The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Still, the Greeks found one sculptor whose work expressed their ideal. Polyclitus was said to be “the only man who has embodied art itself in a work of art.” A “sculptor’s sculptor,” he became the undisputed legislator for his art. While Vitruvius’s “orders” of classic architecture were only Roman afterthoughts about Greek works in earlier centuries, Polyclitus was himself a great Greek sculptor and his “canon” was a product of Greek sculpture’s Great Age, the mid-fifth century B.C. It was as if Vitruvius had designed and built the Parthenon, and then written the specifications in a treatise on architecture.

  Polyclitus’s bronze figure of a nude male athlete, the Doryphoros, or Spear Bearer, came to be called the “canon” (the measure). In the Roman centuries this became the best-known, most influential Greek statue, with the power of a legendary archetype.

  Polyclitus came from Argos, the rival of Sparta in the Peloponnesus. Pupil of the great Ageladas, who was the teacher of both Myron and Phidias, he became the leading sculptor of the Age of Pericles, a prolific sculptor of athletic victors, and the paragon of the classic style. He won a famous competition against Phidias and others for the statue of an Amazon at Ephesus. His spectacular gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess Hera for her temple at Argos was praised by Strabo as even more beautiful, although slightly smaller, than Phidias’s Olympian Zeus.

  His Doryphoros survives only in Roman copies and copies of copies. And we have only a few phrases from Polyclitus’s definitive treatise on sculpture, also called the “canon,” which provided conundrums for archaeologists to match the mysteries of classical beauty. Was his statue shaped to conform to the principles of his treatise or was his treatise written about the statue? We cannot know. But belief in his rules for making a beautiful statue persisted. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79), the versatile Roman encyclopedist, four centuries after Polyclitus still credited him with “perfecting” the science of sculpture in metal, just as Phidias “had opened up its possibilities.” “Polyclitus … made a statue which artists call the ‘Canon’ and from which they derive the basic forms of their art, as if from some kind of law.” Polyclitus’s often repeated axiom was that “perfection arises through many numbers.” Even if a sculptor deviated only slightly in each of his measures, he warned, in the end these could add up to a large error.

  The canon, too, could protect the sculptor from the fickle public taste. A cautionary tale, still repeated seven centuries after Polyclitus’s death, explained:

  Polyclitus made two statues at the same time, one which would be pleasing to the crowd and the other according to the principles of his art. In accordance with the opinion of each person who came into his workshop, he altered something and changed its form, submitting to the advice of each. Then he put both statues on display. The one was marvelled at by everyone, and the other was laughed at. Thereupon Polyclitus said, “But the one which you find fault with, you made yourselves; while the one which you marvel at, I made.”

  The unmistakable Greek classic style may be a product of its mathematically prescribed proportions.

  The ancient Greeks had long associated measure with beauty. “Measure and commensurability,” wrote Plato in the Philebus, “are everywhere identifiable with beauty and excellence.” This notion, the heart of Polyclitus’s canon, Aristotle himself traced back to Pythagoras’s discovery that “the qualities of numbers exist in a musical scale [harmonia], in the heavens, and in many other things.” If the sounds of an octave could be expressed in harmonious proportions, why not also the harmony of the whole universe? The surviving fragments of Polyclitus’s treatise, finding sculptural beauty in numbers, add his bit to the Pythagorean tradition. When Vitruvius, centuries later, expounded his own famous system of proportions, we have seen that his symmetria for the architectural orders plainly drew on a sculptural canon.

  That Polyclitus probably worked by his own canon we know from repeated complaints that his statues were too much alike, “almost all composed after the same pattern.” Lysippus (flourished 328 B.C.), the greatest sculptor of the Age of Alexander the Great, became famous for his slenderized variations from Polyclitus’s canon. A native of Sikyon, near Polyclitus’s birthplace, Lysippus was reputed to have made some fifteen hundred statues, more than any other artist of his time. Still none of his original works has survived. His many portraits of Alexander the Great, beginning when Alexander was only a boy, were said to record the development of both a great artist and a great subject.

