Where Nature and Artifice Collide

It is often in the most challenging of times that the value of art to society is clearest. Such has surely been true of this uncertain era of Covid-19, in which isolated Americans all across the country have turned time and again to film, television, music and literature in search of a moment’s respite or an inspiring tale of resilience on which to draw.

Art’s ability to contextualize our individual struggles and remind us of our place in the order of things is a power it shares with nature. As anyone who has found peace through hiking, camping or gardening this year can attest, the natural world is an inherently meditative and restorative space in which we would all do well to pass a little time.

Given the restorative potential of both art and nature, it is entirely fitting that this year’s Renwick Invitational —a biennial exhibition celebrating a diverse ensemble of gifted craftspeople—is themed around the intersection of these two spheres.

The exhibition, which opened this October at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum , is titled “Forces of Nature” and uses the language of sculpture and other visual art to mediate between humanity and the wonders of the world around us. Installations by a select group of artists hailing from Portland, Maine; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Seattle, Washington; and Bloomington, Indiana will offer striking perspectives on this theme through June 27, 2021.

Opening the show is a larger-than-life installation from the Indiana farmer and mixed-media artist Rowland Ricketts , titled Ai no Keshiki – Indigo Views . Soaring toward the top of its high-ceilinged gallery, the work is composed of pieces of cloth suffused with rich Awa indigo dye cultivated by Ricketts himself. Suspended in neat rows like linens on clotheslines, the sheets nonetheless have an uncanny natural elegance to them, resembling a flock of beautiful bluebirds in flight.

Some of the sheets are more faded than others, owing to the fact that each spent a summer in a specific household in a specific part of the world and organically absorbed a unique amount of light. In all, 450 volunteers from ten countries agreed to keep a swatch of Ricketts’s dyed cloth in their care, their disparate lifestyles all literally coloring the ultimate artwork.

The lighting in the exhibition is also tinged with human experience: its intensity varies dynamically according to changes in local and global Covid statistics, which are algorithmically “interpreted” by the installation’s suspended incandescent bulbs. The ethereal music filling the space, in turn, adapts to the changing lighting. This ever-evolving quality, guest curator Emily Zilber says, “gets to the core of what Rowland’s piece is about: How can nature bear witness to everyday moments?”

Following on from Ricketts’s exploration of nature and human experience, Portland-based artist Lauren Fensterstock stops museumgoers in their tracks with an otherworldly comet of deepest black, titled The totality of time lusters the dark. Running the full length of its large oblong gallery, the surreal, spike-headed missile seems to transcend place and moment—it is eternal and cosmic, all-encapsulating yet stubbornly impenetrable.

Inspired by an image in the 16th-century manuscript The Book of Miracles , Fensterstock’s obsidian-encrusted piece speaks to both the wonder and the folly of human efforts to reckon our place in the cosmos. It exemplifies the sculptor’s approach to art as “unconventional landscape architecture,” which draws on the decorative arts and often features large-scale, fastidiously detailed centerpieces. “There are these huge feats of engineering in it,” Zilber says of the work, “but also these small moments that are just as impressive as the overall splendor.”

Fensterstock’s gallery feeds into the heart of the exhibition space: the home of Washington State sculptor and glassworker Debora Moore’s Arboria series. Arboria is an exquisitely detailed quartet of hand-sculpted trees, each possessed of a delicate, transient beauty that belies both the intensity of its birth in Moore’s hot shop and the finality of its hardened form. Coated in a “liquid skin” of silicone, crushed glass, and pigment, the trees of Arboria at once honor and transcend nature, amalgamating details remembered from across Moore’s world travels—including lichen she observed in Antarctica—into dreamlike hybrid organisms.

Moore’s admiration for her artistic forebears is apparent in the crown of her cherry tree, which she sculpted using a centuries-old chandelier-making technique, and in the body of her magnolia, which she shaped with a 150-year-old Italian glassworkers’ tool. At the same time, her work is emphatically alive, unabashedly of the present. “I love the liquid form,” Moore says, “the hot molten glass you can freeze in a moment.” Inspired by the Japanese concept of shinrin yoku , or “forest bathing,” Arboria envelops you in its hyperreal landscape—an impressive feat for an installation in such a large gallery. “These works demand a lot of psychic space,” Zilber explains. She encourages visitors to “spend some time thinking about what it takes to make something like that”—to find “power through materiality.”

Rounding out the show is the art of Timothy Horn , an Australian mixed-media sculptor who resides in Provincetown. His work playfully explores the imposition of human ideas of class and beauty on the inscrutable elegance of the natural world. Horn’s branching Gorgonia 12 , for instance, named for a genus of corals, is ornamented with blown glass orbs, Christmas tree-like in its contrivance yet still unmistakably bound to the deep, unknowable ocean.

Also on exhibit are a shocking pair of sculptures that Horn fashioned entirely of crystallized rock sugar: one an ornate carriage, the other a massive chandelier. Both smack of rococo excess and impracticality, literally cloying in their brown sugary extravagance. They provide stark warnings against the exploitation of nature’s resources to line the pockets of a privileged few, pleas to preserve the natural world and to ensure that access to its wonders remains universal forevermore. “The pandemic has really drawn attention to inequality in unforeseen ways,” Zilber says, so she anticipates visitors to the museum will find these pieces particularly resonant.

