Towards a Definition of Roman Art

This statue raises the peculiar and peculiarly complex problem of how to define Roman art. What criteria should be applied? - geographical? chronological? ethnic? stylistic? None is very satisfactory. It is sometimes suggested that the Romans leaned so heavily on the figurative arts of earlier times that their own has no definable identity - that they produced no body of works in the visual arts (except in architecture) comparable with their literature. Roman literature, though most of it was written by men who were not strictly speaking Roman, can be defined linguistically. Moreover, the Latin language was itself the creation and vehicle of a culture to so marked a degree that its use alone conferred distinctive 'Latin' or 'Roman' qualities, even on imitations and translations from the Greek (e.g. the plays of Terence, a slave of Libyan stock). A comparable unifying visual language is lacking in Roman art, especially in the imperial period, when Rome was the capital of an ethnically mixed empire, including Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, where Hellenistic traditions survived almost intact. The term Roman may, of course, be used for all works of art produced in territory under Roman rule, but such a geographical definition would necessarily embrace very diverse and stylistically heterogeneous works. Attempts at an ethnic definition founder on our ignorance of the artists and their origins. In the fluid conditions prevailing in so vast a multi-racial empire the identification of any supposedly national tendencies (Italic or Greek) must be very speculative. The Pax Romana permitted great mobility to artists and their works: statues carved in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean were shipped to Rome, imperial portraits were diffused from Rome to the furthest corners of the empire. Nor can any consistent process of artistic development be traced, though there were many and important changes in direction during these centuries. Political history provides no more than a series of convenient date brackets, of dubious stylistic significance, for periods named after the emperors. Markedly different styles, ranging from a crude realism to a refined Greek Classicism, were practised simultaneously or recurrently revived, usually to accord with subject-matter and to satisfy ideas of appropriateness or'decorum'.

Yet certain characteristics or qualities commonly associated with ancient Rome can be recognized in major works of art and in many others as well, as the mention of so essentially Roman a concept as that of'decorum' already suggests. A funerary portrait of an upper-class couple of the late republican period, for example, epitomizes the straightforward republican virtues so eloquently extolled by Cicero (5,55). The woman with her distinctly superior expression recalls, no doubt intentionally, statues of Pudicitia, personifying female modesty. Her grim unsmiling husband is every inch a Roman, the embodiment of dignity, moral rectitude and gravity. Many other portraits of the same period are of elderly men with equally stern, heavily wrinkled, businesslike countenances, quite unassuming in their ordinariness and plainness. None could be described as amiable. Yet the marks of age may not have been thought unsightly. To Romans, especially of the republic, fullness of years implied success in life. The patrician became not simply an old man but an honoured elder, as well as a pater familias, the sovereign ruler of his unmarried daughters, sons, grandsons and their wives, and the sole legal owner of all his family's property.

Figures on the Ara Pads Angus tae - the altar of Augustan peace (5,56) - are equally stern and grave and no less realistic, though carved with greater refinement and set in a structure of complex allegory. The Ara Pads was set up to mark the return of Augustus to Rome in 13 BC, after a lengthy absence in the western provinces, and also to celebrate the peace that followed the civil wars, which had convulsed the dying republic. Its form - an altar on a podium surrounded by a rectangular walled enclosure -is Greek, probably derived from the fifth-century BC Altar of Pity in the Athenian agora. On the outer walls, above exquisitely chiselled panels of foliage ornament, there are figurative reliefs of legendary figures claimed as ancestors of Augustus - Romulus, the warlike founder and first king of Rome, and Numa, the peace-loving second king, religious and civil law-givers - and two long processions, one of senators, the other of Augustus's family (5,57). These processional reliefs differ as much from those on the Parthenon (430) as from those at Persepolis (3,38), being neither of idealized youths nor of expressionless, regimented types all marching in step. Informally grouped, they appear, from their glances, to be in quiet, civilized conversation with each other and they are all recognizably portraits. Augustus (unfortunately damaged) leads as high priest and pater familias of his own family and, by implication, of the entire Roman empire. The prominent man in the centre of our illustration is probably Agrippa, his son-in-law and right-hand man. Unlike earlier processional reliefs, those on the Ara Pads record and commemorate a specific moment in time, the dedication of the altar itself. And this emphasis on actuality reinforces the cool realism of the carving and hence the truth of the propagandists claims it makes for the beneficence of the new Augustan regime.

If the message of the Ara Pads is emphatically Roman, the visual language in which it is expressed remains Hellenistic. The same can be said of a cameo known as the Gemma Augustea, whose carver almost certainly came from the Hellenistic East, where the exacting technique of working semi-precious stones to exploit their natural veins of color had been developed into a fine art by the second century BC (5,58). Romans greatly prized such virtuoso feats of craftsmanship - technical accomplishment was, indeed, the only artistic quality of which they wrote. But the Gemma Augustea is more than merely decorative. On the upper register Augustus is shown deified with the personification of Oikoumene (the whole inhabited earth) placing a crown on his head and the goddess Roma enthroned beside him; the youthful figure descending from a chariot on the far left is probably Tiberius, who succeeded him as emperor. Below, Roman soldiers are setting up a trophy of captured arms after a victory over barbarians, four of whom are shown as prisoners awaiting their fate. Such a mingling of allegorical and historical figures, abstract ideas and hard facts, is a recurrent feature in the official art of the empire.

It was their preoccupation with actuality, above all, that enabled Roman artists to enlarge their range, as can be seen very clearly in portraiture. A high degree of verisimilitude had been attained by Etruscan and Italic sculptors (4,76) and there are equally vivid and penetrating characterizations in Hellenistic portraiture - sometimes extremely matter-of-fact in a Nvarts-and-aU' style (5,13). But the finest Roman portraits surpass them in unflattering directness. A wide cross-section of society is represented, from craftsmen and tradesmen to government officials and courtiers, whose features, unique even in their ordinariness, speak for single individuals caught at a single moment.

Family Piety

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 808