F. Squire_PrimaPorta

Transcription

Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus
Michael Squire
Detail of the Prima Porta
Augustus breastplate (see
plate 1), as viewed from the
right. Photo: Reproduced by
kind permission of Susanne
Muth.
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12007
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
36 | 2 | April 2013 | pages 242-279
© Association of Art Historians 2013
Of all free-standing Roman Imperial portraits, none is more iconic than the
so-called ‘Prima Porta Augustus’, unearthed 150 years ago this month (plate 1).1
Discovered amid the ruins of a private Imperial villa just north of Rome in 1863,
restored by no less a sculptor than Pietro Tenerani, and quickly set up in the Musei
Vaticani (where the statue has lorded over the Braccio Nuovo ever since), the
Prima Porta Augustus epitomizes our collective ideas about both Augustus and
the principate that he founded in the late irst century BCE. Even as early as 1875,
Lawrence Alma-Tadema turned to the sculpture as oficial Augustan emblem: what
better image than the Prima Porta Augustus to conjure up the emperor’s looming
presence within an imaginary ‘audience with Agrippa’ (plate 2)?2 For Benito
Mussolini in the 1930s, this Imperial image was likewise understood to enshrine
the imperial ambitions of Fascist Italy: a bronze copy was duly erected along Rome’s
Via dei Fori Imperiali, where it continues to cast its shadow over the imperial fora
(plate 3).3 ‘No other image is lodged more irmly at the heart of today’s scholarship
on the art and power of Rome,’ as one textbook puts it, ‘no imperial face more
indelibly imprinted on the art historical imagination’.4
But for all our familiarity with the Prima Porta Augustus – and for all the
hundreds of books, articles and chapters dedicated to it – there seems to be more to
say about both the statue and its original historical context. By ‘context’, I do not just
mean the statue’s speciic indspot and provenance (which remain iercely debated).
Nor do I mean solely the art-historical contexts of iconography and typology – the
identity of each igure emblazoned on the breastplate, or the relationship between
this portrait’s coiffure and other examples of the so-called ‘Prima Porta’ type. My
interest in this essay, rather, lies with the contexts of Augustan art in the broadest
visual cultural sense. By looking afresh at the statue, I hope to shed new light on its
manipulations of medium on the one hand, and its careful negotiation of imperial
stance and identity on the other.
‘Looking’ will prove critical here. Instead of trying to ‘decode’ the images
emblazoned on the cuirass, or indeed adding to the various discussions of date
and supposed ‘original’, my objective is to draw renewed attention to the statue’s
igurative ambiguities. What strikes me as so signiicant about the statue is what
W. J. T. Mitchell might call its ‘multistability’ – the playful layering of different visual
igurative modes, no less than the historical, cultural and political frameworks that
this entails.5 I begin with arguably the most ambivalent aspect of all: the recourse to
the cuirass in the irst place. Modern scholars tend to accept this costume as a matter
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of mimetic course. But I think things are somewhat more complex. As both military
device and iconographic costume, the cuirass had been around for centuries (over
600 fragments of cuirassed statues survive from the Graeco-Roman world, from
various dates and models, see plate 26).6 Never before, however, had this sculpted
costume been put to such playful and self-conscious effect.7 To my mind, the statue’s
choice of outit is best understood within a cultural dialectic of the body in the
late irst century BCE: on one side, the pull towards nudity and its association with
masculine power and inluence, premised upon an inherited set of ‘Greek’ visual
conventions; on the other, a certain reticence, resistance and rejection, centred
around a ‘Roman’ rhetoric of cultural remove and difference. As we shall see, the
cuirass allows our princeps (‘irst leader’) at once to bear his clothes and to divest them:
by exploiting the dynamic duplicity of its dress, the statue invites viewers to see its
subject as both buff Greek nude and vested Roman general.
1 The Prima Porta statue
of Augustus, precise date
disputed (but perhaps c. 15
CE, after an earlier model of
c. 19 BCE). Parian marble,
height 2.04 m. Rome: Musei
Vaticani (inv. 2290). Photo:
Author.
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Michael Squire
2 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
An Audience at Agrippa’s, 1875
(Opus CLXI). Oil on panel,
0.98 × 0.628 m. Kilmarnock:
The Dick Institute. Photo:
Reproduced by kind
permission of the Institut
für Klassische Archäologie
und Museum für Abgüsse
Klassischer Bildwerke,
Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität, Munich.
3 Modern bronze copy of
the Prima Porta Augustus,
set up along Rome’s Via
dei Fori Imperiali (next to
the Forum of Augustus).
Photo: Reproduced by kind
It is what such ambivalence or ‘code-switching’ might mean for the statue – and
indeed for the mechanics of Augustan imagery more generally – that interests me
here.8 Thanks to the ambiguous breastplate, which simultaneously exposes the torso
of the princeps and clothes it behind a igurative anatomy of imperialist myth-making,
Augustus manifests a body that both can and cannot be seen. As such, the igurative
duplicity of the cuirass incorporates a set of more profound ‘ontological’ paradoxes
about the statue and its covered/exposed subject. The bodily frame situates Augustus
between different registers of representation: like the bodies depicted in and on the
make-believe cuirass, the emperor’s body luctuates back and forth through literal
and symbolic modes of signiication – between mimetic replication on the one hand,
and extra-igurative modes of allegory and metaphor on the other. Nude vs. clothed,
‘Greek’ vs. ‘Roman’, literal vs. symbolic: the statue gives somatic form to a series
of semantic contradictions, themselves grounded in the political paradoxes of the
Augustan principate.
Although the essay is structured around a single material case study, it also
aims to draw out some broader artistic-cum-political ramiications. In particular,
it examines what the statue’s ambiguities mean for thinking about Augustan
imagery at large. For too long, I think, our narratives about ‘the power of images in
the age of Augustus’ – the title of a landmark book by Paul Zanker in 1988 – have
tended to suppose a neat, ordered and self-contained system of programmatic
‘communication’.9 There were, we assume, single prefabricated Augustan
political ‘messages’; what is more, scholarly responses to Augustan ‘propaganda’
have centred around ‘decoding’ the single sorts of political messages involved
(with some scholars justifying their recourse to this supposed artistic ‘language’
explicitly). To my mind, by contrast, the Prima Porta Augustus embodies a much
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more sophisticated and self-referential politics of visual ambiguity: the ‘power’
of Augustan images lay in the gesture not of excising ambiguity, but rather of
embracing ambivalence and harnessing it to the new political cause.
The World on the Chest
4 Detail of the head of the
Prima Porta Augustus.
permission of Susanne Muth.
Before elaborating that larger argument, let me begin by introducing my central case
study and reviewing its history of scholarship. Since the discovery of the Prima Porta
Augustus on 20 April 1863, Classical archaeologists have concerned themselves with
a variety of interpretive issues: the reconstruction of the hands; the attributes; the
relationship with other Augustan portraits; the statue’s historical origins, provenance
and display; and perhaps most importantly, the iconographic identiication of the
igures emblazoned on the cuirass. This essay cannot aim at a full état de la recherche.
Because of my reliance on earlier discussions, however, it seems important to offer an
annotated description of what can be seen: those interested in the vast bibliography
are referred to the (purposely extensive) endnotes.
Where better to start than with the statue’s size, medium and archaeological
provenance. Excluding its modern base, the Prima Porta Augustus stands at an overlifesize 2.04 metres. In terms of its materials, isotopic analysis conirms that the statue
was crafted from high-quality lychnites marble (imported from the Greek Cycladic
island of Paros).10 As stated above, the sculpture was found in a private residence
some nine miles north of Rome, near the Via Flaminia. Although the site can be
connected with the family of Augustus’ wife, Livia, we do not know where in the
villa the statue was found:11 in the absence of reliable
archaeological records, the exact position of the statue
remains the subject of ongoing scholarly conjecture.12
The identity and iconographic stance of the
sculpture, by contrast, are relatively clear. The facial
features leave no doubt about the Augustan identity.
Indeed, the idealized physiognomy and signature
‘crab-claw’ coiffure have resulted in the eponymous
labelling of a so-called ‘Prima Porta’ portrait type
(plate 4): some 147 copies and versions are known,
and the template is usually thought to have originated
in or shortly after 27 BCE.13 Augustus stands in
counterbalanced contrapposto pose, bearing the
bulk of his weight on his right leg; the left leg is
consequently relaxed, throwing the whole statue into
a dynamic diagonal dance (the right hip is higher than
the left, the left shoulder higher than the right, and
the turn of the head crowns the overarching sense
of animation). As scholars have long observed, the
sculptural schema of the Prima Porta Augustus harks
back to Classical prototypes from the mid-ifth century
BCE. For modern viewers, as indeed for Augustus’
contemporaries, one statue type in particular seems to
have embodied the High Classical style: the Doryphoros,
or ‘Lance-Bearer’, of the Argive sculptor Polyclitus,
crafted sometime around the middle of the ifth
century BCE, and much discussed, copied and imitated
in Rome (for example, plate 5).14 Some have doubted
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Michael Squire
5 Roman copy of Polyclitus,
Doryphoros, irst century
BCE (after an original of c.
460 BCE). Pentelic marble,
height 1.98 m. Minneapolis:
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
(inv. 86.6: purchased by The
John R. Van Derlip Fund, with
additional funds from Bruce
B. Dayton, an anonymous
donor, Mr and Mrs Kenneth
Dayton, Mr and Mrs W. John
Driscoll, Mr and Mrs Alfred
Harrison, Mr and Mrs John
Andrus, Mr and Mrs Judson
Dayton, Mr and Mrs Stephen
Keating, Mr and Mrs Pierce
McNally, Mr and Mrs Donald
Dayton, Mr and Mrs Wayne
MacFarlane, and many other
generous friends of the
Institute). Photo: Reproduced
by kind permission of the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
any speciic reference to that Polyclitan prototype,15
drawing attention to the differences in stance and
pose,16 or else suggesting that the Prima Porta
Augustus was designed to be seen from a different
angle (not from the front, but rather from the front
left).17 Of course, one can only compare later Roman
adaptations of the Doryphoros, not the statue itself,
which is long lost; moreover, we will never know
how many viewers might have noticed (or indeed
commented upon) the apparent reference. Still, we
should not underestimate Roman art’s capacity for
interpictorial allusion.18 In the case of the Prima Porta
portrait type, moreover, the corresponding stylization
of the hair certainly does seem to fashion a knowing
and deliberate sort of allusion; it is also signiicant
that Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (written in the 70s
CE) recognized such sculptural counterbalance as a
distinctively ‘Polyclitan’ trait.19
Things are somewhat trickier when it comes to
reconstructing the Prima Porta Augustus’ arms. The
tubular hollow carved through the statue’s left hand
conirms that (like the Doryphoros) it once grasped
a cylindrical object – variously reconstructed as a
lance, military standard, laurel branch, or sceptre (as
in Alma-Tadema’s painting, see plate 2).20 As for the
extended right arm, some have suggested that the princeps also held something in
his right hand, proposing once again a laurel or a lance.21 Although it is impossible
to reach deinitive conclusions, this hypothesis seems relatively unlikely. Only
the ring inger survives, necessitating a full-scale reconstruction in the nineteenth
century. As John Pollini has observed, however, the tendons on the back of the hand
suggest that the index and middle ingers were extended rather than curved around
an object; similarly, the ring and little ingers appear to have been folded back on
themselves, as conirmed by the single surviving inger.22 True to Pietro Tenerani’s
nineteenth-century reconstruction, in other words, Augustus seems not to have held
anything in his right hand. Instead, he most probably raised it in a sign of adlocutio or
rhetorical ‘address’.23 Augustus is shown speaking to his respectful audience: frozen
in the perpetuity of potential speech (note the closed lips), the statue most likely
engaged its onlookers as though they were – or were about to become – listeners.
If this reconstruction is correct, the gesture seems to have amalgamated the image
of military general with that of orator. In this sense, the raised right arm goes hand
in hand with the trailing left foot. This princeps is no static speaker, but rather points
forward, showing us the direction in which to proceed: Augustus is a man of both
words and actions alike.
This military aspect brings us to the statue’s costume. As we have observed, our
marble princeps is clothed in an imaginary bronze breastplate: the military costume is
strapped over the shoulders and fastened together at each side. Beneath the cuirass
are two undergarments: below the lower straps (just above the knees) are hints at
an underlying tunic, with an additional short-sleeved garment worn on top (the
cuts of the upper arms resemble those of a modern-day T-shirt so that the cuirass’
‘leather’ lappets trim the arm-holes). Following the important iconographic studies
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6 Detail of the lower cuirass
straps of the Prima Porta
Augustus. Photo: Reproduced
by kind permission of Susanne
Muth.
7 Detail of the ‘hip-mantle’
(Hüftmantel) of the Prima
Porta Augustus. Photo:
Reproduced by kind
of Cornelius C. Vermeule and Klaus Stemmer, archaeologists have classiied the
cuirass as an example of the so-called ‘Hellenistic’ type. In contrast to the tongueshaped pteryges of the ‘Classical’ cuirass (compare plate 22), the breastplate is trimmed
with straight leather lappets below; although most of these are obscured by drapery,
a second row of longer straps has been plastically modelled over Augustus’ left leg
(plate 6).24 An additional piece of clothing is draped around the waist (plate 7): scholars
often refer to this by the modern (and somewhat misleading) name of ‘hip-mantle’
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Michael Squire
8 Drawing of the Prima
Porta Augustus breastplate
by Barbara Stucky-Böhrs,
commissioned by Hans
Jucker. From Hans Jucker,
‘Dokumentationen zur
Augustusstatue von
Primaporta’, Hefte des
Archäologischen Seminars
Bern, 3, 1977, 17, plate 1.
(German Hüftmantel);25 as with the yielding marble lappets, the soft voluminous folds
make for a satisfying contrast with the shallow reliefs of the hardened cuirass. Roman
viewers would probably have understood the draped garment as a paludamentum – a
military cloak worn by high-ranking generals in the ield of battle, usually attached at
the shoulder (see plate 22). In this case, however, there is no such fastening: the cloth
cascades over Augustus’ left forearm in virtuoso vertical folds, suspended in mid-air
beside the bent left leg.26 As we shall see, there are revealing iconographic parallels
for such clothing around the waist (compare plate 14 and plate 20). But whatever else
we make of this garment, a compositional rationale also appears to have operated
behind it. By drawing our eye to the statue’s lower reaches, the drapery attracts
attention to the winged toddler at the opposite side. This child – at once literally and
metaphorically propping up Augustus’ imperial stance – straddles a dolphin: ancient
audiences would have had no dificulty in recognizing this igure as Cupid (Eros in
Greek), although some modern scholars have also associated the portrait with that of
Augustus’ nephew, Gaius (born in 20 BCE).27
As for the panoply of igures on the cuirass, these have received much more
extensive commentary (plate 8, plate 9, plate 10, plate 11). With each and every igure, the
scholarly objective has been to name and identify, commenting on the igures both
individually and as a collective. We shall return to the overarching arrangement in
due course. For now, though, it might be useful to introduce each igure in turn,
noting some of the most important controversies along the way. With that purpose
in mind, I reproduce the line-drawing by Barbara Stucky-Böhrs (commissioned by
Hans Jucker in 1977, plate 8), although it should be stated from the outset that such
two-dimensional diagrams latten out the twists and turns of the three-dimensional
original.28
The two male igures at the centre provide an obvious starting-point (see plate 10).
The left-hand igure is dressed in Roman military attire, with boots, helmet and
cuirass (this time a ‘Classical’ cuirass, with tongue-shaped lappets: compare plate 22),
and with paludamentum fastened around his left shoulder;
beneath the left arm, the igure’s sword lies sheathed
in its scabbard, and an animal perches behind the legs
(variously identiied as a ‘dog’ or ‘wolf’).29 Opposite
him stands a man in very different attire. This second
igure is dressed in typical ‘Oriental’ costume,
complete with beard, baggy trousers, and a tunic girt
at the upper waist: with both his left and right hands
he supports a military standard, or signum, topped with
the igure of an eagle.30 The exchange between the
Roman igure on the left and the eastern igure on the
right dominates the composition: while the righthand igure lifts his standard aloft, the left-hand igure
extends his right arm as if ready to receive it, or else
reaching out in a gesture that betokens peace.
As archaeologists have long recognized, this
imagery seems to refer to a particular historical
event in 20 BCE: namely, Augustus’ recovery of the
Roman military standards which Crassus had lost
to the Parthians during the battle of Carrhae in 53
BCE.31 Augustus made much of this episode and its
political signiicance. So it is, for example, that in his
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autobiographical Res Gestae, originally inscribed on monumental bronze tables outside
his Mausoleum in Rome, Augustus boasted how he ‘forced’ (coegi / ἠνάγκασα) the
Parthians to return the standards;32 writing some 200 years later, Cassius Dio likewise
records that Augustus ‘took great pride in the achievement, declaring that he had
recovered without a struggle what had formerly been lost in battle’.33 With this
history in mind, some scholars have gone even further in their attempts to identify
the two protagonists. According to one interpretation, the right-hand igure represents
the Parthian leader Phraates IV;34 by the same logic, the left-hand ‘Roman’ is likewise
identiied as a speciic individual – whether a historical protagonist like Tiberius
(Augustus’ successor),35 or else a more mythical igure like Mars,36 Romulus,37
Aeneas,38 or indeed a personiication of the Roman army (Exercitus Romanus) itself.39
In my view, we might do better to leave these names unspeciied. If the patron
or artist had wanted to suggest particular identities, there were effective visual (and
9 Detail of the Prima
Porta Augustus torso.
