Roman Architecture through the Ages: Fid-Bau Portal

Roman Architecture through the Ages

Altekamp, Stefan

This chapter traces some of the stages of reference or evocation of classical architecture in later construction in chronological sequence, with special attention to the reception of Roman architecture as a specific type of classical architecture. The documentation of authentic classical forms and classicizing creations by Renaissance and Baroque architects circulated in parallel and left behind intersecting traces of their reception. Classical Greek and Roman architecture could only be differentiated based on an expanded familiarity with genuine Greek buildings. The known examples of Greek and Roman architecture that were absorbed into contemporary architectural practice became firmly canonized in the mid‐nineteenth century. Fascism did not, however, establish an uncontested cult of ancient Roman architecture. The claim of having broken through to the original purpose of architecture, redressing modernism's break from tradition, and having allegedly rediscovered the natural by overcoming the experimental, is typical of the theoretical writings of the “New Classicism.”.