page_title: Legacy of the Roman Empire
section_title: Architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Legacy of the Roman Empire / Architecture
caption_attribution_description: English: Vilnius Cathedral
context_page_description: The legacy of the Roman Empire has been varied and significant, comparable to that of other hegemonic polities of world history.
  The Roman Empire itself, built upon the legacy of other cultures such as Ancient Greece, has had long-lasting influence with broad geographical reach on a great range of cultural aspects, including state institutions, law, cultural values, religious beliefs, technological advances, engineering and language.
  This legacy survived the demise of the empire itself and went on to shape other civilisations, a process which continues to this day. The city of Rome was the civitas and connected with the actual western civilisation on which subsequent cultures built.
  One main legacy is the Latin language of ancient Rome, epitomized by the Classical Latin used in Latin literature, evolved during the Middle Ages and remains in use in the Roman Catholic Church as Ecclesiastical Latin. Vulgar Latin, the common tongue used for regular social interactions, evolved simultaneously into the various Romance languages that exist today.
context_section_description: In the mid-18th century, Roman architecture inspired neoclassical architecture. Neoclassicism was an international movement. Though neoclassical architecture employs the same classical vocabulary as late Baroque architecture, it tends to emphasize its planar qualities, rather than sculptural volumes. Projections and recessions and their effects of light, and shade are flatters; sculptural bas-reliefs are flatter and tend to be enframed in friezes, tablets or panels. Its clearly articulated individual features are isolated rather than interpenetrating, autonomous and complete in themselves.
  International neoclassical architecture was exemplified in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's buildings, especially the Old Museum in Berlin, Sir John Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly built White House and Capitol in Washington, DC in the United States. The Scots architect Charles Cameron created palatial Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in St. Petersburg.
  Italy clung to Rococo until the Napoleonic regimes brought the new archaeological classicism, which was embraced as a political statement by young, progressive, urban Italians with republican leanings.
caption: The Cathedral of Vilnius (1783), by Laurynas Gucevičius.
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