Regarded as a whole, this year’s Renwick Invitational is remarkable for both the breadth of its subject matter—from farmland to Antarctica, from the ocean depths to outer space—and the cohesiveness of its message: that the natural world not only deserves our love and admiration, but has the power to inspire us, pick up our spirits, and spur us down the long, uneven path to an equitable, sustainable future. “It offers a pure physical and mental sense of relief and belief,” Zilber says. “It’s an exhibition that has the capacity to meet people where they are, and that’s something that feels especially important now.”

“Forces of Nature” will be on view at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum through June 27, 2021. The space is currently open Wednesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 5:30. While social distancing is enforced on the premises, no timed-entry passes are required for admittance.

The New, Nicer Nero

The Colosseum in Rome draws close to eight million tourists a year, making it one of the world’s most-visited archaeological attractions. I could see the crowds converging on the magnificent first-century amphitheater as I headed across the street to a small park on a hillock. There was almost no one here, aside from a few young mothers pushing strollers along the pathways. A cluster of nuns passed by, and one of them pointed me toward a poorly marked gate at the base of the hill—the entrance to the Domus Aurea, or what’s left of it, anyway.

I had an appointment to meet Alessandro D’Alessio, who oversees the excavation and restoration of what must surely have been, in its day, the world’s biggest royal palace. Even before Covid-19, when the site was open to the public on weekends, few people came.

The emperor Nero commandeered many of the neighborhoods razed by the Great Fire of A.D. 64 to build a palace complex of staggering dimensions. The Domus Aurea, or Golden House, as the entire site was known, spread over almost 200 acres, covering the Palatine, Caelian and Esquiline hills of Rome. It was one of the big reasons that the Roman public suspected Nero of setting the fire himself. No modern scholar, and few ancient ones, believe he did, but you have to admit, the Domus Aurea seemed to give Nero a fairly good motive for arson.

As the first-century Roman historian Suetonius describes it, the Domus Aurea was a home fit for a megalomaniac. “His wastefulness showed most of all in the architectural projects,” Suetonius writes. “Parts of the house were overlaid with gold and studded with precious stones and mother-of-pearl. All the dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory, the panels of which could slide back and let a rain of flowers, or perfume from hidden sprinklers, shower upon his guests....When the palace had been decorated throughout in this lavish style, Nero dedicated it, and condescended to remark, ‘Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being!’”

The Domus Aurea is nearly all gone now. The emperors who followed Nero swept it away in a frenzy, attempting to efface him and his works from Roman memory. One section remains, buried beneath the footpaths of Oppian Hill. The emperor Trajan built his famous baths right on top of it, filling Nero’s vast galleries with soil to support the weight of the baths. Trajan’s memory-expunging project succeeded: The crowds who flock to the Colosseum across the street have no idea that the Domus Aurea is footsteps away. Sic transit .

For the past six years, D’Alessio has been supervising archaeological excavation of the sprawling Domus Aurea’s 150-odd rooms. Even before Covid-19, the dig had halted while D’Alessio and his crew constructed an alternative drainage system to stabilize conditions inside. Completion of the project lies many years in the future.

D’Alessio guided me from one high-vaulted gallery to another. Splendid frescoes line some of the walls, in a style we recognize from the ruins at Pompeii—but the distinctive aesthetic, later expressed across the Roman Empire, originated here, at the Domus Aurea.

A little farther on, D’Alessio led me to a room, its walls surfaced with roughly textured pumice, recreating a natural grotto. The space was dedicated to the nymphs, or female nature deities, whose cult of worship had spread throughout the empire. A micro-mosaic adorns the ceiling: It depicts in astonishing detail a scene from the Odys-sey . The ceiling mosaic surely influenced the Byzantines, who later plastered ceiling mosaics almost everywhere.

But the Domus Aurea’s boldest artistic innovation was surely its architecture. We know little of the two men who designed it—Severus and Celer. D’Alessio thinks Nero himself must have stayed closely involved in this grand-scale project. After all, this is the kind of thing, not ruling Rome, that turned him on.

High overhead, an open hole, or oculus , invited the sky in. Rome’s Pantheon uses the same device to magnificent effect, but Nero’s Octagonal Room did it first. Alcoves radiated off the main space underneath, inviting the eye to wander in unexpected directions. Precisely angled windows channeled sunlight to hidden niches. Light and shadow danced around the room, following the course of the sun.

“Pure genius,” says D’Alessio. “The Sala Octagonale is very significant for Roman architecture, but also for the development of Byzantine and Islamic architecture. It is a very important place for Western civilization. Nero left us masterpieces. We have a certain image of Nero from the ancient sources who were against Nero, and also, in our time, from the movies. The Church chose Nero as the representation of evil, but if you see what he made here, you get a completely different idea.”

* * *

Among history’s most durable memes, one ranks particularly high: a fleshy fellow in a toga, laurel wreath encircling his temples, standing among the columns of an ancient portico, while all around him, fire consumes the great city of Rome. He is not alarmed. Quite the contrary. He calmly plucks the strings of a lyre and, yes, even appears to be singing!

