THE GOLDEN AND THE GROTESQUE

Nero’s spectacular palace in Rome, the Domus Aurea or ‘Golden House’, was rediscovered in the Renaissance. Dalu Jones describes how the opulent designs of its ancient halls inspired some of the most celebrated artists of the 15th and 16th centuries.

- Dalu Jones

In no other matter did he act more wastefully than in building a house that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline Hill, which he originally named ‘Transitoria’ [House of Passages], but when soon afterwards it was destroyed by fire and rebuilt he called it ‘Aurea’ [Golden House]. It was a house whose size and elegance these details should be sufficient to relate: its courtyard was so large that a 120-foot colossal statue of the emperor himself stood there; it was so spacious that it had a mile-long triple portico; also there was a pool of water like a sea, that was surrounded by buildings which gave it the appearance of cities; and besides that, various rural tracts of land with vineyards, cornfields, pastures, and forests, teeming with every kind of animal both wild and domesticated. In other parts of the house, everything was covered in gold and adorned with jewels and mother-of-pearl; dining rooms with fretted ceilings whose ivory panels could be turned so that flowers or perfumes from pipes were sprinkled down from above; the main hall of the dining rooms was round, and it would turn constantly day and night like the Heavens; there were baths, flowing with seawater and with the sulphur springs of the Albula; when he dedicated this house, that had been completed in this manner, he approved of it only so much as to say that he could finally begin to live like a human being.

Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars: Nero 31