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Michael Squire
10 Detail of the Prima Porta
Augustus breastplate.
Augustus breastplate,
as viewed from the left.
indeed epigraphic) means of doing so. By contrast, both of these igures are bestowed
with fairly generic appearances, allowing for a variety of different (and by no means
mutually exclusive) identities. Despite the iconographic uncertainties, there can
be no doubting the overarching cosmic signiicance of the events portrayed. For
whatever else we make of the central scenes, this historical episode is subjected to the
full force of Augustan myth-making: heaven and earth – and everything in between
– are shown to revolve around the pivotal moment when the Parthian standards are
inally returned to Rome.
Take, irst of all, the igures beside and below those at the centre. Flanking
the ribcage are two symmetrical female captives. To the left, a woman wears a
long-sleeved tunic, mantle and open-toed sandals (see plate 11): with her hair tied
back, she rests her head in one hand and holds a sword (with eagle-headed hilt) in
the other. To the right, a second female barbarian sits in corresponding pose and
in similar attire (see opening plate). This second igure wears a illet in her hair;
she holds an empty sword sheath in one hand, and a dragon-headed instrument
(sometimes associated with a Gallic trumpet, or carnyx) in the other.40 Classical
archaeologists have again suggested and debated a series of speciic Roman
provinces:41 the left-hand igure is most often (though not always) associated with
Hispania on the basis of her sword;42 the puzzling animal at the side of the righthand igure (a wild boar?), by contrast, has been connected with Celtic military
standards, leading most to identify her as Gaul.43 Below these lateral captives are
two extra-terrestrial igures loating mid-air: because of the lyre, and the winged
grifin upon which he rides, the draped male on the left has been associated with
Apollo, while the female igure on the right has been identiied as Artemis/Diana.44
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12 Painted plaster cast of
the Prima Porta Augustus,
as reconstructed by
Paolo Liverani (originally
displayed in the Bunte Götter
exhibition at the Munich
Gylpothek between 2003
and 2004). Photo: Wolfram
Martini, reproduced by kind
Completing the symmetrical effect, and framing the horizontal space beneath the
belly button, we ind a single reclining female igure, with a cornucopia (‘horn of
plenty’) on her knee and two babies beside her breast. A number of identities have
been proposed – among them, Tellus (‘Earth’),45 Italia,46 and Ceres-Cybele.47 While
many of the iconographic details remain unclear – the circular object at the feet, the
three-pointed crown of the head, and the stalk behind her right foot, for example –
there can be no doubting the generic image of earthly plenty.
If the cuirass’ low-lying imagery symbolizes the lower reaches of earth, the
upper part embodies the astral expanses of the sky. At the very top of the cuirass, on
the epaulets either side of Augustus’ neck, are two sphinxes: the heads are turned
out to face the viewer, while their bodies are twisted inwards so as to lank the
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Michael Squire
frontal frame of Augustus.48 Beneath these, carved into the upper chest, we see the
protruding naked torso of a bearded elder, surrounded on either side by an additional
igurative duo: to the left, a draped man rides a quadriga (so that the horses’ raised
legs symmetrically frame the military standard below); to the right are two female
igures, orbiting around the chest in the same ‘clockwise’ direction. Once again,
various identiications have been proposed. While the central bearded igure is
usually associated with the sky-god Caelus (his billowing mantle marking the
upper limits both of the heavens and of Augustus’ chest),49 the left-hand charioteer
is most often identiied as Helios or Sol (i.e. ‘Sun’),50 and the right-hand igures are
respectively associated with Eos or Aurora (‘Dawn’, holding a pitcher of morning
dew) and Selene or Luna (‘Moon’ – hence the torch held in the left hand).51
Whatever we make of the cuirass’ sculpted scenes, its central episode helps
situate the sculpture historically. The return of the Parthian standards suggests a
date in or soon after 20 BCE, in the immediate wake of the speciic historical event.
But the origins of the statue are nonetheless contentious, bound up with larger
questions about provenance and display.52 For was this a one-off marble creation
commissioned by Augustus’ wife for her home? Or was it rather a later marble ‘copy’,
one that referred back to an earlier bronze or other metallic ‘original’?53 Various
formal aspects of the statue have been cited in connection with both scholarly
positions: among them, the Cupid support (necessary in marble, but de trop in
bronze?), the uninished workmanship around the rear of the statue (an adaptation
for a speciic topographical display? see plate 23 and plate 24),54 and not least the
supposed ‘Tiberian’ identity of the Roman soldier (was this a later ‘copy’ intended
to promote Tiberius as Augustus’ successor?).55 These are important questions. But
for our immediate purposes, they need not overly distract: as always with GraecoRoman art, it is more interesting to proceed on the basis of what we do know than to
speculate about what we do not.56
This issue of ‘prototype’ does nonetheless lag one inal formal aspect of
the sculpture: whatever its relation to any bronze ‘original’, the extant marble
statue was certainly painted. Traces of colour were noted immediately after the
statue’s discovery, although many of these are no longer visible today.57 With
the development of new scientiic technologies, Paolo Liverani suggested a new
reconstruction as part of the landmark Bunte Götter (‘Coloured gods’) Munich
exhibition in 2003 (plate 12).58 Liverani’s reconstruction is admittedly minimalist,
based on close scientiic analysis of surviving traces of colour (rather than on
nineteenth-century reports). But his general conclusions about the palette and
painted areas nonetheless stand, as Mark Bradley has discussed in this journal in
2009: we shall return to the interpretive stakes of such polychromy below.59
Naked Ambitions and Vested Interests
How, then, to make historical sense of the statue’s various formal features? Since the
late 1980s, most discussions of the Prima Porta Augustus have revolved around the
contemporary political signiicance of the breastplate iconography, concentrating
on the return of Crassus’ standards in particular. ‘The unique historical event’,
writes Paul Zanker, ‘is turned into a paradigm of salvation, in which the gods and
the heavens act as guarantors, but need not intervene directly.’60 Like other scholars
before him,61 Zanker has recourse to a library of literary texts here, not least Horace’s
Carmen Saeculare (composed for the ‘secular games’ of 17 BCE): the imagery of fecundity
and abundance is duly read in terms of Augustus’ new ‘salviic’ order – as part of the
professed saeculum aureum, or ‘golden age’, of Augustan Rome.62
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13 ‘Barberini Togatus’ group,
late irst century BCE. Parian
marble, height 1.65 m. Rome:
Musei Capitoloni, Centrale
Montemartini (inv. I.46).
Photo: DAI: Rom 1937: 378.
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Michael Squire
14 ‘Tivoli General’, late
second century BCE/early
irst century BCE. Marble,
height 1.94 m. Rome: Museo
Nazionale Romano, Palazzo
Massimo alle Terme (inv.
10.65.13). Photo: Author.
15 Colossal acrolithic portrait
of Augustus from the theatre
at Arles, probably early
irst century CE. Marble
and local limestone, height
2.3 m (original height of
whole statue c. 3 m). Arles:
Musée de l’Arles et de la
Provence antiques (inv. FAN
92.00.215/2679). Photo:
Author.
Taking his cue from textual sources, Zanker invests the Prima Porta Augustus
with a larger importance concerning the ‘power of images in the age of Augustus’.
As visual paradigm, the statue is understood not just to forge a particular image
of the emperor, but also to constitute the ‘decisive turning point . . . for the entire
system of visual communication’ which Augustus is supposed to have implemented.
For Zanker, ‘new forms of artistic and visual expression had arisen in the wake
of fundamental political change’, so that a statue like the Prima Porta Augustus
encapsulates a coherent message about both Augustus and the political regime
for which he stood. Above all, the Prima Porta statue embodies Zanker’s idea
that Augustan art – like Augustan politics – was characterized by what he calls ‘a
comprehensive move toward standardization within ixed norms’ (‘ein umfassender
Prozeß der Normierung nach festen Standards’): the effectiveness of Augustus’ Aufstieg relied
upon his effective elimination of visual ambiguity and polyvalence.63
We shall return in the conclusion to Zanker’s overarching framework – above
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16 ‘Gemma Augustea’, early
irst century CE. Sardonyx in
two layers, 19 × 23 × 1.3 cm.
Vienna: Kunsthistorisches
Museum (inv. ANSA.IXa.79).
all, Zanker’s assumption of a supposed Bildersprache, or ‘language of images’, which
encompasses the ‘totality of images that a contemporary would have experienced’.64
For now, though, I want to look more carefully at the visual games of the breastplate.
Zanker takes his propagandistic cue from the iconographic subjects of Augustus’
cuirass, which he proceeds to name and identify. By contrast, my interest will
lie less in what the breastplate imagery can be said to ‘represent’, but rather in how
the cuirassed statue presents its subject in the irst place. The point seems to me
fundamental: that the breastplate imagery is no isolated visual ‘programme’, but
instead forged in and out of the corporeal frame of the princeps. The result is a wholly
ambiguous sort of imperial body. On the one hand, the breastplate parades a host of
anatomical details – pectoral muscles, nipples, ripped stomach, belly button; indeed,
the lower parameters of the breastplate even align with the so-called ‘iliac crest’ above
the groin. While modelling Augustus’ bodily contours, on the other hand, this cuirasse
esthétique simultaneously covers them up; what is more, the suggestive narrative scenes
and fastenings only underscore the fact that we are looking upon costume, not lesh.
As a igure of both bodily volume and skin-deep surface, the cuirass shields Augustus’
chiselled anatomy while at the same time exposing it to the viewer’s inspective gaze.
To understand the hybridity of this body-cum-bodily-costume, we might begin
with its broader social, cultural and artistic context in the late Roman Republic and
early principate. In art, as in life, clothing (or lack thereof) mattered in the Roman
world: as Shelley Hales nicely puts it, ‘power could be negotiated by the wearing,
shedding and swapping of clothes.’65 Consider the following passage from Pliny the
Elder’s Natural History, written in the 70s CE:66
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Michael Squire
In olden times, the statues that were dedicated were clad in togas. Also
popular were naked statues holding a lance (made from models of young
men from gymnasia), which they called ‘Achillean’. The Greek practice is not
to cover up the igure in any way, whereas Roman and military practice is to
add breastplates. Indeed, the dictator Caesar gave permission for a cuirassed
statue to be dedicated in his forum.
17 Silver denarius minted in
Rome for Octavian, 32–29
BCE (?), showing Octavian
crowned with a laurel wreath
(recto) and the columna
rostrata statue of a nude
Octavian erected in 36 BCE
(verso): Octavian is here
shown with a sceptre and
parazonium ‘dagger’. Silver,
2.0 cm (height of obverse),
1.8 cm (width of obverse),
3.6 grams. Previously in the
Walter Niggeler Collection
(see Sammlung Walter
Niggeler, 2. Teil: Griechische
Münzen der römischen
Kaiserzeit; Römische Münzen
(Republik bis Augustus), Zurich
and Basel, 1966, 57, no. 1015).
Pliny articulates an essential dilemma in Roman honoriic sculpture, framing it
around the poles of ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ cultural identities. Whereas Greek artistic
conventions could exploit male nudity as a sine qua non of honoriic portraiture
(associating it with heroes like Achilles, and not least the institution of the
gymnasium),67 Roman patrons and audiences seem to have been more anxious
about the political, social and cultural ramiications.68 This is not the place for a full
discussion of the ‘body problem’ in Roman art: Christopher Hallett has provided a
book-length study of Roman attitudes towards nudity, and numerous other scholars
have situated the issue within their larger reappraisals of Roman attitudes towards the
Hellenic.69 What Pliny helps us to uncover, rather, is how ideologies of the body were
clothed in larger discourses about what it meant to be ‘Roman’ as opposed to ‘Greek’
(and vice versa). According to Hellenic cultural conventions, exposing one’s power and
inluence went hand in hand with uncovering one’s body beautiful (see, for example,
plate 15). To Roman eyes, by contrast, such literal divestment could risk cultural and
political exposure; indeed, Pliny mentions the breastplate speciically, viewing it as an
attribute that intrinsically renders the sculptural subject ‘Roman’ rather than ‘Greek’.
Inspect the artistic products of the irst century BCE, and we ind a range
of responses to this problem of what (not) to wear. Roman art demonstrates a
remarkable self-consciousness about dress and undress – ‘nudity as a costume’, as
Larissa Bonfante has nicely put it.70 One reaction was simply to get rid of the body
so as to focus instead on the head: in contrast to Greek practices, whereby the sort of
person you were was inextricably bound to the kind of body you projected, Roman
patrons and artists seem to have placed much more store by the features of the face.
Indeed, it is precisely because of the Roman reception of Greek portraits that so many
have been handed down to us as bodiless heads: in the Roman world, as opposed to
the Greek, the prioritized persona of the face rendered the body a supplementary (and
hence dispensable) extra.71
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18 Upper frieze from the
south side of the Ara Pacis,
inaugurated 9 BCE (showing
Augustus as the igure fourth
from the left). Parian marble,
height 1.6 m. Rome. Photo:
Author.
If dispensing with the body was one Roman way of dealing with this problem,
another was to swathe it in a mass of decorous drapery. True to Pliny’s diagnosis
about ‘olden times’, we ind numerous Republican and Imperial ‘togate’ statues
wrapping themselves up in the Roman costume par excellence: the toga, after all, was
the eponymous attribute of the self-declared ‘togate race’, or gens togata.72 The so-called
Barberini Togate group provides a neat case study, dating to the late irst century BCE
(plate 13).73 To call this an exclusively ‘Roman’ image would be to overstate the case:
while the portraits held in each hand appear typical products of the Roman Republic,
‘veristically’ emphasizing the age and grauitas of the sitter, there are numerous
Hellenistic stylistic details;74 likewise, the clothed drapery and contrapposto pose are
certainly informed by Classical Greek models. Whatever else we make of the statue,
though, it renders the body a peripheral supplement: it is the head that matters.75
Other images went even further, combining ‘Roman’ heads like the ones in plate 13
with the set-piece naked bodies of Greek sculpture. Hallett lists 26 male statues which
depict their subjects nude or semi-nude (the lower body this time wrapped in skimpy
hip-mantle), and yet with the portrait face of an elderly politician.76 The so-called
‘Tivoli General’ provides one such example (plate 14), excavated from the substructures
of the Hercules Victor sanctuary at Tivoli (north-east of Rome).77 The mantle draped
around the arm means that the statue stops short of full frontal exposure (something
paralleled among Hellenistic dynastic portraits like plate 20). In images like these,
though, the muscular frame strikes modern audiences as discordantly out of keeping
with the aged head: while the torso embodies the bodily ideals of Greek artistic
nudity, the head and supporting cuirass insist upon Roman military credentials.78
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Michael Squire
19 ‘Via Labicana’ statue of
Augustus, early irst century
CE. Marble, height 2.08 m.
Rome: Museo Nazionale
Romano, Palazzo Massimo
alle Terme (inv. 56230).
Photo: Author.
This was the cultural and artistic landscape that Augustus inherited in the
40s BCE. In the wake of Julius Caesar’s death in 44 BCE – Caesar, we remember,
had been assassinated for appearing too dictatorial – Augustus must have realized
the importance of projecting the right self-image. But what sort of image best
suited Rome’s new princeps? To talk of the princeps – or even ‘Augustus’ – is of course
inherently tricky here: Augustus did not simply seize
power, but slowly built up his auctoritas; indeed, the
political landscape inherited by Gaius Octavius –
who only adopted the name ‘Augustus’, or ‘Revered
One’, along with the title princeps in 27 BCE – was very
different from the one bequeathed upon his death
in 14 CE. At the same time, it is often impossible to
date materials precisely, or indeed to differentiate
between posthumous portraits and those set up
during Augustus’ own lifetime. Still, we can be sure
that Augustus experimented with different models of
rendering the body. What is more, Augustus seems to
have been conscious of conversing in different sorts of
‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ visual forms, preferring different
conigurations at different times and places within the
empire.
By the late 20s BCE, Augustus had paraded a
whole host of different sculptural body types among
his portraits.79 Following his predecessors, Augustus
focused on the image of his face: most portraits seem
to have reduced him to bodiless busts. But, contrary
to widespread assumption,80 we also ind various
degrees of bodily exposure. On the one hand, naked
or at least hip-mantled torsos of the emperor could be
seen throughout the empire (for example, plate 15),81
sometimes adorned with the divine trappings of Jupiter
(as, most famously, on the Gemma Augustea: plate 16);82
fully nude statues of Octavian were also on display in
Rome, as seems to have been the case with the (now
lost) gilded bronze portrait dedicated by the Senate
in 36 BCE, set atop the so-called columna rostrata in the
Forum (compare plate 17).83 On the other hand, the
majority of images which survive from Rome portray
a draped Augustus. Once again, the year 27 BCE is
often judged a watershed here.84 After establishing
the trappings of power, and deciding upon his new
‘august’ title, there appears to have been a distinct
artistic preference for clothing the body, dressing it
in voluminous Roman toga.85 These are the images of
Augustus most familiar to us today, whereby the toga
is decorously pulled up over the head (the so-called toga
capite uelato motif): Augustus is portrayed in related guise
on the north frieze of the Ara Pacis (plate 18), as well as in
free-standing statues like the celebrated example from
Rome’s Via Labicana (plate 19).86
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This cultural and artistic backdrop provides the immediate context for the Prima
Porta Augustus. For if this statue derives from the same underlying cultural tension
between ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ bodies, it nonetheless manifests a rather different
response. By displaying a body that is both naked and dressed, the cuirass cites a
Greek rhetoric of the naked body while simultaneously dressing it up in Roman
guise. Nudity is here a literal costume – a Greek attribute which doubles up as tabula
rasa for inscribing a new, distinctly Roman cultural anatomy.
