Arch of Titus

The arch was raised on the Via Sacra, just south-east of the Roman Forum, by the emperor Domitian soon after the death of his elder brother Titus, to mark Titus's official deification and the victory he and their father Vespasian had won over the Jewish revolt in Judaea. It is dated to about 81 and must have been finished by 90. The inscription on the east face reads: "The Senate and the Roman people (dedicate this) to the deified Titus Vespasian Augustus, son of the deified Vespasian".

Vespasian had returned to Rome in 69 to claim the throne, leaving Titus in Judaea to end the revolt. Titus did so the following year: Jerusalem was sacked and the Temple destroyed, and much of the population was killed or driven out. He was received in triumph on his return to Rome in 71.

The sculptural detail has been used to credit the arch to Rabirius, Domitian's favoured architect, though attributing Roman buildings on style alone, without contemporary documentation, is considered shaky. Domitian built it despite being described by Cassius Dio as hateful towards Titus.

Two panels line the passageway, both commemorating the joint triumph of Titus and Vespasian in the summer of 71. The south panel shows the spoils taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, the seven-branched candelabrum carved in deep relief as its focus, with the trumpets, the fire pans for lifting ashes from the altar and the Table of Showbread. The north panel shows Titus in the four-horse chariot, crowned by winged Victory, with a helmeted Valour leading the team among lictors; it is one of the first examples of divinities and humans sharing one scene, unlike the Ara Pacis panels, where the two are kept apart.

The panels are nowhere labelled as the triumph of 71, but they follow closely the procession described a decade earlier in Josephus's The Jewish War. The spoils were probably coloured gold against a blue ground; in 2012 remains of yellow ochre paint were found on the menorah relief. The menorah carved here became the model for the one used as the emblem of the State of Israel, and the arch itself a symbol of the Jewish diaspora.

In the Middle Ages the Frangipani family added a second storey over the vault and turned the arch into a fortified tower, cutting a chamber into the upper half; beam holes from that work are still in the panels. The sculpture on the outer faces of the two great piers was lost when the arch was taken into medieval defensive walls; the attic was originally crowned by further statuary, perhaps a gilded chariot. The medieval travel guide Mirabilia Urbis Romae listed the monument as the arch of the Seven Lamps of Titus and Vespasian.

Pope Paul IV, who reigned from 1555 to 1559 and established the Roman Ghetto by the bull Cum nimis absurdum, made the arch the site of a yearly oath of submission at which Jewish elders were forced to kiss the feet of each newly crowned pope. At a date that is not recorded, Rome's Chief Rabbinate placed a local ban on Jews walking under the arch; the ban was rescinded on the foundation of the State of Israel, and the change was announced publicly at a Hanukkah event in 1997. The arch is never mentioned in rabbinic literature.

The first repairs came in the fifteenth century under Paul II and Sixtus IV, when buildings on the south side were demolished and a buttress added; the arch was later swallowed by the convent of Santa Francesca Romana. It was one of the first buildings to be given a modern restoration. Raffaele Stern began in 1817 and Giuseppe Valadier carried the work on under Pius VII; between 1821 and 1823 the arch was taken down piece by piece and rebuilt clear of the medieval fabric.

New capitals and travertine masonry were used deliberately so that the restored portions could be told apart from the original marble. The inscription cut on the opposite face records that Pius VII, finding the monument weakened by age, ordered it reinforced and preserved in the twenty-fourth year of his pontificate. Further work in 1901-02 lowered the road, bringing the travertine foundations into view.

Triumphal arches have been modelled on it since the sixteenth century. Leon Battista Alberti drew on it for the facade of Sant'Andrea in Mantua in 1462; the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, begun in 1806, took its inspiration from it, as did the Washington Square Arch in Manhattan of 1892 and Edwin Lutyens's India Gate in New Delhi of 1921. Franz Wickhoff made it central to his appreciation of Roman art, against the view then prevailing.