George Loring Brown's Temple of Peace Painting and the Roman Forum's Most Misnamed Ruin
In 1864 the Boston painter George Loring Brown finished a landscape he called View of the Temple of Peace in the Roman Forum. It’s now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum: ruins near the Colosseum in warm light, with the dome of St Peter’s far off in the distance. It’s a lovely picture. The title is wrong.
The building everyone called the Temple of Peace for centuries was the Basilica of Maxentius. The real Temple of Peace was next door, and by Brown’s day there was hardly anything left of it to paint.
George Loring Brown, View of the Temple of Peace in the Roman Forum, 1864, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase (public domain).
The painter who sold Italy to Boston
Brown (1814–1889) was born in Boston and trained as a wood engraver before turning to painting. He spent much of his career in Italy, and his Italian scenes sold much better at home than his American ones. His buyers wanted the Rome they had read about: golden light, broken columns, the sense of a vanished empire. This canvas was painted in Boston, worked up from sketches he had made in Rome years earlier.
That’s also why the title matters. Brown named the picture the way the guidebooks and his patrons named the ruin.
What’s actually standing there
The Basilica of Maxentius was the last great basilica built in Rome. The emperor Maxentius started it around 308 CE. Constantine finished it after he defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312. It was the biggest building in the Forum: a central hall about 80 metres long, 25 metres wide and 35 metres high, roofed with massive concrete vaults borrowed from the design of the imperial baths. A colossal statue of Constantine sat in one apse. Fragments of it, including the huge head, are now in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.
Earthquakes brought most of it down, and the 1349 quake collapsed the central vault. What survives is the north aisle, three enormous barrel vaults that still dominate the view along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. That’s the ruin painters and tourists kept calling the Temple of Peace.
The temple it was mistaken for
The real Temple of Peace was Vespasian’s. He built it in the 70s CE, after the Jewish War, paid for with the spoils of Jerusalem. The menorah and other treasures from the Second Temple were displayed there, alongside Greek sculpture Nero had collected. In the early 3rd century the Severan marble plan of the city, the Forma Urbis, was mounted on one of its walls. A fire in 192 damaged it and Septimius Severus restored it.
Very little of that complex is visible above ground. So for centuries the name floated over to the biggest ruin in the area. The Roman archaeologist Antonio Nibby sorted it out in the 19th century and placed Vespasian’s temple correctly. The old name hung on in popular use anyway, which is how an American painter could still use it on a canvas in 1864.
The basilica’s influence long outlived the confusion. Its vaults were a model for grand public halls, including the main waiting room of New York’s old Penn Station. Brown painted a ruin under someone else’s name. The building itself kept on shaping cities.