Discussion Post 2

The image of ancient Rome is the image of unified, imperial strength–but as Irine Fosi’s “The Plural City; Urban Spaces and Foreign Communities” points out, there were complex undercurrents of mixing culture, religion, and control that are not obvious when looking at the surface. All of these intertwining elements influenced art and architecture in Rome. I am taking another class on cosmopolitanism, and our focus in the past three weeks has been on the founding of Rome through the lens of Vergil’s The Aeneid. I highly recommend this short documentary by Mary Beard: “Who Were the Citizens of Ancient Rome?” (https://youtu.be/teSs_AJ6P88) It discusses similar topics as Fosi’s article–specifically foreigners and implementing an empire-wide culture–and supplemented my learning of how Rome worked at its height.

I thought Dr. McPhee’s “Envisioning Baroque Rome” project was incredibly fascinating. I took Dr. McPhee and Dr. Pastan’s art history course on great buildings last semester, and Dr. McPhee frequently talked about this project. I really had no idea of the scale and detail of what she was working on. Coming freshly out of that course, architecture in relation to art history is something I’m really interested in and excited to explore in this class. The reason I am so intrigued with this model in particular is because of the detail put into measurements and math. Knowing how much attention to detail and measurements goes into scale models simply drawn from life, it is astounding to me that it’s even feasible to make something this accurate and detailed from maps and sketches made centuries ago. In the ECDS class, I asked if it were possible to imbed links/information about specific landmarks in the model. Professor Maloney directed me to “Roma: Caput Mundi,” another digital project that does exactly that, but in an admittedly less exciting 2D map. (It’s gonna be pretty hard to top Envisioning Baroque Rome!) I think this digital source, perhaps used alongside Dr. McPhee’s, would create a super cool immersive experience.