The Curious Cuirass
Just to be clear, it should be repeated that there was nothing inherently new about the
cuirass as iconographic device. What Pliny labels a distinctly ‘Roman’ costume had a
long Classical and Hellenistic Greek pedigree;87 similarly, Augustus was by no means
the irst ‘Roman’ to don this costume (as we have seen, Pliny mentions Julius Caesar
speciically,88 and certain Roman deities were also shown in the same cuirassed
guise, some of them set up by Augustus himself – most famously in the Temple
of Mars Ultor, where the eponymous cult statue wore a Classical breastplate).89
When it came to Roman honoriic statues, though, the cuirassed costume appears
to have been relatively rare, at least until the late Republic.90 What is more, the
Prima Porta Augustus went considerably further than other contemporary images
in the igurative allusions of its body. Compare the statue with the ‘Tivoli General’
(see plate 14), for example, and one sees how, like the Prima Porta Augustus, that
portrait similarly uses the cuirass to prop up the ‘Greek’ costumed nudity. Where
the ‘Tivoli General’ combines the two ‘nude’ and ‘cuirassed’ costumes in its sculpted
composition, however, the Prima Porta statue reconciles them in the actual body of
Augustus: the cuirassed anatomy of the princeps at once acknowledges and plays with
contemporary artistic convention.
Roman audiences must have been all too conscious of such conventional artiice.
Whatever the chiselled bodies of portraits like the ‘Tivoli General’, nudity itself
was more of a cultural taboo in Rome than it had been in the Greek cultural world.
The few times that we do hear of Roman generals stripping off their clothes, it is
not to show off their bodies, but rather to parade their military scars – to display
the corporeal disigurements which embody military prowess.91 When Pliny the
Elder speculates as to Rome’s bravest historical general, for instance, he reaches
his conclusions not on the basis of handsome looks, but rather by totting up the
number of frontal scars (Natural History 7.101–6). Nudity was no less a taboo for
Augustus. The ‘real’ princeps is said only once to have exposed his chest to the Roman
people. In the eyes of Suetonius (who records the story), however, this episode was
seen as a moment of imperial vulnerability, not individual triumph: according to
Suetonius, Augustus responded to calls to become dictator by throwing off his toga – a
proclaimed gesture of humility, and one that reminded his public of the dictatorial
fate of Julius Caesar.92
When considered in light of such stories, what is most remarkable about the
Prima Porta Augustus is its simultaneous acknowledgement of artistic formula and
its attempt to render that convention believable. If the cuirass embodies what one
Roman author labelled a ‘Polyclitan chest’ (pectus Polycletium),93 it also transforms that
attribute into something more convincing – an actual, real-life military costume
that Augustus can don and take off at will (observe, in that connection, the modelled
fastenings: see plate 23).94 Other aspects of the statue develop the conceit. Compare the
hip-mantle of the Prima Porta Augustus with that of statues like the ‘Tivoli General’
(see plate 14), for example, and we ind the same garment worn in exactly the same
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Michael Squire
20 Statue of ‘Alexander’
from the sanctuary of Meter
Sipylene in Magnesia-bySipylos, early to mid-second
century BCE. Marble, height
1.9 m. Istanbul: Arkeoloji
Müzeleri Müdürlüğü (inv.
709). Photo: Author.
position. As far as military outit is concerned, we
have noted that such draping of the paludamentum hardly
makes practical sense: traditionally, the cloak would
be fastened over the left-hand shoulder, not wrapped
around the waist.95 As with the cuirass, in other words,
the draped paludamentum toys with both credible reality
and honoriic artistic formulae. While adding a double
layer of clothed concealment around the groin, the
detail simultaneously alludes to the conventions of
honoriic statues that were otherwise unclothed: it
looks back not only to images like the ‘Tivoli General’,
but also to Hellenistic portraits of semi-naked kings
who could be shown wearing the mantle in similar
fashion (for example, plate 20).96 Once we recognize the
iconographic allusion, the urge to interpret the cuirass
as exposed lesh rather than covering costume becomes
all the greater: the draped mantle strips bare larger
issues of nudity and dress.
To my mind, this is not just a question of having
one’s clothes and divesting them. Rather, the duplicity
of the statue’s dress embodies a larger semantic
signiicance. As lorica, the cuirass ‘protects’ and ‘encases’
the emperor even as it simultaneously exposes his
body. Like the proverbial ‘duck-rabbit’ discussed
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the emperor exhibits an
ambivalent body, one that lips backwards and
forwards between different sorts of igurative reality.97
This in turn establishes different – and in some sense
contradictory – modes of looking. Following the
critical vocabulary of twentieth-century philosopher
Richard Wollheim, we might diagnose the dialectics
of looking at the Prima Porta Augustus in terms of the
dual impulse to ‘see in’ on the one hand, and to ‘see as’
on the other.98 If one way of understanding the statue
is at face value – to see it as mimetic double – the statue draws simultaneous attention
to its igurative ictions, lagging our creative ‘uploadings’ as viewers. Just as the twofold statue shows its subject as at once naked and dressed, it also shufles and shifts
through a spectrum of different representational modes.
One need only consider the breastplate to appreciate the point. For all the
anatomical detailing, Augustus’ torso also partitions the portrayed scenes into a
symmetrical arrangement: as ornamental frame, the cuirass divides the igures
around a series of discrete horizontal and vertical contours, with the line of the
linea alba marking out the respective realms of the Roman soldier and barbarian
rebel, and the pectoral muscles dividing the celestial personiications of the upper
chest. More importantly, the very detailing of the anatomy can blur the boundaries
between bodily igure and decorative adornment. The clearest example comes
towards the upper left of the chest, where the wheel of Helios’ chariot is set beside
Augustus’ right nipple (the spokes, arranged around a central hub, visually recalling
the modelled outline of the aureola). Other details work similarly: observe, for
instance, how the circular fruit of the cornucopia at the bottom of the cuirass recalls
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21 Detail of the central
upper igure on the Prima
Porta Augustus breastplate.
the circular outline of the inverted belly button,
or how the palmette patterns beneath the two
(decorative?) epaulet sphinxes have no anatomical
referent, but instead function as make-believe
ornaments. It is always possible to dismiss such visual
‘rhymes’ or patterns as simple accidents, of course.
But the laborious design seems predicated on the idea
of looking closely – that the layering of anatomical
details and igurative decoration might be enjoyed,
noticed or pondered: once viewers see the visual play,
it is very dificult to ‘un-see’ it once more.
Such igurative games with reality and
representation shed light on other replications besides.
Looking again at the cuirass, we ind all manner of
visual echoes and internal references: observe, for
example, how the quadruped standard of the righthand female captive recalls the ‘real-life’ animal
by the side of the Roman soldier, or how the eagleheaded sword of the conquered female to the left of
the cuirass visually echoes the military ‘eagle’ raised at the chest’s centre. In this
connection, Jaś Elsner may be right to lag the signiicant positioning of the signum,
which is made to occupy compositional pride of place. While signa refers to military
standards, the word could also encompass other sorts of ‘signs’, not least the sculpted,
engraved and painted igures adorning this body, or indeed the statue as a whole.99
With the two outstretched wings of its eagle – which render the separate curves
of Augustus’ pectoral muscles into a single artiicial line – the igurative signum of
our standard signals in turn both the believability of this sculpted costume and its
forged artiiciality.100 The decision to place the make-believe eagle at this pectoral
intersection seems to have been considered and deliberate: it is dificult to ind any
pragmatic as opposed to compositional explanation for the strange and laboured
gesture of at once raising and tilting the aquiline standard. There is visual pleasure
to be had in the compositional coherence. But the knock-on effects are no less
signiicant. Observe, for example, how the signum is held in such a way as to emblazon
one of its own ornamental bands as decorative signum at the upper centre of the
barbarian’s chest (itself emblazoned on the chest of Augustus).
No less intriguing are the hybrid and semi-visible bodies displayed on
Augustus’ own hybrid and semi-visible frame. Consider, for instance, the
chimerical and fantastic igures – the two sphinxes, or indeed the grifin bearing
Apollo – which transcend the parameters of the mimetic: not all bodies, we are
reminded, can be taken at face value.101 Certain other igures on the breastplate
can only partially be seen. To view the two female captives on the breastplate, for
instance, one has to walk around the frontal cuirass; even then, one sees only a
section of their bodies, projecting out of Augustus’ three-dimensional physique.102
In the upper section of Augustus’ naked/clothed torso, moreover, the central skygod is shown as exposing his own upper torso in turn. But what has become of
this loating igure’s lower body, concealed by the horses of the quadriga (plate 21)?
Like the body of Augustus, this igure parades a body that is at once visible and
invisible (the waving vestments of ‘heaven’ held above the head only underscoring
the invisible nudity below). Such a range of different bodily forms serves as a sort
of visual commentary on the body of Augustus himself. Indeed, some igures
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Michael Squire
22 Detail of the central lefthand ‘soldier’ on the Prima
even exploit the contours of Augustus’ body to raise questions about their own
representational reality: although Apollo is sculpted in two-dimensional relief,
for instance, see how his right leg breaks free from the cuirass frame (projecting
the igure out of the representational space of the iliac crest, see plate 11); similarly,
observe how the drapery of the female deity below the navel merges into the folds
of Augustus’ own hip-mantle (see plate 10), like that of Artemis/Diana to the upper
right (see opening plate).
Perhaps the most revealing body of all, though, is that of the cuirassed soldier at
the cuirass’ core (plate 22). As we have said, scholars have tried to explain this igure
by supplying him with a name. But they have overlooked a more basic truth: namely,
that this young body is decked out in a cuirass which recalls Augustus’ own (despite
the differences in so-called ‘Hellenistic’ and ‘Classical’ type). As with the costume,
the igure’s pose presents an additional analogy with that of Augustus: he stands in
proile with his right arm extended and his weight unevenly balanced so that, rather
like our ‘Polyclitan’ Augustus, the left leg is lexed behind the right; similarly, the
animal by the soldier’s left-hand side in one sense echoes the dolphin-mounted Cupid
at the right-hand side of Augustus. Depending on the reconstruction of the whole,
there might have been other resonances too. Were the statue itself to have held a
military signum in its left hand, as Erika Simon has argued, there could have been no
escaping the analogy between the free-standing sculpture and the igurative scene at
its centre: stationed at the statue’s centre of gravity, above the literal and metaphorical
omphalos/umbilicus (‘belly button’), is a two-dimensional relief which visually mimics
the stance, costume and attributes of the three-dimensional whole.103
Such a bodily mise-en-abyme must have been all the more arresting for the statue’s
original audiences. As we have said, we cannot be sure about the derivation of the
Prima Porta Augustus. Were there to have been an
earlier statue cast from bronze, though, the recession
of replications, from a material standpoint, might have
been striking indeed: emblazoned at the centre of the
bronze cuirass of this bronze princeps would have been
a bronze igure complete with a bronze cuirass of his
own. Regardless of any hypothetical prototype, we can
be sure that visual parallels between the two ‘soldiers’
were drawn out through the use of colour on the extant
statue. Liverani’s reconstruction convincingly suggests
that the surfaces of both cuirasses were left unpainted:
the impression is of a sort of ‘white ground’, adorned
in the same shades of red, blue and ochre (see plate 12);
in each case, moreover, this surface was supplemented
by the same corresponding hue of red for both the
paludamentum and tunic. The result can only have
heightened the sense of replicative assimilation: the
analogous use of colours affects an analogy between
the body in the round on the one hand, and the body in
relief on the other.
The whole issue of polychromy is signiicant in
another sense too. In some ways, the technicolour
vibrancy of the paint adds to the sculpture’s largerthan-life mimetic make-believe. In other ways, though,
the restricted palette and exaggerated tones only expose
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its status as statue: the addition of colour makes the statue less, as well as more,
believable. We have already observed that the make-believe metal cuirass seems to
have been left unpainted, whereas the contained igures (or at least their clothes)
were highlighted in red, blue and ochre. But the overarching effect proves, once
again, two-fold. In one sense, the cuirass’ unpainted surface colours a notion of the
body as empty semblance: the three-dimensional torso doubles up as blank canvas
for a series of surface modellings and paintings. At the same time, however, the very
absence of paint reinforces the association between the cuirass and the real lesh of its
cuirassed subject: after all, the unpainted marble pallor of the cuirassed torso mirrors
that of the statue’s exposed and unpainted head, arms and legs; the make-believe
torso of the cuirass, in other words, appears an extension of the real-life body of the
igure contained within it.104 Returning once more to Wollheim’s terms, the statue’s
polychromy seems invested in the simultaneous drive both to ‘see in’ and to ‘see as’:
the colours shade our impression of the statue both as iction, and as lesh.
From the Literal to the Symbolic
So far in this essay, I have focused on the literal bodies depicted – on the physical
forms embodied in and on the cuirassed body of Augustus. But the statue also invites
more symbolic and allegorical interpretive modes. Just as the cuirass gives visible
access to the invisible body of the emperor beneath, so too does the embodied
igure of the statue manifest a series of disembodied ideas. This multi-layered statue
might be said to incorporate not only different degrees of bodily exposure, but also
different modes of iconic expression (and in turn of visual response).
To explain what I mean here, consider once again the igures radiating around
Augustus’ chest. As we have said, scholars have suggested a range of speciic identities.
However we choose verbally to name them, though, the bodies displayed on
Augustus’ body give emblematic form to a range of wholly more bodiless concepts:
the two female barbarians to the left and right serve to chart the terrestrial limits of
empire around Augustus’ ribcage, for example, just as the personiications above and
below materialize the terrestrial conines of earth and sky, respectively. Needless to
say, there is a disconnect here between the abstract referents and the visible signs:
this is not what ‘Sun’, ‘Sky’, or ‘Moon’ ‘really’ look like; however much they allude to
real-life attributes, moreover, the Roman provinces igured through the two female
captives amount to both more and less than these igurative forms.105 The bodies at
which we gaze, in short, serve to substantiate and personify: they map out a much
grander frame of imperial-cum-cosmic signiicance – east and west, earth and sky,
day and night, etc., each clothed in its own iconographic language.106
Like the various corpora depicted within the breastplate, the body of Augustus
could also be seen as a ‘personiication’ of sorts. However believable his bodily
simulacrum, a wholly more abstract set of ideas is at work behind it. In this
connection, it is worth remembering that, by the late irst century BCE, the body
could itself serve as image for iguring imperial power. As Robin Osborne has
recently argued, this was a new intellectual historical departure: while ‘there is
no body politic in the classical Greek world. . .’, in Osborne’s words, ‘the phrase
“body of the state” becomes a familiar one in Latin (corpus rei republicae) . . . it is in the
Roman world that the fable of the parts of the body warring with one another . . .
was transferred . . . to the state’.107 This is perhaps to overstate the case (as Osborne
admits, there are some scattered earlier precedents, and the metaphor of the ‘citizen
body’ inds its conceptual archaeology in Stoic ideas of the ‘leader’ at its ‘head’).
But the underlying point is nonetheless important: that the politics of the body are
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Michael Squire
revolutionized when the body serves as a metaphor for political unity; what is more,
that igurative sculpture acquires a new political dimension in the wake of this new
conceptual shift.
The Prima Porta Augustus plays with that political metaphor in wholly
innovative ways. By the time the statue was created, the concept of the corpus imperii
was a well-established igure of speech.108 Ovid developed the analogy with
particular zeal, hoping to latter his way out of exile by telling Augustus that, ‘within
the whole body of empire’ (in tanto . . . corpore . . . imperiii), no part had lost its footing;109
by the end of the second century CE, moreover, Florus likewise proclaimed that
Augustus alone should be credited with restoring order to the ‘body of empire’
(ordinauit imperii corpus).110 On the cuirass of the Prima Porta Augustus, that igurative
image is made corporeally manifest: a metaphor for conceptualizing empire as body
is leshed out for us to see, incorporated within the literal frame of the standing
princeps.
But it is not just the parameters of the ruled Roman world with which the limits
of Augustus’ body iguratively align. The statue also likens the emperor’s body to the
various bodies of the cosmos at large. This emperor literally embodies both empire
and wider world, in the same way that empire and wider world map metaphorically
onto the physical frame of the emperor: the sky occupies the bottom of Augustus’
neck, just as the Earth lies lush with the fundament of his navel. Once again, there
are literary parallels for such thinking: one might compare, for example, the detail
recounted by Suetonius, whereby Augustus’ ‘body is said to have been covered with
spots and birthmarks scattered over his breast and belly, corresponding in form,
order and number with the stars of the Bear in the heavens’.111 Whatever the ‘reality’
of the anecdote, the cuirass imagery literalizes the same underlying rhetoric: we see
not only the whole empire, but the whole cosmos auspiciously mapped out on this
imperial chest.
