Altar of Peace Museum Rome: Home of the Ara Pacis
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History
The Altar of Peace Museum in Rome, Italy, houses the Ara Pacis Augustae, a Roman monument commissioned in 13 BC and consecrated in 9 BC during the Augustan period. The Roman Senate ordered its construction on July 4, 13 BC, to honor Augustus’s return after three years of military and pacification activities in Hispania and southern Gaul. The altar was dedicated to Pax, the personified Roman goddess of peace, and its imagery presented peace, prosperity, fertility, and the continuity of Augustus’s family as consequences of his rule.
Foundation and Augustan Meaning
The Ara Pacis stood on the northern Campus Martius, an area outside Rome’s older sacred center that was used for military training, public ceremonies, religious monuments, and imperial building projects. It lay near the Via Flaminia and about one Roman mile from the pomerium, Rome’s sacred boundary. The monument formed part of Augustus’s wider building program in the area, alongside his mausoleum and the Horologium Augusti.
The altar’s location expressed the transition from war to peace. Returning soldiers performed rituals nearby, while a magistrate coming back from military service relinquished military authority and resumed civil authority. The pomerium traditionally marked this change, since military power was set aside when a commander returned within the sacred boundary of the city.
Consecration took place on January 30, 9 BC, which was also the birthday of Livia, Augustus’s wife. This association gave the monument a dynastic dimension. Augustus later described the Senate’s decision and the annual sacrifice in the Res Gestae. The yearly ceremony involved magistrates, priests, and Vestal Virgins, the priestesses responsible for the cult of Vesta and Rome’s sacred fire.
The dedication followed the apparent stabilization of Augustus’s empire after the subjugation of Hispania, the settlement with the Parthians, and Roman advances toward the Elbe and Danube. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, ruled from 27 BC to AD 14. His public works and religious reforms presented his regime as a restoration of Roman order after the civil wars. At the Ara Pacis, that political message was expressed through traditional religious practice, images of fertility, and references to Rome’s legendary beginnings.
Burial and Rediscovery
From the second century AD, repeated flooding by the Tiber raised the ground around the monument. A brick wall was built around it, probably by AD 123, but the altar was gradually buried beneath about four metres of silt between the second and fourth centuries. During the medieval period, buried marble was reused as building material, and a palace later occupied the location, including the property associated with the Palazzo in Via in Lucina and the Peretti and Fiano-Almagià families.
Relief fragments began to reappear in the sixteenth century. Nine blocks discovered in 1568 were acquired by the Medici, while other pieces entered collections in Florence, the Vatican, the Louvre, and elsewhere. A relief fragment may already have been recognized in 1536 through a lost print by Agostino Veneziano. Further discoveries in 1859 included the base of the altar, a relief of Aeneas, and a head of Mars from the Lupercal panel.
Friedrich von Duhn identified the remains as the Ara Pacis in 1879, and that identification remains generally accepted. Eugen Petersen proposed a reconstruction in 1902. Excavations carried out from 1903 to 1905 partly exposed the ancient infrastructure and recovered 53 fragments, but the work stopped after about half the monument had been investigated because the excavation threatened the stability of the building above it and was also affected by financial difficulties.
Reconstruction and Modern Museum
Oreste Mattirolo proposed reuniting the scattered fragments between 1918 and 1921. Demolition around the Mausoleum of Augustus began in 1932 as part of Rome’s interwar redevelopment. Excavations resumed in 1937 and 1938 during preparations by the Italian Fascist government for the 2,000th anniversary of Augustus’s birth. About 70 cubic metres of waterlogged soil were frozen so that remains beneath the former Cinema Nuovo Olimpia could be removed safely. The campaign exposed much of the monument, including two sides of the enclosure, one of them in very good condition.
The reconstruction took place under severe time and documentary limitations. Ancient coins, especially Neronian and Domitianic examples showing the altar, helped establish its appearance. Fragments from Florence and the Vatican were returned, while casts represented some pieces that remained in the Louvre and Villa Medici collections. Odoardo Ferretti assisted with the reconstruction of portions for which ancient evidence was incomplete.
In 1938 the reconstructed altar was installed beside the Mausoleum of Augustus, between the mausoleum and the Tiber, rather than at its ancient location. It was turned 90 degrees from its ancient orientation, so that the original western side now faces south. The relocation and reconstruction formed part of Benito Mussolini’s attempt to associate Fascist Italy with ancient Roman power. Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo designed the pavilion, inaugurated on September 23, 1938. Plans for marble, travertine, and porphyry were reduced to concrete and imitation materials because of limited funds and the approach of the Second World War.
During the war, the pavilion’s glazing was removed and stored, the altar was protected with sandbags, and anti-blast barriers were erected. Bombing in the San Lorenzo district in 1943 destroyed the glazing. Postwar restoration continued into 1970, and the sandbag protection had damaged the plaster-reconstructed entablature. Later proposals considered moving or redesigning the monument, but in 1995 Eugenio La Rocca concluded that relocation would cause serious damage.
Between 2000 and 2006, the Morpurgo pavilion was replaced by a larger museum designed by Richard Meier. The present glass-and-steel building protects the reconstructed altar and limits its exposure to sunlight. Its contrast with Rome’s historic surroundings, together with the political associations of the earlier pavilion, has continued to provoke debate. Digital projectors presented experimental color reconstructions in 2009, and the Ara com’era virtual-reality initiative, begun in 2016, reconstructed aspects of the monument’s ancient color, surroundings, and sculptural program. The Ara Pacis remains an important surviving testimony to Augustan public art, although its artistic importance and later influence continue to be debated.
