By: Brenda Harness
Why, one might ask, would modern civilization owe a debt of gratitude to the unpopular, infamous Roman emperor Nero, dead two thousand years now by his own hand? For those folks not tuned in to their own historical roots, Nero is an important part of your culture, not just a computer software tool for burning compact disks. Nero gathered a magnificent collection of classical Greek sculpture from all over the Roman Empire, and much of that collection was lost following his downfall. However, that is not the end of the story.You may have heard the tale of how Nero fiddled while Rome burned in 64 A.D. First, let us lay that story to rest. Despite the hatred he engendered in the Roman populace for his many atrocities, there is no evidence to support this rumor. In fact, he appears to have been rather helpful to a devastated Rome during that period. No, we cannot give him credit for the burning of Rome, but Nero had many other sins for which to account--using Christians as human torches comes to mind first.One of Nero's chief failings was vanity. Nero considered himself to be enormously talented in all things: art, drama, athletics, and, of course, music, a fiddler extraordinaire he claimed. Perhaps he was. We are told that he won every single competition he ever entered, whether artistic or athletic. We are further told that the reason he always won was because really unpleasant things happened to anyone who bested him. Nero made good use of the wide-spread destruction of Rome. The emperor's own house, the Domus Transitoria, was destroyed in the fire, but free space was now available in the burned out city. Nero took advantage of that space to build a pleasure palace, his Domus Aurea, or Golden House. The Domus Aurea was not a place for sleeping, because Nero had other lodgings for that. He filled the Domus Aurea with his collection of classical Greek sculpture and other treasures.Described by Pliny the Elder, Nero built the Domus Aurea of bricks and stucco, lavishly embellished it with gold-leaf decoration and ivory veneer and studded the ceilings with semi-previous stones. It covered 350 acres, roughly a third of Rome, spanning four of the Seven Hills of Rome in the heart of the city. The grounds of the Domus Aurea featured villas, vineyards, forests, a sacred grove, pastures for livestock, and an artificial lake. Nero erected a 120 foot bronze statue of himself in the center dressed as the sun god, Sol, his Colossus Neronis. The Colossus would be the sole survivor of Nero's Domus Aurea. In 68 A.D. the Roman Senate declared Nero an enemy of the state, a death sentence, and the emperor committed suicide. Following his death, the lake was drained, the Colosseum constructed where it stood, and Nero's colossal head was decapitated from the Neronis and replaced with the heads of succeeding emperors. Said to be an embarrassment to the city because of Nero's excesses, the Golden House was denuded of its decorations within ten years, and subsequently buried beneath new construction within forty years.That would seem to be the end of Nero's Domus Aurea, but something strange happened to bring it back to life at the end of the fifteenth century. A young Roman was walking on the Aventine hill only to fall into a hole into a subterranean wonderland. He saw incredible frescoes, appearing to be freshly painted as if new. He had fallen into the cavernous remains of Nero's Golden House. The site of this accident drew Italian artists from far and wide.Raphael and Michelangelo visited the site, and some artists of the time inscribed their names into the walls. From the depths of Nero's pleasure palace, from the frescoes, mosaics, and sculpture, they took inspiration, an inspiration that would be reflected in the art of the High Renaissance. As the Domus Aurea with its new antique source material was explored, one classical Greek sculpture was unearthed on a day that Michelangelo visited. It was the Laocoon, a marble work by famed Greek Hellenistic sculptors, Athanadoros, Hagesandros, and Polydoros of Rhodes.Laocoon, a mythological subject, depicts the Trojan priest Laocoon with his two sons in a struggle against a giant sea snake, a punishment from the gods for warning the Trojans about the Trojan horse. Its powerful emotional content and vigorous muscularity would soon be reflected in the works of Italian Renaissance giants Michelangelo and Raphael. This work and others like it from Nero's private collection of classical Greek sculpture profoundly influenced Italian Renaissance art, and it is from this art that we have developed our own modern aesthetic sensibilities. Had Nero not been the demented, despotic monster that he was, had his Golden House not been stripped and entombed, buried beneath the Baths of Trajan for two millennia, his classical Greek sculpture collection might have been lost like so many other art work of its kind. Without Nero, we might not appreciate beauty when we see it.
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