How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  83 (top left) The colossal head of Octavian in a courtyard of the Vatican, c.30 BC.

  84 (top right) Head of Augustus, c.25 BC, looking less radiant.

  85 (above) Relief from the Altar of Augustan Peace, Rome, 13–9 BC.

  The accompanying texts survive.The literature produced under the patronage of Augustus and his wealthy friends (notably a certain Maecenas) was, like Augustan art and architecture, of high stylistic quality, and similarly consistent in its message. One poet, Ovid, incurred the emperor’s displeasure, and was sent into self-pitying exile; others – Virgil, Horace and Propertius – found modes of extolling the Augustan regime that were delicate, memorable and often oblique. Just as Augustus wanted no colossal gold or silver statues of himself, so he did not invite gross flattery from his poets. Major works of history (by Livy) and geography (by Strabo) added to the general sentiment that Augustus personified a predestined ‘arrival’ of Rome upon the world stage. Since the rustic settlement created on the banks of the Tiber by Romulus, even since the legendary emigration from Troy by the hero Aeneas, Rome’s fortunes were all leading to the glorious time when Augustus could be hailed as Pater Patriae (Father of the Fatherland).

  Over 300 portraits of Augustus survive, from all around the Roman Empire. Of these, none demonstrates more eloquently their subject’s fine judgement of political symbolism than the full-length figure known as the ‘Prima Porta Augustus’ (Fig. 88). At first glance, this looks like the straightforward image of a general raising his right hand, as if about to address his army.The marble was originally painted, making it all the more obvious that Augustus carried the purple cloak of supreme military command. But it soon becomes clear that this is not really the image of a general. For one thing, Augustus is barefoot; furthermore, the posture and musculature of his body is based upon the Classical type of a victorious athlete (following, to be precise, the ‘Spear Bearer’ of Polykleitos: Fig. 31, page 74). At his feet there is a dolphin, with a little Eros or Cupid astride.This coyly alludes to the divine origins claimed by the Julian family, ultimately descended (via Aeneas) from Venus, goddess of love. So the statue conveys authority by unconventional means. But if it is not a direct representation of Augustus as imperator, then what does it commemorate?

  THE CAESARS’ AFTERLIFE

  86 (above) A statue of Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor, the church of St Jean, Müstair (Switzerland), 9th century.

  AUGUSTUS and his successors left an ideological legacy that went far beyond Classical antiquity. It was registered, for instance, in northern Eurasia, where Ivan III, the master builder of the Russian Empire from 1462 to 1505, was attracted to the concept of creating another Rome based at Moscow; and his grandson Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) formally insisted on the title ‘Caesar’ – in Russian Czar or Tsar – at his coronation in 1547.

  An earlier example was Rex Francorum, King of the Franks, the Franks being the Germanic tribes that had overrun the former Roman province of Gallia (Gaul) in the sixth century, following which it became the country of France. By the time of Charlemagne (768–814), Frankish domains extended into the Balkans, and also encompassed north and central Italy. In his image, however, what Charlemagne holds is more of an ideal power than actual tenure. It is the orb of the world surmounted by a crucifix (Fig. 86).

  In the year 800, Charlemagne had a crown placed upon his head, at the altar of St Peter’s Church in Rome, by Pope Leo III. The pope himself was no stranger to regalia. Papa est verus imperator is how the Latin tenet goes: ‘The pope is the true commander’. Here he discharged his role of directing the world’s secular potentates. Charlemagne was saluted as ‘most pious Augustus’; the pope kissed the ground by his feet; Charlemagne was henceforth the ‘Holy Roman Emperor’. His centre of empire was maintained at Aachen, geographically closer to the heart of the unified Europe that Charlemagne sought. As it happened, his vision of European union would not be realized for over 12 centuries, but the understanding that monarchical rulers were guided by God prevailed more or less unquestioned throughout medieval Europe.

  87 (opposite) Charles V near Mühlberg by Titian, 1548.

  The delicacy of the rapport between monarchs and the papacy was signally demonstrated in 1527, when troops in the service of the Spanish king Charles V – a militantly devout Catholic himself – descended upon Rome and vandalized the Vatican.