The meme says everything we need to know about this egotistical monster, his wanton indifference to human suffering and his pathetic delusions of artistic grandeur. He is at once childish and murderous. The story has been told and retold for almost 2,000 years, but it is Hollywood, not surprisingly, that has supplied the pictures in our heads. Pride of place must surely go to Mervyn LeRoy’s 1951 epic Quo Vadis , thanks to Peter Ustinov’s deliciously hammy Nero (the actor was nominated for an Oscar). “Look what I have painted!” shrieks Ustinov as he watches the Technicolor flames engulf his city.

Ustinov calls for his lyre. He commences to pluck. “I am one with the gods immortal. I am Nero the artist who creates with fire,” he sings tunelessly. “Burn on, O ancient Rome. Burn on!” A panicky mob converges on the palace. “They want to survive,” explains Nero’s levelheaded counselor Petronius (portrayed by Leo Genn, also nominated for an Oscar). “Who asked them to survive?” shrugs Nero. Great cinema it isn’t, but it is terrific stuff all the same. And this is more or less the consensus Nero of history, set down first by the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius and etched deeper by the New Testament Book of Revelation and later Christian writings.

The man most responsible for Nero’s modern incarnation is the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, whose Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero , appeared in 1895 and was the basis for the Mervyn LeRoy film and half a dozen other cinematic versions. The plot centers on the doomed love between a young Christian woman and a Roman patrician, but their pallid romance is not what turned the novel into a worldwide sensation. Sienkiewicz researched Roman history deeply; his Nero and other historical characters hum with authenticity. It was they, more than the book’s fictional protagonists, who vaulted Quo Vadis to runaway best-seller status, translated into over 50 languages. Sienkiewicz ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905.

Sienkiewicz plucks two strings that resonated loudly with his audience, and have done so ever since: Nero’s role as the emblematic persecutor of early Christianity (Poland is a deeply Catholic country) and Nero’s political tyranny (to Sienkiewicz, an ardent nationalist, Nero’s Rome stood in for czarist Russia).

* * *

But what if Nero wasn’t such a monster? What if he didn’t invent the spectator sport of throwing Christians to the lions in the Colosseum? What if he wasn’t the tyrant who murdered upstanding Roman senators and debauched their wives? Indeed, what if the whole lurid rap sheet has been an elaborate set-up, with Nero as history’s patsy? After all, we have no eyewitness testimony from Nero’s reign. Any contemporaneous writings have been lost. The ancient Roman sources we do have date from considerably after Nero’s suicide in A.D. 68. The case against Nero, then, is largely hearsay, amplified and distorted over two millennia in history’s longest game of telephone. Besides, no one really wants to straighten out the record. Who wants another version of Nero? He’s the perfect evil tyrant just the way he is.

A few lonely voices have come to Nero’s defense. In 1562, the Milanese polymath Girolamo Cardano published a treatise, Neronis Encomium. He argued that Nero had been slandered by his principal accusers. But Cardano was having his own problems with the Inquisition at the time. Sticking up for a guy who, among other things, supposedly martyred the first Christians for fun was not likely to help his own cause. “You put your life at risk if you said something good about Nero,” says Angelo Paratico, a historian, who translated Cardano’s manifesto into English.

Paratico’s translation, Nero, An Exemplary Life , didn’t appear until 2012, by which time historians had started taking another look at the case against Nero. Out of all the modern scholars coming to the emperor’s rescue, the most comprehensive is John Drinkwater, an emeritus professor of Roman history at the University of Nottingham. Drinkwater has spent 12 years poring over the charges against Nero, and dismantling them one by one. Scourge of Christianity? Nope. Urban pyromaniac? No again. And on down through matricide, wife-killing and a string of other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Nero who appears in Drinkwater’s revisionist new account, Nero: Emperor and Court , published last year, is no angel. But one comes away with some sympathy for this needy lightweight who probably never wanted to be emperor in the first place and should never have been allowed to wear the purple toga.

Drinkwater is in line with the emerging trend of modern scholarship here, but he goes much further. Nero allowed a ruling clique to administer the Roman Empire, and it did so effectively, argues Drinkwater. Most of what Nero is accused of doing, he probably didn’t do, with a few exceptions that fall well within the grisly standards of ancient Roman political machinations. Drinkwater’s Nero bears little personal responsibility, and not much guilt, for much of anything. In the end, says Drinkwater, the “men in suits” got rid of Nero not for what he did, but for what he failed to act on. (On the other hand, Drinkwater believes that Nero probably crooned a few stanzas during the Great Fire, but we’ll get to that later.)

Drinkwater says many modern scholars have been trying to explain why Nero was so awful—“that he was a young man put in the wrong job and therefore he went to the bad. He was tyrannical not because he was evil, but because he couldn’t do the job. That’s more or less what I expected too. I was surprised because my Nero was not coming out like this. My Nero was not the out-and-out evil tyrant, because he was never really in control. Nobody here is tyrannical.”

The blame for saddling Nero with his unwanted destiny falls squarely on his mother, Agrippina the Younger, great-granddaughter of the emperor Augustus and a woman of boundless ambition. (Nero’s father, an odious aristocrat, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, died two years after Nero was born.) Nero became Agrippina’s instrument for conquering the man’s world of Rome.