Remains
The Ara Pacis consists of a central sacrificial altar enclosed within a nearly square, open-air marble precinct. The enclosure measures about 11.65 by 10.62 metres and originally stood on a low podium. Its outer walls were made of Luna marble, quarried in the region of present-day Carrara. Two entrances, each about 3.60 metres wide, were arranged along an east-west axis. The eastern opening faced the Via Flaminia at ground level, while the western entrance faced the Campus Martius and was reached by nine steps. The reconstructed monument has a different orientation because of its twentieth-century installation.
Enclosure and Central Altar
Marble Precinct
The precinct was paved, and its interior floor was probably formed from square travertine blocks. Four openings in each long wall and two in each short wall allowed rainwater to drain from the open-air enclosure. Four corner pilasters and four pilasters beside the entrances were Corinthian in form. Their outer faces carried candelabrum designs, while their inner faces were plain. The enclosing walls marked out the sacred space surrounding the altar, a formally defined ritual area known as a temenos or templum.
Sacrificial Altar
The altar occupied most of the enclosure and stood centrally on a stepped platform. Three steps led toward it on most sides, while the officiating priest used a flight of eight steps; the western approach to the altar table had five steps. The table, or mensa, had projecting side supports decorated with vegetal scrolls and winged lion-griffins. Four lion-griffins stood at its corners, facing outward, with open mouths, two horns, crescent-shaped wings, and acanthus leaves extending from their paws. One side of the altar and fragments of another base frieze survive.
Reliefs on the altar refer to the rules and performance of sacrifice. They include priests, attendants, Vestal Virgins, magistrates, and animals associated with the annual ceremony, including a ram, an ox, and a heifer. The interior walls imitate a temporary wooden palisade, recalling earlier Roman altars and the provisional enclosure erected when the monument was founded. Above this are garlands of fruit and flowers suspended from bucrania, ox skulls used as decorative references to sacrifice, with ritual vessels above the garlands. A band of palmettes and lotus flowers separates the two interior registers.
Exterior Reliefs
Vegetal Decoration
The exterior walls are arranged in a lower vegetal register and an upper figurative register, separated by a meander pattern. Symmetrical acanthus scrolls rise from central stems in the lower register, among birds, lizards, snakes, frogs, scorpions, and other small animals. Flowers, ivy, vines, and fruits fill the design. This abundant vegetation expresses fertility, prosperity, and the renewed natural order associated with peace.
Mythological Panels
The upper register includes four panels beside the entrances. Their subjects combine mythology, history, and allegory, linking Rome’s origins with divine protection, peace, fertility, and the legitimacy of Augustus. The panel commonly called Tellus or Saturnia Tellus is among the best preserved. It shows a richly fertile seated female figure with two children, fruit, flowers, a cow, and a sheep. A female figure carried by a swan and another borne by a sea creature appear beside her, while the landscape combines river, rocky, and marine elements. The central figure has been interpreted as Tellus, Italia, Venus Genitrix, or Pax, and the identities of the accompanying figures remain debated.
The Roma panel is highly fragmentary. It represented a female personification of Rome, probably in warrior dress, seated on captured weapons and associated with the pacification achieved through victory. Another panel, known mainly through fragments, represented the Lupercal episode. It included Mars, the shepherd Faustulus, the she-wolf, and the twins Romulus and Remus near the Lupercal cave and the Ruminal fig tree.
Aeneas Panel
The Aeneas panel shows a veiled priestly figure performing a sacrifice beside a rustic altar. Two camilli, young assistants in a Roman religious ceremony, and a white sow accompany the principal figure. A shrine containing the Trojan Penates, protective household and community deities, stands on rocks in the background. The scene has traditionally been identified as Aeneas’s sacrifice after his arrival in Italy, although another interpretation identifies the principal figure as Numa Pompilius, Rome’s traditional second king and an organizer of its religious institutions.
Processional and Ritual Friezes
Processional Figures
The long northern and southern friezes show priests, magistrates, lictors, senators, members of the imperial family, women, children, and sacrificial attendants moving toward the ritual entrance. Important figures are carved in high relief, while background figures use shallower relief to create several planes of depth.
The northern frieze includes priests from the major Roman colleges, including the Pontifices, Septemviri, and Quindecimviri, together with lictors carrying fasces, bundles of rods symbolizing magistrate authority. Its imperial figures are poorly preserved, and many heads were replaced or restored in the sixteenth century.
The southern frieze includes Augustus, Agrippa, Livia or Julia, Tiberius, Drusus, Antonia Minor, Germanicus, Antonia Major, and other members of the Julio-Claudian family, although several identifications remain uncertain. Children and possible foreign princes appear among the procession. Augustus is shown veiled as an officiating priest and wearing a civic oak crown. Twelve lictors traditionally preceded him, while the four major flamines, priests dedicated to particular gods, followed in the procession. They were associated with Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and the deified Julius Caesar, and a lictor carrying a ritual axe came after them.
Small Ritual Frieze
A smaller ritual frieze shows Vestal Virgins, heralds, priests, lictors, sacrificial attendants, and animals. The figures and heads are preserved to varying degrees, with plaster and other modern materials forming part of the reconstruction. The reliefs combine relatively naturalistic processional figures with the much higher-relief sacrificial scenes of the altar, whose manner is more traditional and Republican.
The Ara Pacis brings together Roman, classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Italic-Etruscan elements. Greek or eastern Hellenistic-trained workshops may have participated in its creation, but the artists and precise origin of the sculptors remain unknown. Today the reconstructed monument stands inside Richard Meier’s museum building, where diffuse lighting gives the reliefs a pale limestone appearance and visually integrates plaster additions with surviving ancient marble.
