Waltzing With Nero: A Syntactic Analysis of Movement Patterns in the Domus Aurea

This thesis investigated the spatial organisation and functional patterning of the rooms of the Oppian pavilion of the Domus Aurea, which was built by Emperor Nero in AD 60-68. The study uses a combination of an analysis of the decorative programme of the Domus as published by Meyboom and Moormann in ‘Le Decorazioni Dipinte e Marmoree Della Domus Aurea di Nerone a Roma’ (2013), and an analysis of the spatial organisation of the building using Space Syntax techniques. The Oppian pavilion has never been subject to a formal spatial analysis prior to this thesis. The new perspective the analyses offer on the pavilion allows to shed new light on an area until now hardly explored. The results achieved by this thesis suggest that the Oppian pavilion was very unlikely to have had residential functions. Concluding from the Visibility Graph Analyses performed, most of the rooms were visually highly integrated, presuming rather a public function. At least two big dining rooms were present:...Show moreThis thesis investigated the spatial organisation and functional patterning of the rooms of the Oppian pavilion of the Domus Aurea, which was built by Emperor Nero in AD 60-68. The study uses a combination of an analysis of the decorative programme of the Domus as published by Meyboom and Moormann in ‘Le Decorazioni Dipinte e Marmoree Della Domus Aurea di Nerone a Roma’ (2013), and an analysis of the spatial organisation of the building using Space Syntax techniques. The Oppian pavilion has never been subject to a formal spatial analysis prior to this thesis. The new perspective the analyses offer on the pavilion allows to shed new light on an area until now hardly explored. The results achieved by this thesis suggest that the Oppian pavilion was very unlikely to have had residential functions. Concluding from the Visibility Graph Analyses performed, most of the rooms were visually highly integrated, presuming rather a public function. At least two big dining rooms were present: rooms 40 and 128. The spatial and decorative characteristics of these rooms complement and amplify each other. The two rooms, moreover, were included in a pattern of visibility lines, called an ‘enfilade’. The enfilade pattern emerged from room 45a and continued on to the eastern end of corridor 92, from there it continued its way to room 132, and from room 132 it went through the Pentagonal Courtyard garden (no. 80a) and the porticoed gallery (no. 21), to end in room 9. A noticeable fact is that the enfilade pattern is cut off where the ‘Second Pentagonal Court’ is thought to have started. Hence it is very likely that th e ‘Second Court’ had a function that was entirely different from that of the rest of the Oppian pavilion. The spatial analysis in this thesis was applied from the perspective of the entrances of the pavilion only. Future investigations of the Domus which focus on all individual rooms as the root nodes for convex spatial studies could well contribute to gaining even more new insights into the spatial organisation of the pavilion.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Waltzing With Nero: A Syntactic Analysis of Movement Patterns in the Domus Aurea