A History of Roman Art. Steven L. Tuck
porches, wide roofs, small cellas, and rooftop sculptures.
1.5a and 1.5b Greek Temple of Hera, Paestum, c. 450 BCE, compared with Roman Temple of Portunus, Rome, c. 150 BCE.
Photos courtesy Steven L. Tuck.
Greek temples were generally very large buildings; this example is 197 ft (60 m) in length. Roman temples, based on the traditions of the Etruscans, were generally much smaller, here 85 ft 4 in (26 m) in length. The Greek temple is raised on a three‐step platform while the Roman one has a tall 7 ½ ft (2.3 m) podium. This changes the relationship of the temple to the viewer as the Greek temple is accessible from all sides while the Roman one is strictly frontal and forces anyone approaching to do so from one direction. It essentially channels anyone viewing or engaging with the temple into a single point of view. By contrast, the Greek temple is peripteral with a colonnade that extends to all four sides allowing approach from every direction and actually shielding the building within so that the front and rear are virtually indistinguishable. Probably as a result of their frontality Roman temples were more often found on hills projecting the religious and cultural identity of a community.
peripteral
refers to a building, usually a temple, with a single row of columns surrounding it.
ITALIC VERSUS CLASSICAL STYLES AND FORMS II: PORTRAITURE
Many art history texts which cover the Roman world use a terminology of plebeian, a term referring to the Roman lower class, art versus patrician, referring to the Roman upper class, art. The former is used to refer to art whose characteristics largely follow the style and conventions of the native Italic works while the latter, patrician, refers to Classical, Greek‐inspired, works. This concept and the associated terms plebeian and patrician are not used in this book. It applies a set of class distinctions to the art that is simply not accurate. When we note the Italic (the preferred term here rather than plebeian) style of a relief dedicated by a Roman emperor, to refer to it as plebeian is absurd. These are not classes of art or people, but choices of styles that in fact do not exist in an Italic versus Greek dichotomy, but as a range of options in which in many cases elements of the styles are blended to serve the needs of the artist and patron and to speak to the viewer in a new way. Some of the best examples of this deliberate use of Greek or Italic antecedents can be found in Roman portraiture, which demonstrate the meanings inherent in much of the art. Portraits as symbols of communication, especially under the principate (period of rule by a princeps, colloquially known as an emperor) represent a dialogue between the ruler and the ruled. This is particularly true when they are not set up by emperors but by others. In some cases this means that they reflect an acceptance of the cultural, political, and social premises of Roman artistic display.
Roman art can be seen, despite the style of a particular work, as a semantic system that conveys various meanings and values in a visual way. This makes sense in a society covering a vast geographical and cultural area with a very low literacy rate and no better means of mass communication than the visual. The arts helped to create and transmit a Roman cultural identity across the Roman world. The style may or may not be a component of this, but the work can also, through its elements of subject, form, and structure, convey a variety of meanings.
1.6 Victorious general from Tivoli, Italy, c. 75–50 BCE. Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Massimo, Rome. H 6 ft 1 in (186.5 cm).
Photo courtesy Steven L. Tuck.
To many modern viewers the image of a victorious general – the subject is confirmed by the use of a set of body armor as a strut supporting the left leg – might resemble the “after” photo for an exercise program. It seemingly incongruously combines an idealized, youthful, bulky, muscular body with a craggy, lined face with sagging skin and a wrinkled neck. To a Roman observer it indicates two separate sets of artistic conventions, and therefore cultural values, combined in a single work of art. The craggy portrait face is the Italic tradition conveying the qualities of dignity and maturity of the depicted man, while the muscular youthful body shows the Hellenistic Greek heroization of rulers from the Greek world after the death of Alexander the Great. Together, they merge into a new form of Roman portraiture in the first century BCE. The imagery of victory was important in the Roman world and their readiness to adopt Greek conventions demonstrates the fluidity of the Roman system and its basis on the personal choices of subjects, artists, and patrons.
While modeling the sort of analysis you will find later in the book, mention should be made of the importance of literary reference to our understanding of art. You might think this statue reflects only the personal preference of the person portrayed as a victorious general. In fact, it is only one in a long line of statues that demonstrates broader Roman cultural values as the Roman politician and author Cicero makes clear in his work De Officiis (Concerning Duties 1.61):
When, on the other hand, we wish to pay a compliment, we somehow or other praise in more eloquent strain the brave and noble work of some great soul. Hence there is an open field for orators on the subjects of Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, Thermopylae, and Leuctra [famous battles], and hence our own Cocles, the Decii, Gnaeus and Publius Scipio, Marcus Marcellus, and countless others, and, above all, the Roman People as a nation are celebrated for greatness of spirit. Their passion for military glory, moreover, is shown in the fact that we see their statues usually in soldier’s garb.
1.7 Emperor Lucius Verus as victorious athlete, c. 169 CE, Rome. Musei Vaticani, Rome.
Photo courtesy Steven L. Tuck.
Another example of the blending of iconography and projected message is in the statue of a Roman emperor, Lucius Verus, as a victorious athlete. The semantic expression in the statue of Lucius Verus communicates a number of lessons. It is portraiture (giving as the Roman writer, Pliny the Elder, says, “an accurate likeness”), ruler imagery, and a victory monument of a successful military leader (the sword and military cloak near his right foot), but also utilizes the vocabulary of the victorious Greek athlete in its nudity. Roman viewers, depending on their level of visual literacy, could engage the image and any or all of these lessons from it. The fully heroic nudity of Lucius Verus is in contrast to the draped figure from Tivoli. In this case the convention seems to have changed in the more than two hundred years between the two sculptures as nudity is now socially acceptable in an image for a Roman elite male celebrating victory.
Almost a hundred years after the statue of Lucius Verus, the image of another Roman emperor, Trebonianus Gallus, shows another shift in the form and meaning of these victory images. In the case of the Gallus statue, it retains the heroic nudity that first entered Roman art three hundred years earlier from Greek conventions of ruler representation. But here the Greek sculptural proportions, either the Hellenistic ones of the Tivoli general or the Classical ones of Lucius Verus, are abandoned in favor of a completely different set of proportions. The figure has, by Classical conventional terms, a tiny head and undeveloped musculature. But rather than conclude that these features are the result of poor art, as has been argued in the past, it is probably a deliberate attempt to exploit the traditional imagery of the victorious ruler/athlete with an image that conveys the massive power of the emperor over