Public Domain- But an interesting insight into Roman Iconography-Joe Geranio


Foreward from Roman Portraits - Phaidon Edition-Oxford University Press: 1940
By L. GOLDSCHEIDER

Other nations likewise earlier peoples seperated from the Romans by hundreds or thousands of years, were aquainted with the art of portraiture.  The Eygyptians made likenesses of their kings, officials,priests and court ladies, magical harbourage for the soul which had become homeless after the death of the body; structures of hard stone, composed of seperate facets, of signs commemorating what was thought essential.  Besides this there was a minor art, which worked with soft fabrics, producing portraits more natural and less stylized, likenesses of peasants, slaves, prisoners and barbarians.  The Greeks had their art of portraiture, in which a victorious youth would lend his features to images of the gods, while the portrait of the general, the philosopher, or the poet was fashioned like a sttue of the divine, and was given superhuman touches.  And just as, for the hellenes, the divine remained a generaliation and intensification of the human, so did hellenic art retain the generalisation of human bodily phenonmena in their quasi-divinity.  The Greeks did not endeavour to reproduce particualr details, but to present a picture in which had been elaborated the idea they embodied.  Hence arose the contradiction, that the Eygptians, who regarded the body as no more than a temporary domicile for the soul, and the soul as the only true reality, tried, in their art, to keep close to the aspects of the body, whereas the Greeks, for whom the body was the only reality and the soul nothing more than a transient breath that inspired the body, did not attempt to reproduce a fugitive similarity, but to depict an eteranl identity.(1)  The Greeks idealised the body; the Egyptions the soul.

In the past two centuries before Christ, upon Asiatic and African soil, and especailly in Alexandria, Greek art arrived at its satryric drama.  The naturalism which the Hellenes had been unable to combine with beauty, became now allied to ugliness.  They depicted old age with its wrinkles and its turgidity, showed withered dryness or obesity, deformity and disease, the stages of the struggle with death, without poesy and with all repulsive details, its vulgar lack of charm, even when their work had sunk to parody and caricature. But all these statues and statuettes of street arabs, hunbacked beggars, fat a dwarfed women, dropsical persons, elderly drunkards, worn out fishermen, have only the physiognamy of their vices and sorrows, being embodiments of poverty and senility; they have the characteristics of types not of individuals.-The original home of true portraiture is the Apennine peninsula; the Etruscans had made likenesses by following the style of the East and the eastern Mediterranean, the Hellenic and the quasi-Hellenic style; and, without undue titvation, they depicted nature in all her whimsies and irregularities.  The sarcophagus-figures with sharply-cut Cypriote features retained an individual character, however much distorted.  The obese bald men, wearing rings on their podgy fingers and garlands round their thick, soft necks, assembled on decorations on cinerary urns and reminding us of Trimalchio at his meal, make us specualte curiously upon their lives; the terracotta heads of women and children are packed with the peculiarities of an individual destiny as if they were little biographies.  But the Etruscans ventured even closer to nature, or did not depart it so far.  We see this in their terracotta masks, whose precision in respect of chance details can only be explained by supposing them to have been elaboated from death-masks or modified from casts taken from nature. (2) But casts from nature were also one of the roots of Roman Portraiture.  Every aristocratic or well-to-do middle class Roman house in its drawing room, the atrium, a collection of family statues, likenesses of ancestors; a museum of " sculptured photos" if one may use the term, to distinguish them from intentional workd of art-casts in wax, death masks.  These wax family portraits were kept in cupboards, to be opened on feast days, or when the head of the house died.  As the dead man lay in state, his face was promplty covered with a waxen mask (promptly because of the rapidity with which putrefaction sets in a hot southern climate), and a waxen cast was prepared portraying the featrures of the deceased.  In the funeral procession, this would be borne in front of the bier, preceded by the crowd of dancers and mimes.  The actor who wore the recently prepared wax mask represented the dead man, and moved onward amid a number of professional mourners.  When the processin reached the forum, this actor would make a funeral oration, as if it had been made by the deceased himself.  The crowd of accompanying mimes wore the masks of the ancestors(1), which were taken from the cupboards, so that athe whole series of ancestors of the deceased accompanied the procession and seemed to be listening to adulatory oration.  