That contemporary viewers could conceptualize imagery in such grand
allegorical terms is clear from Latin literature’s most famous igurative depiction of
military armour: namely, Virgil’s description of the shield of Aeneas, evoked in the
eighth book of the Aeneid.112 Virgil seems to have understood that the sort of world
vision emblazoned on the Prima Porta cuirass required epic instantiation. To lesh out
that igure, moreover, Virgil likewise turned to images – or at least to their textual
‘ecphrastic’ description – evoking heraldic pictures which prophesied Rome’s past,
present and future, and ultimately sketching the battle of Actium and the subsequent
triumph of Augustus. The Prima Porta Augustus, of course, deals not with words
on images, but rather with images themselves. Yet despite their medial difference,
physical cuirass and described shield exhibit some remarkable – and remarkably
overlooked – parallels: there is, for example, a related concern with central epicentre
(Virgil’s shield is said to be centred around Actium, shown ‘in the middle’ [in medio,
v.675], just as the igures of the Prima Porta radiate around the return of the Parthian
standards); likewise, there is a comparable interest in cosmic totality, the polarities
of war and peace, and not least the dual poles of heaven and earth.113 Ultimately,
both textual ecphrasis and visualized cuirass also play upon the magical moment
when mythical costume and hero become one: just as the fulilment of the shield’s
spoken visual stories rests on the future military exploits of Aeneas (the description
ends with the hero carrying the shield on his shoulder), so too are the images of the
breastplate both literally and metaphorically contingent upon the body of Augustus.114
In the case of the Prima Porta Augustus, visual allusions develop this sense of
extra-corporeal signiicance. Whether or not one sees an allusion to the Doryphoros
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speciically, we have said that ifth-century, Polyclitan exempla lie behind
Augustus’ literal and metaphorical costume; when it comes to the portrait’s
coiffure, moreover, there certainly does appear to be an explicit allusion. Such
recourse to Polyclitan prototypes bore implications of its own. Once again,
moreover, the interpictorial reference raises the question of whether one should
view the statue as statement or simile. Numerous scholars have discussed the
Roman obsession with the Doryphoros as stylistic model. Some ancient writers
compared Polyclitan styles with those that preceded or succeeded them; others
supposed that Polyclitan art had its counterpart in certain modes of literary
composition and rhetoric.115 In a pertinent passage of his i rst-century CE Training
of the Orator, Quintilian even cited the Doryphoros in relation to visualizing someone
‘solemnly upright’ and ‘digniied’ (sanctus et grauis): the exemplum is equally itting
for images of ‘war and the palaestra’ (aptum uel militiae uel palaestrae), Quintilian adds,
pairing it with the bodies of other warlike and athletic youths (aliorum quoque
iuuenum bellicorum et athletarum corpora, Inst. Or. 5.12.20–1).116 Among Quintilian’s
contemporaries, what was most celebrated about the Doryphoros was its incarnation
of an abstract set of symmetrical proportions. According to such rhetoric, the
Doryphoros was synonymous with Polyclitus’ written Canon: it gave bodily form to
a golden ratio, whereby each individual part of the body could be understood in
relation to every other.117 Although distinguishing between the ‘manly boy’ (uiriliter
puerum) of the Doryphoros and the sculpted Canon (which the author understands as a
statue rather than simply a treatise), Pliny the Elder likewise tells how artists ‘derive
the basic forms of their art’ from the Polyclitan model, ‘as if from some kind of
law’: ‘so it is’, concludes Pliny, ‘that of all men Polyclitus alone is deemed to have
rendered art itself in a work of art.’118
So what, then, might the Polyclitan stylistic echoes mean in the context of the
Prima Porta Augustus? By becoming part of the princeps’ costume, the Polyclitan frame
serves to embody an ideological connection between Augustus (‘Revered One’) and
the ‘solemnly upright’ form of its model.119 While in one sense attributing Augustus
with a believable sort of body (reduced to a wearable costume), the igured allusions
could also spark more theoretical associations. Behind the embodied aesthetic lurks a
disembodied ideology of balance and proportion: the symmetria of the body betokens
the well-proportioned body politic for which Augustus stands.
The nod to Polyclitus has implications for at least one other aspect of the statue’s
symbolic register: the divine status of the subject. Like Roman writers (or at least
those whose texts survive), we do not know exactly whom the Doryphoros was intended
to represent; indeed, the generic title used by later Greek and Roman writers
(‘lance-bearer’) seems to have left the subject speciically unspeciied. Nevertheless,
according to Greek sculptural conventions, such chiselled and proportioned nudity
was bound up, at least in part, with visual rhetorics of imag(in)ing the gods. The
ambiguities of the cuirass therefore materialize a grander ambiguity about this
embodied princeps: are we looking at a man, or at a god?120
In assessing the Prima Porta Augustus’ claim to divinity, scholars have tended
to home in on individual details. It is standard practice to observe three features in
particular: irst the divine Cupid at Augustus’ side, second the bare feet, and third
the over-lifesize scale. Each aspect is important. To my mind, though, it would be
wrong to try and decide upon any single deinitive answer. The ‘divinity’ of Augustus
was a live political issue in the late irst century BCE: establishing all the trappings
of an imperial cult, Augustus devised numerous ways of fudging his simultaneous
mortality and immortality, working within different cultural conventions in
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different parts of the empire.121 True to form, the Prima Porta statue likewise plays
it both ways. Its embodied subject is presented as both mortal and immortal at
once: the statue suggests Augustus’ godhead while also inviting us to understand its
conventions iguratively.122
Consider, for example, the lack of footwear.123 On one level, the detail draws
renewed attention to the artiice of this costume: what general, after all, would
go into battle without protective boots? In trying to make sense of the bare feet,
however, viewers ind a host of visual parallels within the body of Augustus itself. As
we have said, the Roman soldier at the centre of the cuirass certainly does wear shoes
(a detail that has led some scholars to reject his identiication as the divine Mars). By
contrast, a number of other male and female igures are shown bare-footed – not
just the reclining igure below, but also the female captive to the upper right, and
still more prominently the igure of Apollo to the left. To make head or tail of these
bare feet, we again have to compare the overarching bodily statue with the bodies
depicted in and on it; even then, though, we nevertheless ind a myriad of different
comparanda. Rather than state or deny its godhead, the Prima Porta Augustus lirts
with visual discourses of divinity, and in a series of multivalent ways; it raises
questions without providing deinitive solutions.
The winged Cupid by Augustus’ side proves exemplary here. For Roman
audiences, the igure could be understood in terms of a larger genealogical claim,
whereby Augustus supposed a family relation with the goddess Venus; just as Cupid
was the son of Venus and Mars, Augustus was descended from Aeneas, the offspring
of Venus and Anchises (or so the rhetoric went).124 The issue, though, was how
‘embodiedly’ to take Cupid’s igurative claim – whether to view it (him?) as part
of a literal assertion of divinity, or see him (it?) as metaphorical emblem of quasisuperhuman power. Does the igure serve solely as insignia and symbol, reminding
of a particular set of myths and stories? Or does its presence stake a grander claim,
materializing Augustus as manifest divinity?
The statue allowed audiences to view Cupid in both ways at the same time. On
the one hand, the divine ramiications seem clear enough: where the represented
deities of the cuirass are shown in two-dimensional form, this igure is bestowed
with a different degree of plastic presence, no less (or more?) real than that of
Augustus himself; if Augustus is mere mortal, moreover, observe how his towering
stature dwarfs even that of the divine Cupid. On the other hand, there was always a
visual let-out. The disparity in scale between Augustus and Cupid at once serves to
undermine any impression of Cupid’s ‘real’ presence. What is more, it is possible
to ascribe a mere igurative signiicance to the toddler: is he not to be interpreted in
the same sorts of igurative ways as the personiications on the breastplate, or indeed
like the water-swimming dolphin on which Cupid rides (a more interesting device
for propping up the statue than the perennial Roman ‘tree-trunk’)? Were ancient
viewers, like some modern scholars, to have recognized Gaius in the portrait of the
divine Cupid, the self-conscious role play might have seemed all the more striking:
the result, perhaps, was not to see Gaius as Cupid (or indeed Cupid as Gaius), but
rather to think about the stakes of such ‘seeing-in’ assimilation.125 The ambivalences
of Cupid, like those of the larger statue, again shufle and shift in the manner
of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit: when it comes to Augustus’ divinity, as indeed to
questions about his identity and status at large, the literal could be read in the terms of
the symbolic, and the symbolic seen in the image of the literal.
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Visions and Voids
Augustus breastplate, as
seen from the left/behind.
24 Reverse side of the Prima
To round off my own interpretation of the Prima Porta Augustus, I turn inally to
the back of the cuirass (plate 23 and plate 24). Impressed upon the reverse right-hand
ribcage, just above the swathes of drapery, we ind another cuirass within the cuirass,
this time in two-dimensional relief. Roman viewers would have recognized this
emblem as a tropaeum or ‘trophy’ made out of the captured arms (spolia opima) of the
enemy; the empty armour is mounted on a tree trunk as a token of military victory.126
In narratological terms, viewers might have forged a connection between this image
and the return of the Parthian standards emblazoned on the cuirass’ front: the
interactive exchange between the breastplate’s two central igures is here re-framed
according to the standard iconography of Roman imperial conquest (even if the
reverse cuirass, at least at face value, looks more ‘Roman’ than it does ‘barbarian’ . . . ).
Bar a brief mention by Indra Kagis McEwan, the signiicance of this emblem has
received remarkably little analysis.127 Among scholars, it is customary to observe the
reverse side’s comparative lack of adornment, along with the roughly carved folds of
drapery: this is usually seen as evidence for the statue’s original placement against
a wall. But it strikes me as important that, at the very moment when viewers try to
look behind Augustus’ ‘real’ cuirass – to see what lies beneath it – they are confronted
with the embossed image of yet another cuirass, one which visually recalls the
three-dimensional breastplate donned by Augustus. Like the breastplate on which it
is displayed, this cuirass signiies its own paradoxical nudity, replicating the human
anatomy of the wearer (stomach muscles, belly button, pectorals, etc.); indeed,
the hollow costume is even made to stare out at us, its helmeted head resembling a
human face, the lower branches almost like two human legs. There is one striking
difference, however. In contrast to Augustus’ breastplate, this reverse cuirass is
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25 Cuirassed statue (of
Augustus?) from Cherchel,
late irst century BCE/
early irst century CE (?).
Marble, height 2.35 m.
empty: it is a costume without a wearer. We have already
talked of ‘mise-en-abyme’ in the context of the front
cuirass’ cuirassed solider. Here, on the statue’s reverse
side, though, the hollow cuirass only accentuates
the self-conscious artistry: as surface, rather than
substance, the empty armour draws out the factured
ictions of the whole.
Inspect the strange folds above the tropaeum and
the embodied ambiguities become all the more
riddlesome. There is no easy explanation for these lines
(which merge, at the upper side, with the cuirass’ own
fastenings: see plate 11). Some have tried to understand
them as the wing of some Nike or ‘Victory’ igure;
others have supposed some huge eagle emblazoned
on the back (of which the sculptor, for whatever
pragmatic or prosaic reason, only rendered the parts
‘originally’ visible).128 None of these theories proves
wholly satisfactory. This ornamental decoration seems
to defy igurative explanation: here, on the emperor’s
back, above the void cuirass (around the back of the
breastplate), there seems no escaping the igurative
puzzles.
What, then, to make of the various embodied
ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus? One might
be wary, of course, of pinning too much interpretive
weight on a single statue. Some have even argued that
this cuirassed statue is a ‘one-off’ – and that it has too
long dominated our view of Augustan image-making.129
This seems a step too far. The fact that so few Roman
cuirassed statues survive complete with their heads
means that individual identiications are always tricky.
But we can nonetheless be conident that there were
numerous Augustan comparanda. Vermeule has catalogued many cuirassed images
associated with Augustus,130 and there are plenty of numismatic parallels too.131
Some of these even show iconographic afinities with the Prima Porta example – most
famously, the cuirassed portrait from Cherchell in Algeria (plate 25); indeed, Klaus
Fittschen has convincingly argued that the Cherchell cuirassed statue also clothed
Augustus in a panoply of mythopoetic imagery, and that it dates to between the midand late-Augustan period.132 The Prima Porta statue, then, is not the only example to
have shown Augustus in body-like cuirass. Indeed, it is the celebrity of such Imperial
cuirassed costume that explains, at least in part, the rise of Italian imitations in the
late irst century BCE/early irst century CE.133
Rather than get side-tracked by contemporary cuirassed comparanda, allow
me to conclude with some more macroscopic relections. One way of closing this
essay might be to relate the statue’s games of artiice and make-believe back to longer
traditions of Greek mimetic art. It would be possible, for example, to compare the
igurative games of the Prima Porta Augustus with the mimetic ‘slips, swerves, and
disruptions’ that Richard Neer has analysed in the context of late sixth- and early
ifth-century Attic sympotic ware.134 Alternatively, one might compare this Roman
cuirassed statue with one of the earliest Greek examples known to us (plate 26), a
269
26 Statue of a cuirassed
warrior from the Heraion at
Argos, c. 530 BCE. Marble,
height 0.86 m. Berlin: Berlin
Antikensammlung (Sk. 1752).
Photo: Author.
marble cuirassed ‘kouros’ from the Heraion at Samos,
dating to around 530 BCE: here, in a statue which
knowingly interweaves the symmetrical patterns of
the sculpted body with those of the armour encasing
it, we ind a conceptual archaeology for the bodily
ambiguities of the Prima Porta cuirass.135
The point I wish to emphasize, by contrast,
concerns the semantic signiicance of such ambiguities
in Augustan historical context: by uncovering the
costumed ambiguities of our most familiar ‘textbook’
portrait of Augustus, this essay hopes to have suggested
some tentative new directions for approaching
other images of Augustus. Whether in terms of its
paradoxical clothed nudity, its simultaneous ‘Greek’
and ‘Roman’ cultural identity, or indeed its oscillation
between the mortal and the divine, the Prima Porta
Augustus gives form to a series of igurative tensions.
Rather like works of Augustan literature, with all
their destabilizing provocations, the statue does
not ‘communicate’ a single vision of its subject, but
instead plays with a spectrum of different interpretive
strategies.136 The statue probes, teases and interrogates:
it throws back upon the viewer larger questions about
form, mediation, and interpretation.137
This seems to me important for coming to terms
with Augustan imagery more generally. Unlike scholars
of Latin literature (especially during the last quartercentury or so), scholars of Roman art have been
somewhat reluctant to think in terms of ambiguity.
The vast majority of those who have written about the
Prima Porta Augustus, or indeed about Augustan image-making tout court, proceed
from the tacit assumption of communicated ‘propaganda’: meanings are assumed
to be singular and self-contained – whether imposed from above (as most tacitly
suppose), or else stemming ‘from the interplay of the image that the emperor himself
projected and the honours bestowed on him more or less spontaneously’.138 As we
have said, Paul Zanker’s landmark discussion of the ‘power of images in the age of
Augustus’ is arguably the most explicit about the ‘internalized’ use of visual culture
in affecting (what Zanker calls) an ‘integrating system of shared values’ (‘integrierende
Gemeinschaftswerte’). But most subsequent scholars have concurred in Zanker’s
overarching assumption that ‘the visual arts [die Bilderwelt] contributed measurably to
the remarkable stability of the socio-political system’ – that ‘with the establishment
of one-male rule . . . , there began in every cultural sphere a comprehensive move
towards standardization within ixed norms.’139
To my eyes, by contrast, what the Prima Porta Augustus demonstrates is the
power of polysemy. To embody the paradoxes of being primus inter pares – literally
‘irst among equals’ – ambivalence (if not outright duplicity) was required.140 There
was no unilateral answer as to who (or what) Augustus is (or was): responding
to an image like the Prima Porta Augustus instead involved slipping and sliding –
navigating one’s way through a plurality of different views.141 Ambiguity was not
the sole strategy of Augustan image-making, and some images certainly appear more
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Michael Squire
27 West façade of the Ara
Pacis. Photo: Reproduced by
kind permission of the Institut
ambiguous than others. But the apparent success of Augustan imagery seems to have
relied, at least in part, on manipulations of igurative ambivalence: the stability of
Augustus’ power, one might say, went hand in hand with the staged instability of the
images which embodied it.
There are plentiful parallels for such visual ambiguity and paradox. As Verity
Platt has recently shown, the ethics of representation (and indeed of representational
integrity) was a hot topic in the late irst century BCE: from Vitruvius’ diatribe against
wall paintings that violate ‘truth’ (ueritas) by forsaking the mimetic illusionism of
the so-called ‘Second Style’, to Horace’s talk of hybrid painted bodies at the start
of his Ars Poetica, all manner of writers fretted about reality and replication; in each
case, as Platt argues, the contested limits of representational art played their part
within larger verbal-cum-visual discourses about the contradictions of Augustus.142
Something comparable can be found on even the most public and programmatic
of monuments: the Ara Pacis, for example, which integrated different strategies of
signiication within a single work (plate 27) – the processional ‘real-life’ friezes above,
the fantastic ornamentation below, and not least the mythical paradigms that frame
one’s access to the monument at the east and west. Whatever we conclude about
the symbolism of the leaves and tendrils paraded in the lower parts of the altar’s
exterior, they embody a different sort of representational register from the panelled
frieze above: occupying the boundaries between the mimetic and the abstract, they
raise the question of whether we are looking at mere ornament (a ‘welcome respite
271
from signiication’, as Platt puts it), or alternatively a symbolic language pregnant
with hidden meaning.143 Once again, this is a Bilderwelt that relies not on top-down
‘communication’ or semantic ‘standardization’, but instead exploits more subtle
modes of visual ambivalence.
The complex and multifaceted mechanics of Augustan imagery is something to
which Jaś Elsner also turned in his earlier 1995 monograph on Art and The Roman Viewer.
In one sense, the Prima Porta Augustus very much tallies with Elsner’s diagnosis
of the ambivalences of Roman Imperial visual culture at large: while in tune with
a Greek tradition of mimetic verisimilitude – viewers are faced with a believable
sort of body – the statue is simultaneously premised upon the iction that substance
is only ever surface (remember the empty cuirass around the back: see plate 23 and
plate 24). Different regimes of representation are here implicated each within the
other, and viewers were called upon to switch between different interpretive modes.
