Comparing The Roman Colosseum And The Pantheon

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1. I choose the Colosseum and the Pantheon. The Roman Colosseum attracts me the most. It’s a grand Roman architecture. I first knew it from high school history, since that time I wish I could go to visit it myself one day. Nero suicide due to his lavish lifestyle, then Vespasian built the Colosseum on the ground, which was Nero’s palace (Section 3.1 Colosseum). Above that, it meant the end of Nero’s reign, or an era of authoritarian tyrant. Citizens did love that. As we all know the Colosseum was a place Roman watched fights shows: people to people, animals to animals, and people to animals. As the biggest events at that time, not only the aristocrats, but also normal people went there to watch the “killing games”. Countless animals and gladiators died there. It sounds so violent, and it truly was.
2. First, Rome did a good job in Portrait Busts. As our textbook points out in 3.1 Cicero and the Politics of Rhetoric, “These are generally portraits of patricians (and upper-middle-class citizens wishing to emulate them) rather than equites. Roman portrait busts share with their Greek ancestors an affinity for naturalistic representation, but they are even more realistic, revealing their subjects' every wrinkle and wart.” As we can see in the picture 3-5, every small wrinkle was true to life. …show more content…

The Colosseum, where animals and gladiators fought at the old time, is mainly round shape. Audience watched the fights on the stepped stands. Triumphal Arches, known for triumphant armies walked through it. “It were composed of a simple barrel vault enclosed within a rectangle, and enlivened with sculpture and decorative engaged columns”, nonetheless, it deeply influenced later architecture, especially in Renaissance (3.1 Triumphal Arches and Columns). What’s more, Column of Trajan, the Pantheon and some others, were great representative in Roman

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