The Augustan marble “revolution” marked more than the substitution of one building material for another. It changed Rome's color, texture, and light, and visually redefined its sacred architecture. For centuries, temples in and around Rome had been decorated with brightly painted architectural terracottas, which typically featured a swirling array of plants and flowers. Terracotta was the material of sacred tradition, and the vegetal motifs employed on temples evoked a pious Italic past. The lush array of plant life present in Augustan art has not been adequately considered against this background. This paper explores the use of traditional plant motifs in Augustan art and architecture, with an emphasis on viewer response. It considers the so-called Campana reliefs before turning to a more detailed analysis of the Ara Pacis's vegetal panels. These, I argue, consciously evoked ancient temple decoration and drew it into the new visual language of the Augustan Principate.

This article reconsiders the possible statuary of the Pantheon in Rome, both in its original Augustan form and in its later phases. It argues that the so-called ‘Algiers Relief’ has wrongly been connected with the Temple of Mars Ultor and is in fact evidence of the association of the Divus Julius with Mars and Venus in the Pantheon of Agrippa, a juxtaposition which reflects the direction of Augustan ideology in the 20s b.c. and the building's celestial purpose. This triple statue group became the focus of the later Pantheon, and its importance is highlighted by the hierarchized system of architectural ornament of the present building.