Roman Eyes

Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text

Jaś Elsner

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691240244
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

In Roman Eyes, Jas Elsner seeks to understand the multiple ways that art in ancient Rome formulated the very conditions for its own viewing, and as a result was complicit in the construction of subjectivity in the Roman Empire.
Elsner draws upon a wide variety of visual material, from sculpture and wall paintings to coins and terra-cotta statuettes. He examines the different contexts in which images were used, from the religious to the voyeuristic, from the domestic to the subversive. He reads images alongside and against the rich literary tradition of the Greco-Roman world, including travel writing, prose fiction, satire, poetry, mythology, and pilgrimage accounts. The astonishing picture that emerges reveals the mindsets Romans had when they viewed art--their preoccupations and theories, their cultural biases and loosely held beliefs. Roman Eyes is not a history of official public art--the monumental sculptures, arches, and buildings we typically associate with ancient Rome, and that tend to dominate the field. Rather, Elsner looks at smaller objects used or displayed in private settings and closed religious rituals, including tapestries, ivories, altars, jewelry, and even silverware. In many cases, he focuses on works of art that no longer exist, providing a rare window into the aesthetic and religious lives of the ancient Romans.

1

BETWEEN MIMESIS AND DIVINE POWER

Visuality in the Greco-Roman World

A PRINCIPAL ARGUMENT supporting the assertion of a great divide between the arts of Classical antiquity and the Middle Ages has been an assumption about naturalism. Classical art, we have been told, is the supreme precursor of the Renaissance—not only in its search for illusionistic forms and in its celebration of the artists who led the way in creating such forms¹ but also in the kinds of visuality associated with naturalistic verisimilitude. Even in the “coldly classicizing academic” copies of the Roman imperial period,² sophisticated viewers, like the essayist Lucian or the rhetorician and historian Philostratus, were able to indulge the most complex and elegant wish-fulfillment fantasies in front of naturalistically rendered objects. The power of naturalism encouraged (and still does encourage) the imagination to believe that the visual world of a painting or sculpture is just like our world, even an extension of it. This kind of Classical visuality—leading ultimately to fantasies of (and apparently, according to our sources, even attempts at) sexual intercourse with statues so perfectly beautiful as to be better than the real thing—anticipates the frisson of Renaissance masterpieces from Michelangelo’s David to Titian’s Venus of Urbino.³ The superlative naturalism of the image—its artifice so brilliant as to disguise the fact that it is merely art, as Ovid puts it⁴—prompts the willing viewer to suspend his or her disbelief that the image is more than pigment or stone. Entrapped, like Narcissus, in the enchanting waters of desire and illusion, the viewer identifies with, objectifies, and may even be seen by the image into which the imagination has poured so much aspiration.⁵

Writing on art within the Roman empire shows extraordinary self-awareness of the problematics of visuality in relation to naturalism. Just as Narcissus sees himself reflected in the pool and is deceived into a fatal love, so we who look at his image in a painting (and at his image in the pool within the painting) are ourselves putting a toe into the dangerous waters of his visual desire. In the Elder Philostratus’ scintillating account of a painting of Narcissus, the realism is so vibrant that the writer (and his audience) cannot tell whether a “real bee has been deceived by the painted flowers or whether we are to be deceived into thinking that a painted bee is real.”⁶ In one sense this is a literary topos of the sort which occurs in Pliny the Elder’s chapters on art history,⁷ but at the same time this very dilemma (our dilemma as viewers) is a version of the fatal delusion of Narcissus himself.⁸ Philostratus, in his description of a painting showing huntsmen, with superior psychological insight sees the pursuit of a boar (the painting’s ostensible subject) as a sublimation of its real theme, the hunters’ pursuit of a pretty boy whom they seek simultaneously to impress by their exertions and to touch physically (1.28.1). Yet at the moment the writer discovers the image’s deeper meaning as a presentation of desire, he draws back, seeing his own desire as interpreter thwarted by the fact that naturalism is not nature, that what is realistically realized may not necessarily be real:

How I have been deceived! I was deluded by the painting into thinking that the figures were not painted but were real beings, moving and loving—at any rate I shout at them as though they could hear and I imagine I hear some response—and you [that is, Philostratus’ listeners or readers] did not utter a single word to turn me back from my mistake, being as much overcome as I was and unable to free yourself from the deception and stupefaction induced by it.⁹

Yet this kind of sophistication, and the concomitant fascination with the sheer artistry of art—the anecdotes of famous painters, the exquisite skillfulness of technique, the works which deceived even animals and birds—are only part of the story. For if antiquity was the ancestor of the Renaissance, it was also the mother of the Middle Ages. Alongside wish-fulfillment fantasies in the aesthetic sphere of the art gallery¹⁰ went a culture of sacred images and ritual-centered viewing, in which art served within a religious sphere of experience strikingly similar to the world of icons, relics, and miracles of medieval and Byzantine piety. I will briefly sketch Roman art’s “Renaissance” visuality, and then explore the “medieval” visuality of its oracular, liturgical, and epiphanic experience of images. My question is in part how these apparently exclusive worlds could be reconciled. My answer will be that, to some extent at least, in looking at a culture that is not just foreign but also ancestral to us our own expectations and interpretations have distorted the ancient evidence and material to suit our own desires and preconceptions. The predominant trends of ancient visuality, I suggest, were stranger and less familiar than is usually supposed when we subsume the arts of antiquity into a discourse inflected by the assumptions of Renaissance naturalism.

