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Giuseppe Vasi's Digression - Tivoli - part four: Villa Adriana

Introduction

Hadrian became emperor on the death of Trajan in 117 and soon after he started building a residence for his otium (rest/leisure, but also introspection) on a piece of land which surrounded a small suburban villa owned by the family of his wife Vibia Sabina.
Hadrian spent twelve years travelling through almost all the provinces of the empire from Britain to Morocco, from Greece to Egypt and in the design of his residence he introduced elements which reminded him of the great monuments he had seen in his journeys.
Villa Adriana (as the residence is called today) was abandoned after the death of Hadrian. Its existence was already forgotten when the Roman Empire was still alive and for more than a thousand years it was used as a quarry and a location for goats to graze.
In the XVth century Villa Adriana was rediscovered and since then it has attracted and inspired artists and architects.

Scenery

Plants
Cypresses and olives

The Fede family, to whom most of Villa Adriana belonged in the XVIIIth century, gave it its current appearance; they planted olives on the former gardens of the villa and alleys of cypresses linking its various monuments; they also planted a few pines. Although Hadrian had designed more formal gardens, these old trees induce the right spirit for visiting the villa; the ancient buildings, fountains and porticoes were not aimed at impressing, but more at eliciting feelings of harmony and peacefulness.

Layout

Terraces
Terrace of Poikile and walls supporting it

Villa Adriana is not a royal palace, but rather a university campus. Its terraces have different orientations; some have a view towards Rome, others towards Tivoli or the Castelli Romani. There is not an evident hierarchy among the buildings: the smaller ones are not aligned in order to emphasize the larger ones.
It is evident by the many porticoes which flanked the terraces that Hadrian enjoyed wandering along them with his friends, as Aristotle and the other peripatetic philosophers used to do in Athens.
At first sight one does not realize that the terraces are to a great extent artificial and are supported by imposing substructures which were used to house the many servants who worked in the villa.

Masonry

Masonry
A wall of the Nymphaeum and a detail of the Room of the Doric Pilasters

Trilithon (three stones - two vertical stones supporting a horizontal one) is a characteristic of the early architecture from Ancient Greece to Stonehenge and it applies in a more general sense to all buildings erected by placing large stones one upon the other. Of this construction technique very little can be seen in Villa Adriana which is a celebration of the Roman masonry skills and in particular of opus reticulatum, a thick wall made up of small blocks of tufa or bricks arranged along diagonal lines.
Even where the design follows the Greek trilithos pattern the pilasters and the entablature have a brickwork inner structure.
You may wish to compare the concave lines of the Nymphaeum wall shown above with the façade of Borromini's S. Maria dei Sette Dolori.

Shapes

Shapes
Temple of Venus and Canopus

According to the reconstructed model of Villa Adriana, some buildings were preceded by a small porch having on top the traditional Greek triangular tympanum. As a matter of fact all these porches do not exist any longer, so that curved shapes definitely prevail on straight lines. In the Canopus even the classic entablature is disrupted; the new resulting shape is known as Serliana, after the Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio who included it in his treaty.

Materials

Columns
Marble columns in the Naval Theatre; granite columns near the Greek Library; cipollino column near the Latin Library and view of Tivoli

Some of the buildings are decorated with white marble columns, but here too Hadrian departed from the canons of Greek architecture as he made use of coloured stones: grey granite from Egypt (he employed it also in the Pantheon) and green cipollino from a Greek island (he employed it also in the Athens' Library).
Coloured marbles as well as curved shapes have led modern art historians to define the architecture of Villa Adriana as Ancient Roman Baroque as it anticipated some of the features of the XVIIth century style.

Orders

Capitals
Capitals in the Triclinium of the Imperial Palace and near the Nymphaeum

The images of the previous headings of this page show Doric columns in the Temple of Venus, Ionic columns in the Naval Theatre and Corinthian columns in the Canopus; Hadrian however did not limit himself to the standard three orders: he combined elements of the Corinthian capital with the leaves of Egyptian capitals and occasionally he added reliefs portraying facing dolphins.
In the XVIth century Antonio da Sangallo developed a new design for the capitals which decorated his buildings, based on those he saw in Villa Adriana (see S. Maria di Loreto). Other architects followed his steps: Ferdinando Fuga in Chiesa dell'Orazione e Morte came even closer to the capital shown above (left).

Domes

Domes
Domes of the Philosophers' Hall and of Serapeum

Most of the main buildings were covered by domes and the passages between them had curved ceilings. For this reason Renaissance architects came to Villa Adriana to study this sort of real life catalogue of construction techniques; the gigantic dome of Serapeum is a precursor of the rib vaults which are typical of medieval cathedrals (most likely Borromini had in mind this dome when he designed the interior of S. Ivo alla Sapienza).
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was another artist who fell in love with the domes of Villa Adriana; he was the first to draw an accurate map of the site and several of his engravings show views of Villa Adriana (the following links to external sites show the Philosophers' Hall and the Serapeum).

Decoration

Decorations
Ceiling stucco decoration in the Great Thermae; coloured marble floor in the Imperial Palace; black and white mosaics in the Hospitalia

A few fragments scattered here and there help in the understanding of how Villa Adriana was decorated. Geometrical patterns prevailed both in the paintings on the walls and in the stucco ceilings. The floors of the most important buildings were in opus sectile, a mosaic made up of relatively large pieces of coloured marbles, while those in the rooms where visitors were hosted (Hospitalia) were decorated with black and white mosaics; their motif was different in each room.

Facilities

Facilities
Praetorium, an arm of the great Cryptoporticus (underground passage), a public urinal outside the firemen's barracks

To run such a large complex of buildings required not only a crowd of servants and guards, but also well designed facilities to ensure that these people performed their duties without interfering with the life of the emperor and of his guests.
For this reason a net of underground passages allowed the servants to move around the villa without even being seen by the emperor. The servants and the guards were housed in the substructures supporting the terraces or in buildings which were hidden by one of the many nymphaeums (large fountains) placed in the courtyards or the terraces.
Villa Adriana could rely on an ample supply of water as it was located near the aqueducts which supplied Rome.


Hadrian eventually did not enjoy for a long time the villa he had so carefully designed; due to health problems he spent most of his last years in the imperial residence of Baia on the Gulf of Naples, where he died in 138.

You may wish to see Villa Adriana at night.

Return to Villa d'Este or move on to the next step in your tour of the Environs of Rome: Palestrina.