For Elsner, the importance of such duality lies in the longer trajectory of Roman
Kunstwollen, as indeed the evolution of ‘ways of seeing’.144 Where standard histories
of Roman art can all too often assume an age of Augustan classicism succeeded by
a steady ‘decline’ – a movement from (‘Greek’) mimetic replication to the sorts of
‘abstract’ and ‘symbolic’ schemes that we see in late antique and Byzantine art – the
Prima Porta Augustus pays heed to the knowing coexistence of different systems of
making and manifesting meaning, materialized within one and the same political
monument.
In light of the present discussion, we might tend to a slightly different conclusion.
If nothing else, the Prima Porta Augustus monumentalizes the primary importance
of politics within the process which Elsner describes: the statue shows how
ambiguities of artistic iguration were irst and foremost politically embodied; better,
perhaps, it demonstrates how political ambiguities were bound up with (and indeed
substantiated through) the ambivalences of visual iguration. Looked at like that,
Augustan imagery does not constitute a scenographic backdrop for political change;
nor is this ‘propaganda’ in anything like our modern understanding of the term (art
as passive pawn of politics). Instead, Augustan art incarnates Augustan politics in a
much more fundamental sense: the ambivalences of Augustan images are themselves
active in embodying the ambiguities of Augustan power.
Notes
The present essay derives from a larger project on GraecoRoman images of the body, funded by the Alexander von
Humboldt-Stiftung at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
in Munich. A pampered fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin allowed me to develop that earlier research, and a
conference at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
(‘Conditions of Visibility in Greek and Roman Art’) provided a
preliminary opportunity to present my ideas. I am grateful to Rolf
Schneider (my academic host in Munich); Susanne Muth (who
supplied so many photographs); Georg Gerleigner (for help with
copyediting); Nikolaus Dietrich, Jaś Elsner, Luca Giuliani, John
Henderson, Robin Osborne and Verity Platt (for their comments
on an earlier draft); and, last but not least, to the journal’s editors
and two anonymous readers.
1
Musei Vaticani, Braccio Nuovo, inv. 2290. As the following
endnotes make clear, the statue has attracted a truly enormous
bibliography: for a masterful review of some 118 books and articles
published before 1977 (in fact, only a selection), see Hans Jucker,
‘Dokumentationen zur Augustusstatue von Primaporta’, Hefte des
2
Archäologischen Seminars Bern, 3, 1977, 16–37; subsequent interventions
are discussed by Tonio Hölscher, in Matthias Hofter, ed., Kaiser
Augustus und die Verlorene Republik, Berlin, 1988, 386–7, no. 215; and Erika
Simon, ‘Altes und Neues zur Statue des Augustus von Primaporta’,
in Gerhard Binder, ed., Saeculum Augustum, Band 3: Kunst und Bildersprache,
Darmstadt, 1991, 204–33 (Simon also summarizes her views in
Augustus: Kunst und Leben in Rom um die Zeitenwende, Munich, 1986, 53–7).
Anglophone scholarship has tended to underplay numerous German
debates (not least the statue’s problematic reconstruction), but there
is an important review and response by John Pollini, ‘The Augustus
from Prima Porta and the transformation of the Polykleitan heroic
ideal: The rhetoric of art’, in Warren G. Moon, ed., Polykleitos, the
Doryphoros, and Tradition, Madison, WI, 1995, 262–82 (with bibliography
at 276 n. 7; cf. also Pollini, Studies in Augustan ‘Historical’ Reliefs, diss.
Berkeley, 1978, 8–74). Those seeking book-length treatments of the
sculpture are referred to three slim volumes, all in German, and all
published in the same year: Walter H. Gross, Zur Augustusstatue von Prima
Porta, Göttingen, 1959; Heinz Kähler, Die Augustusstatue von Primaporta,
Cologne, 1959; Erika Simon, Der Augustus von Prima Porta, Bremen, 1959.
See Vern G. Swanson, The Biography and Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings
of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London, 1990, 187, no. 197 (= Opus CLXI).
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Michael Squire
True to form, Alma-Tadema adds numerous archaeological details
of his own: for one thing, the statue is given an inscribed base;
like contemporary archaeologists, moreover, the artist supposes a
preferred viewing angle from the front left. Perhaps most strikingly
of all, the Cupid igure by Augustus’ right-hand side has been
eradicated, so that the dolphin alone now acts as structural support.
When, in 1879, Alma-Tadema returned to the same scene for his After
the Audience, that Cupid igure was reinstated (see Swanson, Biography
and Catalogue, 205, no. 244 [= Opus CXCI] with colour plate on 393):
this time, though, the inscription has vanished, and a group of
onlookers are depicted looking up at the cuirass’ reverse side – an
archaeological joke, perhaps, about the semi-decorated reverse
side of the Prima Porta Augustus cuirass (see plate 23 and plate 24); for
discussion, see e.g. Michael Liversidge and Catharine Edwards, eds,
Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century, London,
1996, 143–6, nos 51–2.
3 There is a good introduction to Mussolini’s building programme
(and his adoption of Augustus as ideological model) in Tim Benton,
‘Rome reclaims its empire’, in Dawn Ades, ed., Art and Power: Europe
under the Dictactors, London, 1995, 120–9; cf. Katie Fleming, ‘Fascism’,
in Craig W. Kallendorf, ed., A Companion to the Classical Tradition,
Malden, MA, 2007, 342–53, esp. 343–6 (with further bibliography).
Mussolini also sent a bronze copy of the statue to Zaragora (ancient
Caesaraugusta), where it is still on display near the Roman walls.
4 Mary Beard and John Henderson, Classical Art: From Greece to Rome,
Oxford, 2001, 216.
5 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation,
Chicago, IL, 2004, 35–82, esp. 45–57.
6 See below, n. 24. For two excellent overviews, see Hans Georg
Niemeyer, ed., Studien zur statuarischen Darstellung der römischen Kaiser, Berlin,
1968, 47–54; and Götz Lahusen, Untersuchungen zur Ehrenstatue in Rom:
Literarische und epigraphische Zeugnisse, Rome, 1983, 51–3.
7 On the ‘intensely self-conscious’ nature of the statue, compare
Richard Brilliant, Gesture and Rank in Roman Art, New Haven, 1963,
66–7. Elsewhere (Brilliant, Roman Art from the Republic to Constantine,
second edition, London, 1974, 112), the author notes that ‘although
hellenistic artists had developed the decorated cuirass as a ield for
ornament and symbolic display, always subservient to the forms
of the human body beneath, the Roman sculptors treated the
cuirass almost as an independent form, capable of bearing the most
elaborate, allusive images.’ My ideas about the igurative ambiguities
of the Prima Porta Augustus have greatly learned from analyses of
related games of representing bodily armour at other times and
places within the western artistic tradition: from the substantial
bibliography, I think especially of François Lissarrague’s research
into Archaic and Classical Greek representations of ‘body’ and
‘armour’ (e.g. François Lissarrague, ‘Corps et armes: igures grecques
du guerrier’, in Véronique Dasen et Jérôme Wilgaux, eds, Langages et
metaphores du corps, Rennes, 2008, 15–27), as well as Victor I. Stoichita’s
recent interpretation of armour as a ‘second skin’ enveloping the
body in Renaissance painting and sculpture (Victor I. Stoichita,
‘“La seconde peau”: quelques considérations sur le symbolisme des
armures au XVIe siècle’, in Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, ed., Estremità e
escrescenze dei corpi / Extremities and Excrescences of the Body [= Micrologus, 20,
2012], 451–63, citing additional bibliography).
8 I take the idea of ‘code-switching’ in the late Republic and early
Empire from Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘To be Roman, go Greek:
Thoughts on Hellenization at Rome’, in Michael Austin, Jill Harries
and Christopher Smith, eds, Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey
Rickman, London, 1998, 79–91; fundamental now is Wallace-Hadrill,
Rome’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, 2008, 38–70, discussing ‘crossdressing’ on 41–57.
9 See Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan
Shapiro, Ann Arbor, MI, 1988, discussing the statue on 98–9, 175–7,
188–92 (which translates Zanker’s Augustus und die Macht der Bilder,
Munich, 1987, 103–4, 179–81, 192–6).
10 On the marble, see John Pollini and Norman Herz, ‘The marble type
of the Augustus from Prima Porta: An isotopic analysis’, Journal of
Roman Archaeology, 5, 1992, 203–8; John Pollini, Norman Herz, Kyriaki
Polikreti and Yannis Maniatis, ‘Parian lychnites and the Prima Porta
statue: New scientiic tests and the symbolic value of the marble’,
11
12
13
14
15
16
Journal of Roman Archaeology, 11, 1998, 275–84; John Pollini, ‘The marble
type of the statue of Augustus from Prima Porta: Facts and fallacies,
lithic power and ideology, and color symbolism in Roman art’, in
Demetrios U. Schilardi and Dora Katsonopoulou, eds, Paria Lithos,
Athens, 2000, 237–52.
There are two accessible introductions to the villa in Carmelo Calci
and Gaetano Messineo, La Villa di Livia a Prima Porta, Rome, 1984; and
Jane Clark Reeder, The Villa of Livia ad Gallinas Albas: A Study in the Augustan
Villa and Garden, Providence, RI, 2001. A more detailed reconstruction
of the archaeology can be found in Maurizio Forte, La villa di Livia: un
percorso di ricerca di archeologia virtuale, Rome, 2007.
The fundamental problem is the lack of any recorded statue base.
For a review of the excavation archives and of the vast subsequent
bibliography on the statue’s original location, see John Pollini, ‘The
i ndspot of the statue of Augustus from Prima Porta’, Bullettino della
Commissione Archeologica Communale di Roma, 92, 1987, 103–8. Pollini
suggests an indoor location to the west of a staircase (107–8). But
debates continue to run rife. One scholar, for example, has argued
for an outdoor location in a grove outside the villa (albeit on rather
tenuous literary and archaeological grounds: Jane Clark Reeder, ‘The
statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, the underground complex, and
the omen of the Gallina Alba’, American Journal of Philology, 118: 1, 1997,
89–118; cf. Reeder, Villa of Livia, 84–5); others have suggested a more
prominent indoor location along the south wall of the villa’s atrium
(Allan Klynne and Peter Liljenstolpe, ‘Where to put Augustus? A note
on the placement of the Prima Porta Statue’, American Journal of Philology,
121: 1, 2000, 121–8, esp. 125–7).
See Ulrich Hausmann, ‘Zur Typologie und Ideologie des
Augustusporträts’, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte
und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, vol. II.12.2, Berlin, 1981,
513–98, esp. 565–89; and Dietrich Boschung, Die Bildnisse des Augustus,
Berlin, 1993, 38–50. There is a helpful overview in R. R. R. Smith,
‘Typology and diversity in the portraits of Augustus’, Journal of Roman
Archaeology, 9, 1996, 31–47, esp. 38–9.
Two edited volumes collect some of the most important discussions
of Polyclitus’ Doryphoros and its subsequent ancient reception: Herbert
Beck, Peter C. Bol and Maraike Bückling, eds, Polyklet: Der Bildhauer der
griechischen Klassik, Mainz, 1990; and Moon, ed., Polykleitos, the Doryphoros,
and Tradition. Early analyses of the Prima Porta Augustus’ relationship
with the Doryphoros are summarized in Gross, Zur Augustusstatue,
144–51. Among the most important subsequent treatments are Götz
Lahusen, ‘Polyklet und Augustus: Zur Rezeption polykletischer
Gestaltungsmuster in der römischen Bildniskunst’, in Beck et al.,
eds, Polyklet, 393–6; Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’, 263–76;
Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction, Princeton, NJ,
1996, esp. 24; and Indra Kagis McEwan, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of
Architecture, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 264–72 (‘In the donning of the
lesh of the Doryphoros, Augustus put on the canon…’, 268). For
the argument that the Polyclitan allusion to ‘Classical forms’ carried
an overtly ‘moral claim’, see the inluential discussion by Zanker,
Power of Images, 245–52, along with e.g. Tonio Hölscher, The Language
of Images in Roman Art, trans. Anthony Snodgrass and Annemarie
Künzl-Snodgrass, Cambridge, 2004, 47–57. The classic work on selfconsciously ‘Classicizing’ allusions in late Hellenistic and Imperial
sculpture is Paul Zanker, Klassizistische Statuen: Studien zur Veränderung des
Kunstgeschmacks in der römischen Kaiserzeit, Mainz, 1974: Zanker argues
for the Prima Porta Augustus’ wholly deliberate and self-conscious
imitation of Polyclitan models (‘Der entwerfende Bildhauer [des
Augustus von Prima Porta] bediente sich bewußt der polykletischen
Formensprache…’, 43).
Cf. e.g. Smith, ‘Typology and diversity’, 41–5, arguing that ‘in
general, the Augustus-Doryphoros theory requires a very optimistic
view of the general level of art-historical knowledge and sympathy
on the part of the Roman viewer’ (43). More sanguine is Peter
Stewart, Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response, Oxford, 2003,
110.
Augustus’ left foot is placed slightly further away from the right than
seems to have been the case with the Doryphoros; likewise, Augustus’
head is not turned to quite the same angle (Pollini, ‘Augustus from
Prima Porta’, 266). As Pollini suggests, however, these adaptations
might be understood in light of the Prima Porta Augustus’ supposed
273
new ‘speaking’ pose (271–2).
17 Cf. e.g. Kähler, Augustusstatue, 14.
18 For two excellent discussions of stylistic reference and quotation
in Roman art, see Mark Fullerton, ‘Imitation and intertextuality in
Roman art’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 10, 1997, 427–50, and Jeremy
Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and
Artistic Rationalisation, Cambridge, 2006, 277–302 (‘the artist selected
and abstracted elements from a variety of sources and recomposed
them in order to reconstruct a new unitary synthesis, which the art
historically informed viewer could recall through an act of metabasis,
intellectual transfer’, 288). For other allusions to Polyclitus in early
Imperial Roman free-standing sculpture, see Caterina MadernaLauter, ‘Polyklet in hellenistischer und römischer Zeit’, in Beck et
al., eds, Polyklet, 376–85; Michael Koortbojian, ‘Forms of attention: Four
notes on replication and variation’, in Elaine Gazda, ed., The Ancient Art
of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition, Ann Arbor, MI, 2002,
173–204, esp. 183–7.
19 Cf. HN 34.56: ‘The discovery of statues which throw their weight
on one leg is entirely his [Polyclitus’] own’ (proprium eius est, uno crure
ut insisterent signa, excogitasse…). On the signiicance of the hairstyle,
see Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’, 266: ‘The Prima Porta
statue’s neatly ordered locks, whorl on the crown, and hair pattern
at the nape of the neck, as well as some degree of linear emphasis
on individual hairstrands, were undoubtedly ultimately inspired
by the Doryphoros’ (although Pollini also concedes some important
differences). There are more detailed comments in Paul Zanker,
Studien zu den Augustus-Porträts I: Der Actium-Typus, Göttingen, 1973, 44–6;
Zanker, Power of Images, 98–9; and Boschung, Bildnisse, 64.
20 For bibliography, see Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’, 265,
responding to e.g. Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 226–33.
21 Cf. e.g. Kähler, Augustusstatue, 12–13 (laurel); Simon, Augustus, 56, and
Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 230–3 (lance): there is a more detailed
overview and critique in Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’, 277 n.
24.
22 See Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’ 266: ‘In short, the statue’s
nineteenth-century restorer, understanding the anatomy of the body,
restored the missing i ngers more or less correctly.’
23 On the many supposed iconographic parallels for such a gesture, see
e.g. Brilliant, Gesture and Rank, 67–9 (with further bibliography): ‘In the
absence of an objective goal the gesture is addressed to the observer,
incorporating the world with its soterial grandiloquence’ (68). The
standard iconographic comparandum is the so-called Arringatore (from
Lake Trasimeno, dated to the i rst half of the i rst century BCE, and
inscribed in Etruscan script with the name of Aulus Metellus: Museo
Archeologico Nazionale, inv. N.2): cf. e.g. Nigel J. Spivey and Michael
J. Squire, Panorama of the Classical World, second edition, London, 2008,
178–82 (with illustration on 181, Fig. 285); as Luca Giuliani rightly
points out to me, though, the iconographic problem lies in i nding
precise parallels for this particular coniguration of the i ngers. More
generally on the importance of bodily deportment within oratorical
address, see Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.3.65–149: Quintilian discusses the
speciic signiicance of some twenty different hand gestures (Inst. Or.
11.3.92–121: cf. Peter Wüli ng, ‘Classical and modern gesticulation
accompanying speech: An early theory of body language by
Quintilian’, in Olga E. Tellegen-Couperus, ed., Quintilian and the Law:
The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics, Leuven, 2003, 265–75).
24 On the cuirass type, see e.g. Richard A. Gergel, ‘Costume as
geographical indicator: Barbarians and prisoners on cuirassed
statue breastplates’, in Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante,
eds, The World of Roman Costume, Madison, WI, 1994, 191–209, at 194;
Jane Fejfer, Roman Portraits in Context, Berlin, 2008, 208. Cornelius
C. Vermeule’s research was published as a series of ive articles
(‘Hellenistic and Roman cuirassed statues’) in Berytus, 13, 1959, 1–82
(the Prima Porta Augustus is discussed on 34, no. 13); 15, 1964,
95–110; 16, 1966, 49–59; 23, 1974, 5–26; 26, 1978, 85–123: there is
an abbreviated catalogue by Vermeule, Concordance of Cuirassed Statues
in Marble and Bronze, Boston, MA, 1980. Stemmer’s catalogue discusses
the material in terms of twelve categories: see Klaus Stemmer,
Untersuchungen zur Typologie, Chronologie und Ikonographie der Panzerstatuen,
Berlin, 1978.
