Domus Aurea (AD 64): Nero's Golden House in Rome

The Domus Aurea, or Golden House, was the vast palace that the emperor Nero built in the heart of Rome after the Great Fire of AD 64. Set in a landscaped park with an artificial lake, it was famous for gilded walls, painted ceilings and daring architecture. Buried by Nero’s successors, its surviving wing was rediscovered in the late 15th century and shaped the art of the Renaissance.

A palace from the ashes

The Great Fire of Rome in July AD 64 destroyed Nero’s earlier palace, the Domus Transitoria, and cleared large areas of the city centre. Nero used this land for a new residence on an unprecedented scale, stretching across parts of the Palatine, the Esquiline (including the Oppian Hill) and the Caelian.

Tacitus names the architects as Severus and Celer, whom he describes as men bold enough to attempt by art what nature had denied. Instead of a single building, they created a country estate in the middle of the city, with pavilions, colonnades, woods, fields, vineyards and pastures with animals. The total area is uncertain; modern estimates range from about 50 to more than 100 hectares.

Gold, gems and a giant statue

Suetonius describes the palace’s wonders. Its entrance court held a colossal bronze statue of Nero about 120 Roman feet (roughly 35 metres) high, made, according to Pliny the Elder, by the sculptor Zenodorus. A colonnade a mile long surrounded the grounds, and an artificial lake, “like a sea”, lay in the valley between the hills.

Inside, parts of the walls were overlaid with gold and set with gems and mother-of-pearl. Dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory with panels that could turn to shower guests with flowers and perfume. Suetonius says the main banqueting hall was round and rotated continuously like the heavens. When the palace was finished, Nero reportedly remarked that he could at last begin to live like a human being.

Pliny the Elder records that the painter Famulus (or Fabullus) spent his working life decorating the palace, painting in a toga even on scaffolding. Its wall paintings are among the most important examples of the so-called Fourth Style of Roman painting.

The Octagonal Room

The best-known surviving space is the Octagonal Room in the Oppian wing. Its concrete dome, open at the top through a central oculus, spans an eight-sided hall surrounded by radiating rooms lit from above. Water may have cascaded into one of the side rooms.

Architectural historians see the room as a landmark in the use of concrete to shape interior space, a step towards later domed buildings such as the Pantheon. The technique is explained in the article on Roman concrete.

After Nero

Nero died in AD 68, before the palace was complete (see the death of Nero). His successors were eager to distance themselves from his memory. Vespasian drained the lake and on its site began the Flavian Amphitheatre, later known as the Colosseum, presenting it as a gift to the people. The Baths of Titus rose nearby.

The colossal statue was remodelled as an image of the sun god and later moved by Hadrian; the name “Colosseum” probably derives from it. After a fire in AD 104, Trajan built his great public baths over the Oppian wing, whose rooms were stripped, filled with earth and used as foundations. Ironically, this burial preserved them.

Rediscovery in the Renaissance

Around 1480 a young Roman reportedly fell through a hole in the Oppian Hill into what seemed to be a painted cave. Artists soon followed, lowering themselves on ropes into the buried rooms by torchlight to study the paintings. Many, including Pinturicchio, left their names scratched on the ceilings.

The delicate patterns of plants, animals, masks and fanciful figures they found became known as grottesche, from the “grottoes” in which they were seen, the origin of the word “grotesque”. Raphael and his assistant Giovanni da Udine adapted this style for the Vatican Loggias, and it spread across European decorative art.

The site today

About 150 rooms of the Oppian wing survive underground. Water seeping through the gardens above has damaged them, and the site has been closed several times; part of a gallery vault collapsed in 2010. Restoration work continues, and the monument can be visited on guided tours. It is part of the Historic Centre of Rome World Heritage Site.

Timeline

• July AD 64: The Great Fire destroys Nero’s earlier palace.
• AD 64–68: The Domus Aurea is built.
• AD 68: Nero dies; work on the palace stops.
• AD 70s: Vespasian begins the Colosseum on the site of the lake.
• AD 104–109: Trajan’s Baths are built over the Oppian wing.
• c. 1480: The buried rooms are rediscovered.
• 2010: Part of a vault collapses, prompting new conservation work.

Why it matters

The Domus Aurea was a symbol of imperial excess that Nero’s successors deliberately erased. Yet its innovative domes and painted interiors survived underground, and their rediscovery gave Renaissance art one of its favourite decorative styles.