She moved first to disrupt the planned nuptials of the emperor’s daughter Octavia, so that Nero could marry her. The emperor at the time was Claudius, easily swayed. Agrippina’s improbable little lie—that Octavia’s fiancé had committed incest with his sister—proved toxic enough to torpedo the wedding. Readers of Robert Graves’ picaresque and hugely popular Claudius novels are unlikely to forget the sexual gymnastics of Messalina, Claudius’ notorious wife. In the end, Messalina’s antics brought her down, leaving a vacancy in the marriage bed that Agrippina filled in A.D. 49. Shortly thereafter, Claudius adopted Nero as his own son, making Nero a legitimate claimant to the throne, alongside Claudius’ natural son Britannicus. And finally, in A.D. 53, Nero married Octavia. The stage was set. Agrippina had managed everything with steely efficiency.

The Roman historian Tacitus is not always reliable and he is certainly not unbiased, but his portrait of Agrippina in her hour of triumph feels right today: “From this moment the country was transformed. Complete obedience was accorded to a woman—and not a woman like Messalina who toyed with national affairs to satisfy her appetites. This was a rigorous, almost masculine despotism.”

More power to her, says Drinkwater, who is a big fan. “I think the Roman Empire lost out by not having Empress Agrippina. Given half the chance, I think she could have been another Catherine the Great. I admire her intelligence, her perspicacity. She was one of the few people who knew how the system worked. For example, Claudius is often reproached for killing a lot of senators, and he did, but when Agrippina comes along, you get very little of that. The modern thinking is that she worked well with the senate. If she had been given more time, she might have been able to establish a precedent of an active executive woman in Roman politics.”

Claudius died in A.D. 54 after eating a mushroom that was either bad or poisoned—Tacitus and the ancients say poisoned on Agrippina’s orders, and while there’s no hard proof, nobody then or now would put it past her. In either case, Agrippina had greased the succession machine so that Nero, just 17, slid smoothly onto the throne following Claudius’ death, past the slightly younger Britannicus.

We know very little about the teenager who found himself absolute ruler of a sprawling, multiethnic empire. He had been educated by the great Stoic philosopher Seneca, but Nero was clearly no stoic. We do know, however, that the Roman people welcomed their new emperor enthusiastically and held high expectations for his reign.

Things started out well, mostly because Nero was more than happy to allow three highly capable people to steer the ship of state: Seneca, Burrus, the levelheaded commander of the Praetorian Guard, and, of course, Agrippina. Behind them stood Drinkwater’s “men in suits,” the senators, well-trained freedmen and ex-slaves who made up a kind of civil service. In Drinkwater’s account, the roster of Team Nero shifted around somewhat during the 14 years of his reign, but it oversaw the empire competently.

For his part, Nero gave himself over to the pursuits that mattered most to him—chariot-driving, singing, poetry and playing the cithara, a stringed instrument like a lyre but more complex and much harder to master. Nero was a thoroughgoing philhellene—a lover of Greece and its sophisticated culture. He had little of the Roman appetite for blood and conquest, which makes him look far more appealing to us than to the Romans.

The Nero meme leaves the impression of an effete dilettante, confident in his own genius only because nobody had the guts to tell him otherwise. This is wrong on several counts. Suetonius tells us that Nero worked very hard to get good at singing. “Heonscientiously undertook all the usual exercises for strengthening and developing his voice. He would also lie on his back with a slab of lead on his chest, use enemas and emetics to keep down his weight, and refrain from eating apples and every other food considered deleterious to the vocal cords,” Suetonius reports, adding cattily that Nero’s voice remained “feeble and husky.”

Even the poetry Nero wrote himself was apparently pretty good; the Roman poet Martial tells us so. We have selections of it, and they don’t sound anything like the grandiloquent tripe that generally comes out of his mouth in the movies. Nero cannot be dismissed as a mere dabbler: He took his hobbies seriously—too seriously, in fact, for a Roman establishment that liked its emperors to make war, not art.

Nero was an accomplished athlete as well. Suetonius is impressed that Nero can pilot a four-camel rig around the racetrack. In other references, we find Nero at the reins of a ten-horse chariot. That was the ancient Roman equivalent of a Formula One car. Nero won races in it. “If Nero could do that, he is no fool. He is intelligent, he is fit. On his own terms, he is to be taken seriously and he’s not to be projected as a clown,” Drinkwater concludes.

Those qualities made the young Nero very popular with the common man. He had an exuberant personality and enjoyed being out in public. He was no snob and remembered the names and faces of people up and down the social ladder. All in all, he comes off as a fairly likable young fellow.

OK, sure, there were casualties. But let no one be overly troubled by the fact that Nero’s brother Britannicus turns up dead a year after Nero takes power. “He was doomed from the start,” Drinkwater writes. Political murder was an accepted tool of governance and made few waves in first-century Rome, provided it was not overused. Everybody did it, not just Nero.

“You get the impression that people are being murdered all the time,” Drinkwater told me. “But if you start adding up the Neronian murders, there are not that many of them.

“Even the thing that people point to later as the real blood bath, just after the Pisonian conspiracy of A.D. 65, if you tot up the numbers, they are still quite small—20 or 30. In terms of 16th- or 17th-century English politics, that’s nothing. It’s a surgical strike! I go bananas about this supposed ‘reign of terror.’ For those involved it was dreadful, and it’s not a society that one would have liked to live in, but it’s also not that dangerous for politicians. If you overstepped the mark, you paid the penalty, but most people knew where the boundaries were.”

