On the Private Apartments of Roman Emperors

Here are some in Milan--Ancient Mediolanum--or rather their remaining foundations:

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Their plan:

And an imagined reconstruction, by the talented and prolific Francesco Corni, with the remaining foundation walls shown in the foreground:

Here is the suite in what’s left of its original context, at the top in red with the other archaeological remains of the palace:

As in Rome the palace occupied its own special precinct, which like that on the Palatine Hill in Rome overlooked a racing circus, where the emperor could see and be seen by the Roman public:

(this and other line drawings here also by Corni)

Likely the palace in Mediolanum was built for the Roman emperor Maximan in the late 3rd Century AD, when the city became one of four new capitals of the Tetrarchy inaugurated by Diocletian. All were located on the empire’s periphery near its northern and eastern boundaries which were increasingly vulnerable to barbarian incursion.

And how, given that so much of their immediate context is missing, do we know Maximian’s private apartments were the very scanty remains we see today? Their shape and configuration are familiar from earlier palace architecture, but what really tells is their character as a self-contained and highly ordered “world within the world” of the larger palace complex, just as this complex itself constituted a self-contained and idealized world within the real world of the city. In the emperor’s private suite this theme is restated in its most compact and elaborate form.

We recognize the same theme at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli outside Rome. At one end of the so-called Piazza d’Oro were likely the private apartments of that emperor (at left above), and there we find the basic arrangement later repeated in Milan. A major domed space with a central fountain, likely beneath an oculus, was flanked by a pair of suites arranged around their own small open courtyards (shown roofed by mistake in the section drawing). These smaller suites reprised the larger arrangement, with a central salon or day room between a pair of two-room suites, each with a vestibulum preceding the cubiculum, or bedroom proper, which was also accessible by a separate service door. Lavatories were back on the other side of the private courtyard, tucked between it and the major domed room.

Hadrian’s private apartments like the villa they belong to likely represent the imperial palace--at least in its villa incarnation--on its most lavish scale, which is appropriate for the ruler of the Roman Empire at its height, himself an architect and the likely designer of his own villa as well as the Pantheon in Rome, that greatest domed space open to the sky.

Closer to Maximian’s time we find the same arrangements in a much better state of preservation at the villa in Piazza Armerina, Sicily, which may in fact have been the tetrarch’s country retreat from Mediolanum.

Here at one end of a large peristyle courtyard we find a long transverse gallery (28) with a major hall beyond (43), flanked by two suites of private apartments. The more elaborate of these (37-41) were again the emperor’s or the imperial family’s private apartments, with again a pair of two-room sleeping suites on either side of a covered fountain court, this one semicircular. On axis beyond is an apsed day room, a smaller version of the audience hall down the corridor. Again the private suite reprises and repeats larger patterns in more compact, elaborated form.

Now we can return to the private apartments in Mediolanum, which we recognize as an expanded version of those at Piazza Armerina.

We have the same transverse gallery, with the same fountain court and apsed hall beyond it on axis. Here the fully circular hall allows for three private suites, each with salons flanked by two cubicula, the largest of these, on axis with the fountain court and gallery presumably belonging to the emperor.

And what did it feel like to inhabit this centralized and idealized world within the world? For this even imaginative reconstructions like Sr. Corni’s or the French architects who reconstructed Hadrian’s Villa are not enough. We have to imagine those spaces not from above or outside but from the inside, as they were experienced, as settings for both ritual and routine. 

This painting of a Roman interior by the Italian artist Ettore Forti gives some idea of the experience of a private suite in a Roman palace. It's a long way indeed from what remains. How far, though, was that ancient reality from this one?

--- Sam Roche

Viking Apotheosis

Accident at sea?

by Michael Djordjevitch

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By no means, an accident.  

Rather, this, an image from the finale of an 1958 Film, a cinematic epic called The Vikings, shows us a Norse hero setting out on his Final Journey.