  Creating a statue to resemble a particular person was a new idea for the Greeks and had to be introduced as a kind of “style.” Pliny credits Lysistratus, the brother of Lysippus with “inventing” realistic portraiture. “He was the first person who modelled a likeness in plaster of a human being from a living face, and established the method of pouring wax into this plaster mould and then making final corrections in the wax cast.… It was this man who introduced the method of making realistic likenesses. Before him they sought to make statues as beautiful as possible.”

  20

  For Family, Empire—and History

  THE Romans sought something different. No longer fixing their eyes on Plato’s “perfect truth as a perpetual standard of reference, to be contemplated with the minutest care,” they granted the individual in all his warts and wrinkles a claim to sculptural immortality. Roman artists aimed to make that person survive in bronze or marble, “thereby not allowing human appearances to be forgotten nor the dust of ages to prevail against men.” To celebrate the individual was the distinctive aim of Roman sculpture. And celebrate in every sense of the word—to make public, to honor, and to preserve. “Is there anyone,” Polybius (205–125 B.C.) asked, “who would not be edified by seeing these portraits of men who were renowned for their excellence and by having them all present as if they were living and breathing? Is there any sight which would be more ennobling than this?”

  The “ennobling” custom that propelled their art of portrait sculpture began in the Roman funeral. After the procession to the Forum for the eulogy and after the burial rites, the family returned to put a portrait of the deceased in the most prominent part of the house. “The portrait is a mask,” Polybius explained, “which is wrought with the utmost attention being paid to preserving a likeness in regard to both its shape and its contour. Displaying these portraits at public sacrifices, they honor them in a spirit of emulation, and when a prominent member of the family dies, they carry them in the funeral procession, putting them on those who seem most like [the deceased] in size and build.… One could not easily find a sight finer than this for a young man who was in love with fame and goodness.” These imagines, as the Romans called them, made of wax and painted, were fastened on busts and kept in small wooden shrines in the inner walls of the atrium. There could be no mistake about who was the person portrayed, for under each shrine was inscribed that person’s name, merits, and achievements. These images in the atrium wall were connected with one another by colored lines, displaying in sculpture the family’s genealogical chart for all who entered the house. On festival days the shrines were opened and the busts crowned with bay leaves. At family funerals, to recall eminent ancestors, people put on these masks and walked in procession before the body.

  The right to parade these images was a privilege of noble families. Beginning in the Republic, the custom actually helped create a Roman “nobility.” The name for a member of this new class, nobilis, originally meant celebrated, renowned, or well-known (from Latin noscere, to know). Members of this “noble” class came to be “known” by name and facial features because their family masks had been carried through the streets. So Roman portraits were creators as well as creatures of nobility.

  Recognizable likenesses of individual people were not unknown before the days of the Roman Republic. In Old Kingdom Egyptian tombs the figure of the deceased had to be recognizable so the Ka could find its proper habitation. But the Egyptian tomb statue was not a memorial. It was a substitute for the person, to provide an e
ternal body in case the mummy was destroyed. Art historians debate whether the first drawn and sculpted human figures were of individuals or of types or symbols. Some “primitive” figures appear to be caricatures of individuals. Unlike Greek statues, the Egyptian tomb statues were not intended for public display. In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt the public statues in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. appear to represent types.

  In the early fifth century B.C., when some Greeks began to try to individualize figures, their love of the ideal type expressed in the canons of Polyclitus proved overwhelming. Even as they made their athletic nudes more and more “natural” and perfected the ideal proportions, they still did not make them more individual. When the Romans made copies of the full-size figures of the nude body, they commonly copied them as busts or herms (pillars topped by busts or heads). The Romans liked to adorn their houses, gardens, and public places with portraits of the great figures of Greek history, philosophy, and poetry. Of Demosthenes alone more than forty different representations survive. They are identified as Demosthenes not by facial features but by the name inscribed. The individualized figure of the tyrannicide, Aristogeiton, erected in 477 or 476 B.C. is a rare, perhaps unique example. We have little reason to believe that the Roman portraits used to commemorate famous Greeks really resembled their subjects.

