A beautifully decorated room has been
discovered at Emperor Nero's famed Domus Aurea (Golden House) in
Rome and brought back to light after 2,000 years.
The room is decorated with panthers, centaurs and a
delightful sphinx.
Experts chanced upon the fresh marvel in the fabled palace
while they were doing restoration work on the vault of a
neighbouring part of the structure.
They dubbed the new area "the Sphinx Room".
"It is the fruit of our strategy that focuses on conservation
and scientific research," said Alfonsina Russo, the head of the
Colosseum archaeological park that the Domus Aurea belongs to.
The discovery was revealed to ANSA first.
"It is an exceptional and thrilling find," Russo told
reporters.
The discovery was made in the last few months of last year,
archaeologists and restorers told ANSA.
It was made thanks to a platform erected to restore the vault
of room 72 od the sprawling and sumptuous complex, one of the
150 rooms hitherto rediscovered in the grand House the
controversial emperor built in 64 AD after the great fire that
devastated Rome, in which he is generally but erroneously said
to have fiddled.
"We came across a large opening positioned in the northern
corner of the covering of the room," said Alessandro D'Alessio,
the official in charge of the Domus Aurea.
The lamps the restorers had at their disposal did the rest,
he said in describing the magical moment of discovery.
"Lit up by the artificial light, there suddenly appeared the
entire barrel vault of a completely frescoed adjacent room", he
said.
The restorers immediately decided to salvage the new room,
with an intervention that ended at the start of this year,
d'Alessio said.
Much of the room, which is rectangular and covered in rich
decoration including the vault, is still unfortunately
underground, buried by tonnes of earth on the orders of the
architects of Emperor Trajan, who built luxurious baths over
Nero's former palace, archaeologists said.
It will remain so, they said, because of fears for the
stability of the complex.
Among the decorations, on a white background, are elegant
small figures divided into pictures bordered in red and golden
yellow.
In one scene we see the god Pan, in another a man armed with
a sword, quiver and shield who is fighting a panther, and in
another the small sphinx that is standing out on a pedestal,
officials said.
There are also stylized aquatic creatures, both real and
imagined, architectural motifs of the time, vegetal garlands and
branches of trees with delicate green, yellow, red leaves, as
well as festoons of flowers and fruit and posing birds.
This type of decoration, which is also found in the Domus on
the Colle Oppio and in other rooms of the Golden House including
the Cryptoporticus 92, has led experts to attribute the Room of
the Sphinx to the so-called 'A' Workshop, which operated between
65 and 68 AD.
The Domus Aurea has been yielding fresh wonders for years
amid a series of closures for restoration.
The golden palace of the ill-famed Nero (37-68 AD) first
re-opened in June 1999 after 21 years in which it was Rome's
best-kept secret - open only to art officials and special
guests.
Some five billion lire (2.5 million euros) were spent in
refurbishing the visitable rooms filled with frescoes of weird
animals like winged lions, griffins and tritons which led to the
original coinage of the word 'grotesque', from the Italian word
for cave (grotto).
Architecturally, the Domus's 'piece de resistance' is the
eight-sided Sala Ottagonale where Nero is supposed to have
entertained his guests with his singing and lyre-playing on a
rotating floor.
According to Roman historian Suetonius, Nero surprised his
guests by having marble panels slide back to shower guests
with petals and perfume.
When the Domus was completed, it actually stretched for 50
hectares and covered most of the neighbouring Palatine and
Celian hills as well.
Nero was reputed to have remarked that finally he was
beginning to be "housed like a human being".
After Nero's suicide in 68 AD the Flavian emperors who
succeeded him proceeded to bury all trace of his legacy.
The Flavian amphitheater, better known as the Colosseum,
was built on the site of Nero's palace-side lake, while
Trajan built his baths on top of the main part of the pleasure
dome.
The Colosseum is so-called because of the massive statue of
Nero-as-Apollo, a colossus, that his successors dragged beside
their own monument, after changing the head.
The Domus also has a cherished place in Italian art history
because Renaissance greats like Raphael and Michelangelo lowered
themselves through the oculus on ropes to gaze at and copy the
ancient wall drawings - a crucial stage in the full rediscovery
of how to apply the laws of perspective to painting.
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