Thus, among the Romans, was the art of the portraiture combined with that of the mystery play, in which the deceased and his fore-fathers appeared in the dress of life, to represent the living.  Complete statues of the dead were somtimes present, with head, hands, and feet made of wax, but the body, made of other material, was shown in the rough, though fully clothed.(2)  At the funeral of Julius Caesar there was a complete wax figure, rotating on a pivot, with the face and body showing the three-and-twenty stabs.  At the funeral procession of Emperor Pertinax, there was a borne upon a bier the wax figure of a sleeper representing death as sleep-an idea shich recurs in the mortuary monuments of the renaissance.  To make such wax plastics imperishiable it was needful to have bronze casts made of them, and the technique of bronze founding was already perfected by the Greeks and Etruscans.  In this the way the first Roman bronze heads originated as imitations of nature, and little scope was left for the scupltor's art with the chisel.  Imitations in terracotta were likewise an easy substitute.(1)  Throughout, for the Romans, the mask representing a man's face remained of the uttermost importance.  In the Flavian period, when natualism in sculpture had reached its climax, this still only applied to the face, the body being formed in accordance with the conventional fourth century types.  In contradistintion to this, the Greeks always treated the face as part of the whole body; and in the spirit they depicted the elevations and depressions of a back and prominences of a knee with as much attention to detail as if they had been portraying a face.  That is why we, trained in another school, that of christian art (the heiress of roman art), find the heads of Greek statues poor in detatil, whereas the bodies of these statues are so packed with detatils that our eyes cannot discover them all, but only an exploring finger.  This is why, moreover, to us Roman statues that have lost their heads seem to lack artistry, and we often consider that the most beautiful Greek statues are those which remain merely as torsos.  The Eygptians, also, in so far as they elaborated detatils, gave them only in the face, whereas the body was treated diagrammatically.(2)  But in their mummy masks, made of painted plaster and papier-mache, the Eygptians, from the ptolemaic period onward, achieved a verism which can give us an idea of that of the lost Roman death-masks.  The ruthlessly naturalistic marble heads of the republican period, the earliest Roman portraits which have come down to us, were obviously direct reproductions of wax masks.(3)  In the course of four centuries, plastic portariture among the Romans underwent many changes in style, but throughout , the realistic trend was preserved.  There were two great classicist epochs, one in the days of Augustus and the other in the days of Trajan.  The Greeks were considered their masters by the Romans, who collected the works of the Hellenes in the flowering season, exhibited them, and often copied them. (1)  Greek sculptors worked to satisfy the demand of the imperial court, they had their studios in Rome and in the provinces, and they took Roman pupils.  Their style was suited to the wishes of their patrons.  Nevertheless Franz Wickhoff could write: " The Greeks in Rome would never have shaken off this imitative naturalism.  It was only when Roman amateurs gave up their exclusive patronage of Greek artists and began to give commissions to people of their own race, that a change of style could take place" (Roman Art, London, 1900, p.46).  As an example of the Greek share in Roman Portrariture may be mentioned the bust of Pompey at Copenhagen (see web. for this photo), which A.W. Lawerence (in his Classical Scupture, London, 1923, p. 316) describes as "purely Greek". But, for the Romans, realism was not a mere popular fashion, as their Graecism was an aristocrataic fashion; it suited the tendencies of the national art.  THey soon discovered in what respect their painted busts of wax and stone fell behind nature.  In so far as these plastics were based upon wax masks, they gave the features a stiffness (no matter whetehr death-masks or life masks had been the sources).  They reproduced proportions and the underlying bony structure with a harsh exactitude, and even reproduced chance perculiarities of the surface, such as warts and scars; but they failed to reproduce the texture of the skin, the mobility of the surfaces, or to disclose the breathing vitality of the originals.  The Antonine artists (about 160 A.D.), however, discovered how to reproduce the texture of the skin.  They had developed the the technique of impressionism, a deliberate inaccuracy and sketchiness, in great measure an indifference to detatils of form, so that the onlooker is compelled to fill in imaginatively the details shich the artist's chisel and polishing have left incomplete.  Their sense for the value rough and smooth increased.  