle: you could scarce catch the upper levels with your weary vision, and you would imagine them as panels of the gilded heaven. When Caesar bade Romulus’ magnates and the columns of robed Knights recline here together at a thousand tables, Ceres herself, with her dress girt up, and Bacchus toil to supply their wants. So flowed the bounteous path of sky-borne Triptolemus; so Lyaeus shaded bare hills and sober fields under his clustered vines. But not for the viands or the Moorish wood resting on Indian columns or the ordered troops of servants had my eager gaze the time; for him, only him – calm of visage, softening its radiance with serene majesty, modestly lowering the banners of his fortune; yet the hidden splendour shone in his face; such a sight even a foreign enemy could recognise, and nations unknown.
In the previous section, we saw how Lucan’s phantasia of Cleopatra’s palace presents resonances of Nero’s Golden House, the most conspicuous architectural palace of his own time. It gives little idea of the precise layout or extent of the estate, but rather a series of visual illusions of its materials that present surface as mass and an overall impression of stunningly bright light and reflective materials that coheres with the experience of Nero’s palace by the spectator. Statius’ version, however, of Domitian’s Palatine mansion immediately and explicitly describes its spatial extent as boundless and on a cosmic scale and its description as correspondingly in epic proportions. A description of this banqueting setting that instantly (1–4) supersedes its epic forebears, Virgil’s palace of Dido and Homer’s gardens of Alcinous, must exceed what Smyrna and Mantua together would inspire (8–10). The portentous repetition of Virgil’s insinuation of Augustus’ Domus Augusta in his palace of Picus at the opening of the ekphrasis (18) unmistakably alludes to the name August(i)ana of Domitian’s palace, but the celestial image equating the columns of Domitian’s palace with those supporting the world transcends the imperial model by assimilation to cosmic space. As expected, it causes amazement (stupet), but the wonder is not that of a human viewer, but of the neighbouring ‘palace’ of Jupiter Tonans. What should be the object of amazement is its agent.
The shock of Domitian’s palace is its massive bulk (tanta … moles, 23). With its cosmic sense of spreading space (effusae, 23), it assails the spectator: impetus (23), like ekplēxis, is the debilitating assault of celestial phenomena on the human viewer.Footnote 88 However, the ‘exposed’ presence of the palace is not only ‘more open than the Campus (Martius)’ (24), whose northern reaches were still the most expansive open space in Rome, but also hints at the terrifying impact of a direct view of natural landscape.Footnote 89 Its spatiality embraces both the earth and the ether, ‘covered’ as if by a roof (operti aetheros, 24–5). Like Nero’s palace, Domitian’s Domus Augustiana was an ongoing project, originating earlier in the Flavian period, extending further to the south-east on the hill than its definition today, and completed only in the second century, with a further restructuring after the fire of 191/2 CE.Footnote 90 Yet what particularly characterised the Domitianic phase of the palace was its vast dimensions, which surpassed all previous aristocratic residences and even Nero’s palace.Footnote 91 This sprawling, cavernous spaciousness resembles the endless, open courtyards, and high vaulted spaces of an early modern ‘Baroque’ palace, such as Caserta or Versailles.
