Roman art

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Roman art has left us a vast body of sculpture surviving from about the 1st century BC onward, yet almost no painting that a contemporary would have ranked among the highest quality. That imbalance shapes everything we think we know. Pliny, Ancient Rome's most important historian on the arts, recorded that nearly all forms of art had been advanced in Greek times, and in some cases more advanced than in Rome. He even singled out a painter named Peiraikos, who depicted barbershops, shoemakers' stalls, donkeys, and vegetables, and came to be called the painter of vulgar subjects. The word vulgar here means common. Yet those works, Pliny noted, were altogether delightful, and sold at higher prices than the greatest paintings of many other artists. So what was Roman art, if so much of its finest output is gone and so much of what remains leans on Greek models? Why were Roman artists mostly anonymous tradesmen when Greek masters were revered? And how did a culture of borrowers end up building the Pantheon and the Colosseum? The answers run through copied statues, buried wall paintings, gold-flecked glass, and concrete.

• 2. A Creative Pastiche

  ›

  Etruscan, native Italic, and even Egyptian visual culture all fed into Roman art, alongside the dominant Greek models. Recent analysis frames Roman art not as simple copying but as a highly creative pastiche, with stylistic eclecticism and practical application as its hallmarks. Much of the Greek sculpture known today survives only as Roman marble copies, which speaks to the esteem Roman artists held for Greek work.

  The roster of Greek antecedents was legendary. In the mid-5th century BC, the most famous Greek artists included Polygnotos, noted for his wall murals, and Apollodoros, the originator of chiaroscuro. Realistic technique was credited to Zeuxis and Parrhasius, who according to legend once competed in a bravura display, producing history's earliest descriptions of trompe-l'oeil painting. In sculpture, Skopas, Praxiteles, Phidias, and Lysippos stood foremost.

  Virtually every artistic technique used by Renaissance artists 1,900 years later had already been demonstrated by Ancient Greek artists, with the notable exceptions of oil colors and mathematically accurate perspective. One exception that may be Etruscan or early Roman is the bust that does not include the shoulders. Greek artists were highly revered and wrote extensively on artistic theory; most Roman artists were anonymous, considered tradesmen, with practically no signed works. Roman art was more decorative, indicative of status and wealth, and apparently not the subject of scholars or philosophers. Because Roman cities were mostly far larger than Greek city-states, art was commissioned, displayed, and owned in far greater quantities, and adapted to more uses than in Greek times.

• 3. The Vanished Paintings

  ›

  Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, and the disaster preserved the best known pocket of Roman painting we have. The wall paintings of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and nearby sites show how residents of a wealthy seaside resort decorated their walls in the century or so before the eruption. Modern art historians beginning with August Mau defined a succession of dated styles showing increasing elaboration.

  Nero's palace in Rome, the Domus Aurea, built in the 60s AD, survived as grottos whose paintings inspired the grotesque style popular during the Renaissance. Murals also survive from houses identified with the emperor Augustus and his wife Livia, dating to the beginning of the first century AD, along with the Casa della Farnesina. Outside Italy, fragments turn up across the Empire, but in the Western provinces most date from after the year 200 AD.

  From Roman Egypt come the Fayum mummy portraits, bust portraits on wood added to mummies by a Romanized middle class. Despite their distinct local character, they are probably broadly representative of Roman painted portraits, which are otherwise entirely lost. Starting in the 3rd century AD and finishing by about 400, a large body of paintings survives from the Catacombs of Rome, by no means all Christian. In sum, the surviving range covers only about 200 years out of roughly 900 years of Roman history. Most of this wall work used the a secco, or dry, method, though some fresco existed; and the Romans entirely lacked a tradition of figurative vase-painting comparable to the Greeks, which the Etruscans had emulated.

• 4. What The Walls Showed

  ›

  Animals, still life, scenes from everyday life, portraits, and some mythological subjects fill Roman painting, with erotic scenes relatively common. During the Hellenistic period it evoked the pleasures of the countryside: shepherds, herds, rustic temples, and country houses. After 200 AD, early Christian themes mixed with pagan imagery on catacomb walls.