A more visually charged depiction of the same event, The Funeral of a Viking, circa 1893, by Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee (1853 - 1928) :  

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A funeral pyre on a Long Ship was a form of Viking funeral reserved for very high status individuals, such as some rulers or very great heroes.  There were a number of other forms of monumental farewell and commemoration available for high and low status Vikings in their liminal moments, as they faced an afterlife in one of their nine realms.  

The Icon of all these realms together, Uppsala’s Sacred Tree (quite likely of the species European Yew) was a manifestation in the here and now of the cosmic World Tree, Yggdrasil.   

Below is the The Llangernyw Yew, an ancient tree in Wales estimated to be anywhere between 1,500 and 5,000 years old.  

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Two contrasting realms newly departed Vikings would face were Valhalla and Helheim, the first a destination for fallen heroes who had died bravely in combat, the second, a place of no honor for those who, without a life of achievement, merely died in bed, or by way of mundane accident or illness.  Helgafjell was the abode of those who had lived honorable lives, even though their ends were not heroic.  

The Vikings practiced both cremation and inhumation, though the first was much more dominant in their earlier history.  The goal of cremation was the total calcification of the body.  This required an extremely hot fire, thus the need for a substantial funeral pyre consuming a great amount of wood.   

The ashes would then be buried along with goods and belongings (including chattel) befitting the status of the interred individual.  While the Viking ideal was a burial at sea, those on land emphatically echoed that ideal.  

A number of burials on land within whole ships, even of the highest category, Long Ships, have been discovered and excavated this past century.  These are the primary source for our detailed knowledge of Viking ships.  

Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki (1843 - 1902), in his Funeral of a Varangian Chieftain (1883), with great panache presents us with the Ship Burial of a chieftain of the Volga Vikings, directly inspired by a surviving text from the tenth century by an Ahmad ibn Fadlan, an emissary of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the Khan of the Volga Bulgars.

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Ibn Fadlan said it was customary when a chieftain died for his family members to ask slave girls and boys, “Who among you will die with him?” If they volunteered, they were not allowed to back out. Usually, Ibn Fadlan wrote, slave girls made the offer. One girl volunteered for the spectacle Fadlan saw. “Every day the slave-girl would drink <alcohol> and would sing merrily and cheerfully,”

I was told that when their chieftains die, the least they do is to cremate them. I was very keen to verify this, when I learned of the death of one of their great men. They placed him in his grave (qabr) and erected a canopy over it for ten days, until they had finished making and sewing his <funeral garments>.

In the case of a poor man they build a small boat, place him inside and burn it. In the case of a rich man, they gather together his possessions and divide them into three, one third for his family, one third to use for <his funeral> garments, and one third with which they purchase alcohol which they drink on the day when his slave-girl kills herself and is cremated together with her master. (They are addicted to alcohol, which they drink night and day. Sometimes one of them dies with the cup still in his hand.)  . . .   

. . .  They [mourners] advanced, going to and fro <around the boat> uttering words which I did not understand, while he was still in his grave and had not been exhumed.

Then they produced a couch and placed it on the ship, covering it with quilts <made of> Byzantine silk brocade and cushions <made of> Byzantine silk brocade. Then a crone arrived whom they called the “Angel of Death” and she spread on the couch the coverings we have mentioned. She is responsible for having his <garments> sewn up and putting him in order, and it is she who kills the slave-girls. I myself saw her: a gloomy, corpulent woman, neither young nor old.”

There is much more here :  

Charles Ernest Butler’s  (1864–1933) Death of a Viking Warrior (1909) gives us a more operatic vision of the moment before the  immolation of  a young Viking hero :       

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The best known inhumation boat burial is from a place called Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, England.  There, was found an undisturbed ship burial dating from the early 600’s A.D., likely, of the early East Anglian King, Rædwald, a Saxon Ruler from the period of the final takeover of Late Roman Britannia.   

