Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus Michael Squire
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Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus Michael Squire Of all free-standing Roman Imperial portraits, none is more iconic than the so-called ‘Prima Porta Augustus’, unearthed 150 years ago this month (plate 1).1 Discovered amid the ruins of a private Imperial villa just north of Rome in 1863, restored by no less a sculptor than Pietro Tenerani, and quickly set up in the Musei Vaticani (where the statue has lorded over the Braccio Nuovo ever since), the Prima Porta Augustus epitomizes our collective ideas about both Augustus and the principate that he founded in the late i rst century BCE. Even as early as 1875, Lawrence Alma-Tadema turned to the sculpture as ofi cial Augustan emblem: what better image than the Prima Porta Augustus to conjure up the emperor’s looming presence within an imaginary ‘audience with Agrippa’ (plate 2)?2 For Benito Mussolini in the 1930s, this Imperial image was likewise understood to enshrine the imperial ambitions of Fascist Italy: a bronze copy was duly erected along Rome’s Via dei Fori Imperiali, where it continues to cast its shadow over the imperial fora (plate 3).3 ‘No other image is lodged more i rmly at the heart of today’s scholarship on the art and power of Rome,’ as one textbook puts it, ‘no imperial face more indelibly imprinted on the art historical imagination’.4 But for all our familiarity with the Prima Porta Augustus – and for all the hundreds of books, articles and chapters dedicated to it – there seems to be more to say about both the statue and its original historical context. By ‘context’, I do not just mean the statue’s specii c i ndspot and provenance (which remain i ercely debated). Nor do I mean solely the art-historical contexts of iconography and typology – the identity of each i gure emblazoned on the breastplate, or the relationship between this portrait’s coiffure and other examples of the so-called ‘Prima Porta’ type. My interest in this essay, rather, lies with the contexts of Augustan art in the broadest visual cultural sense. By looking afresh at the statue, I hope to shed new light on its manipulations of medium on the one hand, and its careful negotiation of imperial stance and identity on the other. Detail of the Prima Porta ‘Looking’ will prove critical here. Instead of trying to ‘decode’ the images Augustus breastplate (see emblazoned on the cuirass, or indeed adding to the various discussions of date plate 1), as viewed from the right. Photo: Reproduced by and supposed ‘original’, my objective is to draw renewed attention to the statue’s kind permission of Susanne i gurative ambiguities. What strikes me as so signii cant about the statue is what Muth. W. J. T. Mitchell might call its ‘multistability’ – the playful layering of different visual DOI: i gurative modes, no less than the historical, cultural and political frameworks that 10 .1111/1467- 8365.120 07 this entails.5 I begin with arguably the most ambivalent aspect of all: the recourse to Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 36 | 2 | April 2013 | pages 242-279 the cuirass in the i rst place. Modern scholars tend to accept this costume as a matter © Association of Art Historians 2013 243 Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus of mimetic course. But I think things are somewhat more complex. As both military device and iconographic costume, the cuirass had been around for centuries (over 600 fragments of cuirassed statues survive from the Graeco-Roman world, from various dates and models, see plate 26).6 Never before, however, had this sculpted costume been put to such playful and self-conscious effect.7 To my mind, the statue’s choice of outi t is best understood within a cultural dialectic of the body in the late i rst century BCE: on one side, the pull towards nudity and its association with masculine power and inl uence, premised upon an inherited set of ‘Greek’ visual conventions; on the other, a certain reticence, resistance and rejection, centred around a ‘Roman’ rhetoric of cultural remove and difference. As we shall see, the cuirass allows our princeps (‘i rst leader’) at once to bear his clothes and to divest them: by exploiting the dynamic duplicity of its dress, the statue invites viewers to see its subject as both buff Greek nude and vested Roman general. 