The Trier Ceiling: Power and Status on Display in Late Antiquity

Abstract

The fourth-century painted ceiling at Trier, Germany was destroyed less than two decades after it was decorated, yet today it is one of the best-known monuments of Late Antique Gaul (figure 1). In excavations begun by Theodor Kempf in 1945, archaeologists collected the ceiling's fragments from the ruins of a Roman house beneath the city's Romanesque cathedral. Painstaking assembly of the plaster fragments into their original form was completed in 1980. Now displayed in the Trier Episcopal Museum, the ceiling is a rare example of Late Antique domestic painting. It comprises fifteen trompe l'oeil coffers which are outlined by red and green borders and a yellow guilloche. Each coffer contains an image of a different subject; bust-length female and male single figures alternate with pairs of putti in various active poses.The ceiling's rarity, its mysterious, unidentified figures, and the possibility proposed by Kempf that it belonged to a palace built by the emperor Constantine have made it the subject of extensive scholarship. Because conservators assembled the ceiling over a thirty-five year span and individual scenes were published as they were completed, the first scholars of the ceiling studied sections in isolation from the whole monument. Attention first focused on the depictions of the woman with the mirror and the woman with the jewel box, because they were the first single figures to be restored and published. Many archaeologists and art historians concentrated on identifying the women as portraits of Constantine's family. Irving Lavin took a different approach and carefully addressed the painting's classicizing style. Scholars in the 1980s, with the advantage of the ceiling's completed restoration, have considered the ceiling as a thematic whole.