Lecture 2: New Stories about Old Objects

Antiquity's own sense of antiquity

Key Lecture Takeaways

1. The ancient Romans had a highly complex & creative relationship to their past.

   • Retrospective admiration & melancholic nostalgia

Led to:

(1) The construction of a sequential history

(2) The desire to collect (and display) works of art

• E.g. Cicero: 1st century BCE Roman statesman scholar

• Letters to his friend Atticus

• Atticus was helping him source Greek art to decorate his countryside villa

• Suitabililty of the subject & locational context > artist’s style/a specific named artist

  • E.g. villa was meant to encourage contemplation; peaceful rural setting was supposed to provide contrast to the big city of Rome

  • Cicero rejected a shipment of items that included decadent images of basic debauchery & aggressive images of Mars

  • NOT just blind reverence; intentional & discriminate

• Contrasts collecting practices of many in the 18th-19th centuries in Europe

  • Indiscriminately collected classical objects with unrelated themes

2. Roman copies of ancient Greek works may actually be creative, even original, responses to earlier models.

   • NOT necessarily mindless repetition

   • Possibility of creative emulation that produced new, interesting, & even original works

3. Art historians should focus less on whether/how Roman copies replicate a possible lost Greek original, and focus more on Roman works in their own right

   • Assumptions of the former have led to:

     (1) The elevation of earlier art & artists to a heroic status

     • Reliance on & repetition of written evaluations by ancient Greeks

     • Relative lack of surviving Greek works

       = later Roman & modern-day writers unable to come to their own independent judgements

     (2) A challenge to/criticism of present-day art

     • Ancient artworks as perfect models that the present couldn’t possibly hope to emulate

     • Greece vs. Rome

     (3) Reliance on Roman copies to reconstruct ancient Greek perfection

     • BUT these approximations may not actually be useful/accurate

     (4) Misplaced focus on searching for the elusive Greek original

     • WITHOUT properly understanding the viewing contexts that originally gave them meaning

     • We need to reassess Roman copies of Greek works in their own terms rather than in ours

       • What do they tell us, NOT about Greece, but about Rome

       • Integration into domestic & public spaces?

       • Interpretation by diverse Roman & Greek audiences?

Venus of the Rags (1974), Michelangelo Pistoletto

Provenance

• Multiple versions made using diff. materials

  (a) Original: concrete/cement

  (b) Hand-carved from an expensive block of Greek marble

  (c) Gilded

  (d) Gigantic polythene copy

Description

• Pile of rags

• Marble sculpture copied from a concrete statue bought in a garden centre

  • Itself was a Neoclassical imitation of an ancient original by sculptor Bertel Thorvalsen

    • Callipygian Venus type

  • Replica of a replica

  • Dubious r/s to any purported original

Interpretation

• Ironic comment on classicising canons of Western art history

  • Tension between the banality of reproduction & the creative possibilities of emulation

    • Same tension lies at the heart of Roman art’s r/s to its own canonical past in ancient Greece

• Demonstrates a willingness to deploy any & all aspects of life in art

  • Unites a series of oppositions: hard/soft, formed/unformed, monochrome/coloured, precious/disregarded, historical/contemporary, unique/common, high/low

  • Arte Povera (poor art) movement

The Artist in despair over the magnitude of antique fragments (ca. 1788), Henry Fuseli

Provenance

• Drawing

Description

• Depicts an artist w/ his elbow resting on a puny sketchpad

  • Overwhelmed by the wonder & enormity of ancient art (literal size & metaphorical grandeur)

Interpretation

• The oppressive feeling that it must be impossible to ever meet (let alone exceed) the achievements of classical predecessors

Diskobolos vs. Diskobolos Lancellotti

Provenance

• Bronze original made by Myron (5th century BCE)

Controversy

• Several Roman marble copies survive to this day, each w/ subtle differences

  • E.g. Diskobolos Lancellotti has its head looking back (as described by Lucian’s writing) vs. Diskobolos doesn’t

  • Modern scholars have obsessively tried to decide which of the 3 versions is really based on Myron’s lost original

    • Rather than considering that variations may be a part of Roman artists’ interpretative/creative responses to the lost original

• Adolf Hitler’s usage of the Diskobolos Lancellotti as part of his propaganda program

  • Bought it from 1938 from the pro-Nazi fascist government of Mussolini

  • A body that supported his claim that the Aryan race were the true inheritors of the ancient Greeks

    • Greeks regarded as the greatest of all ancient civilisations

Villa of Emperor Hadrian @ Tivoli

Provenance

• Built & decorated in the 1st half of the 2nd century CE (50-100 CE)

Description

• Collected & displayed objects from throughout his empire

  • NOT only Greece but also Egypt, etc.

  • Diversity of collection broadcasted the universalising ambitions of the patron

• Collected BOTH old/original versions & modern copies of famous statues, displayed as multiples

  • Intentionally highlighted their status as imitations

    = suggested sophisticated & self-conscious understanding of Rome’s relationship to an ancient Greek past, which is very different to what modern scholars have retrospectively proposed

Interpretation

• Meant to serve as a microcosm of the world itself

  • Over which Hadrian was eager to assert his authority (militarily & culturally)

Salvator Settis, ‘Did the ancients have an antiquity?’

1. The ancients experienced their own sense of antiquity and Renaissance (rebirth)

   (a) Scholars have argued for >1 definitive Renaissance

   • E.g. the Carolingian Renaissance (8th-9th centuries), the Byzantine Renaissances

   • E.g. within antiquity itself: Gallienic Renaissance (during Emperor Gallienus’s short reign: a return to classical forms inspired by Augustus & Hadrian, marked by a romantic attitude towards a classical past, to legitimise authority during a turbulent period)

   (b) The ancients understood antiquity as something which could die but be repeatedly reborn (cyclical view of cultural revival)

   • Romans (e.g. Pliny) evaluated Roman art by referring to Greek art

   • By late antiquity, Greek art had become canonised

     • Romans produced almost NO written criticism of contemporary Roman art

     • Being able to retrospectively invoke Greek art = privilege of educated classes (e.g. collecting, copying, ‘quoting’)

2. Modern art history could be described as a literary genre invented by the Greeks and then transmitted by Pliny

   • It was the ancients’ sense of antiquity that gave rise to our own idea of antiquity

   • Pliny the Elder wrote the only surviving compendium of ancient art history, handing down ideas from prior writings about art

     • E.g. the biological pattern of evolution —> Winckelmann

Leonard Barkan, ‘Histories’

1. Important role of ancient texts in the Renaissance

   • Ancient art was rediscovered & reimagined through archaeological finds AND ancient texts (e.g. Natural History)

   • Provided insight into how the ancients viewed art

   • Guided scholars’ integration of ancient art —> contemporary contexts

2. Pliny the Elder’s influence on Art History (see Tutorial 1 flashcard)