Part of Blackwell's series of Companions to the Ancient World, this welcome volume delivers much of the promise of its jacket notes in presenting an up-to-date overview of critical approaches to its subject. It brings together contributions that attune with the mission to understand Roman architecture ‘as an integrated cultural practice’, responding to factors as disparate as aesthetics, geography, politics and technology.
The scope is ambitious, covering expected as well as discretionary topics, for example on how Roman architecture was co-opted in Fascist Italy, and its visualisation whether on coins in its own time or by means of digital media today. Predominantly drawn from north American academia, the contributors bring long established expertise (e.g. J. Anderson on architects and patrons) and ongoing preoccupations (e.g. P. Davies on Republican architecture and politics).
After a short introduction the 25 chapters are sensibly structured. The first group of six constitutes a chronological overview, beginning with features of Italic Architecture in the early first millennium b.c. (by J. Becker), and ending with the architecture of the Tetrarchy (by E. Mayer). There are gaps (e.g. from the end of the reign of Hadrian to that of Septimius Severus), but comprehensiveness is hardly essential.
The next group of chapters, 7–10, addresses the creation of Roman buildings. There is a chapter on architects and patrons, as mentioned, one on the delivery of design by means of plans, models, measuring and surveying (Chapter 8 by J. Senseney), one on materials and techniques (Chapter 9 by L. Lancaster and U.), and one on the workforce and worksite (Chapter 10 by R. Taylor). Arguably the chapter on Vitruvius (Chapter 22) may have gone better after Chapter 7. Belying the emphasis placed on design in both the jacket notes and the introduction, there is regrettably little treatment of this subject, so too the principles and methods by which Roman architects composed projects and key architectural elements.
The largest group of chapters tackles the ‘canonic’ Roman building types and spaces, accounting for their origin, development, variation and use in different geographical contexts. This sequence is the familiar one of religious to civic to domestic, but is not for that any less effective: Urban Sanctuaries (Chapter 11 by J. Stamper); Non-Urban Cult Places (Chapter 12 by T. Stek); Fora (Chapter 13 by J. Frakes); Funerary Cult and Architecture (Chapter 14 by K. McDonnell); The Architecture of Roman Spectacle (Chapter 15 by H. Dodge); Baths and Thermae (Chapter 16 by F. Yegül); the Insulae of Ostia (Chapter 17 by U.); the Domus (Chapter 18 by J. Clarke); Villas (Chapter 19 by M. Zarmakoupi). The reader thus encounters a range of specific building types and spaces (temples, sanctuaries, theatre-temple complexes, tombs and so on). There are surprising omissions, however, such as the basilica and triumphal arch (though these do figure briefly in Chapter 6), and most notably military architecture, and this in spite of fortifications featuring as part of the Italic background in Chapter 1.
The volume concludes with six chapters bearing to a greater or lesser extent on the reception of the Romans' architectural legacy. There are chapters on Romanisation (Chapter 20 by L. Revell), on Streets and Facades (Chapter 21 by R. Laurence), on Vitruvius and his Influence (Chapter 22 by I. Rowland), on the ‘Romanità’ of the architecture of the Fascist period (Chapter 23 by G.S. Gessert), on visualisation (Chapter 24 by M. Grunow Sobocinski) and on Conservation (Chapter 25 by W. Aylward).
Apart from an understandable patchiness in the last group of chapters – these being it seems ‘tasters’ of the diversity of current scholarly debate – there is overall consistency in terms of quality and balancing the needs of the intended audience, that is to say readers who already possess some grasp of the subject but who are looking to advance their understanding. References are generally judicious: not so many as to hamper readability given that the references are stitched into the text (footnotes, though, would have been preferable). Each chapter ends usefully with a ‘Guide to Further Reading’, while the common bibliography is suitably extensive. The book is equipped with maps and a glossary, while it is didactically instructive that familiar standards (e.g. the Pantheon or Pompeii) are intermixed with new discoveries and/or lesser-known buildings.
Given the visual nature of the subject matter, the chief shortcoming of the volume lies in its illustrations, and this despite the not inconsiderable cost of the volume. Their number is merely sufficient, and they are a mixed bag. Some photographs of lesser quality appear it would seem because their sourcing involved no expense. While this kind of enterprise cries out for effective graphic reconstructions, the rationale behind those supplied seems that they be out of copyright, or that this lies with the authors. Since more plans would have been desirable, it is irritating that several are reproduced at a greater scale than necessary. The reader would have been served by comparative plans or illustrations, ideally at the same scale, but these are rare (e.g. fig. 2.1 on p. 30).
The volume lives up to its claim of being up to date, as instanced by mention of the possibility that the Pantheon was begun under Trajan rather than Hadrian (L. Hetland, ‘Dating the Pantheon’, JRA 20 [2007], 95–112; T.A. Marder, M. Wilson Jones [edd.], The Pantheon from Antiquity to the Present [2014]). As regards contested interpretations, it would be inappropriate at this level always to qualify a consensus view with specialist counter-argument. Yet the student is rightly alerted to areas of divergent interpretation now and then. Thus we encounter the debate over the size of the Capitoline temple. The consensus claim for spectacular enormity (Chapter 1, p. 22) is followed by Stamper's arguments for a much-reduced scale (Chapter 11), and later (Chapter 24, pp. 455–7) by note of J. Hopkins's re-championing of gigantism as part of an extended discussion (J. Hopkins, ‘The Capitoline Temple and the Effects of Monumentality on Roman Temple Design’, in Monumentality in Etruscan and Early Roman Architecture [2012], pp. 111–27). Meanwhile it is understandable that Augustus' temple of Apollo on the Palatine is presented as facing towards the Circus Maximus (Chapter 3, pp. 51–5), with no mention of the case for the opposite direction, given that the controversy has only just come to prominence (opposing positions are presented side by side in the articles by T.P. Wiseman and S. Zink, JRA 25 [2012]).
Without space to comment on more chapters, mention may be made of two that will attract readers by virtue of addressing architecture as a vector of power and cultural negotiation. Davies's chapter on Greek Building Practices in Republican Rome (Chapter 2) presents familiar material while adding new twists via a cleverly structured and thoughtful strategy for upping the game. The issue of Romanisation, the focus of Revell's chapter (Chapter 20), naturally surfaces in many of the preceding chapters, and it is useful to have this treated in its own right, and effectively too. This sets out conventional ‘top-down’ approaches (charting the penetration of building types and patterns flowing from Rome, with some regions accordingly being characterised as more Romanised than others), while explaining the limitations of this model and why it has been contested. The case is made for a more agency-centred approach and for placing the emphasis ‘back onto the people inhabiting these spaces’ (p. 383). We read of the shortcomings of ‘“wall-chasing”’ as opposed to investigating deposits, and of the dangers of circular argumentation as when buildings are reconstructed on the basis of standard types and the results used as evidence of Romanisation. The exploration of other diagnostic indicators, especially architectural decoration and material culture, is rightly advocated. At the same time the challenge of so doing, in the face of exiguous remains, emerges in the case studies chosen for the final section (pp. 392–7), the Casa de los Pájaros in Italica and the Maison au Dauphin in Vaison-la-Romaine. For both the conventional analysis of plans by comparison with standard typologies remains fundamental.
It is good to find such nuance and debate alongside the necessary conventional material. Albeit with shortcomings in the domain of illustration, this sure-footed and intelligent Companion will serve the student of Roman architecture well.