  The papacy came to terms with Charles V, affirming him to be Holy Roman Emperor, a title that by then encompassed control of territories in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Naples and Sicily, Spain and the Spanish Americas. So Charles had very considerable power.Yet he was physically a slight individual, and because of intermarriages between members of his own dynastic family, the Habsburgs, he inherited a lantern jaw so pronounced that he could not chew his food, and gaped continually.

  How was he to be depicted as the imposing, heaven-sent guardian of Church and State? In a portrait commissioned after Charles had done battle with rebel German Protestants against the Catholic faith, we see how the image of Marcus Aurelius cast its archetypal shadow. In the huge canvas produced by the Venetian painter Titian (Fig. 87), Charles V becomes an earnest, spear-bearing knight with a mission. The legend of the battle was that the sun had delayed its going down in order to facilitate a conclusive victory for the imperial side: lustrous skies accordingly glow all around the imperator. He looks to be alone, but he would deny that it had been a solo effort: 'I came, I saw, and God conquered', was his reputed remark. Augustus would have approved.

  The answer lies in the decoration of the breastplate (Fig. 89). Here, at the centre of the portrait, just above its subject’s navel, we find, carved in relief, the image that makes the key allusion to an historical event.Two figures are meeting: one in Roman military dress, the other typified by his costume and beard as an Easterner. Something is being handed over between them. It is a set of Roman legionary standards – the ‘totems’ that each principal unit of the Roman army carried into battle, as emblem and rallying point. Losing such standards was tantamount to disastrous defeat: and just such a disaster had befallen Roman forces in the East, at Carrhae (Harran), several decades before Augustus took control.The bearded barbarians who had seized these standards were the Parthians, a people who by now dominated lands once ruled by Darius and Alexander.The Parthians had already resisted a campaign led by Mark Antony to retrieve the standards, a costly expedition in which many Roman lives were lost. Could any Roman leader redeem the shame of loss?

  Only Augustus.That is what the Prima Porta statue declares. By contrast to Mark Antony, Augustus did not need to mount an invasion of Parthia. Instead, he negotiated. Historians presume that some sort of bargain was made with the Parthians, but the imagery of the statue is not concerned with such details. An emblematic Roman figure extends an arm; a generic Parthian figure surrenders the precious standards. It is presented not so much as a diplomatic triumph, more an inevitable act of destiny. Ranged around the central scene are signs of cosmic support for this transaction. The event is flanked by Apollo and his sister Diana (Artemis in Roman mythology); underneath, Mother Earth rejoices, while above there is blessing from the heavens. More threatening, perhaps, are the attendant personifications of captive peoples belonging to the Roman Empire. But this is not, overall, an aggressive or triumphalist piece. It demonstrates the power of Augustus as transcendental – a supreme authority held in alliance with divine will and the very elements of the Earth. Augustus does not need to wage war; he is above that – as close to the gods as any mortal could be.

  AFTERWARDS DEIFIED

  Officially, Roman emperors were accorded divine status only as a posthumous honour. It is further testament to the adroit image wisdom of Augustus that, while he allowed people to worship his spirit or ‘genius’ during his lifetime, he did not court disapproval of impious pretensions by overtly projecting himself as a god.This was a temptation that several of his successors could not resist.The infamous Nero, for example, commissioned a colossal gi
lded statue of himself as the sun god Helios, to shine conspicuously in Rome’s skyline. His own downfall did not topple the statue, but nearby an arena for public entertainment was erected, the name of which, the Colosseum, became a lasting reminder of Nero’s outsize ego. Few emperors, as it turned out, would be able to match Augustus in the exemplary handling of images:Trajan (see page) was one of those few.

  88 (left) The Prima Porta Augustus, probably a copy after a bronze original c.20 BC.

  89 (above) Detail of the breastplate of the Prima Porta Augustus.

  90 Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, Rome, c.176 BC.

