One of the key buildings in my imagination (it still stands proudly on a busy roundabout in Rome ) is Cestius’ Pyramid in Rome. This Cestius guy wasn’t bothered enormously by modesty so he got himself buried under a 37 m. high pyramidal mausoleum. A delusion of grandeur if ever you saw one. The romans had seen pyramids when venturing into Egypt some 15 years before its constuction. So Egypt, being an new province of Rome (Aegyptus) was very much à la mode when Cestius died. However the builders must have built it from imagination rather than from a proper set of measurements since the inclination of its sides is way too steep for an Egyptian mausoleum. Some thousand sevenhundred fifty years later Piranesi (1720-1778) made a famous engraving from the pyramid of Cestius in Rome for his ‘Vedute di Roma,’ the first widespread work of art to satisfy the eyes and imagination of ‘tourists’ making their Grand Tour of Europe at home.
Thus, Cestius ‘mistake’ was to be continued in the minds of antiquity lovers, architects and dreamers.
Unfortunately, the spread of Photographs from the likes of Felice Beato (+/- 1860) finally corrected our vision and idea about how a pyramid looked like. As a blogger of the speculative possibilities of photography I do deplore this correction.
Wikipedia facts and figures:
The pyramid was built about 18 BC–12 BC as a tomb for Caius Cestius, a magistrate. It is of brick-faced concrete covered with slabs of white marble standing on a travertine foundation, measuring 100 Roman feet (29.6 m) square at the base and standing 125 Roman feet (37 m) high.[1]
In the interior is the burial chamber, a simple barrel-vaulted rectangular cavity measuring 5.95 metres long, 4.10 m wide and 4.80 m high. When it was (re)discovered in 1660, the chamber was found to be decorated with frescoes, which were recorded by Pietro Santi Bartoli, but only the scantest traces of these now remain. There was no trace left of any other contents in the tomb, which had been plundered in antiquity. The tomb had been sealed when it was built, with no exterior entrance; it is not possible for visitors to access the interior.
- Cestius Pyramid, Rome 2009, copyright photography@swad.be
No comments:
Post a Comment