A closer view envisages the materiality of the palace. As with Lucan’s evocation of the Golden House in the precious minerals of the Ptolemaic palace, the materials imagined in Statius’ phantasia are the most prominent ones among the Palatine remains, and here too they exceed reality to suggest a vaster scale. Scholars occasionally recognise how his evocation of marble ‘wealth’ reflects the materials actually used in the complex, even if few of these survive today.Footnote 92 In the Palatine ‘Hippodrome’, the column bases are predominantly of white Luna marble, ‘only good enough to hold up columns of coloured stone’ (29).Footnote 93 They feature elsewhere too, as in the dining room, where they supported fluted columns of giallo antico from ‘Libyan’ Chemtou (Simitthus), fragments of which survive from the colonnade in the north-west fountain court.Footnote 94 Fluted columns of ‘Trojan’ pavonazzetto, in Statius’ grandiose epic terms (Iliacus, 27), probably screened the entrance to the room.Footnote 95 The juxtaposition of these two materials signalled by Statius (27) is visible in the marble dado along the walls, with slabs of ‘African’ yellow marble capped by mouldings in purple and white Docimian.Footnote 96 Such colour contrasts, echoing Augustan architecture, typified Roman aesthetics.Footnote 97 For Statius, however, these are not manufactured ornaments, but materials restored to their raw state, as the mountains whence they came. Deriving from the few quarries administered at this time by imperial officials, associated directly with the emperor himself, they represented Domitian’s personal cosmic landscape.Footnote 98 ‘Black Syene’ – red granite from Aswan – pink Chian portasanta marble, and ‘minerals rivalling the grey-green sea’ (27–8), surely the wave-like cipollino verde from Euboea, complete the picture. All are present on the Palatine, the portasanta and cipollino in the peristyle colonnades, the granite not in columns, as none such adorned the architecture of Rome until Trajan’s reorganisation of the quarries at Mons Claudianus, but rather in surface revetment or perhaps Domitian’s obelisk.Footnote 99 These marbles materialise through spatial illusion. Statius’ reduction or assimilation of them to raw natural states tallies with Walter Benjamin’s depiction of Baroque iconography as intended ‘not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked’.Footnote 100 Yet exposing the bare materiality of the palace also reinforces its cosmic dimension, hinting at the phantasia of a natural landscape vaster than the palaces of Homer and Virgil. The imagined contest of cipollino with the sea highlights the capacity of its shifting surface to evoke or transcend natural landscapes.Footnote 101 The materials of the palace unite wonders of the world with wonders of nature.
Statius’ portrayal exceeds the aesthetics of display. It is a species, a ‘semblance’, conveying an impression of celestial grandeur concocted by the poet, which makes his reader see and feel natural landscape in constructed materials. Another, however, may read an aesthetic moral. The grandeur of the palace is not the real thing, but a bloated and inflated version. The colonnades are no longer recognisable as columns, but as a formless mass of mountains and quarries. Earlier rhetoricians knew that a ‘swollen style’ (sufflata oratio) could lead writers astray, ‘deluded by the semblance of solemnity’ and unable ‘to perceive the swollen nature of their speech’ (Rhet. Her. 4.15). Similarly, the space of Domitian’s palace swells with an inflated pomposity that gave the illusion of grandeur, but could seem to result in its opposite, that turgid style against which there was a reaction in Tacitus’ Dialogus, published after Domitian’s death, ‘when it was safe to do so’.Footnote 102 Around the same time, the writer of On the Sublime, who urged poetical phantasia aiming at ekplēxis, warns against ‘tumidity’ (τὸ οἰδεῖν), which comes about when ‘those who aim at grandeur, in avoiding accusations of feebleness or aridity, are somehow carried into this extreme, convinced that “to miss the height is a noble flaw”’. ‘In bodies and words’, he writes, ‘swellings are bad and empty inflations, void of sincerity’ ([Longinus], Subl. 3.2–4). These are the criticisms so commonly hurled against the ‘Baroque’.Footnote 103 Such desire for grandeur was a deception of architects, as well as writers, producing bulging forms not only visible to the eyes, but thrust into space to involve the spectator’s body too.Footnote 104
A long-range view of Domitian’s palace (longa supra species, 30) is offered by the upwards illusion of the ceiling. Some commentators imagine a dome;Footnote 105 but the invitation to visualise the ‘coffering of the gilded sky’ (auratique … laquearia caeli), as in Lucan’s palace, points to those gilded panelled ceilings associated with tyranny, with which architectural scholars now prefer to reconstruct the main reception rooms of the palace.Footnote 106 The experience of this ceiling induces a ‘baroque’ shift in scale. The imagination that ‘with your vision exhausted you could barely grasp’ the gilded ceiling (fessis vix culmina prendas visibus), and not touch it physically but perceive it spatially by your body enclosed under its imprint, points to the outer heaven, the ultimate creation of ekplēxis. Like Nero’s estate, the architecture becomes ‘cosmoscape’, but here the experience is vertical, not horizontal.Footnote 107 This palace too is peopled, but, unlike Cleopatra’s palace, the people who fill this universe are not from varied cultural heritages, but ‘Rome’s leading men and ranks in knights’ dress’ summoned to ‘a thousand tables’, a notional, nameless multitude, valued as an estimate of spatial volume, not for their personal presence. The author ignores ‘the squads of well-drilled slaves’ and gazes at his host, who becomes the true object of vision (46–56).Footnote 108 Other humans are invisible in his shadow and the excessive scale of this cosmic space.
