Trajan’s Column: History and Significance
Trajan’s Column
General Documentation
- Author: Apollodorus of Damascus
- Chronology: 2nd Century AD
- Location: Forum of Trajan (Rome)
- Size: 40m in height
- Material: Marble
- Style: Imperial Roman
- Type: Relief
- Theme: Memorial
Formal Analysis
Technique and Material:
This work is a marble carving on a shaft, and a subtractive technique was used with abrasives. The shaft is smooth in certain areas. It is a relief sculpture that appears sunken and in half-relief: low relief incisions are representing buildings thoroughly; however, the middle relief represents the characters. It should be added that marble is a porous and very fine material with a few flaws. In this work, we see no kind of impurity.
This column (on a pedestal) is divided into base, shaft, and capital. The base is convex with a decoration of laurel leaves. The shaft is arranged with helicoidal relief sculptures; this provision is a continuous frieze, 200m in length, with more than 2500 characters. Each character is very individual. For example, Emperor Trajan appears 59 times and always seems like the level of expression and personification.
The middle relief represents the characters, and the low relief represents buildings or landscapes. This creates a sense of foreground and background where there is an obstruction between the characters. Sometimes it seems that there is a vanishing point, but in reality, there is an axis of flight.
Stylistic Analysis
Romanesque art is a mix between:
- Etruscan Realism: Roman portrait.
- Treatment of volume and depth of Greek and Etruscan art.
Relationship with Space
The work was located in Trajan’s Forum, located in the heart of the city, focused on public and iconic buildings. This forum consisted of the following buildings: a triumphal arch entrance to where we are, with an arcaded courtyard with a statue in the middle, followed by a basilica, and then Trajan’s Column between two libraries.
Interpretation, Meaning, and Function
It is a memorial building that served to commemorate an event: the victory over the region of Dacia. In the first scene, we see the advance towards the Danube River, and in the last scene, we see the last prisoners of Dacia.
Function:
- Memorial
- To be a Columbarium: At the top of the column, there are two columbaria that kept the ashes of Trajan and his wife.
- It marked the highest point of the forum.
Assessment
It is a monument that combines architecture and sculpture. The state of conservation is excellent, with virtually no erosion. It perfectly summarizes the general characteristics of Roman imperial art: eclecticism, functionality, and colossalism.
Interpreting Meaning and Function
It is a reality-representing close to him. There’s a self-portrait, but it represents the red tape that he had to do when he married the daughter of painter Ambla Madrazo.
- Theme: Signature bed with the priest standing, groom signing, a witness, the bride, and all the guests, offering something a servant with a tray, and right bullfighters queuing.
The yellow carpet separates the humble people from the bourgeois. The yellow carpet is the humble people. The last woman is rotated with a friendly attitude to the humble. This kind legitimizes social differences.
- Custom themes: Everyday life represents a way forward, bombastic, pompous, ceremonial, extremely sensitive.
- Reception kindly directed to the bourgeoisie, friendly, good people. Customers of this work are bourgeois.
Final Rating
- It is a work to illustrate the Catalan pictorial realism and its differences with the French. (Catalan is less critical).
- Whether this format, as the preciousness of the French, speaks of collecting at the time.
- This work was never preserved, unlike the works of Courbet.
- We speak of social strata of the moment.