  Landscape was the main innovation of Roman painting compared to Greek art, incorporating techniques of perspective, though true mathematical perspective developed 1,500 years later. Surface textures, shading, and coloration are well applied, but scale and spatial depth were still not rendered accurately. Some landscapes were pure scenes of nature, others architectural vistas of urban buildings, and others showed episodes from mythology, the most famous demonstrating scenes from the Odyssey. Franz Wickhoff defended the debatable theory that eastern art knew landscape only as a backdrop to narrative; Plato's Critias suggests Greek awareness of representing earth, mountains, rivers, and woods.

  Still life subjects were often placed in illusionist niches or shelves, depicting fruit, live and dead animals, seafood, and shells. The theme of a glass jar filled with water was skillfully painted, and later served as a model during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Pliny complained that portraiture had declined, writing that the painting of portraits which used to transmit accurate likenesses through the ages had entirely gone out, and that indolence had destroyed the arts. The most prestigious painting form besides sculpture was panel painting in tempera or encaustic on wood, but wood perishes, leaving only a very few examples such as the Severan Tondo from around 200 AD.

• 5. Gold Beneath Glass

  ›

  Gold sandwich glass fixed a layer of gold leaf, carrying a design, between two fused layers of glass. Developed in Hellenistic glass and revived in the 3rd century AD, it produced around 500 survivals, the great majority of them roundels cut from the bottoms of wine cups or glasses, pressed into mortar to mark and decorate graves in the Catacombs of Rome. They predominantly date from the 4th and 5th centuries. Most are Christian, with many pagan and a few Jewish examples, and were likely originally given as gifts on marriage or festive occasions such as New Year.

  The earlier group ranks among the most vivid portraits to survive from Early Christian times, staring out with a stern and melancholy intensity, and represents the best surviving indication of what high quality Roman portraiture could achieve in paint. The Gennadios medallion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a fine Alexandrian portrait on blue glass, using a more complex and naturalistic technique, with painting onto the gold to create shading and a Greek inscription showing local dialect. He may have commissioned the piece to celebrate victory in a musical competition.

  Another famous Alexandrian-style medallion was later mounted in an Early Medieval crux gemmata in Brescia, mistakenly believed to show the empress and Gothic queen Galla Placidia and her children; the knot in the central figure's dress may instead mark a devotee of Isis. It belongs to a group of 14 pieces dating to the 3rd century AD, all individualized secular portraits of high quality. The tiny detail of such pieces is thought to have required lenses. The later catacomb glasses, by contrast, show rudimentary portraiture with stereotypical features, hairstyles, and clothes. The same gold-leaf technique began producing tesserae for mosaics in the mid-1st century in Rome, and by the 5th century these had become the standard background for religious mosaics.

• 6. Portraits And Power In Stone

  ›

  A bronze head supposedly of Lucius Junius Brutus survives as a very rare example of Italic style under the Republic, in the preferred medium of bronze. Portraiture is arguably the main strength of Roman sculpture, visible in the tomb monuments of prosperous middle-class Romans, which very often featured portrait busts. No survivals remain of the masks of ancestors worn in processions at the funerals of great families, but many surviving busts must represent ancestral figures, perhaps from large family tombs like the Tomb of the Scipios.

  By the 2nd century BC, most of the sculptors working in Rome were Greek, often enslaved in conquests such as that of Corinth in 146 BC, and their names are very rarely recorded. Coins and busts sent around the Empire were the main visual form of imperial propaganda. Even Londinium had a near-colossal statue of Nero, far smaller than the 30-metre-high Colossus of Nero in Rome, now lost. The Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker, a successful freedman from around 50 to 20 BC, carries a frieze that is an unusually large example of the plebeian style, while imperial portraiture began Hellenized and idealized, as in the Blacas Cameo and other portraits of Augustus.