Conclusion: Baroque rhetorics of space
This article has argued that the evocations of palatial space and materiality in later first-century Rome by Lucan and Statius reveal illusionistic strategies of deception and emotional involvement. Their presentations of shimmering surface as solid mass, manufactured construction as natural landscape, and enclosed areas as wide-open, cosmic spaces all result from the aim of literary description to produce ekplēxis, stunned shock and intimidation, rather than clarity of vision, enargeia. That writers seek to persuade or deceive is unsurprising, as enargeia is fundamentally a device of persuasion, but, while enargeia brings clarity by the light it throws on an object, ekplēxis brings confusion, bewilderment, or terror by its directness and the excess of light with which it dazzles. Verbal descriptions achieve these effects by developing the reader’s power of imagination and manipulating it, so that one image reaches another scale or level to become something else entirely.
Such forms of amazement, based on manipulation and deception, were ‘the Baroque passion par excellence … because colossal and extravagant display was both aesthetically powerful and politically intimidating’.Footnote 109 It continues to be a feature of the fictive spaces of modern Neo-Baroque spectacle and cinema to create sensual or spatial deceptions through hyperbolic materiality, spaces coextensive with the observer that involve ‘slippages between appearance and truth, deception and insight’.Footnote 110 The architects of the imperial Roman palaces, Severus and Celer and Rabirius, played similar ‘Baroque’ games of illusion, shifting between appearances and realities. The intrusion of the sunlight through the open oculus of the octagon of Nero’s east wing might deceive viewers into believing themselves beneath an image of the heavens as much as the high ceiling of Domitian’s dining room might establish the illusion of a view upwards into the natural ether. Its gilded panels, like those of the coffered ceiling over the Salon de Mars in Louis XIV’s Versailles, suggest a spatial metaphor of regal overreach and a ‘desperate and pathetic … disproportion between the human ambition of a king and the vastness of the earth’.Footnote 111
‘Baroque spatialities’ exist both in material culture and in literary modes of expression. Architects and poets cultivate deceptions and illusions, rather than spatial realities: voids suggesting solids, surfaces suggesting mass, dazzling materialities, and wide-open, cosmic views. Hyperbolic descriptions play on the creative agency of natural raw materials to evoke other impressions and on the misapprehensions of surface as body and body as surface. They define sensual experience in terms of the illusions and delusions of their materials and spaces and the fantasies produced in the imagination by ambitious or inventive architecture: hard, lifeless minerals becoming living, fluctuating wonders of nature; shifts in scale from the human to the cosmic; and materials in unfamiliar manifestations. Palatial architecture delivers physiognomic change arising from a spatial experience deluded by the synaesthetic encounter with materials, which involved not only illusions of vision, but mirages of spatial awareness, touch, sound, and smell. Each of the palaces of Nero and Domitian inspired and intimidated in its time, provoking ekplēxis in every sense, as amazement, shock, and horror. These distorted visual reactions that they inspired, as much as the distorting poetic evocations by Lucan and Statius that verbalised contemporaries’ experiences, informed the limited reminiscences of these spaces early in the next century as bejewelled excess or destabilising open expanse.Footnote 112
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this article were delivered at conferences on Embodied Ekphrasis in Cambridge in 2019 and on the Spatial Turn virtually in 2020. I am very grateful to the organisers of the Cambridge conference, Anna Athanasopoulou, Albert Bates, and Benedek Kruchio, for starting my thoughts on these texts, to the physical and virtual audiences at both conferences for their insightful comments, especially the respondent at the Cambridge conference, Helen Lovatt, and above all to Amy Russell and Maxine Lewis for helping me to develop the spatial aspects of this article and for their invitation to contribute to this special issue. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for their suggested improvements to the article. Any remaining errors are my own.