Nero’s problems with his mother started early on, when he fell in love for real. Not with Octavia, his wife, alas. Nero’s arranged marriage to her brought neither love nor children. Instead, Nero fell hard for a lowborn freedwoman named Acte. He even flirted with the idea of marrying her, a project Drinkwater calls “absolutely silly.” But it is Agrippina’s disapproval of her son’s comportment—not just with his mistress but a new gang of friends his own age—that plants the wedge between them. He’s coming into his own and his mother is no longer the partner she intended to be. She’s an impediment.

Before long, Nero strips Agrippina of her personal security detail and kicks her out of the palace. As in much ancient Roman history, the coinage tells the tale: first Agrippina and Nero stop appearing together on the heads side of Roman coins and she gets flipped to the tails side; then she disappears from coins altogether.

Things go downhill. When Nero falls in love again, this time with his adored future wife Poppaea, Agrippina again tries to come between them. Are these the real reasons Nero has his mother killed in A.D. 59? It seems like a stretch, but none of the ancient sources can explain to anyone’s satisfaction why Nero commits this atrocity. Even by the grim standards of ancient Rome, you don’t kill your mother. Matricide will become a defining moment for the authors of the Nero meme, when he is first fitted for his role as history’s monster.

The story of the murder verges on the burlesque. Nero invites his mother to a kind of reconciliation party at his country villa in Baiae on the Bay of Naples. He graciously provides a galley to ferry Agrippina home after the party, but the boat is rigged to come apart at sea. Agrippina is meant to drown, but she is an unexpectedly strong swimmer and manages to make it safely back to shore. After some comical dithering, a henchman is sent to dispatch Agrippina the old-fashioned way, with a sword.

“When you look at the evidence here, you can play it any which way,” says Drinkwater. “The great joy of doing ancient history is taking the bits you’ve got and putting them together—let’s be honest—more or less the way you feel. I got to know Nero, and I always felt that he couldn’t have done this to his mother in cold blood. They stayed close even after the breakup over Acte and the squabble over Poppaea. Down to her death, Agrippina is not stripped of her imperial titles. And the actual story of her death is so confused, overdramatic and elaborated that you could take the whole lot together and suggest that he didn’t intend to kill her himself, but that after the shipwreck—or the accident—others seized the opportunity to get rid of her themselves.”

Here Drinkwater directs the jury’s attention to Seneca, designated by history as the virtuous foil to Nero, the frivolous killer. Seneca’s noble suicide six years later (at Nero’s not-so-polite invitation) became a favorite theme for European painters. Tacitus puts a parting dig at his executioner in Seneca’s mouth: “After a mother’s and a brother’s murder, nothing remains but the destruction of a guardian and tutor.”

Balderdash, says Drinkwater. Seneca was caught up in the bloody aftermath to Piso’s conspiracy, and it’s fair to say he knew about the conspiracy beforehand, even if he wasn’t a plotter himself. “If Seneca lived today, he would have been a TV guru, saying the right thing on his chat program. He had to survive in quite a difficult world, so he could write one thing and do another. One thing that recent biographers have made of him is that, when push comes to shove, he lacks moral courage. Good luck to him, but he doesn’t come out well at the end.”

OK, you might say, perhaps we can give Nero a pass on his brother and even his mother. (I haven’t mentioned his wife Octavia; she went too.) But what of the fire and what of the fiddling? They are the building blocks of the Nero legend. They are also among the least solid historically.

On July 18, A.D. 64, in the tenth year of Nero’s largely successful reign, a fire broke out in the Circus Maximus. The fire burned for nine days, destroying the better part of the city as it spread.

Nero wasn’t at home when the fire ignited. He was vacationing at Antium, today’s Anzio and another of his favorite getaways. But when news of the fire reached him, he hurried straight back to Rome and took charge—effectively—of firefighting efforts. He moved quickly to aid the victims. And in the fire’s aftermath, he introduced legislation to make Rome less vulnerable in the future.

“For the relief of the homeless fugitive masses he threw open the field of Mars...and even his own gardens,” writes Tacitus. “Nero also constructed emergency accommodation for the destitute multitude. Food was brought from Ostia and neighboring towns, and the price of corn was cut to one-quarter sesterce a pound. Yet these measures, for all their popular character, earned no gratitude. For a rumor had spread that, while the city was burning, Nero had gone on his private stage and, comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy.”

Perhaps the rumor wasn’t even true. The evidence is murky. Drinkwater believes that it was true, however, and that Nero sang his head off. But Drinkwater doesn’t see Nero’s singing the way history has depicted it—as proof of Nero’s cruel indifference to the plight of his people. “I think anyone with Nero’s artistic susceptibilities would have reacted the same way. He’s written an epic on the sack of Troy and we know the Greeks burned Troy. So it wouldn’t surprise me if he goes to the modern Farnese Gardens, looks down and lets loose. He’d already done all he could to fight the fire, so he just responded to the flames. But if we accept that he did that, he leaves himself open to the charge of arson.”