  But by the fourth century B.C. Greek portraits do become individualized. It was these Greek artists who would teach Romans the art of portraiture and so help them achieve their distinctively Roman art. By that time the Greek portraits that purport to show us Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Socrates have individualizing features. Were these mere fantasies of the sculptors? When the Athenian statesman Lycurgus (c.390–c.325 B.C.) rebuilt the theater of Dionysus (c.340–330 B.C.), he erected portrait bronzes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all of whom had been dead for at least seventy years. Although these likenesses could hardly have been shaped by anyone who had known the men, they showed that a taste for individualized sculpture was developing. Masks worn by actors in the theater were now supposed to resemble the people who were personified.

  After the decline of the city-state, Greek sculptors had produced another great age in the Hellenistic flowering. Instead of pursuing the athletic ideal, they made realistic portrait heads of unique individuals. The era began appropriately with a now-famous, persuasively individual bust of Aristotle (died 322), followed by portraits of Demosthenes (died 322 B.C.; statue dedicated 280 B.C.) and Epicurus (died 270 B.C.). These were only a sample, for they left us “portraits” too of Zeno, Diogenes, Aesop, and the familiar blind Homer. The Greeks in this Hellenistic age were actually perfecting a new genre of realistic fiction. Sculptors offered their imagined unique individuals in an art that would flourish among the Romans.

  The many portraits of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) betray this new kind of realism. While they show his development during his short life, they portray him as the fictionalized hero. The Hellenistic era that followed his death left countless portraits of other rulers, many on coins.

  The contrast between the Greek and the Roman spirit was dramatized in the sculptural creations of the Roman Republic. It was the contrast between Greek idealism, the search for the perfect, and Roman verism, which focused on the world’s miscellany. The abstract beauty of myth was displaced by personality and politics. On the Parthenon the victory of the Greeks over the Persians was depicted not directly in the historic battles but obliquely in battles of Giants, Gods, and Amazons. Greek sculptors, even when they reached for portraiture, simply depicted eminent lawgivers, philosophers, and poets.

  The Roman demand for portraits that had begun in the funeral customs of noble families reached down to include ordinary citizens, women, and children. It became as common for a Roman man of affairs to commission portraits of his family as it would be for the seventeenth-century Dutch burghers. The portraits that Romans copied from the Greeks were mostly busts and herms, but portraits of their own men and women were often whole life-size figures, fully clothed in toga, military regalia, or domestic garment. Through these we can write a history of Roman costume, style, and coiffure. We can date the portraits of women by their hairdo—from the simple parted design with central roll of the Augustan Age to the high honeycomb and coils of the Flavians and Antonines.

  Under the Roman Republic, sculpture still served family ritual—now by ruthlessly depicting wrinkles and warts and creases. Because of the funeral function of portraits, old age naturally became a common subject. But when Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (63 B.C.–A.D. 14) was given the title “Augustus” (exalted, sacred) in 27 B.C. and became the object of worship, his portrait had to be apotheosized. As sculpture became the vehicle of politics and the visual symbol of empire, sculptors were posed a new dual problem. They had to offer recognizable reproducible likenesses of this Augustus, to unite imperial loyalties behind this particular man. Yet the figures had to be sufficiently idealized to serve a religious ritual function, raising him above human rank. An ideal figure by the canons of Polyclitus or anybody else would not do. Nor would an unflattering portrait of the idiosyncratic individual. So, with the reign of the imperial divine Augustus there emerged a new “classicism.” While the Greeks had given their gods an ideal human form, the Romans strived to make their rulers godlike.

  As portraits of Augustus and the imperial family spread out to the provinces, Greek sculptors and their Roman disciples made an enduring public record of Roman history. The need to advertise each emperor, and the miscellaneous succession of emperors, invigorated art with a new political purpose, originating in the distinctive Roman classicism of the reign of Augustus (31 B.C.–A.D. 14).

