The Historical Relief Of Roman Art

THE HISTORICAL RELIEF OF ROMAN ART

From the beginning .of the first century BC, reliefs carved in stone or marble, together with paintings, were adopted as a means of expressing dominant ideological tendencies.The politico-religious doctrines on which Sulla established his power were expressed in the frieze in Via della Consolazione, with its weapons and trophies. Towards the middle of the century, scenes of contemporary political life, together with nautical subjects, featured on the base of an altar which stood on the Campus Martius, near the Circus Flaminius. A generation later, the glory of Augustus was celebrated in epic form in the reliefs of the Ara Pacis, while, some years earlier, Cartilius Publieola had commissioned scenes of his military exploits for his tomb at Ostia. At Glanum and elsewhere, low- relief replaced mural painting as the means of representing the stage-by-stage development of an event, with ,the successive episodes juxtaposed like the frames of a cartoon. It is true that legendary episodes had already been illustrated in this way on the altar of Zeus at Pergamon, but continuous narrative had generally been the preserve of painting, in the home, on tombs and in certain public settings.

The Odyssey frieze in the Vatican Library, the frescoes of the Esquiline columbarium narrating the origins of Rome, or the mural painting of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, may he cited as examples.

The creation of sculpted reliefs depicting a continuous story and a taste for historical narrative arc the two key elements in the new Roman artistic tradition, which was as much an expression of Empire as a way of iconographically justifying the imperial succession. Continuous historical narrative was not without precedent in Creek art, as the roots of Hellenistic triumphal art can be traced back to the fifth century BC in the western regions of Asia Minor. The two chief innovations destined to provide a setting for Roman historical relief were the historiated column and the triumphal arch. The Greeks had made use of the votive column, but when the triumphal column first appeared in Rome in the third century BC, it was a monument in its own right and therefore fitted to become, under the Empire, a support for decoration on a grand scale. Trajan’s Column is both a celebratory and a funerary monument, while, that of Marcus Aurelius had no funerary purpose. Its base is an altar. It stood, as it does today, in the centre of a vast square, possibly enclosed by colonnades to the north and south, and definitely flanked by a temple to the deified Marcus on the west. Crowned with a statue of the Emperor, the column originally stood over 160 feet high.

Sculpted reliefs became widespread in imperial times. More than thirty-eight arc known to have been carved in the time of Augustus and the Julso-Claudian emperors, including such famous examples as the Villa Medics procession and the Suovetaurilia in the Louvre. A similar number were produced under the Flavians, not to mention the reliefs for the Arch of Titus and the two Cancelleria friezes, which served as models. But the full flowering of the continuous narrative style occurred in Trajan’s time:

on the column bearing his name, of course, but also in the great frieze on the Arch of Constantine. The group depicting the Emperor on horseback attacking his enemies, the work of great masters, can be said to plunge us into a new artistic realm, prefiguring, even before the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the art of the late Empire. The twelve relief panels decorating the two façades of the triumphal arch at Benevento form a stage-by-stage biography of Trajan. The inner walls of the arch depict the Emperor’s involvement in local affairs, in the presence of an old man and a youth, Ordo and Populus. These figures, personifying the constituent elements of the city state, appear on many other monuments, for instance the triumphal arch of the Severans at Leptis Magna.

The military spirit of the reliefs of Marcus Aurelius’s Column, combining ancient Italic traditions with borrowings from frontier regions, reflect the angst caused by the sudden collapse of confidence in the Empire and the need to find a new ideal to restore it. The role played by the Column, the reliefs housed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori and those re-used on the Arch of Constantine — which may originally have decorated the arch giving access to the square in which the Column stood — was decisive in forming the new style. Its elements arc repeated on many sarcophagi, contributing to the spread of the ideology. There is a tendency to focus on the sarcophagus of one of Marcus Aurelius’s generals depicting a battle against barbarians, whilst neglecting other examples, for instance the group of sarcophagi showing the death of Meleager, the finest of which came from the Borghese collection and is now housed in the Louvre. In the case of the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, the four large panels above the lateral bays represent the Emperor’s eastern expeditions. They epitomize the older realistic style of Roman sculpture, of the time of Julius Caesar, but also incorporate the aesthetic of the Trajanic and Aurelian columns in breaking down the events into a certain number of typical episodes (marches, battles, addresses to the troops, sieges, negotiations and so on). It is relatively easy to identify the scenes by comparing the reliefs with the works of the Roman historians Dio Cassius and Herodian. Herr again, the style of composition, emotional agitation and technical details can fruitfully be compared with reliefs on sarcophagi, particularly the so-called Pietralata group depicting battle scenes, dating from between 185 and 200 AD. That all these monuments prefigure the style of Late Antiquity is because much of the history of Roman sculpture can be written in terms of the development of the historical relief The art of imperial columns continues right down to those of Theodosius and Arcadius, though these are only a step away from Byzantine art and the theology of victory they exemplify is different.