VISUALITIES OF NATURALISM

The extent of antiquity’s “Renaissance” visuality can be indicated by a quick comparison of some images and texts. Let us begin with two visual realizations of the mythological tale of Perseus and Andromeda. The first is a wall painting excavated from the villa rustica at Boscotrecase near Pompeii in the first decade of the twentieth century. It dates from about 10 B.C. and is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (figure 1.1).¹¹ The second is a sculpted relief panel now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome and earlier in the Villa Doria Pamphilj and Albani collections. It dates from the mid-second century A.D., probably from the reign of Hadrian (figure 1.2).¹²

FIGURE 1.1. Landscape with the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, fresco from the east wall of a room in the villa at Boscotrecase. Roughly 10 B.C. Now in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (20.192.16). (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1920.)

FIGURE 1.2. Perseus rescuing Andromeda, marble relief from the Capitoline Museum, Rome. Second quarter of the second century A.D. (Photo: Koppermann, DAI, 65.1703.)

Beside the fresco, place the following description of a painting from the great second-century novel Leucippe and Clitophon, written by Achilles Tatius:

The girl was placed in a recess of the rock which was just her size. It seemed to suggest that this was not a man-made but a natural hollow, a concavity drawn by the artist in rough, irregular folds, just as the earth produced it. Looking more closely at her installed in her shelter, you might surmise from her beauty that she was a new and unusual icon, but the sight of her chains and the approaching monster would rather call to mind an improvised grave.

There is a curious blend of beauty and terror on her face: fear appears on her cheeks, but a bloomlike beauty rests in her eyes. Her cheeks are not quite perfectly pale, but brushed with a light red wash; nor is the flowering quality of her eyes untouched by care—they seem like violets in the earliest stage of wilting. The artist enhanced her beauty with this touch of lovely fear.

Her arms were spread against the rock, bound above her head by a manacle bolted in the stone. Her hands hung loose at the wrist like clusters of grapes. The color of her arms shaded from pure white to livid and her fingers looked dead. She was chained up waiting for death, wearing a wedding garment, adorned as a bride for Hades. Her robe reached the ground—the whitest of robes, delicately woven, like spider-web more than sheep’s wool, or the airy threads that Indian women draw from the trees and weave into silk. . . .

Between the monster and the girl, Perseus was drawn descending from the air, in the direction of the beast. He was entirely naked but for a cloak thrown over his shoulders and winged sandals on his feet. A felt cap covered his head, representing Hades’ helmet of invisibility. In his left hand he held the Gorgon’s head, wielding it like a shield . . . his right hand was armed with a twin-bladed implement, a scythe and sword in one. The single hilt contains a blade that divides halfway along its extent—one part narrows to a straight tip, the other is curved; the one element begins and ends as a sword, the other is bent into a sinister sickle, so a single manoeuvre can produce both a deadly lunge and a lethal slash. This was Andromeda’s drama.¹³

However a modern spectator might refrain from (admitting to) such an excessive response to a work of art, for Achilles Tatius a painting perhaps somewhat like the Boscotrecase mural was the occasion for indulging his readers in an intense sexual fantasy. The maiden, ravishing in her “curious blend of beauty and terror,” is exposed to be ravished by the viewer’s (as well as the reader’s and the monster’s) gaze—tied up, powerless, in a posture worthy of Ingres’ spectacularly voyeuristic painting of Roger and Angelica.¹⁴ The writer dwells on voyeurism, virtually caressing the young woman’s “lovely fear,” playing with descriptive pseudo–art criticism (“drawn by the artist in rough, irregular folds,” “a light red wash,” “the colour of her arms shaded from pure white to livid”) and with suggestive similes and metaphors (Andromeda’s “flowering” eyes, the “violets in the earliest stage of wilting,” the hands splayed from the wrists “like clusters of grapes”). To the brutal penetration of the male gaze—equally that of the writer, readers, and viewers as well as of both Perseus and the sea monster within the picture—the “airy threads” of her wedding garments reveal more than they disguise. It is no surprise that this passage of hypersexualized male objectification, a voyeur’s anticipation of the violence of rape, climaxes on the sword’s phallic conquest of the sea monster, which is as much a hint of the hero’s future domination of the lady as it is a description of his valorous feat.¹⁵ “A deadly lunge and a lethal slash” would indeed be “Andromeda’s drama.” She is “spread out against the rock” as an erotic vision to satisfy and excite the viewer of the picture and the reader of the text as well as the viewers (Perseus and the monster) within the image. The strategies of description are enticing us to identify with the twin-bladed hero in anticipation of both his conquests, the monster and the girl.

Turning back to the Pompeian fresco from the erotic intensity of Achilles’ description, one might be forgiven for wondering at the extent of the novelist’s rhetorical “reading in.” The painting...