Paintings & Mosaics

mosaics

Mosaics are small stones that are placed together to create a bigger image. Each tile is about 1-2 cm. Smaller stones would have 150 tiles per 1 sq. cm.. How did they have so much patience?!

 

                                                                       Frescos
A fresco is a fresh painting that is made out of wet plaster. They were used as decorations, like how we use paintings. They also used them as family portraits and faux landscapes.

The city of Pompeii is a partially buried Roman town near Naples, it was buried under ashes from a volcano. The ashes helped preserve the city, which leaves us a perfectly good roman city to investigate. How cool!
 

Last one standing!

                                                                     Statue
This statue of Marcus Aurelius is the only equestrian bronze to survive aniquity! Equestrian statues were very common in the Roman times.

The Column of Trajan!

                                                                           trajan
The outside of the column is like a comic strip that had all of Trajan's accomplishments, like a timeline. The inside, on the other hand, had his ashes in it. ew. The column had bas relief on it, kinda like a coin, which meant it had a bumpy texture you could feel.

Constantine the great

                                                                     Constantine
  Constantine the great stood at a whooping 30 ft tall! To make it look more real they had to exaggerate his eyes. By doing that it made the head seem more proportionate to the body. They also made his eyes bigger to show that they were windows to his soul!

Aqueducts!

Roman aqueduct

These aqueducts were used to bring water from the mountains to the city using the force of gravity! The Romans once again are pretty smart! They also knew that the aqueducts were made out of concrete so they would only repair the aqueducts between the months of April and November because of the temperature effecting the concrete! They had 77 aqueducts in Rome, all together they brought 350,000,000 gallons of water into the city per day! Each one had a 1/2 inch grade change per mile, that allowed the water to build up momentum over the miles and create pressurized water!

About the city!

Roman Forum

The roman forum was where they shopped, had town meetings, and political gatherings.

 

City Planning!

They had sewers, running water, city squares, paved streets, and resitential and commercial areas!

 

                                                                     Roman homes!

The roman homes were often 2 stories, had an attrium, fountains, and several rooms with certain purposes. That's were we got the idea of having a different rooms for different purposes; such as a bedroom to sleep, dining room to eat, etc.

Arch of Constantine!

The arch of Constantine commemerated his accomplishments.

Personal hygiene? Check!

Roman Baths!

The romans were really fond of personal hygiene! They had different pools with different temperatures, for instance: the frigidarium pool was the coldest, then the tepidarium was room temperature, and lastly the caldarium was the hottest!

The Pantheon!

                                  

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The Pantheon was a place to whorship all Gods. The walls were 20 feet thick to support the dome at the top. The floor was 144ft in diameter ad the top of he dome to the floor was also 144 ft. The walls were coffered, had small boxes in side boxes in the walls, and the eye of the  dome was called the oculus. The oculus was 30 ft wide! The floor inside the pantheon had a drainage system in it for when it rained! Thats pretty cool!

The Colosseum!

 

With walls made of concrete, marble and decrative plaster, the Colosseum was beautiful! It stood at a whopping 16 stories high! It could hold over 50,000 people and was used for various entertainment activities! Such as mock navel battles, where they would fill the colosseum up with water. Yes, i said water. Isnt that amazing?! They would also have animals, and people, fight to the death. Now you may be wondering, but wait what happens if it rains. You see, the romans were very smart people, they had a man made woven canvas called the velarium. It took a 1,000 men to help cover the colosseum in the velarium! Thats alot of men. For the actual building, they used the standard roman sequence: bottom- doric, middle- ionic, and on top- corinthian. It had several arcades surrounding the building, the little arches, and inside each of those archs were niches filled with statues. Fun fact: Each patron had to have a ticket to enter, and everyone had an assigned seat.

Stealing ideas from other cultures?! Yep, were talking about roman art history!

 

The romans excelled in art and architecture, mostly because they used other peoples ideas. They used arch, vault & concrete better than anyone else! They did what we call "assimulated" all other cultures, which technically means they stole ideas from everyone else and used them to make their culture better, pretty smart right?

                                                                          
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 This is called a vault. A vault is an arched roof or covering made of brick, stone, or concrete



                                          
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This is an arch. An Arch is a curved architectural element used to span an opening.