25 As Christopher H. Hallett, The Roman Nude: Heroic Statuary 200 BC– AD
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
300, Oxford, 2005, points out, the designation is ‘misleading
. . . since it implies a special kind of cloak intended to be worn
around the hips, which is certainly not the case’ (102). On the late
Republican resurgence of the attribute, and in particular its Augustan
appropriations (ultimately said to descend from an image type of the
Diuus Julius), see Stefano Maggi, ‘Augusto e la politica delle immagini:
lo Hüftmanteltypus (Sul signiicato di una iconograia e sulla sua
formazione)’, Rivista di Archeologia, 14, 1990, 63–76.
Cf. Robin Osborne, ‘Augustus’ bath towel’, Omnibus, 60, 2010, 1–3,
who suggests (among other reasons) this sort of compositional
explanation: ‘the sweep of folds across the lower body emphasizes
the dynamic given to the statue by the position of the left leg, acts as
a counterweight to the extended right arm, and lends a thrust to the
body in that direction. What is more, the length of cloak hanging
down from the left arm both draws attention to and balances the
Cupid beside the right leg’ (3).
See esp. John Pollini, The Portraiture of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, New York,
1987, 41 (with further bibliography in n. 2): Pollini notes not only
the puzzling proportions of head to body, but also the distinctive
coiffure (‘appropriate for a human child but not for Cupid’); he
nevertheless acknowledges some departure from other portrait types
(with further comments on e.g. 45–7, 51–3).
For the drawing (created ‘mit Lynkeusaugen und Hiobsgeduld’),
see Jucker, ‘Dokumentationen’, 16. Jucker offers the best overview
of different scholarly opinions (at least until 1977). In what follows,
I refer to Roman names and titles: for the important argument
that ‘die Bildsprache der Panzerstatue des Typus Primaporta . . .
in griechisches, nicht in lateinisches Vokabular aufzulösen [ist]’,
however, see Hugo Meyer, Kunst und Geschichte: Vier Untersuchungen zur
antiken Historienkunst, Munich, 1983, 123–40 (quotation from 124).
Identiication tends to depend on the ‘Roman’ igure identiied beside
it: see below, nn. 35–9, along with the more detailed bibliography of
Pollini, Studies in Augustan ‘Historical’ Reliefs, 61 n. 67.
For the underlying Roman visual rhetoric of the ‘barbarian’, see e.g.
Rolf M. Schneider, ‘Friend and foe: The Orient in Rome’, in Vesta S.
Curtis and Sarah Stewart, eds, The Age of the Parthians: Volume 2, London,
2007, 50–86. On the strange appearance of this signum, see below, n.
100.
The classic analysis remains Jos P. A. van der Vin, ‘The return of
Roman ensigns from Parthia’, Bulletin Antieke Beschaving, 56, 1981,
117–39, discussing the Prima Porta Augustus on 120–1; cf. Thomas
Schäfer, Spolia et Signa: Baupolitik und Reichskultur nach dem Parthererfolg
des Augustus, Göttingen, 1998. For one recent challenge to the
conventional ‘Parthian’ interpretation (and a subsequent re-dating of
the statue to after 9 BCE), see Christopher J. Simpson, ‘Where is the
Parthian? The Prima Porta statue of Augustus revisited’, Latomus, 64,
2005, 82–90: to my mind, however, the political importance given to
the Parthian episode leaves little room for interpretive doubt.
Res Gestae 29.2: for discussion, see Alison Cooley, Res Gestae Divi Augusti:
Text, Translation, and Commentary, Cambridge, 2009, 242–5.
Dio Cassius 54.8.2: καὶ γὰρ ἐπὶ τούτοις ἐφρόνει μέγα, λέγων ὅτι τὰ
πρότερόν ποτε ἐν ταῖς μάχαις ἀπολόμενα ἀκονιτὶ ἐκεκόμιστο. There
are numerous other Augustan poetic references to the event (among
them, e.g. Hor. Epod. 1.12.27–30, 1.18.55–7; Ov. Fast. 5.579–94): see
Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 156–8; Zanker, Power of Images, 185–92.
The standards were brought to Rome in October 19 BCE but only
deposited in the Forum Augustum’s Temple of Mars Ultor in 2 BCE.
Cf. e.g. Franz Studniczka, ‘Zur Augustusstatue der Livia’, Mitteilungen
des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts: Römische Abteilung, 24, 1916, 27–55,
esp. 40; Emanuel Löwy, ‘Zum Augustus von Prima Porta’, Mitteilungen
des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts: Römische Abteilung, 42, 1927, 203–22,
esp. 203; Gilbert Charles Picard, Les trophées romains: contribution à
l’histoire de la religion et de l’art triumphal de Rome, Paris, 1957, 279; Gross,
Zur Augustusstatue, 151. Others have identiied a more mythical igure
like Mithridates I, corresponding with what they suppose to be the
‘legendary’ igure opposite (e.g. Harald Ingholt, ‘The Prima Porta
statue of Augustus. Part I: The interpretation of the breastplate’,
Archaeology, 22: 4, 1969, 176–87, esp. 181–5). Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’,
210, is surely right to suppose a less speciic identity, concluding
in favour of ‘eine Art Genius des Königs’; for a similar conclusion,
cf. Pollini, Studies in Augustan ‘Historical’ Reliefs, 30–5 (‘The Prima Porta
274
Michael Squire
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
igure would therefore symbolize Parthia in general and the military
forces of Parthia, in particular’, 35).
Cf. e.g. Brilliant, Gesture and Rank, 66–7, following (inter alios) Gross,
Zur Augustusstatue, 151–2. On Tiberius’ active role in collecting the
standards, see Suet. Tib. 9.1; for the interpretive problems, though, see
Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 207–9.
See e.g. Walther Amelung, Die Skulpturen des Vatikanischen Museums, vol. 1,
Berlin, 1903, 22; Alfred von Domaszewski, ‘Der Panzerschmuck der
Augustusstatue von Primaporta’, in Strena Helbigiana, Leipzig, 1900, 51–
3, esp. 52; Klaus Fittschen, ‘Zur Panzerstatue in Cherchel’, Jahrbuch des
Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 91, 1976, 175–210, esp. 204–5; Simon,
‘Altes und Neues’, 207–9 (with further references, and supposing
that the igure replicates ‘ein damals bekanntes Kultbild . . ., eine
republikanische Statue auf dem Marsfeld in Rom’, 209).
See Ingholt, ‘The Prima Porta statue of Augustus. Part I’, 185–7.
See e.g. Frédérick L. Bastet, ‘Feldherr mit Hund auf der
Augustusstatue von Prima Porta’, Bulletin Antieke Beschaving, 41, 1966,
77–90, esp. 88–90; Louise A. Holland, ‘Aeneas-Augustus of Prima
Porta’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 78, 1947, 276–84,
esp. 279–80.
For the suggestion, see Pollini, Studies in Augustan ‘Historical’ Reliefs,
15–30, concluding of the return of the standards that ‘it is the spirit –
or the idea – of the event which is found represented’ (36). Compare
also van der Vin, ‘Return of Roman ensigns’: ‘I believe that the
central scene has to be interpreted rather in a symbolic way and that
a “Roman oficial” and a “Parthian colleague” have been pictured as
representatives of their people’ (121).
On the carnyx, and various iconographic parallels for it, see Picard,
Les trophées romains, 279–80. The attribute also appears to the right of
the empty cuirass on the reverse (see plate 23 and plate 24): cf. Andreas
Alföldi, ‘Zum Panzerschmuck der Augustusstatue von Primaporta’,
Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts: Römische Abteilung, 52,
1937, 48–63, esp. 50.
For a bibliographic review, see Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 211–13,
along with the sensible comments of Pollini, Studies in Augustan
‘Historical’ Reliefs, 37–9 (‘In the case of the dejected female barbarians
of the middle zone, it cannot be determined with certainty whether
they have reference to speciic victories or to more generalized ones’,
37).
See e.g. Amelung, Skulpturen, 24; Domaszewski, ‘Panzerschmuck’,
52; Simon, Augustus von Prima Porta, 9. Others have proposed Germania
(e.g. Alföldi, ‘Zum Panzerschmuck’, 48–52 – such identiications
of the German Volk were a nationalist obsession in 1937; cf. Kähler,
Augustusstatue, 17; Gross, Zur Augustusstatue, 152; Gerhard Zinserling,
‘Der Augustus von Primaporta als ofiziöses Denkmal’, Acta Antiqua,
15, 1967, 327–39, at 334); others still have proposed ‘Dalmatia
oder Pannoia’ (e.g. Helga von Heintze, ‘Statue des Augustus von
Prima Porta’, in Wolfgang Helbig, ed., Führer durch die öffentlichen
Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom, fourth edition, Hermine Speier,
ed., Tübingen, 1963, vol. 1, 314–19, no. 411, at 315), or else – less
convincingly – Armenia (e.g. Harald Ingholt, ‘The Prima Porta statue
of Augustus. Part II: The location of the original’, Archaeology, 22.4,
1969, 304–18, at 315–17).
See e.g. Amelung, Skulpturen, 24; Domaszewski, ‘Panzerschmuck’, 52;
Karl Woelcke, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Tropaions: Der Tropaion
am Panzer der Augustusstatue von Primaporta’, Bonner Jahrbücher des
Rheinischen Landesmuseums in Bonn und des Vereins von Altertumsfreunden im
Rheinlande, 120, 1911, 180–91, esp. 191; Picard, Les trophées romains, 279;
Simon, Augustus von Prima Porta, 9. On the gender dynamics of these
female province igures, and their relation to those of the statue at
large, see Mary Beard and John Henderson, ‘The emperor’s new
body: Ascension from Rome’, in Maria Wyke, ed., Parchments of Gender:
Deciphering the Body in Antiquity, Oxford, 1998, 191–219, at 214–16.
For iconographic parallels, see the references cited in Simon, ‘Altes
und Neues’, 215–16.
See e.g. Amelung, Skulpturen, 27; von Heintze, ‘Augustus von Prima
Porta’, 315; Bastet, ‘Feldherr mit Hund’, 79.
See e.g. Holland, ‘Aeneas-Augustus’, 280. For the parallel suggestion
that this is instead Terra Mater, see Eugenie Strong, ‘Terra Mater or
Italia?’, Journal of Roman Studies, 27, 1937, 114–26, esp. 115.
See e.g. Simon, Augustus von Prima Porta, 10. Other suggestions vary
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
from Magna Mater (cf. e.g. Kähler, Augustusstatue, 19; Gross, Zur
Augustusstatue, 152 n. 30), to Venus Genetrix (cf. Frances van Keuren,
‘Cosmic symbolism of the Pantheon on the cuirass of the Prima Porta
Augustus’, in Rolf Winkes, ed., The Age of Augustus, Louvain-la-Neuve,
1985, 177–87, esp. 180–4).
On their signiicance, see Zanker, Power of Images, 270–1, who suggests
an allusion to an ‘original . . . “life-size” standing igure’ that served
as a ‘famous monument in Rome’ – ‘perhaps . . . one of the votives
dedicated by Augustus in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine’ (271);
cf. Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 221–2, and Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 162
(labelling the sphinxes as ‘another [sort of] “contemplative image”’).
For the rival argument that the igure should be identiied as Saturn,
see Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 213–15.
On the importance of solar imagery to Augustan ideology at large,
see Marianne Bergmann, Die Strahlen der Herrscher: Theomorphes Herrscherbild
und politische Symbolik im Hellenismus und in der römischen Kaiserzeit, Mainz,
1998, esp. 123–6, discussing this statue at 124.
Needless to say, these identiications are by no means universally
accepted: some of the most important discussions are referenced
by René Rebuffat, ‘Les divinités du jour naissant sur la cuirasse
d’Auguste de Prima Porta: recherche sur l’illustration symbolique de
la victoire orientale’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, 73, 1961, 161–228.
Others have identiied the female deity carried by ‘Dawn’ as ‘Venus’
(Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 214; Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 159–60).
While I gloss over further bibliographic debates about the identities
of these igures, it is perhaps worth observing how, in one sense,
the astral personiications of the cuirass’ upper section relect the
embodied divinities below (Apollo on the left and Artemis/Diana on
the right): both conceptually and iconographically, it was a short step
from the sun-god Apollo to ‘Sun’, as indeed from the moon-goddess
Artemis-Diana to ‘Moon’.
For some different attempts to date the statue, see Karl Friis Johansen,
‘Le portrait d’Auguste de Prima Porta et sa datation’, in Karen Ascani,
ed., Studia romana in honorem Petri Krarup septuagenarii, Odense, 1976, 49–57;
Fittschen, ‘Zur Panzerstatue in Cherchel’, 203–8; Frank Brommer,
‘Zur Datierung der Augustus von Prima Porta’, in Rolf A. Stucky
and Ines Jucker, eds, Eikones: Studien zum griechischen und römischen Bildnis,
Bern, 1980, 78–80; Brilliant, Gesture and Rank, 66–7; Pollini, Studies in
Augustan ‘Historical’ Reliefs, 39–47. Others have gone still further – and
in my view too far – in speculating about the particular purpose
and context of the supposed ‘original’: most inluential has been the
putative association with the round base in the Sanctuary of Athena
Polias at Pergamon (cf. Ingholt, ‘The Prima Porta Statue of Augustus.
Part II’ – an interpretation revived by e.g. Meyer, Kunst und Geschichte,
139–40; and Thomas Schäfer, ‘Der Augustus von Primaporta im
Wechsel der Medien’, in Hans J. Wendel, Wolfgang B. Bernard and
Sven Müller, eds, Wechsel des Mediums: Zur Interdependenz von Form und Inhalt,
Rostock, 2001, 37–58).
For the best-referenced discussion, see Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’,
216–20 (along with 220–4 on the statue’s date).
Cf. e.g. Kähler, Augustusstatue, 14: I return to the statue’s reverse
decoration in this essay’s conclusion.
For the supposed ‘Tiberian’ identity of this igure, see above, n. 35.
That said, there are no good reasons for supposing the statue to be
a posthumous ‘Tiberian’ invention, as sometimes assumed: for
critique, see Fittschen, ‘Zur Panzerstatue in Cherchel’, 207–8.
See e.g. Ulrich Köhler, ‘Statua di Cesare Augusto’, Annali dell’Instituto
di Corrispondenza Archeologica, 35, 1863, 432–49: ‘Un pregio particolare
della statua si è in i ne questo, che in essa meglio che in alcun’altra si
sono conservate le tracce dei colori, le quali una volta la fregiarono’
(432–3, with description in n. 1); cf. Amelung, Skulpturen, 19–20;
Patrik Reuterswärd, Studien zur Polychromie der Plastik: Griechenland und
Rom: Untersuchungen über die Farbwirkung der Marmor- und Bronzeskulpturen,
Stockholm, 1960, esp. 212–16.
For the reconstruction (based on ‘nur sechs oder sieben Farben’:
188), see Paolo Liverani, ‘Der Augustus von Prima Porta’, in
Vinzenz Brinkmann und Raimund Wünsche, eds, Bunte Götter: Die
Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur, Munich, 2004, 186–91, along with the
supporting articles by Ulderico Santamaria and Fabio Morresi, and
by Stefano Spada; a revised version of Liverani’s article is translated
in, ‘L’Augusto di Prima Porta’, in Liverani, ed., I colori del bianco:
275
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
policromia nella scultura antica, Vatican City, 2004, 234–42. Perhaps most
intriguing of all is Liverani’s evidence for the ancient re-painting
of the statue: just as the statue’s right arm and left leg are known to
have been repaired at some stage in antiquity, Liverani reports two
different colours for e.g. the tunic of the central ‘Roman’ igure on
the cuirass; these different colours were evidently applied at different
times.
See Mark Bradley, ‘The importance of colour on ancient marble
sculpture’, Art History, 32: 3, 2009, 427–57, esp. 447–50.
Zanker, Power of Images, 192 (translating Macht der Bilder, 195).
One might compare the rhetoric of the very i rst presentation of the
statue (four days after its excavation) on 24 April 1863: Guglielmo
Henzen, ‘Scavi di Prima Porta (2)’, Bullettino dell’Instituto di Corrispondenza
di Archeologia, 1863, 71–8, at 77.
For the ‘golden age’ in Augustan art, cf. e.g. Galinsky, Augustan Culture,
106–21. For one attempt to relate this theme to painted domestic
interior decoration, compare Gilles Sauron, Quis deum? L’expression
plastique des idéologies politiques et religieuses à Rome à la i n de la République et au
début du Principat, Rome, 1994, 567–642, discussing the Prima Porta
villa at 571–3.
Shelley Hales, ‘Men are Mars, women are Venus: Divine costumes in
Imperial Rome’, in Liza Cleland, Mary Harlow and Lloyd LlewellynJones, eds, The Clothed Body in the Ancient World, Oxford, 2005, 131–42,
132. On the underlying ways in which clothing at once dressed and
uncovered discourses of Roman and Greek identity, see also WallaceHadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, esp. 41–57.