  A later successor, the second-century AD emperor Marcus Aurelius, discharged his imperial responsibilities with more sense of endurance than enthusiasm. ‘Alexander, Julius Caesar, Pompey … what a load of cares were they burdened with, and to how many things were they slaves!’ noted the philosopher emperor in private memoranda later published as his Meditations. He was philosophically contemptuous of the expectation that his image be marble, for Marcus felt this was no more than a ‘callous excresence of the earth’; gold and silver were merely dust and sediment, and the purple dye of his imperial cloak was simply organic matter squeezed from some mollusc. Yet duty called. And partly because he went to posterity as a good emperor, but mainly because later Christians in Rome mistook him for Constantine, the first emperor to accept Christianity, Marcus Aurelius has survived in one particularly influential bronze image of individual authoritarianism (Fig. 90). It shows him in the saddle, and wearing the military cloak of active service as imperator. Originally, the statue probably also figured a hapless barbarian, fallen beneath the raised right hoof of the emperor’s steed, in which case the right arm of Marcus may stretch forth as much to reassure a victim as to address or direct his troops. But, especially since it was made the centrepiece of Rome’s Campidoglio Square during the sixteenth century, the image has come to epitomize the vocation of paternalistic leadership: every equestrian generalissimo statue in the West seems descended from the piece.

  TYRANNICIDES AND TOTALITARIANS

  THE ORIGINAL democracy was created in Athens, c. 510 BC, with the Greek word demokratia meaning literally ‘rule by the people’ or ‘popular government’. In keeping with their ideals of equality between citizens, the democratic Athenians did not like raising monuments to particular individuals. They made an exception, however, for two men deemed to have facilitated the arrival of democracy by assassinating one of the city’s ruling tyrants in 514 BC. Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who died as a result of their boldness,were duly heroized as ‘The Tyrannicides’ (Fig. 91). Placed prominently in the city, this statue group became the iconic talisman of Athenian democracy. An earlier version was deliberately removed by the Persians when they occupied the city in 480 BC, and allegedly retrieved by Alexander when he took Persepolis. Meanwhile, the group appeared as a motif on Athenian coins and vases, symbolizing defiance of any regime deemed autocratic.

  Fast forward to a project jointly assembled by architect Boris Iofan and sculptor Vera Mukhina for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937. International exhibitions were phenomena that emerged from the nineteenth century, like the revived Olympic Games; and like the modern Olympics, their aim of promoting goodwill and cooperation among the peoples of the world was often obscured by the spirit of aggressive national rivalry. On no occasion was that spirit more evident than at Paris in 1937, when one part of Europe – Spain – was recently split by civil war, and the Fascist states (Germany and Italy) were clearly flexing themselves for military action. Iofan allowed his structure to serve as the pedestal for a bronze statue that was, at 24.5 metres (81 feet), half the height of the building itself (Fig. 92) The sculpture was integral to the pavilion’s purpose in declaring to the world, triumphantly, ‘the rapid and powerful growth of the world’s first Socialist state’.

  Mukhina’s thickset workers, with their rigid arms and horizontally striated drapery, may now seem disturbingly robotic in aspect.We should remember, however, that they were made to be seen from a distance, from where there is no ambivalence about their symbolic effect. They hold the proletarian attributes of hammer and sickle, as on the national banner of the Soviet Union. They personify the advance, in unison, of industrial and agrarian labour. Yet this lofty group was not innovative. It was created by the same technique used for the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour – welding sheets of metal over an armature. More significantly, its composition made a clear reference to the Tyrannicides group, as if to borrow the ‘feel-good factor’ of their democratic associations. Again, Augustus would have approved.

  91 (opposite) The Tyrannicides – a Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze group c.477 BC.

  92 (left) Industrial Worker and Collective Farm Girl by Vera Mukhina, erected for the Paris International Exhibition of 1937.

  7

  SEEING THE INVISIBLE

  IT WAS IN FEBRUARY 2001 that the Mullah Muhammad Omar, then head of the fundamentalist Islamic movement known as the Taliban, urged his followers to destroy ‘shrines of the infidels’ throughout Afghanistan.The order was most notoriously obeyed at Bamiyan, a valley in the Hindu Kush about 160 kilometres (100 miles) to the northwest of the Afghan capital, Kabul. In the sandstone bluff of this valley stood two late-sixth-century images of the Buddha. Carved from the cliff-face, one reached a height of 55 metres (180 feet), while the other, a short distance to the east along the valley, was just over 38 metres (125 feet). Local inhabitants were evacuated, but the world’s press was not kept entirely distant from an artillery operation that lasted for several days. Pictures soon appeared around the globe, showing plumes of dust and smoke swelling from the enclaves where the statues had stood (Fig. 93). It was studious insolence; a spectacle of iconoclasm (image breaking) staged not so much to offend practising Buddhists, as to enrage UNESCO officials, guardians of World Heritage Sites.

  In the heat of international reaction to the ‘barbarism’ of the Taliban attack upon the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan, one historical fact was overlooked: that casual and intentional dilapidation had been sustained at Bamiyan for about a thousand years.The Taliban offensive was part of an old iconoclastic tradition. Damage was very likely first inflicted in the course of Arab raids in these parts during the ninth century. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes are reported to have carried out a wholesale slaughter in the vicinity; and it is disputed whether the lower limbs of the greater Buddha were violently amputated by a seventeenth-century Mughal emperor called Aurangzeb or a twentieth-century Afghan king by the name of Nadir Shah. At one time, the cells and niches cut into the cliff around the figures provided accommodation for thousands of monks and pilgrims, but these occupants had deserted the valley since at least the incursion of Genghis Khan, so a process of gradual ruination by neglect had also taken place.

  93 The gaping hole in the rock left after the destruction of the greater Buddha at Bamiyan, 2001.

  So how did the Bamiyan shrine function before all this destruction and decay? We would have little insight were it not for two Chinese writers called Fa-Hsien and Hsuan-Tsang (or Zuanzang), who during the fifth and seventh centuries respectively trekked thousands of kilometres along the line of routes collectively known as the Silk Road – a cross-continental trading artery running from western China to Mesopotamia, onwardly linking to the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean.When Hsuan-Tsang passed by Bamiyan in the year 632 or 634, he found the valley sanctuary animated by a population of some 5000 monks and devotees. Not just two, but three massive images were then to be seen – the third (now vanished) figuring a Buddha laid out horizontally in the state of final repose known as parinirvana (perfect passing-out).To Hsuan-Tsang, the two standing Buddhas gleamed from afar, as if fashioned from brass or bronze; evidently the wooden substructure and mud or lime-plaster stucco that formed the faces and other bodily details had some sort of metallic finish.

  The huge Buddha statues at Bamiyan evidently
served as some kind of caution to mortal kings and princelings. In the course of his visit, Hsuan-Tsang witnessed a public ceremony in which the local ruler of Bamiyan pledged devotion to the Buddha by offering up himself, his family, his wealth and all his trappings of state. Officiating monks at the sanctuary symbolically took the gifts, then returned them, so the prince was confirmed and blessed in his tenure of power.

  Colossal images of the Buddha were not new to Hsuan-Tsang.They loomed up at various sites along the Silk Road, marking the addition of territory to the Buddhist faith. In China, for example, comparable statues were to be seen by the caves at Yungang, in the northerly Shanxi province; also at Miran, near the lake of Lop Nor.Why were these statues so large? Because the particular faith that found favour in Tibet, China, Japan and eastern Asia was Mahayana Buddhism, which developed a concept of the Buddha as an incarnation of ultimate truth, wisdom and goodness in the world – a figure literally larger than life. Legend told of a sculptor who had been magically transported to the heavenly abode of Maitreya, ‘the Buddha of the Future’, and gained a glimpse of infinite power. On his return to normality, this sculptor created an image for a shrine to the north of Kashmir that envisaged Maitreya as 80 cubits tall.The cubit is an archaic unit of measurement, denoting the length of a forearm. Equating it to half a metre gives us a statue about 40 metres (132 feet) high – somewhere in between the two images at Bamiyan.

  Now that those images have been reduced to dust, it seems futile to pursue the local reasons for making them in the first place, or indeed the particular motives of those who brought them down. But the wider questions remain. In what sense can an image be understood to represent the Buddha, or any other deity? How – and why – is visible form given to spiritual experience?