The Arch of Constantine was dedicated on July 25, 315 CE, and its large size and prominent location next to the Colosseum have made it the most famous antique arch in Rome, if not the entire world. It is a very strange thing to have done, and where the original idea came from is anybody's guess. In inventing it, the Romans took a conventional architectural element with a useful function – a monumental portal used to mark an important entrance into a walled city or building – and isolated it for purely symbolic reasons, turning it into a passageway to nowhere. The triumphal arch abandoned functional purpose altogether. Like the giant freestanding column, it was meant only to celebrate, commemorate, and memorialize.īut the freestanding column at least retained some semblance of functional purpose, if only to support a statue of the individual whose life it honored. In fact, the purpose of the freestanding Roman triumphal arch was entirely metaphorical. Metaphorical function is another matter altogether. In a triumphal arch, the Modernist doctrine that form follows function is entirely subverted. Moreover, the Classical columns, which in Greek buildings always functioned as vertical posts to hold up horizontal lintels, here serve no functional purpose whatsoever, and are merely applied to the surface of the structure as exterior decoration. Their voids do not signal transit (since the archways can be easily circumnavigated) and their solids do not signal transition (since the space on one side is no different from the space on the other). paradoxical because they were openings one could walk around." This is all perfectly straightforward, and beyond dispute.īut the effect of a freestanding arch is far from straightforward.Īs MacDonald goes on to observe, Roman triumphal arches were "in a pragmatic sense. invites passage and suggests the presence beyond of a place different from that before it, of an experience in contrast to that of the present, near side. It sharply marks a division between two areas or places without sealing off either. ![]() ![]() MacDonald describes it in The Architecture of the Roman Empire, the arched opening in a wall is a fundamental architectural form: Above all an arch is a mechanism of transit and transition. The Arc de Triomph in Paris, Marble Arch in London, Washington Square Arch in New York – most large Western cities possess at least one such monument, and many possess several.įamiliarity, in this instance, has bred acceptance, and few people nowadays give triumphal arches a second glance, much less a second thought.īut a second thought will quickly lead to a third: architecturally speaking, the triumphal arch is a very strange beast indeed.Īs William L. (Courtesy Mary Ann Sullivan at The triumphal arch was a Roman invention, and its adoption in later times by later cultures has made it a familiar architectural convention.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |