The Boundaries of Art and Social Space in Rome

The Caged Bird and Other Art Forms

Frederick Jones

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781350066847
• eBook ISBN: 9781472529992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

This volume focuses on four cultural phenomena in the Roman world of the late Republic - the garden, a garden painting, tapestry, and the domestic caged bird. They accept or reject a categorisation as art in varying degrees, but they show considerable overlaps in the ways in which they impinge on social space. The study looks, therefore, at the borderlines between things that variously might or might not seem to be art forms. It looks at boundaries in another sense too. Boundaries between different social modes and contexts are embodied and represented in the garden and paintings of gardens, reinforced by the domestic use of decorative textile work, and replicated in the bird cage. The boundaries thus thematised map on to broader boundaries in the Roman house, city, and wider world, becoming part of the framework of the citizen's cognitive development and individual and civic identities. Frederick Jones presents a novel analysis that uses the perspective of cognitive development in relation to how elements of domestic and urban visual culture and the broader world map on to each other. His study for the first time understands the domestic caged bird as a cultural object and uniquely brings together four disparate cases under the umbrella of 'art'.

1

Introduction: Art

This book is about four elements of Roman visual culture that have special connections with the domus and manifold connections with the cultural and cognitive contexts of the Roman citizen. They are the garden, the garden painting (in particular, one in Livia’s villa at Prima Porta), tapestry, and the domestic caged bird. Nature, in an abstracted form, is important in at least three of the four, but there are other interconnections to be made as well, particularly with regard to boundaries, and, as we shall see, cognitive development. These four elements do not make a closed set (other phenomena could easily be added), but they are chosen as a sample of inter-relating examples of the visual environment of the Roman citizen.

At the same time, they raise another issue; as well as depicting or embodying boundaries themselves, they raise the question of the boundaries of art. One of the four has some immediate credibility as an art form, the garden painting, and a claim might be made for a second, tapestry, as a possible art medium, but the garden and the caged bird might well seem to fight against being classified as genres of art, most strongly, perhaps, in the case of the caged bird. If it is true that only one or two of the four exemplar cases used here belong in the field of art, then we can fairly ask what it is that allows them into the category, or what prevents the others from being so included. Looking at the peripheries and boundaries, we should be able to say something about the internal consistency of art.

Of course, the question of what art is is itself problematic. Thomas Adajian begins his entry on the definition of art in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Adajian 2012) by listing some ‘uncontroversial facts’¹ before stating that the question of whether ‘any definition of art’ does or could account for these facts is a key concern for the philosophy of art.² It is immediately evident that the lack of a pre-agreed definition has not prevented him (or others) from using statements about art and artworks in the course of reviewing the problems inherent in making such a definition. A key problem is that ‘art’ is neither a simplex, nor a static, timeless phenomenon. The kinds of objects produced exhibit huge variety, the social dynamics of the relationship between producers and users changes, alignment with mainstream social values is very uneven, and so on. In an account of the ‘modern system of the arts’, Paul Kristeller (1951) argues that the grouping of five major arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music) is a comparatively recent development, a proposition which would be even stronger were we to add to the list prose fiction, stage drama, and film and television drama). The coherence of the ‘system’ is not stable, and, while it is certainly clear that in some periods contacts between novelists, painters, and composers, say, or dramatists, poets, composers, and architects has been close and productively intimate, suggesting some degree of commonality of assumptions, the lack of stability and the fluidity of these internal alliances might lead one to conclude that the concept of art is simply too polymorphic, too different in different periods to allow a definition to capture it.³

Institutionalist definitions have tried to allow for the historical and cultural variability of art.⁴ Such definitions are designed to allow for change over time and recognise as relevant factors in its integrity and continuity the producer’s intent to make a work of art, its validation by a complex social network (the artworld), and an understanding audience. As for the characteristics of the artwork, we can look to both connoisseurial accounts, and functional and aesthetic definitions.⁵ The element of validation is important. It is based on spoken/unspoken criteria (from which one should probably not exclude capriciousness). The net of criteria used by the not fully homogenous social entity of the artworld includes features (which are also observed in traditional definitions and critical writings) such as formal, emotional, and aesthetic properties, and experiential and moral interest.⁶ Of course, things that are not art may also possess these features, and validated artworks may lack some, perhaps even all.⁷ The idea of validation requires some unfolding.

Art is mimetic, not primarily in the sense that it imitates its subjects, but in the sense that the incipient artist has a subjective experience of art and thinks ‘I can do that.’ The artist imitates art. Points of contact with a tradition or member of a tradition are factors in the process of validation.⁸ As regards the process of validation and the artworld, a system clearly subject to evolutionary and revolutionary processes, I would like to look very briefly at the nineteenth and the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, in the spirit of setting parameters, before going back to the Roman period. I hope, by moving backwards in time with these crude snapshots of two points on a continuum, to mitigate in some degree the potentially disorientating gulf between the Classical period and our own.

In the nineteenth century, the various practitioners often lived near each other, and knew and often wrote about or painted each other. Their works were housed or presented in grandly imposing public buildings, the Opera House, the great civic and national libraries, galleries, and concert halls. That is the stereotypical portrait of the cultural creator, and it is one that still lingers and is still the target of aspiration and ideological critique.⁹ We know what an artist is, however hard to define art may be, and the great artist has prestige because the work is prestigious. However, if we probe what is being valued, the answer will be mixed.

The nineteenth-century art museum and opera house are embroiled in national and civic constructions of identity and implicated in nationalist rivalries. The art museum requires art to fill it, and what fills it needs to be more or less self-evidently art. An institutional and circular definition of what art is comes into play, and the massed accumulation of art starts to build up its own battery of messages, moralisms and anti-moralisms. In the tensions between sincerity and expressionism, aestheticism and moralism, the judging of art and sound taste in art become politicised as well as status-indicators, although there is always more going on than just this.¹⁰ In view of this complexity, prestige is an equivocal measure, and the criterion of craftsmanship becomes ideologically charged. If we go back two more centuries, the picture is different. Although there were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries figures trying to raise the profile and respectability of artists, musicians, and composers, and to attach a set of lofty ideals to the notion of art, there was also the idea that the painter, the poet, and the composer were skilled craftsmen producing visual or aural artefacts according to patronal job specifications. Nonetheless, the monetary evaluation of artistic work encompassed more than the expensiveness of the materials and artisanal skill and claims for special status for particular artists were made or implied in the same period, for example, by bodies of theoretical and biographical work.¹¹

In the Graeco-Roman context, we do indeed find famous names for Greek practitioners like Polyclitus, Myron, and Praxiteles, and some famous works like Apelles’ Venus Anadyomene and Goddess on One Knee, Polyclitus’ Doryphoros, the Laocoon group, and Polycles’ Sleeping Hermaphrodite. In the absence of an explicit discussion of what art was, we could see this accumulation of canonical names and works as pointing toward a characterisation of what counts as art. In the Roman context, we can see an impassioned speech on art that is structured around such famous names, made by the Petronius’ poetaster Eumolpus (Petronius Satyrica 83);¹² however inadequate Eumolpus is as spokesperson and critic, this way of speaking about art is still indicative of an idea implicit in the canonical list, and Eumolpus’ inadequacy itself gives a picture of one point in the totality of the cultural validation process.

Prestigious canonic names are, of course, few in comparison with the actual number of producers, and we find many things in the Graeco-Roman world that bear some resemblances to things that we call art, but whose status as art can be questioned for one reason or another. Craft and skill were, of course, recognised, but so were crafts.¹³ Craftsmanship is manifestly a part of sculpture and painting, and also, manifestly and avowedly, a part of the composition of poetry (cf. Horace Satires 1.4; 1.10; 2.1). Equally, it is a part of building and cooking. For us, the term ‘art’ does not always and necessarily include either one type or a special group of types of culturally prestigious activity as opposed to that which is merely, as it were, craft, but it can be so used. For the Romans, ars (and equally technē in Greek) could refer to any of a range of crafts and sciences, to sets of skilled activities, to poetry, sculpture, and so on.¹⁴

We might have hoped to see prestige make a distinction between art, or the arts, and craft in the Roman world, but this is very far from being clearly the case.¹⁵ Indeed, here we can straightaway make a strong contrast between the poet, on the one hand, and painters and sculptors on the other.¹⁶ We know the names of very many more poets than painters or sculptors, especially in the Roman context, as though the identity of the artist in a banausic craft did not matter.¹⁷ In his attempt to raise the status of art and artists in his own time, Leon Alberti, the renaissance architect, artist, and theoretician, mines Classical literature for legitimising antecedents for the socially respectable artist (de Pictura; 1435).¹⁸ His rhetoric is persuasive, but read carefully it does not conceal the fact that the aristocratic amateur artist is virtually unknown in Rome.¹⁹ Pliny tells us (NH 35.120) that a certain Famulus painted in a toga, a clear attempt to claim respectability, and cites a handful of aristocratic examples (NH 35.19–23). These are C. Fabius Pictor, who painted the Temple of Salus at Rome (the work survived until a fire in the principate of Claudius), and the recent cases of Turpilius, an eques from Venetia, and Titedius Labeo, a man of praetorian rank. Pliny goes on to mention a Q. Pedius who had painting lessons as a boy on the advice of the orator Messala (and with the approval of Augustus himself), and made good progress, but died while still a child. Suetonius in his life of Nero, tells us that the Emperor ‘had also no mean enthusiasm for painting and sculpting’ (habuit et pingendi fingendique non mediocre stadium; Suetonius Nero 52). Tacitus suggests that these were merely boyhood interests (Ann. 13.3.7), and neither he nor Suetonius appear to be using them as part of their overall negative portraits of the Emperor.²⁰

By contrast, increasingly from the latter part of the second century BC, the Roman aristocrat was happy to indulge in versification and felt no stigma in doing so. After something of a watershed mark in the aristocratic Lucilius (second century BC), later held up by Horace as the founding figure in Roman verse satire,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series-Text
• Title-Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Art
• 2 The Roman Garden
• 3 The Garden Room at Prima Porta
• 4 Tapestry in Rome
• 5 The Caged Bird
• 6 Conclusion: Self-Projecting Inside and Out
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright