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

The negative reflex of this attitude seems to manifest itself in the new practice of expunging the figures of the disgraced from narrative reliefs without any effort to camouflage the resulting gaps. The little early third-century Arch of the Silversmiths in the Velabro district of Rome, with its distressingly (to our eyes) gap-ridden scenes of the Severan imperial family, is an eloquent example.(9) (One of its shadowy presences is Plautilla (202-205 A.D.), teenage bride and eventual victim of Caracalla (211-217 A.D.); we are aided in reimagining her in her original place by a lovely portrait of the young empress, one of two in the exhibition, which shows her as she was being represented at just about this time.(10)) In this fashion the monument perpetuates, in the form of a conspicuous void, the negative memory of the "disappeared."

Some of the portraits exhibited here are works of no more than average quality whose interest resides in their historical significance or in the light that they throw on the procedures and problems of the adapter's craft. Others are extraordinary works of art whose impact would be startling in any context. One of these is a radiant portrait of Augustus (29 B.C.-14 A.D.) belonging to the J. Paul Getty Museum. In a reversal of the sequence usual in such conversions, a sculpture of Caligula was here remade to represent his great-grandfather, founder of the empire and unassailable fountain of legitimacy for the Julian succession. The date of the recutting and its underlying basis are betrayed in the broader relief and more florid modeling which situate this work in the mid-first century A.D.

Equally outstanding is an unaltered portrait of Caligula from a New York private collection. This is a small-scale bust in bronze, of a sort intended for private indoor display. It is one of the show's four such bronze miniatures of Caligula, out of a total of eight known worldwide, that together afford an otherwise unobtainable overview of this subcategory of imperial portraiture. The astonishingly expressive portrait conveys an emotional nakedness that is obscured in the surviving full-sized examples and suggests the complexity of the lost original. Instead of being smashed, the bronze was hurled into the Tiber--no doubt in the immediate aftermath of Caligula's assassination--which paradoxically resulted in its intact survival.

The finest of all the works on display is a marble portrait of Macrinus (217-218 A.D.), ephemeral successor of the assassinated Caracalla, belonging to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Brutally mutilated in a deliberate act of desecration, this extraordinary masterpiece is, paradoxically, otherwise preserved in a condition more pristine than that of virtually any other surviving work of Classical sculpture, even to the lustrous polish of its surfaces and the most refined details of the carving of hair and beard. Battered though this wreck is, its transfixing power and sensitivity bring us as close as we are ever likely to get to an original by its unknown author--clearly one of the great court sculptors of the later Roman Empire, a portraitist comparable (in another medium and from another millennium) to Titian.