  Romans rarely competed with free-standing Greek heroic works, but excelled at relief. The triumphal columns of Trajan, dated 113 AD, and Marcus Aurelius, by 193, wind continuous narrative around them, while the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace from 13 BC, represents the official Greco-Roman style at its most refined. Then came a change whose causes remain much discussed. In the 3rd century, Roman art largely abandoned classical sculpture, showing stumpy, large-eyed figures in a harsh frontal style. The Arch of Constantine of 315 combines this new manner with older roundels in full Greco-Roman style, and the Four Tetrarchs from around 305, now in Venice, shows what Ernst Kitzinger called an almost complete rejection of the classical tradition.

• 7. Documentary In Relief

  ›

  Trajan's Column records the various Dacian wars in what is now modern Romania, and stands as the foremost example of Roman historical relief. Where Greek sculptors illustrated military exploits through mythological allegory, the Romans used a more documentary style, glorifying Roman might while preserving first-hand detail of military costume and equipment. Over 650 feet of spiraling length present more than 2,500 realistically rendered individuals, alongside landscapes, animals, and ships, in effect an ancient precursor of a documentary movie. It survived destruction by being adapted as a base for Christian sculpture.

  Triumphal Paintings appeared from the 3rd century BC, indicated by Pliny, showing triumphal entries, episodes from war, and conquered regions, with summary maps highlighting key points of a campaign. Josephus described the painting made for Vespasian and Titus's sack of Jerusalem, a most lively portraiture showing a happy country laid waste, squadrons of enemies slain, walls overthrown by machines, and fire sent upon temples. On the top of each pageant stood the commander of the captured city. These paintings have disappeared but likely influenced reliefs on military sarcophagi, the Arch of Titus, and Trajan's Column.

  Ranuccio described the oldest painting found in Rome, in a tomb on the Esquiline Hill, painted in four superimposed sections on a clear background. Figures named Marcus Fannius and Marcus Fabius appear larger than the others, near a crenellated city wall and a warrior with an oval buckler and feathered helmet. One hypothesis links it to a victory of the consul Fabius Maximus Rullianus during the second war against the Samnites in 326 BC. Presenting figures at sizes proportional to their importance is typically Roman, also seen in plebeian reliefs, and during the Christian era after 300 AD full-sized sculpture died out while door panels and sarcophagi continued.

• 8. The Triumph Of Architecture

  ›

  Concrete is where Roman art produced its greatest innovations. Massive buildings like the Pantheon and the Colosseum could never have been constructed with previous materials and methods. Concrete had been invented a thousand years earlier in the Near East, but the Romans extended its use from fortifications to their most impressive monuments, capitalizing on its strength and low cost. The concrete core was covered with a veneer of plaster, brick, stone, or marble, then often decorated with polychrome and gold-gilded sculpture. Many ruins have since been stripped of their marble, leaving the concrete core exposed and appearing reduced from their original grandeur, as with the Basilica of Constantine.

  The Colosseum was completed around 80 AD, holding over 50,000 spectators, with retractable fabric coverings for shade and the capacity to stage huge gladiatorial contests and mock naval battles. It incorporates all three architectural orders: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Less celebrated but just as important for most citizens was the five-story insula, the Roman equivalent of an apartment building, which housed tens of thousands of Romans.

  Under Trajan, who reigned from 98 to 117 AD, and Hadrian, from 117 to 138 AD, the Empire reached its greatest extent and Rome reached the peak of its artistic glory. The arch, concrete methods, and the dome permitted vaulted ceilings and great public complexes, including the Baths of Diocletian and the Baths of Caracalla. The Pantheon, dedicated to all the planetary gods, is the best preserved temple of ancient times, its intact ceiling featuring an open eye at the center, its height exactly equal to the interior radius, creating a hemispherical enclosure. Roman aqueducts based on the arch carried water to large urban areas, with impressive standing remains such as the Pont du Gard and its three tiers of arches, and the aqueduct of Segovia, which Renaissance architects like Brunelleschi would later study as inspirational models.