A more nuanced view of Nero’s response to the Great Fire receives strong support from a new book by Anthony Barrett, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver. The historian’s Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty , draws on little-known Italian archaeological studies to reconstruct the tragedy and its consequences. While Barrett concedes that the extent of the devastation is almost impossible to pin down—there are no casualty figures, and we don’t know the name of one person who died in the fire—he finds it likely that the scale of human suffering was great. “The poor lived in high-rises that were notoriously dangerous—it is reasonable to surmise they were anywhere from five to eight stories high,” says Barrett. “The people who lived there would have been trapped.”

Barrett largely agrees with Drinkwater about the singing. “We have a contemporaneous account by a witness to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 who speaks of its ‘great beauty,’” says Barrett. “J. Robert Oppenheimer recited the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first explosion of the atom bomb. Scipio Africanus quoted Homer on seeing the destruction of Carthage. These are very human reactions to tragedy. Only in Nero is it seen as evil.” Like Drinkwater, Barrett takes a dim view of the charge that Nero set the fire: “The case against Nero is very flimsy.”

Still, Nero’s musical response to the conflagration was indisputably a mistake. A few years later, Nero’s “artistic susceptibilities” would get him in even deeper trouble. If a modern well-wisher could send one word of counsel back through time, it would be this: “Dear Nero, please stop singing.”

* * *

The Domus Aurea project was also a mistake, criticized in its day as a lot more house than any absolute monarch would ever need. But it may be that Nero never meant for this city-within-a-city to be his purely private playground. “The Emperor wanted to make its pleasures available to the people,” David Shotter, a historian, asserts in his 2008 biography of Nero. “Recent excavations near the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum have revealed a colonnaded pool, the stagnum Neronis, which imitated Nero’s lake at Baiae and the stagnum Agrippae on the Campus Martius. The implication of this appears to be that Nero intended that his new house and the rebuilt city of Rome should be one—the home of the people and of himself, their Emperor, Protector and Entertainer.” Shotter goes on, “those looking for signs of Nero’s supposed madness will not find it here; his contribution to Roman construction should not be dismissed or underestimated in the shallow manner of many of his contemporaries. Here, writ large, is Nero the artist and popular provider—almost certainly the way in which he would have wished to be remembered.”

If Shotter is right, why did Tacitus and Suetonius write so disparagingly about the Domus Aurea? Why castigate Nero altogether? Who started this historical pile-on? How did it go viral? There are several culprits, but Drinkwater and others blame the Flavians first.

The year following Nero’s death in A.D. 68 is known as the Year of Four Emperors, which tells you most of what you need to know. After much turmoil, Vespasian, the first of three Flavian emperors, took control (Vespasian was followed by his two sons, Titus and Domitian). Before them, the empire had known only one ruling family. Augustus founded the Julio-Claudian dynasty in 27 B.C., and it lasted for almost 100 years, until the death of Nero. The Julio-Claudians stood for stability. For legitimacy. They stood, in short, for Rome itself.

“The Romans were descended from Aeneas of Troy, and Aeneas was the ancestor of the Julio-Claudians. So history would come to an end when this dynasty ruled Rome and ruled the world, because Jupiter said so,” says Drinkwater. “That works very well while the dynasty is going, but what happens when it stops? How do you transfer all that credit from one dynasty to a totally different family?

“The amazing thing is, the Flavians managed to pull this off, but one way to do this was to destroy the memory of what came before. So they said that the Julio-Claudians were worth displacing because they had become corrupt. And the more you can denigrate them, the better. The anti-Neronian tradition came into play very quickly. When Tacitus and Suetonius came along later, they were working within a tradition of historiography that had already been well established.”

Which brings us to the Christians, who added their own grievances to the Nero-bashing narrative. It must be conceded upfront: Nero did kill Christians. Simmering public resentment over the Great Fire put enormous pressure on the government to find a scapegoat. Early accounts make it unclear whether Christians were persecuted for their religious beliefs or simply as an outsider group—Drinkwater says the latter—but they were easily framed for arson. Whatever he was up to, Nero wasn’t trying to stamp out the nascent faith, which, at this point, was taking shape more in the Middle East than in Rome.

The Christians whom Nero did kill were never thrown to the lions before a crowd of baying spectators in the Colosseum, as the story goes. For one thing, the Colosseum wasn’t even built yet. More to the point, from what we know, Nero had little taste for the kind of blood sport we associate with popular Roman entertainment. As a philhellene, he would much rather watch a good chariot race than see two armed men slice each other up. When protocol demanded that he show up at gladiatorial games, Nero is said to have remained in his box with the curtains drawn. He took some heat for this. It was considered insufficiently Roman of him.

The Christians Nero executed for setting the Great Fire were mostly burned in his own gardens, which conforms to the standard Roman legal practice of fitting the punishment to the crime. And that appears to have been the end of it, at least at the time. The public was appeased and the Christians of Rome stayed silent. “Persecution isn’t mentioned at all in the early Christian sources,” says Drinkwater. “That idea comes up only much later, in the third century, and is fully accepted only in the fourth century.”