They contrasted the polished marble of the flesh with the roughness of the hair, and they left the depth of the mouth rough so that shadows might collect there.  They worked, indeed, with intensified shadows, to produce something intended to be viewd from a distance, in accordance with the principles of the illusionist style.  The black-and -white effects became so powerful, that the sculptor often expressly renounced naturalistic tinting.(2)  After the Flavian epoch, the drill came to be used more and more as a tool, for the depiction of mouth and ears, and especially of the hair.  The fantastic Rococo hair -dressing of women could be reproduced by the use of the drill, the tresses being picked out by the boring of the holes which cast deep shadows.  Since fashions in hair-dressing changed rapidly, some busts were provided with removable marble wigs.  (This begins with Julia Domna, about 200 A.D.)  Towards the middle so the second century A.D., or perhaps even earlier, about 130 A.D., during the reign of Hadrian, the expression began to be indicated plastically by drilling out he pupils.(1)   The iris was represented as a segment of a sphere, with depressed parallel rings; the pupils were hollows, or sometimes a mere notch.  Light and shade replaced colour in these representations of the eyes.  In the later development of the art, the lids were gouged, and the pupils were drilled.  From the third century onward, the eye became more and more the chief feature in representation; it was surrealistically enlarged, and borings where made which had the desired effect.  These various ways of representing the iris, the hair, and the beard enable archaeoligists to date a portrait bust; but in this matter the shape of the bust is also a help.  In the course of the imperial epoch the amount of the busts increased.  In the Julian-Claudian epoch, it was shown only as far down as the collarbone; and in the Flavian epoch , it represented shoulders and the top of the chest; in the Hadrian and Antonine epochs, it has gone so far as to include the greater part of the thorax and the upper arms; in the third century, it gave the complete thorax.  The modern form of plastic portratiure, showing no more than head and neck, did not exist in the days of antiquity.  The antique heads of this sort that we find in our museums were only made to be affixed to headless busts or statues.  Such partial statues were turned out by the mass, the artist in portraiture being commisssioned to add the head, and sometimes also the hands and the feet.  This practice was very general in the middle of the imperial epoch, when it became fashionable for the great to have themselves depicted as gods, as Apollo and Mars, as Venus and Ceres, as Ariande and Maia.  If this is an obvious exemplification of Roman vanity, we see vanity still more in the eagerness to have as many portraits of oneself as possible.  The well-to-do had busts made of their friends as presents, or promised them as bribes.  A rich gentlemen in the third century paid for the portrait bust of a vestal virgin, this being given to her in return for her patronage when he was elevated to the equestrian order.  Portrait bust would be given to a man who had spent money upon public purposes; because he had entertained the citizens; because he had financed plays, animal-baiting, gladatorial shows, and chariot races; because he had paid for the sending of the embassies.  The right to the public exhibition of a statue was purchasable in Rome, just as in some countries during the nineteenth century titles of nobility were purchasable.  But, apart from corruption and the conferring of honour, statues and busts were multiplied by the thousand.  THe guilds gave commissions for the portraits of their patrons and patronesses; the towns for musicians, pantomimists, athletes, and circus stars; the bronze busts of scholars, playwrights, sophists, and leading doctors were placed in public libraries and in the market-places.  No site was thought unworthy of this mark of appreciation nor any considere too good, so that the likenesses of gladiators, courtesans, and minions stood in the temples among the images of the gods.  The number of the statues amd busts of the emperors was legion.  The erection of these memorials began directly a man mounted the throne, so that we have numerous likenesses even of caesars whose reign lated no more than a few months.  Wickhoff remarks that we should make a mistake if we should try to study the Roman art of portraiture by looking only at the imperial busts, for most of these were produced in dozens of replicas by the copyists.  Statues and busts of the emperors were erected in the temples, and there received divine honours; and there were other busts in the exchanges, the shops, and the workshops.  Medallions with their portraits were placed on the walls of goverment buildings and law courts. (1)  Ohers were found to be in schools, barracks, and prisons.  These likenesses were multipled in routinist fashion and sent to all the provinces, so that there were almost as many if them among the Romans as there are colour prints of sovereigns in our own days.  Augustus had in Rome eighty statues of silver, a good many of gold, equestrian statues, and likenesses of him driving a four-in-hand,  Thousands were sent to every town of the empire.  No doubt when a detested ruler died, many of these scuptures were destroyed during an outburst of popular wrath, as happened after the death of Domitian.  Often to save time, or from thrift, earllier statues were retouched.  Pausanias reports how a statue of Orestes was renamed "Augustus"; while Philo informs us that event the statues of women were transformed into statues of the emperors.  Pliny speaks of the refurbishing of old statues by fitting them with new heads and writing new inscriptions; and Cicero refers to the giving of false names to earlier statues by effacing the old names and chiselling new ones.(2)  On the other hand, we have to remember that not all statues were made during the lifetime of those whom they represent, but some of them even centuries later.  Thus Herodianus informs us that Caracalla had statues of Alexander, Sulla, and Hannibal put up.  Coins bearing the head of Augustus were minted during the time of Tiberius.  As material for making the statues the Romans used not only marble(3) but also softer materials, such as basalt, porpyry, ebony,ivory-besides bronze, precious metals, and gold alloyed with silver (which was called electron, the word also used for amber).  Pausanias, speaks of an electron bust of Augustsus at Olympia, but it is not clear from what he writes whether this bust was made of amber or of metallic electron.-A love of art seems to have been widespread among the Romans, so that there were a great many amateur artists, and some of these amateurs were emperors.  Heliogabalus (HerodianusX,5) sent a self-portrait to Rome; Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and Alexander Severus were amateur painters; and Valentinian I was a scuptor.  The paintings of the days of Roman antiquity should be used to throw a comparative light upon the sculptured portraits of those days.  Portraits from El-Fayum, most of them belonging to the second century A.D., have little to do with the matter, for, though they date from the Roman epoch, they were not painted by Romans.  More useful, therrefore, are the portraits of Proculus, the baker and his wife, and certain mosaics (see Roman portraits-Phaidon Edition).  Though few portraits have survived , we know that a great many were painted, especially for use as the title-pages of books, but also other portraits of poets, scholars, and artists.  Varro made a collection of 700 portraits.  We read of a colossal portrait of Nero (Pliny XXV,51), which was 120 ft. high; also of portraits of courtesans and of betrothed princesses.  Lucian tells us that ladies insisted upon flattering portraits.  In the days of Pliny there were galleries filled with painted portraits.  Still, so few of these remain that for the pictorial history of the Roman people and its rulers during four centuries we depend almost exclusively upon sculptures.  Between Hellenic portraiture and Roman portraiture therre is as wide a gap as between the Acanthian capital and the plant sculptures of the Ara Pacis.  The Romans tried to make fidelity to nature a part of their art.  Portraiture is always regarded as the highest peculiar development of Roman art-with the proviso that modern "classicism" from the renaissance on into the eighteenth century clung to Hellenising and Baroque statues of the emperore, whereas the close of the nineteenth century , which was the period of impressionism (and of Wickhoff), preferred the illusionist portraits of the Flavian epoch and of the barbarian emperors; until our own time (since Riegl), when expressionism developed or art became unnatural and the portraits of the latest epoch of ancient Rome were more in vouge.  Two recent writers may be quoted to show their estimates of Roman portraitrue.  Wickhoff writes; "One merit has never been denied to Roman art, and that is the excellence of its portraiture.  Who has not seen, in its collection of antiques, heads from the period of Vespasian to Trajan whose striking lifelikeness and apparently superficial technique, adopted for a distinct purpose, puts one in mind of the best portraits of Velazquez and Frans Hals" (op. cit. pp. 17-18).  In another place Wickhoff writes that portraits whose boldness in technique outdoes that of the early painters of the Netherlands and Spain are described in the catalouges as "hasty work" because the critics failed to recognise the touch of an experienced master who, thus showing his vast experience, with broad strokes of the chisel created vivid pictures in shich his genius manifested itself so easily that he almost seemed to be at play.  Gisela Richter describes Roman portrariture as "the natural expression of the Roman genius"; and in another place she says, " In one branch art, however, their own native qualities helped the Romans to achieve real greatness, viz. that of portraiture".  LONDON, JULY 1940- L. GOLDSCHEIDER.