A Companion to Roman Art

Barbara E. Borg, Barbara E. Borg

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118886045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Companion to Roman Art encompasses various artistic genres, ancient contexts, and modern approaches for a comprehensive guide to Roman art.

• Offers comprehensive and original essays on the study of Roman art
• Contributions from distinguished scholars with unrivalled expertise covering a broad range of international approaches
• Focuses on the socio-historical aspects of Roman art, covering several topics that have not been presented in any detail in English
• Includes both close readings of individual art works and general discussions
• Provides an overview of main aspects of the subject and an introduction to current debates in the field

PART I
Methods and Approaches

CHAPTER 1
Defining Roman Art

Christopher H. Hallett

The Discovery of Roman Art in the Late Nineteenth Century

A hundred years of “Roman art”

“Roman art” was first identified as a distinct subfield within the history of art only in the late nineteenth century; and the first scholars to attempt to define the subject, Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl, felt compelled to adopt a markedly defensive tone (Wickhoff and von Hartel 1895/1900; Riegl 1901/1985; Brendel 1979, 25–37). Up to that time art historians, following the lead of Winckelmann, had regarded the art produced in the Roman period as simply “ancient art in its period of decline”—a motley art, unlike Egyptian or classical Greek art, in that it possessed no recognizable style all of its own. Of course, the Romans themselves were partly responsible for this eighteenth- and nineteenth-century view. Had not Virgil, in a celebrated passage of the Aeneid, put into the mouth of one of his characters a memorable prophecy (Virgil, Aeneid 6.847–848)?

“excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus…”

“Others will hammer out bronze till it is soft and breathes, and will draw forth from marble living faces…”

This is referring, of course, to the Greeks. The Romans—in the very same passage—are charged with a rather different destiny (Virgil, Aeneid 6.851–853):

“Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.”

“But you, Roman, remember to rule Earth’s peoples with imperium!
For these shall be your arts: to crown peace with the rule of law,
To spare the vanquished and to battle down the proud.”

Read together with other well-known excerpts from Latin literature, like Horace’s oft-quoted remark (Horace, Epistles 2.1.156) “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis / intulit agreste Latio” (“captive Greece took her uncouth conqueror captive, and introduced the arts into rustic Latium”), Virgil’s lines inevitably suggest that there really was no Roman art. And by the late nineteenth century most educated people seem to have taken this for granted. George Bernard Shaw, for example, offers this very loose version of the Virgilian passage just quoted, in his play Caesar and Cleopatra of 1898. We are in the last act (Act V), and Julius Caesar is about to board ship and set off from Alexandria for Rome. He calls out to the Sicilian Greek, Apollodorus, a freelance “artist” and carpet salesman:

caesar:

Apollodorus, I leave the art of Egypt in your charge. Remember:
Rome loves art and will encourage it ungrudgingly.

apollodorus:

I understand, Caesar. Rome will produce no art itself; but it will buy up and take away whatever the other nations produce.

caesar:

What! Rome produce no art! Is peace not an art? is war not an art? is government not an art? is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain.

Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those scholars who were attempting to found the new field of “Roman art” felt that they were faced with two urgent tasks. The first was to try to establish that there really was such a thing as “Roman art”; that it was not merely Greek art in decline. The second was to show that the art of this period was not merely a mass of heterogeneous and disparate works, related to one another only in being products of the same time and culture; but that it represented instead a clear artistic development, shaped by identifiable aesthetic goals.

Looking back after more than a century of scholarship, we may fairly say that in the first aim scholars of Roman art were remarkably successful. Talk of “decline” has been all but banished from our books—even when discussing the art of late antiquity—and few writers now feel the need to justify the subject as an independent field of study, distinct from Greek and Hellenistic art. In the second aim, however, the field has been conspicuously less successful. Within particular genres of monument, like historical relief or monumental sarcophagi, scholars have made great strides in describing and analyzing the way in which styles change; and plausible explanations have been advanced as to why they change as they do. Yet overall, a glance through any modern textbook of Roman art reveals the same very varied assortment of material: a selection of Roman buildings, portraits, coins, mosaics, and so on; and how these various genres of artwork are all to be related to one another in aesthetic terms—that is, in terms of their style, their formal composition, or their outward appearance—remains as unclear as ever (compare the more or less contemporary works Figures 1.3, 2.1, and 3.9, for example). No consensus has emerged on what are the defining characteristics of this art; and no way has yet been found of understanding all the various genres of Roman art—from wall paintings to imperial cameos—as parts of a unified artistic tradition.

Thus, the field has achieved remarkable success in one key aim, and striking lack of success in another. In this chapter I shall argue that these two outcomes are directly related. The current definition that we have of “Roman art” was devised specifically in order to defend it from the charge that it was really Greek art in a stage of decline; and this modern, restrictive definition to some extent prevents us from seeing Roman art as a whole, and perceiving the links and associations that unite all its products. Further, in the latter part of the chapter I shall propose a way out of the current dilemma, and offer a new formulation for understanding artistic production in the Roman world.

Continuing Problems of Definition

What is Roman about Roman art?

Those who first attempted to distinguish Roman art from Greek art started with representations of distinctly Roman subject matter, and the genre that we have come to know as “Roman historical relief,” in which Roman public ceremonies or historical events were commemorated (Figures 2.3–2.6, 11.2). Greek art offered no real precedent for this kind of representation; in its time it was clearly something authentically new. The products of late antique art were quickly also included (Figures 7.2, 7.8, 8.4), since they plainly represented the gradual abandonment of Greek and Hellenistic standards of representation. The next group of monuments to be widely recognized as properly part of Roman art were the portraits (Figures 3.1–3.10, 12.2–12.6). Here, of course, no one was arguing that the Greeks had not had portraits (distinctive and immediately identifiable images of specific individuals), merely that Roman portraits were sufficiently different, in style and appearance, to be regarded as an original creation of Roman culture. And rather similar considerations led to the inclusion of monumental carved sarcophagi (Figures 1.8, 15.4, 28.2). The reliefs on these are so unlike anything in earlier Greek art that—even where the subject matter is straightforwardly Greek—they could safely be regarded as something new. (Certainly there was no danger of these works appearing in books on Greek art.) Mosaics were not far behind the sarcophagi, since this was a medium enthusiastically taken up in the Roman period, and developed in wholly new directions (Figures 14.4–14.6, 21.6–21.7). And here, in a nutshell, we have the most important building blocks of any early twenty-first-century book on Roman art. If one adds a smattering of wall paintings, presented from the point of view of Roman domestic decoration (Figures 13.1–13.5), and a selection of the art produced for the middle levels of Roman society (Figures 4.5, 11.3, 11.5)—non-elite art, sometimes still misleadingly referred to as “plebeian art”—then we have the recipe for just about everything that one finds in a contemporary handbook of Roman art. In short, our books on Roman art may be described as perfect responses to the question: “What is Roman about Roman art?”

The problem with all of this, of course, is that what we are calling “Roman art” is actually a selection. It leaves out of the picture a large part of Roman artistic production. Whole categories of objects, produced in great quantity during this period, are either not acknowledged at all or are only very se...