1 The Prima Porta statue of Augustus, precise date disputed (but perhaps c. 15 CE, after an earlier model of c. 19 BCE). Parian marble, height 2.04 m. Rome: Musei Vaticani (inv. 2290). Photo: Author. © Association of Art Historians 2013 244 Michael Squire 2 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, It is what such ambivalence or ‘code-switching’ might mean for the statue – and An Audience at Agrippa’s, 1875 (Opus CLXI). Oil on panel, indeed for the mechanics of Augustan imagery more generally – that interests me 0.98 × 0.628 m. Kilmarnock: here.8 Thanks to the ambiguous breastplate, which simultaneously exposes the torso The Dick Institute. Photo: Reproduced by kind of the princeps and clothes it behind a i gurative anatomy of imperialist myth-making, permission of the Institut Augustus manifests a body that both can and cannot be seen. As such, the i gurative für Klassische Archäologie und Museum für Abgüsse duplicity of the cuirass incorporates a set of more profound ‘ontological’ paradoxes Klassischer Bildwerke, Ludwig-Maximilians- about the statue and its covered/exposed subject. The bodily frame situates Augustus Universität, Munich. between different registers of representation: like the bodies depicted in and on the 3 Modern bronze copy of make-believe cuirass, the emperor’s body l uctuates back and forth through literal the Prima Porta Augustus, and symbolic modes of signii cation – between mimetic replication on the one hand, set up along Rome’s Via dei Fori Imperiali (next to and extra-i gurative modes of allegory and metaphor on the other. Nude vs. clothed, the Forum of Augustus). ‘Greek’ vs. ‘Roman’, literal vs. symbolic: the statue gives somatic form to a series Photo: Reproduced by kind permission of the Institut of semantic contradictions, themselves grounded in the political paradoxes of the für Klassische Archäologie und Museum für Abgüsse Augustan principate. Klassischer Bildwerke, Although the essay is structured around a single material case study, it also Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität, Munich. aims to draw out some broader artistic-cum-political ramii cations. In particular, it examines what the statue’s ambiguities mean for thinking about Augustan imagery at large. For too long, I think, our narratives about ‘the power of images in the age of Augustus’ – the title of a landmark book by Paul Zanker in 1988 – have tended to suppose a neat, ordered and self-contained system of programmatic ‘communication’.9 There were, we assume, single prefabricated Augustan political ‘messages’; what is more, scholarly responses to Augustan ‘propaganda’ have centred around ‘decoding’ the single sorts of political messages involved (with some scholars justifying their recourse to this supposed artistic ‘language’ explicitly). To my mind, by contrast, the Prima Porta Augustus embodies a much © Association of Art Historians 2013 245 Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus more sophisticated and self-referential politics of visual ambiguity: the ‘power’ of Augustan images lay in the gesture not of excising ambiguity, but rather of embracing ambivalence and harnessing it to the new political cause. The World on the Chest Before elaborating that larger argument, let me begin by introducing my central case study and reviewing its history of scholarship. Since the discovery of the Prima Porta Augustus on 20 April 1863, Classical archaeologists have concerned themselves with a variety of interpretive issues: the reconstruction of the hands; the attributes; the relationship with other Augustan portraits; the statue’s historical origins, provenance and display; and perhaps most importantly, the iconographic identii cation of the i gures emblazoned on the cuirass. This essay cannot aim at a full état de la recherche. Because of my reliance on earlier discussions, however, it seems important to offer an annotated description of what can be seen: those interested in the vast bibliography are referred to the (purposely extensive) endnotes. Where better to start than with the statue’s size, medium and archaeological provenance. Excluding its modern base, the Prima Porta Augustus stands at an over- lifesize 2.04 metres. In terms of its materials, isotopic analysis coni rms that the statue was crafted from high-quality lychnites marble (imported from the Greek Cycladic 10 4 Detail of the head of the island of Paros). As stated above, the sculpture was found in a private residence Prima Porta Augustus. some nine miles north of Rome, near the Via Flaminia. Although the site can be Photo: Reproduced by kind permission of Susanne Muth. connected with the family of Augustus’ wife, Livia, we do not know where in the villa the statue was found:11 in the absence of reliable archaeological records, the exact position of the statue remains the subject of ongoing scholarly conjecture.12 The identity and iconographic stance of the sculpture, by contrast, are relatively clear. The facial features leave no doubt about the Augustan identity. Indeed, the idealized physiognomy and signature ‘crab-claw’ coiffure have resulted in the eponymous labelling of a so-called ‘Prima Porta’ portrait type (plate 4): some 147 copies and versions are known, and the template is usually thought to have originated in or shortly after 27 BCE.13 Augustus stands in counterbalanced contrapposto pose, bearing the bulk of his weight on his right leg; the left leg is consequently relaxed, throwing the whole statue into a dynamic diagonal dance (the right hip is higher than the left, the left shoulder higher than the right, and the turn of the head crowns the overarching sense of animation).