  In portraits of Augustus, his aquiline nose and the characteristic divided locks of hair above his forehead are easily recognized. But he has the body of a god, in classic Greek proportions. He is always in the prime of life, never old or aging. The most famous of his surviving portraits (the Augustus of Prima Porta, Livia’s Villa; now in the Vatican) shows him wearing ornate Roman armor, right hand raised to address the army, left hand holding a staff or lance. His imperial ventures are recorded in relief on his armor. Another type of Augustus depicts him draped and veiled performing sacrifices as pontifex maximus. Still another is a simple royal head. The other patricians, too, live on in only mildly idealized portraits. This is a period of unforgettable faces. One Roman nobleman is so concerned for his family status that he displays in each hand the bust of an ancestor.

  Politicians used portrait sculpture for extravagant self-advertising. Cicero himself so indicted Verres (73–71 B.C.), the rapacious governor of Sicily:

  There was an arch set up by him [Verres] in the forum of Syracuse, upon which stood a nude figure of his son and also a statue of Verres himself on horseback looking out over the province which he has denuded. In addition there were statues of him in every location, a fact which seemed to demonstrate that he was able to set up in Syracuse just about as many statues as he took away. In Rome too we see on the base of statues to him in large letters: “Given by the federation of Sicily.”

  Augustan portraits were only a beginning. Likenesses of succeeding Roman emperors followed without exception: the vigorous Tiberius, the uncouth Claudius, the flabby Nero, the majestic Hadrian (reigned 117–138), the reflective Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161–180), the sinister Caracalla (reigned 211–217). For us the sculptors have made the history of the Empire more vividly personal than any other era of antiquity.

  Though the glories and tragedies of Augustan Rome were military, its preeminent sculptural monument advertised peace. After a long series of far-flung battles climaxing in the Battle of Actium against Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C., Augustus had pacified Gaul and Spain. Then the Altar of Augustan Peace (Ara Pacis) was decreed by the Senate in 13 B.C. and dedicated in 9 B.C. on the Campus Martius. This Altar of Peace, which luckily we can see substantially reconstructed in Rome today, was a Roman foil for the Parthenon. The Athenians had glorified their
patron goddess with ideal figures in the Panathenaic procession. But the Ara Pacis celebrated Emperor Augustus himself, and portrayed him followed by the members of his family, the officers of the government, the priests, and a sample of the Romans who were there to dedicate the site on July 4, 13 B.C. The frieze on the walled enclosure (thirty-eight by thirty-four feet) surrounding the altar depicts in realistic detail the actual dedicatory procession. The imperial children are looking bored in their little togas. One tugs at the garment of the adult in front of him as his older brother looks on reproachfully. This pictorial archive removes any uncertainty that the emperor himself and the highest dignitaries were really there.

  Still, the sculptors of the Ara Pads had not forgotten the Greek tradition to which they owed their arts. An allegorical panel of Mother Earth—or perhaps Italia—in the Greek manner provides a rotund symbol of fertility, flanked by two personified winds, all localized in a pastoral landscape of the kind Virgil (70–19 B.C.) was romanticizing in his Eclogues. The historical event is validated and sanctified by the legendary prototype as we see Aeneas, the founder of Rome, sacrificing on his arrival at his promised land. To confirm Augustus as the second founder of Rome, another panel shows Romulus and Remus. On the processional panels and smaller friezes ordinary Romans are casually conversing. The sculptures become a journalistic report framed in the pastoral and patriotic tradition.

  Roman sculptors remained faithful servants of historical journalism, bringing alive for us the struggles and triumphs of their Empire. Historical arches, in a technique rivaling modern photojournalism, depicted the world-shaking events as Romans wanted to see them. The monuments themselves remind us of the wondrous continuity of the Empire and its works. Although the emperor Titus (A.D. 79–81) had a short reign, a series of catastrophes and good fortunes made him a large figure in Roman history. He worked energetically to repair the destruction caused by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79. And then the fire that devastated Rome in A.D. 80 gave him another grand opportunity for reconstruction. He had the glory of finishing the Colosseum, which his father, Vespasian (A.D. 70–79), had begun, to replace the amphitheater destroyed in the fire of Nero’s time, and he hastily built magnificent public baths. Titus’s opening festivities, according to Suetonius, were “of the utmost magnificence and lavishness.” He staged a mock naval battle by flooding an old amphitheater built by Augustus near the Tiber, along with spectacular gladiatorial combats and a show with five thousand animals.