The Emperor Vanishes - analyzing the 'From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in Roman Portraiture' exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery

Art in America, March, 2001 by Sheldon Nodelman

A traveling exhibition of portraits from imperial Rome, now at Yale, documents how identities were appropriated and transformed in the era ruthless cycles of political ascension and disfavor.

Roman imperial art has a fair claim to be regarded as the postmodern art of antiquity. Only recently has our own experience equipped us to appreciate properly some of its most distinctive features--those which for so long consigned it to the status of an inconvenient stepchild in the canon of Western art history. Reflecting the rivalrous aspirations of a tumultuous, multilayered and multicultural society, it voices itself in a multitude of apparently incongruous vocabularies of form. These were concurrently available and interchangeable rhetorical instruments, which could be mixed and matched according to the imperatives of occasion and context. Heir to an entire spectrum of preexisting styles, Romans could appropriate them as game elements in shifting relation to one another to generate new meaning. Inherited and newly invented images could be replicated, modified, subverted and recombined in a dizzying system of reflections--a "culture of the copy," to borrow the title of a recent book,(1) as the profusion of contending visual appeals reached a saturation level unparalleled in any other ancient culture. One of the more disturbing aspects of this heteromorphic visual culture is explored in the fascinating exhibition "From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in Roman Portraiture," which originated at Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta and is now on view [through Mar. 25] at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.

In this contentious image ecology, the portrait--preeminently the portrait statue--played a special role. It was a premier vehicle for individual self-assertion in an age of status competition and permeable, uncertain social boundaries. Amid the portraits of haughty aristocrats entering upon traditional magistracies and nouveaux riches freedmen parading their hard-won success, the imperial portraits, as urgent political instruments, stood out in their unrivaled authority and in their dominance of the urban milieu's most prestigious loci of display. In a society unequipped with today's means of mass communication, such statues exploited the elemental identification between the image and its referent, functioning as surrogates--psychologically and legally--for the emperor's person. As layered rebuses of meaning with an exceptional iconographic density, they visually manipulated inherited codes of social value, adroitly invoking both positive and negative contemporary references.(2) These lightning rods of political and social power attracted hostile as well as favorable attention. "Tyranny and Transformation" explores the negative dimension of their predominance.

Portrait statues did more than promote immediate claims of status and authority; they served to perpetuate the fame and memory of the subject for future generations in a kind of civic immortality. Roman custom provided a special form of posthumous punishment for those held guilty of offenses against the state--an Orwellian procedure intended to eradicate all public memory of the condemned. Conventionally known as damnatio memoriae, it was directed in particular against the images through which this memory was objectified. A recent epigraphical discovery has yielded the verbatim text of a decree of the Senate specifying the measures of this kind levied in 20 A.D. against a former governor of Syria named Calpurnius Piso. (Piso had been accused of complicity in the death of Germanicus, the heir apparent of Tiberius [emperor 14-37 A.D.], in one of the causes celebres of the early principate.(3) Wholesale destruction was visited upon the statues and other images of an overthrown or discredited personage--a procedure refamiliarized to us by news photos depicting the toppling of honorary statuary in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. Americans, for their part, should not forget the destruction in 1934 of Diego Rivera's great mural at Rockefeller Center on account of the portrait of Lenin that it contained. In imperial Rome, this situation could occasionally be reversed as changing political fortunes dictated the rehabilitation of the condemned: so, for a time, the portraits of Nero (54-68 A.D.)--and later, more lastingly, those of Commodus (180-192 A.D.)--were reerected or created anew.

In any case, marble was costly, and there was no need to smash an entire expensively carved statue when one could merely replace or recarve the head--specially given a pressing demand for images of a newly installed successor. If not destroyed or immediately reemployed, decommissioned statues (or their heads) would be warehoused for later use, sometimes at a considerable remove in time. The exhibition thus features portraits which have survived intact (often owing to their having been shelved in this fashion and never reused) as well as works bearing marks of injury or decapitation4 and others actually recut into new portrait images.