Below we see a reconstruction, based on the excavated remains, of the funeral chamber (in the heart of his ship) of this ruler as it would have appeared just before he was buried under a very large mound of earth.  

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In form and ornament, King Rædwald's Royal Helmet prefigures that of the future Vikings, who would soon move into the lands newly vacated by the Saxons, Angles and Jutes, displacing their remnant southwards.  Yet, though belonging to a distinct tribal and linguistic lineage, these most northern of the northerners, our Vikings, closely shared with the Germanic peoples just south of them a common material and religious culture.  This helmet type also bears witness to the sources of many of the elements of this entire cultural ecumene, as it is directly derived from Late Roman cavalry helmets of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

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This Tradition of Leaders and Heroes being buried in ships would be carried forward by those who would soon occupy the Saxon Homeland, the Vikings.

Even but the mere outline of a ship alone quite often sufficed, as we can see from these two virtual ships from Badelunda, near Västerås, Sweden, within which were buried the cremated remains and funeral goods of their occupants.  

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As for the ever hoped for destination of our Vikings, The Ride Of The Valkyrie, 1890, by the German painter, William T Maud (1865 - 1903) :

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The Vikings & The Sacred

A Viking Temple?

by Michael Djordjevitch

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Well, no, or at least, not exactly.  

The above is a photograph, circa 1900, of the best preserved of a number of the earliest surviving religious structures from the Viking world, conventionally known as Stave Churches.

This rare surviving monument from Norway’s early Christian period, the Borgund Stave Church, has been judged to have been built sometime after 1180 but before 1250 A.D.  The term “stave” refers to the type of construction of its walls, being fashioned of cheek by jowl vertical wooden boards.

Below we see the plan of this church.  It’s form is comprised of a tall (multi-story) inner core surrounded by an interior and an exterior ambulatory.  The more compact types of Stave Churches have only the inner ambulatory.   

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This view shows a cutaway perspective of the Borgund Church's interior, revealing the fairly complex construction of an architecturally nuanced conception.     

The next engraving is an image of the original front portal of another very old Scandinavian building, the Hedal Stave Church, the oldest surviving of its type in Norway, and bearing direct witness to the Pre-Christian origins of this architecture.  

A drawing, circa 1853, by G. A. Bull of the Hedalen Portal :

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Next, and now through digital means, we see an image of a reconstructed interior, and an archeological representation of the excavated plan remains, of a Viking-Age building recently found in Uppåkra, Sweden.  Its excavator, Lars Larsson, has stated that this is "the first Scandinavian building for which the term 'temple' can be justly claimed".  

The evidence for the construction of his building reveals that it too was of the Stave Type.  In the plan below the pink shows the location of trenches dug for the walls.  The brown shows the location of the central columns, and the red, the place of the hearth/altar.  

According to the archeological evidence, the building was situated on the remains of a third century A.D. longhouse, and from the sixth to the tenth centuries A.D. rebuilt six times in the same form as its final iteration seen below.  Among the remains associated with its walls were found around two hundred fragments of gold foil, incised with human figures.

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Two possible reconstructions of the exterior form of this Viking Temple:  

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Almost a century before this momentous discovery, Sweden's then-foremost painter, Carl Larsson (1853 - 1919), in the course of his commission to ornament the monumental entry hall and staircase of the National Museum in Stockholm with scenes from Swedish history, proposed to crown his work by depicting a semi-legendary moment from Swedish history, poetically preserved in the Sagas of Snorri Sturlusson, an Icelander.  This vast canvas would become the most controversial painting in Swedish history.  

The resulting monumental painting, entitled “Midvinterblot“ (Midwinter Sacrifice), shows the monarch, King Domalde offering himself for sacrifice.  This Viking ruler gave himself to the gods so as to appease them, after a prolonged period of drought and starvation, for whatever faults may have brought about this calamitous withholding of divine favour.  

Here we are presented with the very public spectacle of this exceptional mid-winter sacrifice before the most venerable of Viking Temples on the Holy Ground of Ancient Uppsala and its adjoining Sacred Tree.

