La decorazione architettonica di piazza d’oro. Il ciclo figurativo

Hadrian’s mansion in Tivoli, famous during antiquity and investigated and studied since the Renaissance, is still not sufficiently known. The main reason is due to the focus of those researches: despite their dissemination over time, they were centred on a variety of aspects or, at the contrary, aimed at solving specific topics of individual buildings. This is especially true with regard to the architectural and sculptural decoration, given the huge dispersion of these elements originally belonging to the Villa and undergone to systematic and constant despoliation over the centuries. The analysis of existing documentation of Piazza d’Oro - ranging from antique sources, to the still preserved friezes and decorative elements inside the Villa, and/or stored inside museums and Italian and foreign collections - has disclosed new interpretation proposals of mixtilinear architectures. Digital acquisition technologies played a crucial role for the interpretation of those complex shapes characterizing great part of the Imperial Villa, as well as 3D digital modelling, very useful to exhibit new and more accurate location proposals of figurative patterns that adorned those sumptuous buildings. Ongoing research has also allowed to reassign, within the frame of Piazza d’Oro, some marble elements of the architectural decoration, traditionally attributed to the southern pavilion, to other parts of the same building.