When the idea finally surfaces in Christian polemics, it appears with a vengeance. The Book of Revelation was interpreted to cast Nero as the Anti-Christ: The numerical equivalents of the Hebrew letters that spell “Neron Caesar” come out to 666—the “number of the beast.” Do with that what you will. Lactantius, a tutor of the Christian Emperor Constantine’s son, wrote On the Deaths of the Persecutors in the early fourth century. He has this to say: “Nero, being the abominable and criminal tyrant that he was, rushed into trying to overturn the heavenly temple and abolish righteousness, and, the first persecutor of the servants of God, he nailed Peter to the cross and killed Paul. For this he did not go unpunished.”

Never mind that Nero has an alibi for Peter’s death: There’s no evidence Peter was ever in Rome. Paul was there, from A.D. 60 to 62, and he may even have been killed there, but that was well before the so-called “Neronian persecution.” But none of that matters much anymore. Early Christians and the Flavians set their stamp on the written record early, and they held a grudge.

Nero’s increasingly beset final years were marked by a few things he should have done and one big thing he shouldn’t have done. Until the latter part of his reign, Nero confined his crooning mostly to a small audience of invited guests. As time wore on, however, Nero grew bolder. His living room no longer provided a big enough stage. He had always craved applause. He was addicted to showbiz.

Early in the year A.D. 64, Nero went to Naples, a city he loved for its Greek roots and theatrical culture, and performed in public for the first time. He sang and accompanied himself on the cithara in a kind of Bob Dylanesque, singer-songwriter one-man show. The crowd went wild, and Nero came away exhilarated and wanting more. He repeated the performance, this time in Rome itself.

Given all the horrendous things Nero was accused of doing, it’s bizarre that a little musical comedy ranked so high on his list of crimes. And yet that is the way the Roman upper classes saw things. In A.D. 65, Roman senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso organized a ham-fisted plot to kill Nero. Among the conspirators’ chief complaints were Nero’s acting and singing in public. The plot was easily undone, but before he went to his death, one of the conspirators, a Praetorian guard, Subrius Flavus, told Nero to his face why his “devotion turned to hatred.” Nero was a matricide and an incendiary, said Flavus, but he was also...an actor.

Much about ancient Rome seems recognizable to us. That does not. “Entertainers were low status, and in a society where status was very important, for a high-status person to project themselves as low status was not acceptable,” says Drinkwater. “It shook the foundations of society.”

Nonetheless, near the end of his reign Nero put together the ultimate roadshow. One of the things expected of a proper Roman emperor was official travel to the provinces. Nero never liked to travel and for years refused to budge. When he finally agreed to leave Italy, he arranged to play the festival circuit in subjugated Greece (he had asked the Greeks to squeeze all their major festivals into one year, and, not surprisingly, they obliged). Shotter, the biographer, tells us Nero won every contest he entered, along with a few he did not. When he returned to Rome in A.D. 67, he carried back 1,808 first prizes. So overcome was Nero by this outpouring of love that he liberated Greece (Vespasian promptly unliberated it). Roman public opinion did not react badly to Nero’s foreign tour. Apparently, what happens in Greece stays in Greece.

Nero’s end crept up on him slowly and from afar. There was no immediate crisis of state that required his ouster. Some historians argue that Nero had depleted Rome’s treasury and that the empire was desperately short of cash. Drinkwater disagrees. The empire’s frontiers were mostly quiet: An uprising in Britain had been put down. Titus, the future emperor, was in the process of extinguishing a rebellion in Judaea. The crisis that did arise should have been merely a tempest in a teapot. A firmer, less diffident emperor than Nero might have flicked it away. Nero watched as it slowly gathered momentum, and he sat there, paralyzed, as it rolled over him.

In the spring of A.D. 68, a Gallic official, Julius Vindex, rose up not against Rome, he said, “but against Nero.” The reasons were vague, the usual grab bag of crimes—matricide, acting, that sort of thing. Vindex could never hope to sit on the throne himself—he was a Romanized Gaul, for one thing—so he enlisted someone who could, a middling Roman patrician named Galba.

“In most popular works, you get the notion that the whole empire was against Nero and the army revolted. That’s not true,” says Drinkwater. “Clearly what the establishment thought would happen was: Nero would go up there, he’d lead his troops, end of Vindex, end of Galba, wonderful!”

Militarily, Vindex never posed a real threat to Nero or to Rome. Few of the important commanders in Gaul, Germania and the East supported Vindex. But Nero temporized, effectively signing his own death warrant. By the time Vindex was routed at the Battle of Vesontio, the whole empire was somehow in play. “Nero had done nothing. The establishment had seen the future, hadn’t they?” says Drinkwater. “It’s not the army that turns against him, it’s the men in gray suits.”

Nero fled Rome for the villa of his friend Phaon, four miles from Rome. Here, on the 8th of June in the year 68, Nero read the news that the Senate had declared him hostis —an enemy of the state. Suetonius has him wavering irresolutely before hearing the approach of cavalry and plunging a dagger into his throat.

It is Suetonius, too, who has given us Nero’s infamous last words: qualis artifex pereo —“what an artist perishes in me!” Historians still debate exactly what Nero meant by this, but it is often taken as a final expression of Nero’s self-deluded conceit. As such, it is the kind of operatic finale that richly satisfies all the haters.

But there’s a different way of looking at it. Not that he was a great artist, perhaps, but that he was undoubtedly a committed one, and it is the artist, not the half-hearted emperor of Rome, who perishes here. “The one major figure who we certainly know was never allowed a fair trial under Nero was Nero himself,” Drinkwater concludes.