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Informing Carl Larsson’s representation of this lost-to-history Pagan Temple are, very reasonably, Stave Churches, Norse Epics, and the one surviving account of this place from Adam of Bremen, a chronicler from medieval Germany who lived in the second half of the eleventh century.  He has left us a priceless  description of the Pagan Great Midwinter Sacrifice in Viking Uppsala:

“In this temple, entirely decked out in gold, the people worship the statues of three gods in such wise that the mightiest of them, Thor, occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber; Odin and Freyr have places on either side. The significance of these gods is as follows: Thor, they say, presides over the air, which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather crops. The other, Odin-that is, the Furious-carries on war and imparts to man strength against his enemies. The third is Freyr, who bestows peace and pleasure on mortals. His likeness they fashion with an immense phallus. But Odin they chisel armed, as our people are wont to represent Mars. Thor with his scepter apparently resembles Jove. The people also worship heroes made gods, whom they endow with immortality because of their remarkable exploits, as one reads in the Vita of Saint Ansgar they did in the case of King Eric.

A golden chain goes round the temple. It hangs over the gable of the building and sends its glitter far off to those who approach, because the shrine stands on level ground with mountains all about it like a theater. They solemnize in Uppsala, at nine-year intervals, a general feast of all the provinces of Sweden. From attendance at this festival no one is exempted.

The sacrifice is of this nature: of every living thing that is male, they offer nine heads, 4 with the blood of which it is customary to placate gods of this sort. The bodies they hang in the sacred grove that adjoins the temple. Now this grove is so sacred in the eyes of the heathen that each and every tree in it is believed divine because of the death or putrefaction of the victims. Even dogs and horses hang there with men. A Christian seventy-two years old told me that he had seen their bodies suspended promiscuously. Furthermore, the incantations customarily chanted in the ritual of a sacrifice of this kind are manifold and unseemly; therefore, it is better to keep silence about them.”

Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, by John Lindow, 2002, is an accessible and judicious entry into this world.    

Carl Larsson third preparatory study for Midvinterblot (1915) :   

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Somewhat closer to home, the Old-English Epic Poem, Beowulf, the oldest surviving major work of literature in our language, offers us an image of a monumental building in the Denmark of the sixth century A.D., then the home of those Saxons who were, along with their neighbours the Jutes and Angles in the process of conquering and colonising Celtic/Roman Britannia.

Then, as I have heard, the work of constructing a building

Was proclaimed to many a tribe throughout this middle earth.

In time—quickly, as such things happen among men—

It was all ready, the biggest of halls.

He whose word was law

Far and wide gave it the name "Heorot".

The men did not dally; they strode inland in a group

Until they were able to discern the timbered hall,

Splendid and ornamented with gold.

The building in which that powerful man held court

Was the foremost of halls under heaven;

Its radiance shone over many lands.

John Howe here gives us a plausible glimpse of this precursor to the monumental architecture of the Vikings.  

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Apart from the Stave Churches, what survives of the Architecture of this World can still be readily encountered today in the substantial and captivating remains of its other monumental artifacts, its Long Ships.

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A detail of the great portal from the Hedal Stave Church:

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And what of the heirs to the Vikings of yesteryear?   

The twilight world between Viking Paganism and Christianity found its peerless chronicler and poet in the novels of  Sigrid Undset (1882 - 1949), most notably in Kristin Lavransdatter, the epic work for which she most deservedly received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928.  

That was then.  

Today, almost a century later, if we were to seek out the remains of Uppsala’s once sacred ground, we would find this building, which now stands on and in some sense is intended to memorialize this still poorly understood and exceedingly mysterious place.

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Agnes Slott-Møller  (1862–1937), Borgund Stave Church in Norway, 1915 (oil on canvas):   

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For more on Viking buildings watch this clip from Michael's lecture on the Vikings