19. Baroque Extravaganzas: Rock Tombs, Fountains, and Sanctuaries in Jordan, Lebanon, and Libya

Roman Architecture (HSAR 252)

Professor Kleiner features the baroque phenomenon in Roman architecture, in which the traditional vocabulary of architecture, consisting of columns and other conventional architectural elements, is manipulated to enliven building façades and inject them with dynamic motion. This baroque trend is often conspicuously ornamental and began to be deployed on the walls of forums and tombs in Italy already in the late first century A.D. But baroque architecture in Roman antiquity was foremost in the Greek East where high-quality marble and expert marble carvers made it the architectural mode of choice. At Petra in Jordan, tomb chambers were cut into cliffs and elaborate façades carved out of the living rock. The cities of Miletus and Ephesus in Asia Minor were adorned with gates and fountains and libraries and stage buildings that consisted of multi-storied columnar screens. The lecture culminates with the Sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus, a massive temple complex at Baalbek in Lebanon, with Temples of Jupiter and Bacchus in enormous scale and with extreme embellishment, and the Temple of Venus with an undulating lintel that foreshadows the curvilinear flourishes of Francesco Borromini's S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in seventeenth-century Rome.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Baroque Architecture in the Roman Empire
11:51 - Chapter 2. Exploring Baroque Elements in Italy
23:41 - Chapter 3. Baroque Facadism at Petra
41:39 - Chapter 4. The Baroque in Ancient Asia Minor
59:35 - Chapter 5. The Temples of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Venus in Baalbek, Lebanon

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2009.