Triumphal Monuments In The Roman Empire

During the Roman Empire, a series of triumphal monuments where created to commemorate important events and victories. The triumphal arch would become the most common one of these with over 50 of them in Rome alone. “The monuments transformed the simple act of walking through the city center into a reenactment of the triumphal procession” that would have taken place in the same route with the exalted figure dressed in the guise of Jupiter which included the symbolic, painted, red face (Marlowe 235). The relief carvings on the arch would contribute to this effect by illustrating the victorious event. “Triumphal arches thus gave the streets an ideological charge, reaffirming the nexus of conquest, imperial benefaction, and urban form, and made ordinary citizens complicit in their message” (Marlowe 235). The foremost example of this composite structure would be the Arch of Constantine; which commemorates the rise to power of this emperor. Constantine rose to

Created by sculptor Zenodorus, the bronze statue features a nude male figure in a contrapposto stance; “he wears a radiate crown, leans on a pillar, and holds a ship’s rudder in his right hand; the rudder rests on a sphere or globe” (Marlowe 226). It originally stood in the palace vestibule of Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House) on the Velian Hill. The statue, with its Nero-likeness and its representation of the sun god Sol, could have been “conceptualized as Nero-in-the-guise-of-Sol or Sol-with-the-portrait-features-of-Nero” (Marlowe 227). Over the different reigns of emperors the statue was rededicated to represent Sol by Nero’s successor Vespesian, moved next to the Flavian Amphitheater by Hadrian, rededicated in the inscription by Maxentius and once again by Constantine. The Arch of Constantine was plotted directly in front of the statue, transforming the way spectators saw