Architectural images in Roman state reliefs, coins, and medallions: Imperial ritual, ideology, and the topography of Rome.

Abstract

Depictions of architecture in the official state reliefs, coins, and medallions of the Roman emperors have much to reveal about how the Romans conceptualized and manipulated the urban environment of the city of Rome for symbolic and ideological purposes. Such images have always been analyzed for the valuable evidence they provide concerning the original appearance of badly damaged and lost structures. But to consider the architectural images in the background of figural scenes depicting rituals and historic events primarily as topographic evidence does not do them justice. In this dissertation, I place architectural backgrounds in their contexts: within compositions, within the state imagery of the Roman emperors, and within the topography of Rome. The chronological bounds of the sculptural and numismatic material under consideration coincide roughly with the first three centuries A.D., the period in which the emperors ruled from Rome. In Chapter 2, I develop a methodology for identifying and interpreting architectural images as representations of specific buildings. Chapter 3 considers, through the investigation of a particular iconographic type---the emperor sacrificing before a temple---how the location of an event is an essential element of the event's iconography, and how even the presence of an unrecognizable architectural background can take on iconographic significance. Chapter 4 explores how memories and expectations of the emperor's actions in specific places are created by the depiction of the emperor amidst recognizable architectural backgrounds. I emphasize the privileged status of the city of Rome as the site and object of the majority of these visual discourses on the emperor's roles. Chapter 5 seeks to understand the reliefs in their topographic contexts. I argue that many reliefs were placed to create sightlines to the buildings represented. These sightlines aided in the recognition of building images, but more importantly, they created immediate visual connections between the location of the relief and the location depicted upon it. These links suggest an interest in influencing the viewer's experience of the place where the relief was located as well as the viewer's perception of the location represented. For this phenomenon, I have coined the term metatopography.