Plin. HN 34.18: Togatae efigies antiquitus ita dicabantur. placuere et nudae tenentes
hastam ab epheborum e gymnasiis exemplaribus; quas Achilleas uocant. Graeca res nihil
uelare, at contra Romana ac militaris thoraces addere. Caesar quidem dictator loricatam
sibi dicari in foro suo passus est. Among the most recent discussions is
Michael Koortbojian,‘The double identity of Roman portrait statues:
Costumes and their symbolism at Rome’, in Jonathan Edmondson
and Alison Keith, eds, Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture, Toronto,
2008, 71–93, at 78–9. Other ancient textual testimonia concerning
cuirassed statues are discussed by Stemmer, Untersuchungen, 139–48; cf.
Lahusen, Untersuchungen, 51–3; Thomas Pékary, Das römische Kaiserbildnis
in Staat, Kult und Gesellschaft: Dargestellt anhand der Schriftquellen, Berlin, 1985,
97–100.
The subject has attracted a large bibliography. Among the most
important analyses are: Nikolaus Himmelmann, Ideale Nacktheit in
der griechischen Kunst, Berlin, 1990 (with inluential review by Tonio
Hölscher: Gnomon, 65, 1993, 519–28); Andrew Stewart, Art, Desire,
and the Body in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, 1997, 24–42; Robin Osborne,
‘Sculpted men of Athens: Masculinity and power in the ield of
vision’, in Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, eds, Thinking Men: Masculinity
and its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition, London, 1998, 23–42;
Osborne, ‘Men without clothes: Heroic nakedness and Greek Art’, in
Maria Wyke, ed., Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean, Oxford,
1998, 80–104; Hallett, The Roman Nude, 5–60; Jeffrey M. Hurwit, ‘The
problem with Dexileos: Heroic and other nudities in Greek art’,
American Journal of Archaeology, 111: 1, 2009, 35–60. For a more nuanced
interpretation of how this phenomenon came about – noting, along
the way, important variables of geography, chronology and different
visual contexts – see now Jens Daehner, ‘Grenzen der Nacktheit:
Studien zum nackten männlichen Körper in der griechischen Plastik
des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen
Instituts, 120, 2005, 155–300: Daehner concludes that ‘Nacktheit nicht
die Voraussetzung des männlichen Körpers in der Plastik, sondern
eine Option seiner Inszenierung [ist]’ (296).
Cf. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 51–2 (citing e.g. Plut.
Cato Mai. 20.5 and Cic. Tusc. 4.70). Following Wallace-Hadrill, my
own view is that ‘at least some of the shock of nudity remained in
the Roman mind in the face of any artistic conventions’ (54): for
all the talk of Pliny and others, moreover, we have to be wary of
constructing too ‘homogeneous and uncontroversial [a model of
Roman] cultural identity’ (55).
See Hallett, The Roman Nude, esp. 61–101; cf. also Tom Stevenson,
‘The problem with nude honoriic statuary and portraits in Late
Republican and Augustan Rome’, Greece and Rome, 45: 1, 1998, 45–69;
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 181–227; Michael J. Squire, The Art of the Body:
Antiquity and its Legacy, Oxford, 2011, esp. 125–33 (in relation to longer
traditions of ‘Neoclassical’ nudity). Jan Bernhard Meister, Der Körper des
Princeps: Zur Problematik eines monarchischen Körpers ohne Monarchie, Stuttgart,
2012, was published while this essay was in proofs: Meister usefully
surveys ‘senatorische Körper in der späten römischen Republik’
(21–107), albeit with only minimal reference to the visual and
archaeological record. More generally on Roman (Republican)
attitudes to Greek art, see e.g. Jerome J. Pollitt, ‘The impact of Greek
art on Rome’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 108, 1978,
155–74; Erich S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome,
London, 1993, esp. 84–182; Anne Kuttner, ‘Roman art during the
Republic’, in Harriet I. Flower, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Roman
Republic, Cambridge, 2004, 294–321; Miranda Marvin, The Language of
the Muses: The Dialogue Between Greek and Roman Sculpture, Los Angeles, CA,
2008.
See Larissa Bonfante, ‘Nudity as a costume in Classical art’, American
Journal of Archaeology, 93: 4, 1989, 543–70, tracing this back to the
eighth century BCE. More generally on ‘nudity’ as ‘a form of dress’
in the Western classical tradition, see esp. John Berger, Ways of Seeing,
London, 1973, 45–64; cf. also Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution
(‘nakedness is a dress code which is heavily visual, and “emblematic”
in the sense that those who adopted it were aware of, and indeed
provocatively paraded it as a sign’, 52).
On the Roman severing of portrait head from body, see e.g.
Sheila Dillon, Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles,
Cambridge, 2006, 11, along with the qualifying remarks on 30–6,
76–98; for the so-called ‘appendage aesthetic’ of Roman portraiture,
cf. Brilliant, Gesture and Rank, 26–31; Stewart, Statues in Roman Society,
47–59; Hallett, The Roman Nude, 271–307; Marvin, Language of the Muses,
225–8. The most sophisticated analysis is now Jennifer Trimble,
Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture, Cambridge,
2011, esp. 150–205.
On the ideology of the toga, cf. Caroline Vout, ‘The myth of the
toga: Understanding the history of Roman dress’, Greece and Rome, 43:
2, 1996, 204–20; Glenys Davis, ‘What made the Roman toga virilis?’,
in Cleland et al., eds, The Clothed Body, 121–30; Emma Dench, Romulus’
Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian, Oxford,
2005, 276–9; Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 41–57 (with
further bibliography). On the orator’s studied wearing of the toga,
see Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.3.137–49.
Rome, Musei Capitolini, inv. 3024: there is a good discussion and
bibliographic review in Hofter, ed., Kaiser Augustus, 341–2, no. 192.
The phenomenon that modern scholars have labelled ‘verism’
(literally ‘truthfulness’) has been much discussed: there is an
introductory guide (with further bibliography) in Diane E. E.
Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, New Haven, 1992, 31–47. Also useful
are Sheldon Nodelmann, ‘How to read a Roman Portrait’, in Eve
d’Ambra, ed., Roman Art in Context, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993,
10–26; Jeremy Tanner, ‘Portraits, power and patronage in the late
Roman Republic’, Journal of Roman Studies, 90, 2000, 18–50; and Peter
Stewart, The Social History of Roman Art, Cambridge, 2008, 77–107. On
the ideological underpinnings of Roman republican portraits more
generally, the best discussion remains Luca Giuliani, Bildnis und
Botschaft: Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Bildniskunst der römischen Republik,
Frankfurt am Main, 1986.
Cf. e.g. Brilliant, Roman Art: ‘It would seem, therefore, that the
sculptor had created the head as the principal visual clue for the
purposes of identiication, set into a well-orchestrated environment
similar in conception, if not in intent, to the scenic lats with cut-outs
for faces, popular among resort photographers in the twentieth
century’ (166). As if to reinforce the point, it is worth noting that
the head of this particular image, though ancient, is a modern
restoration. A similar sort of segregation can be seen on the Prima
Porta Augustus, where the upper outline of the cuirass quite literally
divides the body from the lower neck.
See Hallett, The Roman Nude, 312–14.
For the statue (= Rome: Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo
alle Terme, inv. 10.65.13), see Hallett, The Roman Nude, 1–2, 120–1. As
Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, writes, ‘the treatment of the body is thus in
opposition to that of the face that portrays an older man with lined
276
Michael Squire
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
forehead, bags under his eyes, prominent crow’s-feet, creased cheeks
and neck, and sagging jowels’ (36).
For the historiography, see Hallett, The Roman Nude, 1–4, 271–307.
The best recent discussion of such images is Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s
Cultural Revolution, 38–70: ‘Granted that there was a well-established
Roman Republican convention of representing Roman generals
naked, can we safely infer that this must have been acceptable, any
more than inferring, granted that Cicero voices standard Roman
prejudices against such nudity, that such statues must have been
disturbing or discordant?’ (54).
For a good overview (with further bibliography) see Hallett, The
Roman Nude, 159–222, esp. 160–3 on Julio-Claudian hip-mantle
images. Hallett counts thirty-nine such images of Julio-Claudian
emperors and their families, and from across the empire, of
which between nine and ifteen portray Augustus (161 n. 3). The
classic analysis of different sorts of imperial statue types and their
chronological and geographical spread is Niemeyer, Studien, esp.
38–64, supplemented by the more discursive analysis of Fejfer, Roman
Portraits, 393–404; cf. also Meister, Der Körper des Princeps, esp. 192–221.
Cf. e.g. Charles B. Rose, Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the
Julio-Claudian Period, Cambridge, 1997, 74–5.
For a more detailed survey, see Hallett, The Roman Nude, 159–222,
especially 160–3 on Julio-Claudian hip-mantle images; cf. Niemeyer,
Studien, 55–9, 101–4 (although I do not always agree with Niemeyer’s
chronology). Plate 15 (= Arles: Musée de l’Arles et de la Provence
antiques, inv. FAN 92.00.215/2679) is from the Roman theatre at
Arles: see Boschung, Bildnisse, 141–2, no. 70.
See Hallett, The Roman Nude, 163–72, 256–8; cf. Bergmann, Die
Strahlen der Herrscher, esp. 103–7. On the Gemma Augustea (= Vienna:
Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. IX.a.79), which most likely dates to
after Augustus’ death, see Wolf-Rüdiger Megow, Kameen von Augustus
bis Alexander Severus, Berlin, 1987, 155–63, as well as Tonio Hölscher’s
well-referenced review in Hofter, ed., Kaiser Augustus, 371–3, no. 204.
For discussion of the lost statue, see Hallett, The Roman Nude, 97–9,
157–8, and above all Markus Sehlmeyer, Stadtrömische Ehrenstatuen der
republikanischen Zeit, Stuttgart, 1999, 255–9 (labelling this ‘der erste
dei nitive Beleg für eine nackte Ehrenstatue in Rom’, 259, and
adding that, by showing him naked, this statue portrayed Octavian
‘wie einen hellenistischen Herrscher’, 260); for the numismatic
evidence, see C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman Imperial Coinage, I: From 31 BC to
AD 69, revised edition, London, 1984, 60, no. 271, along with JeanBaptiste Giard, Catalogue des monnaies de l’empire romain: I Augustus, second
edition, Paris, 1988, 69–70, nos 68–72. The statue was apparently
still standing in the time of Vespasian: cf. Bergmann, Die Strahlen der
Herrscher, 110–11 n. 683. More generally on the ideology of such nude
portraits, see Zanker, Power of Images, 37–43, surveying numerous nude
images of Octavian, in the late 40s and 30s BCE, and discussing plate
17 at 41–2.
See Zanker, Power of Images, 79–100; Hallett, The Roman Nude, 160, 172–5;
Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 164–79.
Cf. Hallett, The Roman Nude, 260. Like others, Hallett reads a poignant
reference to this decision in Augustus’ i rst-person, monumental list
of ‘things done’ (Res Gestae): Augustus boasts of having removed and
melted down eighty silver statues of himself ‘standing, on horseback,
or in chariots’, turning them into gold gifts offered to Apollo (Res
Gestae, 24).
For further discussions of the statue (= Rome, Museo Nazionale
Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, inv. 56230), see Hofter, ed.,
Kaiser Augustus, 323–4, no. 168; cf. Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 186, 397–9;
Niemeyer, Studien, 40–7. Contrary to common belief, the motif long
predates Augustus’ title of pontifex maximus (‘high priest’) in 12 BCE, as
the list in Boschung, Bildnisse, 6 n. 57 testiies.
See Stemmer, Untersuchungen, 131–48; Vermeule, ‘Hellenistic and
Roman cuirassed statues’ [1=1959], 5–6; R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Royal
Portraits, Oxford, 1988, 32–3.
On the cuirassed image of Julius Caesar, see Stemmer, Untersuchungen,
144–5, along with Sehlmeyer, Stadtrömische Ehrenstatuen, 230–1; for
other images, cf. Hallett, The Roman Nude, 156–8.
See Zanker, Power of Images, 195–201; Paul Zanker, Forum Augustum:
Das Bildprogramm, Tübingen, 1968, 18–19. For discussion of a related
cuirassed image of Mars (complete with paludamentum) on the Ara
Pacis, see e.g. Paul Rehak, Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern
Campus Martius, ed. John G. Younger, Madison, WI, 2006, 113–15
(with plate 37).
90 For bibliography, see above, nn. 6, 24, as well as Stemmer,
Untersuchungen, who persuasively demonstrates that the cuirassed
statue was not a ‘geläuige Form der repräsentativen Ehrenstatue’
until the late Republic (142).
91 Cf. Hallett, The Roman Nude, 292–3, citing e.g. Liv. 45.39.17, Cic. Verr.
2.5.3–5, 2.5.32 and de Or. 2.194–5.
92 See Suet. Aug. 52, with discussion by Hallett, The Roman Nude, 100. On
the ‘real-life’ physical appearance of Augustus, see Boschung, Bildnisse,
93–6: Suet. Aug. 79.2 explicitly comments on Augustus’ ‘shortness of
stature’ (staturam breuem).
93 For the phrase, see Rhet. ad Her. 4.9: the classic discussion is by
Felix Preisshofen and Paul Zanker, ‘Relex einer eklektischen
Kunstanschauung beim Auctor Ad Herennium’, Dialoghi di Archeologia, 4/5,
1970/1, 100–19, arguing that ‘eklektisches Bilden seit dem späteren
Hellenismus bewusst als soches relektiert und goutiert wurde’ (110).
94 At the same time, as Niemeyer, Studien, 51, rightly points out, the
military cuirass of the Prima Porta Augustus is in another sense
highly unbelievable: ‘Der reich mit igürlichem Relief verzierte
Metallpanzer aber, wie ihn die Statue des Augustus von Prima Porta
aufweist, läßt sich außerhalb der Gattung der Panzerstatuen selbst
nicht belegen und ist sicherlich nie getragen worden’.
95 Cf. Gergel, ‘Costume as geographical indicator’, 191: ‘Although
several rare examples, such as the Augustus of Prima Porta, show the
paludamentum around the hips, the garment is usually worn draped
over the upper torso and fastened at either the left or right shoulder
by means of a ibula, or pin.’
96 Plate 20 = Istanbul: Arkeoloji Müzeleri Müdürlüğü (inv. 709): for
discussion, see Andrew Stewart, Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and
Hellenistic Politics, Berkeley, CA, 1993, 334–6 (with bibliography at
427). On the Prima Porta Augustus’ combination of cuirass and
hip-mantle, compare Maggi, ‘Lo Hüftmanteltypus’, 66: Maggi
likewise concludes of this ‘iconograicamante e semanticamente’
new combination of attributes that it parades Augustus’ military
credentials while self-consciously incorporating ‘una componente
che sembra ovvio pensare proiettata nella sfera del trascendente,
del divino’. In the case of the Prima Porta statue, we know that the
paludamentum was painted a kingly shade of scarlet, developing this
royal sort of association (see Liverani, ‘Der Augustus von Prima
Porta’, 191: ‘eines der deutlichsten Zeichen des Status des Augustus’).
On the Roman hip-mantle, and its harking back to Hellenistic
iconographic traditions, cf. Hallett, The Roman Nude, 120–32, esp.
123–7.
97 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude E.
M. Anscombe, third edition, Oxford, 1972, 193–229, with excellent
discussion by Mitchell, Picture Theory, 45–57.
98 See Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects, second edition, Cambridge,
1980, esp. 205–26; Wollheim, Painting as an Art, Princeton, NJ, 1987,
46–77; Wollheim, ‘On pictorial representation’, Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 56, 1998, 217–26.
99 See Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the
Pagan World to Christianity, Cambridge, 1995, 168: ‘Just as the cuirass
bears a signum – a standard which represents Rome triumphant –
so the whole image stands as a signum, a sign linking the imperial
bearer and redeemer of standards with us.’ On the etymology and
meanings, see OLD s.v. signum 10 (‘a military ensign or standard’), and
12 (‘a sculpted igure, commonly of a deity, statue, image; a igure
engraved, embroidered, etc., in relief; a igure in a painting’). For
further discussion on the terminology, cf. Stewart, Statues in Roman
Society, 20–8.
100 On the way in which the wings of the eagle play visually with the linea
alba of the chest, see McEwan, Vitruvius, 257. Whatever we make of this
central signum, we must acknowledge its ‘merkwürdige Mischung aus
aquila und signum’ (Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 210; cf. Pollini, Studies in
Augustan ‘Historical’ Reliefs, 48–9).
101 On such ‘hybrid’ monstra as a particular obsession of Augustan art and
poetry, see the essays in Philip Hardie, ed., Paradox and the Marvellous in
Augustan Literature and Culture, Oxford, 2009.
102 This sort of play with two- and three-dimensional representation is
277
to be found elsewhere on the cuirass. One thinks, for example, of the
barbarian captive above Apollo (see plate 11): both head and body are
carved in proi le, but with sharp differentiation between inscribed
111
shallow surface (on the igure’s left-hand side) and the projecting
right-hand limbs.
112
103 See Simon, ‘Altes und Neues’, 226–33. There are nonetheless
problems with the reconstruction: see above, n. 20.
104 Cf. Liverani, ‘Der Augustus von Prima Porta’, 190: ‘Von großem
Interesse ist schließlich das Ergebnis, dass die Haut des Augustus, des
Eros und der Personen auf dem Panzer sowie der Grund des Panzers
selbst nie bemalt und im Originalton des Marmors belassen waren.’
For Liverani, it is the high quality of the marble that explains this
feature. But it is worth noting how Liverani independently connects 113
this issue of colour to the (non-)believability of the cuirass: ‘Nur
die dekorativen Details waren bemalt und sollten, soweit nach
den technischen Mitteln der Zeit möglich, realistisch erscheinen.