Two thousand years later, Nero is finally getting his day in court.

There’s a Massive Jester Floating on Austria’s Lake Constance

On July 17, the 74th season of Austria's Bregenz Festival will begin, kicking off a monthlong celebration of opera. As in past summers, more than 200,000 people will descend on Bregenz, a lakeside city with about 29,500 people at the base of Pfänder mountain. Various performances—this season includes two versions of Don Quixote (one opera and one musical theater), a musical theater performance of François Sarhan's Wunderwandelwelt , Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde (which will also be performed as a concert), Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin , and a series of performances called Musik & Poesie —take place in three different locations, and as is tradition, the prize show is performed nightly on a massive stage floating on Lake Constance, a nearly 40-mile-long lake at the foot of the Alps.

But the set for this year's lakeside show— Rigoletto , a three-act Giuseppe Verdi tragic opera about a disfigured court jester trying to protect his daughter from a lecherous duke—is a bit different than the other spectacular stages preceeding it. Almost every single part of this stage moves.

“The challenge was really to invent something that’s not been seen here,” says this year’s stage director and designer, Philipp Stölzl. “That was a bit of a process; we threw our first idea into the trash can at some point and started again from scratch. We finally ended with a design that offers a lot of movement and transformation, which is really a fresh approach for Bregenz. Most of the previous productions have been rather static, more like sculptures.”

The very first Bregenz Festival happened in 1946 , when the town didn't even have its own theatre. Instead, the inaugural performance— Bastien et Bastienne —was performed on two barges moored on Lake Constance. One barge carried the stage, the other carried the orchestra.

The lake stage at the Bregenz Festival has come a long way since the inaugural event. In the 1991-1992 season, the set for Carmen appeared to emerge from a valley between mountains. Fidelio was performed in the 1995-1996 season, with a series of rowhouses stretched across the stage. The 2001-2002 season showed La Bohème , with a massive cafe table and chairs half-submerged in the water. The 2007-2008 show, Tosca , was set in front of a colorful projected eyeball; the stage made an appearance in James Bond movie Quantum of Solace . Aida came to Bregenz for the 2009-2010 season, perfomed under a half-deconstructed Statue of Liberty. Last season, Carmen was accentuated by two giant hands throwing a deck of cards into the air; the cards changed through projections as they appeared to fall.

But the set for Rigoletto takes design to the extreme, with a 45-foot-tall jester's head flanked by two hands, one holding a balloon. Every part of the set moves except for the hand holding the balloon. To hold up the massive weight of the head (nearly 40 tons on its own, and hitting abut 150 tons with the machinery attached to make it move), the stage is built on 119 wood and steel piles driven almost 20 feet into the lakebed. The hand on the left, powered by a hydraulic swivel, moves like a human hand and opens to about 37 feet tall. The frill around the jester's neck appears to ruffle in the wind. Speakers for the show are incorporated into the set: five in the head and two in the index finger of the right hand.

"Bregenz is what every set designer dreams of creating. Everybody wants to work at Bregenz," said Es Devlin in a 2017 interview , when she designed that year's Carmen set. "The photographs of Bregenz are now dispersed around the world. Because of social media, because of the internet, everybody knows—they know the big bust , they know the cafe table , these images have penetrated the culture."

Stölzl’s career began as a stage designer’s assistant at the Munich Kammerspiele. He went on to direct music videos for Madonna and movies like North Face , Goethe! , and The Physician . But like many other stage designers, he always dreamed of working at the Bregenz Festival. “It offers such a wonderful combination of monumental scale, broad audience and creative ambition,” he says. Now he’s realizing his dream—and executing on a rather technical feat: a giant color-changing balloon that flies up into the sky with singers inside.

" Rigoletto doesn’t require an epic scale right away,” Stölzl says. “But the distance from most seats in the auditorium to the singer is pretty long, so you have to work with bold images, otherwise it won’t read well in this massive open-air setup. In the end we decided to project the emotional arcs and beats of the lead character (Rigoletto) into a way-larger-than-life alter ego, and at the same time, invent iconic metaphoric images that help us to tell the story in a powerful way.”

Because the stage itself is floating over water, special considerations need to be made to keep it safe from wind, water and wave damage. Part of the development and design process of the stage, says technical director Wolfgang Urstadt, is completing a risk analysis that covers the life of the stage—which is usually for two seasons, after which the stage is dismantled and recycled for use in other stages. This year, 46 different companies helped in the analysis and creation of the stage, including engineering, woodwork, metalwork and professional diving firms. The risk analysis changes throughout the life of the stage, adapting to whatever concerns might come up.

“We have to use wooden and steel pilots to build the foundation for the individual components in the water,” Urstadt says. “The changing water levels, the waves, and of course the basic suitability of the components used in the water must be taken into account.”

To start, all the components of the stage are engineered to withstand wind speeds of more than 75 miles per hour. Then façade plaster and paint are layered on enough times to make the stage waterproof for a year—though Urstadt says regardless, regular maintenance has to be done. A single stage for the show takes nearly a year to complete, after two or three years of planning, and costs on average €8 million ($8.97 million) to build.

It’s all worth it, though, to make a stage designer's inventive dream a reality.