Anderseits ist es gerade der farbliche Realismus der Reliefs, der den
Panzer als Ganzes unrealistich erscheinen lässt’ (191).
105 Tonio Hölscher captures the allegorical point when he writes: ‘Der
gedemütige Osten und die Repräsentanten des bezwungen Westens
fügen sich zu einem Schaubild der römischen Weltherrschaft
zusammen’ (in Hofter, ed., Kaiser Augustus, 387).
106 The Greek and Roman art of personiication – and its implications 114
for ancient ‘allegorical’ understandings of images – remains a
conspicuously under-theorized area of Classical archaeological
research: Emma Stafford, Worshipping Virtues: Personiication and the Divine 115
in Ancient Greece, London, 2005, offers a useful introduction to the
ideological stakes in the context of Greek literary texts; on the visual
arts speciically, see chapters 14–17 of Emma Stafford and Judith
Herrin, eds, Personiication in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium,
London, 2005, as well as Jessica Hughes’ recent intervention in this
journal (‘Personiications and the ancient viewer: The case of the
Hadrianeum “Nations”’, Art History, 32: 1, 2009, 1–20); cf. also Amy C.
Smith, ‘Personiication: Not just a symbolic mode’, in Tyler Jo Smith
and Dimitris Plantzos, eds, A Companion to Greek Art, Malden, MA, 2012,
vol. 2, 440–55.
107 Robin Osborne, The History Written on the Classical Greek Body, Cambridge,
2011, esp. 102–5 (quotations from 104); cf. also Meister, Der Körper des 116
Princeps, 153–92, concerning ‘den Körper des Princeps als Metapher
für das Gemeinwesen’ in Rome.
108 For the metaphor, see Jean Béranger, Recherches sur l’aspect idéologique du
principat, Basel, 1953, 218–52, along with Dietmar Kienast, Augustus, 117
Princeps und Monarch, Darmstadt, 1982, 416–17 n. 236; Kienast, ‘Corpus
imperii: Überlegungen zum Reichsgedanken der Römer’, in Gerhard
Wirth et al., eds, Romanitas-Christianitas: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte
118
und Literatur der römischen Kaiserzeit. Johannes Straub zum 70. Geburtstag,
Berlin, 1982, 1–17. McEwan, Vitruvius, 275–98, also discusses the
concept in connection with Vitruvius’ On Architecture, ending with a 119
comparison with the Prima Porta Augustus: ‘To encase imperium in
a stony skin as permanent and impermeable as that of the cuirassed
statue of Augustus from Prima Porta: that, ultimately, is the point of
assembling and ordering knowledge Vitruvius calls architectura into a
complete corpus’ (298).
109 Ovid, Trist. 2.231–2. Cf. Béranger, Recherches, 224: ‘Dans les termes de
cette comparison, corpus garde le sens proper. Mais le mot habillait
120
si bien l’idée que celle-ci évoquait cella-là, et vice versa. Ainsi naît
la métaphore’; cf. Kienast, ‘Corpus imperii’, 10–11. More generally on
the shifting ideology of imperium in the Augustan period, see John
S. Richardson, ‘Imperium Romanum: Empire and the language
of power’, Journal of Roman Studies, 81, 1991, 1–9, esp. 7: Richardson
charts a change from ‘the already existing senses of imperium meaning
a “power” as well as the power of a magistrate . . . [to] the use of
imperium to describe the corporate power of the Roman state’ (citing
e.g. Tac. Ann. 11.61 and Hist. 1.16).
121
110 Florus 2.14.5–6. Other earlier parallels are cited by Béranger,
Recherches, 228, among them Suet. Aug. 48, on how Augustus
‘never failed to treat all the parts with consideration as limbs and
components of his empire’ (nec aliter uniuersos quam membra partisque imperii 122
curae habuit). As McEwan, Vitruvius, 275–6 concludes, ‘the notion of
what we call the Roman Empire – a spatial unit with a centre, Rome,
and a clearly marked limit or periphery – i rst took shape under
Augustus Caesar, through whom, as through the golden milestone
and the Prima Porta statue, all expressions of unity were initially
formulated.’
Suet. Aug. 80: corpore traditur maculoso dispersis per pectus atque aluum genetiuis
notis in modum et ordinem ac numerum stellarum caelestis ursae . . .
On Aen. 8.626–728, Philip Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium,
Oxford, 1986, esp. 337–76, remains foundational; compare also
Michael Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid, New Haven,
1998, 119–88 (with more detailed bibliography at 234 n. 1). For the
relationship between the cuirass of the Prima Porta Augustus and the
Virgilian shield, see especially Sauron, Quis Deum?, 521–3, and Elsner,
Art and the Roman Viewer, 164–6.
In this connection, one might cite a still older epic paradigm for
both the lower ‘earthly’ igure and the celestial personiications in
the upper part of the cuirass: it is with the depiction of the ‘Earth’,
as well as that of the ‘heavens’, ‘the sea’ and ‘the indefatigable sun
and the full moon’ that the Homeric description of Achilles’ shield
begins at Iliad 18.483–4. I return elsewhere to the ‘orderings’ of the
Virgilian shield ecphrasis, and to the signiicance of its ‘middle’ in
particular: Michael J. Squire, ‘The ordo of rhetoric and the rhetoric of
ordo’, in Jaś Elsner and Michel Mayer, eds, Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture,
Cambridge, forthcoming.
See Aen. 8.731, on Aeneas ‘raising to his shoulder the fame and
fortunes of his descendants’ (attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum): for
discussion, see Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs, 152–4.
Translations of some of the most important texts are collected in
Jerome J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents, Cambridge,
1990, 75–9; more thorough (though by no means exhaustive) is
Johannes Overbeck, Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden
Künste bei den Griechen, Leipzig, 1868, 166–75, nos 929–77. For the
Roman rhetorical recourse to Polyclitus, see Christoff Neumeister,
‘Polyklet in der römischen Literatur’, in Beck et al., eds, Polyklet, 428–
49. Among the most insightful discussions are Sauron, Quis Deum?,
523–4; Maderna-Lauter, ‘Polyklet in hellenistischer und römischer
Zeit’; Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’, 267–76; Galinsky, Augustan
Culture, 25; McEwan, Vitruvius, 264–72; and Hölscher, Language of Images,
93.
For discussion, see Neumeister, ‘Polyklet in der römischen Literatur’,
438–9. On the complex connotations of the adjectives sanctus and
grauis, see Jerome J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History
and Terminology, New Haven, 1974, esp. 234–6, 381–2, 422–3.
For discussions, see (inter alios) Andrew Stewart, ‘The canon of
Polyclitus: A question of evidence’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 98, 1978,
122–31; Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body, 86–97; Tanner, The Invention of Art
History in Ancient Greece, 117–21 (with more detailed bibliography).
Plin. HN 34.55: fecit et quem canona artiices uocant liniamenta artis ex eo petentes
ueluti a lege quadam, solusque hominum artem ipsam fecisse artis opere iudicatur.
On Augustus’ choice of name, see Zanker, Power of Images, 98–100.
Florus declares that the name was chosen over that of ‘Romulus’
because it ‘seemed more sacred and reverent . . . so that [Augustus]
might be made holy by the name itself and by the title’ (sanctius et
reuerentius uisum est nomen Augusti, ut . . . ipso nomine et titulo consecraretur,
2.34.66); according to Cassius Dio, moreover, the name was selected
because it implied ‘something more than what is human’ (ὡς καὶ
πλεῖόν τι ἢ κατὰ ἀνθρώπους, 53.16.7).
On the whole question of ‘divine assimilation’ in the early principate,
see e.g. John Pollini, ‘Man or god: Divine assimilation and imitation
in the late Republic and early principate’, in Kurt A. Raalaub and
Mark Toher, eds, Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus
and his Principate, Berkeley, CA, 334–357. On the staged ‘ambiguities’
of Augustus’ imperial status, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Civilis
princeps: Between citizen and king’, Journal of Roman Studies, 72, 1982,
32–48, along with e.g. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, 168–72 (again in
connection with the Prima Porta statue).
Still fundamental on ‘divine emperors or the symbolic unity of the
Roman Empire’ is Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge,
1978, 197–242.
For an excellent discussion, see Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, 161–72,
responding to e.g. Simon R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial
Cult in Asia Minor, Cambridge, 1984, 170–206, esp. 185–6 (‘the divine
aspects of the [Prima Porta] statue are merely hints of divinity and
278
Michael Squire
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
do not come into direct conlict with oficial policy’, 186). Cf. also
Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’, 280 n. 69 (on the question of
implied mortality/divinity): ‘having it both ways is in fact a hallmark
of Augustan political imagery.’
The detail is most often cited as evidence that the statue is a
posthumous imitation of a bronze original where Augustus did wear
boots: cf. e.g. Gross, Zur Augustusstatue, 166–7. On the interpretive
stakes, see Pollini, Studies in Augustan ‘Historical’ Reliefs, 41–2, and Simon,
‘Altes und Neues’, 218–19.
For the genealogical claims – at least as visually materialized – see
Zanker, Power of Images, 167–238.
For bibliography, see above, n. 27.
On such spolia opima, see Ida Östenberg, Staging the World: Spoils, Captives,
and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession, Oxford, 2009, esp.
19–30 (with further references). Scholars have typically tried to
identify the precise conquest ‘symbolized’ by this tropaeum rather than
consider its ontological signiicance: most associate it with conquests
in Gaul (e.g Woelcke, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Tropaions’, 180–
91; Picard, Les trophées romains, 279; cf. Ingholt, ‘The Prima Porta Statue
of Augustus. Part II’, 312) or Dalmatia (e.g. Pollini, Studies in Augustan
‘Historical’ Reliefs, 69 n. 114a), although others suggest a broader Celtic
signiicance (e.g. Gross, Zur Augustusstatue, 153; Simon, Der Augustus
von Prima Porta, 9). Whatever else we make of the feature, Ingholt is
surely right to emphasize its peculiarity as breastplate device: ‘the
Prima Porta statue is the only known cuirassed statue on which the
back is decorated’, and ‘the sculptor must have had a very important
reason for breaking this otherwise universally accepted practice’
(312, pace e.g. Meyer, Kunst und Geschichte, 137–9); for this reason, the
interpretation of the back as ‘nichts als Füllung einer störenden Leere’
(Kähler, Augustusstatue, 14) strikes me as unsustainable.
McEwan, Vitruvius, 266: ‘It is almost to stress the self-conscious
deliberation with which the Polykleitan armor has been put on . . .
that, on the back of the cuirass . . . the statue’s sculptor has carved a
trophy – another much smaller cuirass, emptied of its vanquished
owner.’
See e.g. Gergel, ‘Costume as geographical indicator’, 195 (associating
it with Victory); cf. Kähler, Augustusstatue, 14.
Cf. e.g. Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 401: ‘it is . . . a paradox that the most
famous cuirassed statue to have survived is that of Augustus from
Prima Porta’, and compare e.g. Rose, Dynastic Commemoration, 74, with
the list of other examples at 254 n. 25.
Cf. Vermeule, ‘Hellenistic and Roman cuirassed statues’ [1 =1959],
34–5, nos 13–20. Vermeule also discusses a later statue excavated
from the Forum of Augustus, even attributing this to the same
sculptor as that of the Prima Porta (‘Hellenistic and Roman cuirassed
statues’ [5 = 1978], 90, no. 13a). In addition, there are a host of JulioClaudian examples: Vermeule, ‘Hellenistic and Roman cuirassed
statues’ [1=1959], 35–44, nos 21–77 (and compare e.g. Emilio Marin
and Michael J. Vickers, The Rise and Fall of an Imperial Shrine: Roman Sculpture
from the Augusteum at Narona, Split, 2004, 148–50, on a cuirassed statue
from the Augusteum at Narona).
For the parallels, see Pollini, ‘Augustus from Prima Porta’,
265–6 (with further bibliography). Cf. Stemmer, Untersuchungen,
145, concluding ‘daß die Darstellung im Panzer zu dieser Zeit
bereits verbreiteter gewesen sein muß als es der willkürliche
Erhaltungszustand vortäuscht’, and that there must have been ‘andere
Panzerstatuen des Augustus bzw. Octavian’.
On the statue, see Fittschen, ‘Zur Panzerstatue in Cherchel’,
convincingly arguing that iconographic and stylistic elements
‘weisen also auf die Entstehung der Statue in Cherchel noch in
augusteischer Zeit’ (202), and supposing a date between 2 BCE and
14 CE; cf. Stemmer, Untersuchungen, 10–12, no. 1.5, and Vermeule,
‘Hellenistic and Roman cuirassed statues’ [1=1959], 55, no. 179,
along with van Keuren, ‘Cosmic symbolism’, 185. Zanker, Power of
Images, 223, goes still further, concluding that ‘since . . . the decorative
program of the cuirass is closely related to that of the Augustus from
Prima Porta, we may suspect that the Cherchel statue is one of several
copies of a major monument created in Rome’. Subsequent imperial
cuirassed statues clearly looked back to the statue type, not least
in the late Flavian and Domitianic period (cf. Geyer, ‘Costume as
geographical indicator’, 203).
133 Among numerous other examples, one might cite the statue of
Marcus Holconius Rufus from Pompeii (Naples, Museo Nazionale
Archeologico, inv. 6233: cf. John H. D’Arms, ‘Pompei and Rome in
the Augustan age and beyond: The eminence of Gens Holconia’, in
Robert I. Curtis, ed., Studia Pompeiana and Classica in Honor of Wilhelmina F.
Jashemski, New Rochelle, 1988, 51–68). As Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 212,
admits, ‘the habit [of clothing such igures with cuirasses] was no
doubt sparked by imperial representation’.
134 See Richard T. Neer, ‘The lion’s eye: Imitation and uncertainty in
Attic red-igure’, Representations, 51, 1995, 118–53, developed in Neer,
Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting, Cambridge, 2002, esp. 9–86
(quotation from 85).
135 Plate 16 = Berlin: Antikensammlung Sk. 1752: for discussions, see
e.g. Martin Robertson, A History of Greek Art, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1975,
90 –1; John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period. A Handbook,
London, 1978, 88; Peter Bol et al., Die Geschichte der antiken Bildhauerkunst:
I, Frühgriechische Plastik, vol. 1, Mainz, 2002, 265, 324, Abb. 351a–d.
More generally on the Greek igurative games of representing bodily
armour, see Lissarrague, ‘Corps et armes’.
136 For an overview, see especially Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 370–5 on
the Augustan ‘allowance for contradictions’, most starkly in the Aeneid.
The essays in Hardie, ed., Paradox and the Marvellous, now offer a wideranging analysis of the theme, and across a range of interdisciplinary
perspectives.
137 In this sense, the statue’s epic pretensions i nd their playful
counterpoint in the combined visual and verbal games of the socalled Tabulae Iliacae, an assemblage of early Imperial miniature marble
reliefs which overtly toyed with the multivalence of both image and
text (and in markedly politicized ways): for my own interpretations,
see Michael J. Squire, The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae
Iliacae, Oxford, 2011.
138 Zanker, Power of Images, 3 (translating Macht der Bilder, 13).
139 Quotations from Zanker, Power of Images, 335, 338, 335 (= Macht der
Bilder, 329, 332, 329).
140 Cf. Verity Platt, ‘Where the wild things are: Locating the marvellous
in Augustan wall-painting’, in Hardie, ed., Paradox and the Marvellous,
41–74: ‘When traditional mechanisms of power had literally
been supplanted, it is not surprising to i nd that conventional
representational categories were being radically rethought’ (74).
141 The key discussion of the knowing and deliberate ambiguities of
Augustan political self-dei nition remains Andrew Wallace-Hadrill,
‘Rome’s cultural revolution’, Journal of Roman Studies, 79, 1989, 157–64:
Wallace-Hadrill responds to Zanker’s fundamental argument that
Augustus simply ‘purged’ the artistic ambiguities of the late Republic,
resulting in a new, ‘propagandistic’ ‘ritual of power’ (see e.g. Zanker,
Power of Images, esp. 1–4); cf. Stevenson, ‘The problem with nude
honoriic statuary’, esp. 57–66. Also important is Jaś Elsner, ‘Cult and
sculpture: Sacriice in the Ara Pacis Augustae’, Journal of Roman Studies,
81, 1991, 50–61, and Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, esp. 192–210.
142 Cf. Platt, ‘Where the wild things are’, discussing (inter alia) Hor. AP
1–23 and Vitr. 7.5 on 51–7, and relating these testimonia to the monstra
of contemporary wall paintings: ‘incursions of the monstrous,
hybrid, and fantastical not only signify bad poetry, but also threaten
the seemingly “natural” unity of form and meaning that Horace’s
poetry ascribes to the Augustan social and political order’ (53).
143 Platt, ‘Where the wild things are’, 71–4, quotation from 72. The best
discussion of the ‘ambivalences and contradictions’ of the Ara Pacis
imagery is Elsner, ‘Cult and sculpture’, 61: ‘If the Ara Pacis, a prime
monument located in the great new imperial complex in the Campus
Martius . . . , could evoke ambiguity and uncertainty even during
the sacriicial ritual for which it had been designed, can we be sure
that no other Augustan monuments might work in a similar way?
If the imagery of the Ara Pacis could be read in more than one way
by different viewers, how can we decide which was most normal in
Roman culture?’
144 Cf. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, 10: ‘What changed was the gradual
elimination of the self-ironising (even “post-modernist”) elements
in Roman imagery in favour of a different kind of religious frame of
cultural interpretation – a frame overwhelmingly scriptural.’
279

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