Chapter 11 “Arte Plebea” and Non‐elite Roman Art Lauren Hackworth Petersen Assessments of style and the formation of stylistic categories are staples of art‐historical research. As a method of critical inquiry, an analysis of style can be useful in defining a set of visual criteria that at once distinguishes some works of art from others, while grouping together those that share a definable pattern. For example, as historians of Roman art, we discuss wall decoration and painting styles (the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Styles) and what the characteristics and dates are for each (e.g., Mau 1882; cf. Ling 1991; Leach 2004; Strocka 2007), or define a historical style and interpret its meanings (such as Flavian art, which is dis­ tinguished from Julio‐Claudian art in appearance and message). Analyses of style thus create relationships among works of art primarily derived from drawing comparisons and contrasts based on visual characteristics. In fact, categories of style can be immensely useful, as they help to organize bodies of artistic material and to create historical narratives (Ackerman 1962). All of this may seem obvious and something that we may take for granted, but there is much at stake in defining categories of style—often with some problematic consequences. Such is the case with the study of Roman art. This chapter takes as a point of departure Jaś Elsner’s observation that style was once “king” of the discipline of art history. He asserts that it should be central to what we do as art histo­ rians, despite the fact that style as a method of art‐historical inquiry apparently died in the 1970s and 1980s (Elsner 2003, 98). In Roman art, however, investigations into style never really faded away. Rather, it could be argued that we put style to a different use than scholars did earlier in the twentieth century—that is, in the name of a social history of Roman art that produced the category of non‐elite art. Style and Roman Art To begin, we are confronted with the fact that the corpus of Roman art resists easy categoriza­ tion; it defies the type of internal, chronological/stylistic development that has traditionally been assigned to Greek art: archaic, severe, classical, late classical, and Hellenistic period styles (cf. Donohue 2005 for a rigorous challenge of this type of “objective” description). It has thus A Companion to Roman Art, First Edition. Edited by Barbara E. Borg. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. “Arte Plebea” and Non‐elite Roman Art 215 been commonplace to think about Roman art as wide‐ranging and diverse, with eclecticism being its defining attribute: eclecticism is what makes Roman art Roman (Bianchi Bandinelli 1970; Brendel 1979; Kleiner 1992, 9–11). Indeed, at a given time or on a single Roman monument, we can sometimes detect the presence of more than one style. The column base of Antoninus Pius (161 CE) serves as an excellent and oft‐cited example (Figures 11.1–11.2). Of its four sides, one contains an inscription, one a scene of apotheosis, and the other two are identical and show the funerary decursio, military maneuvers in honor of the deceased (Vogel 1973; Kleiner 1992, 285–288; Davies 2004, 40–42, 96–101). The apotheosis scene owes much of its appearance to the classical tradition in ancient art. The figures are carved against a plain background and with a single ground line, which serves to provide a steadying frame with which we view the image head on. The bodies themselves are rendered in what we tend to consider as pleasing, naturalistic proportions. With the strong use of vertical and horizontal lines (except for the winged genius/Aion), the composition is calm. The faces likewise carry solemn, almost aloof expressions. In contrast, the identical reliefs depicting the decursio are often described as being non‐classical or as simply different from the apotheosis relief (Kleiner 1992, 285). While the figures are carved against a plain background, they are pitched in high relief, creating deep pockets of shadow. The scene is depicted with two simultaneous view­ points—the men in the central portion are seen head on, and those on horseback are seen uneasily in a tilted perspective. Yet the latter group occupies several horizontally placed turf segments, forcing viewers to read the cavalrymen both head on and as if from above. The horses and bodies are put into motion with the use of diagonal lines. One could also point out that the men appear disproportionately large for the horses and are of relatively solid or sturdy proportions. Figure 11.1 Apotheosis of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, from the base of the Column of Antoninus Pius, 161 CE. Rome, Vatican Museums, Cortile delle Corazze. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY – ART45685. 216 Lauren Hackworth Petersen Figure 11.2 Parade of soldiers, from the base of the Column of Antoninus Pius, 161 CE. Rome, Vatican Museums, Cortile delle Corazze. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY – ART 22011. How we describe objects reveals our values and priorities. To describe the decursio reliefs as unclassical reifies a bias toward more classically rendered artistic forms, which is to say that the decursio reliefs are typically put up against the normalized standard as depicted on the apothe­ osis relief, whether explicitly or implicitly. Despite many recent and outstanding attempts to question the primacy of classically rendered images (namely, imperial images), dualisms are alive and strong in the study of Roman art. This essay briefly summarizes some of the assump­ tions that seem to lie behind these dualisms, with an eye toward understanding the circum­ stances leading to Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli’s influential theory of the plebeian tradition (arte plebea) in Roman art and its aftermath. It concludes with some recent contextual and social approaches that attempt to integrate the seemingly unwieldy corpus of Roman art objects into the canon, while pointing to some strategies that we might consider in describing Roman art and in narrating its multipronged histories (cf. Kampen 1995 and 2003). A History of Roman Art History Most surveys of Roman art tend to present a narrative that is biased toward the capital city of Rome, thereby privileging monuments produced by and for the emperors and the imperial retinue (there are exceptions, to be sure: e.g., D’Ambra 1998; Elsner 1998b; to some extent Kleiner 2010; Knapp 2011). Indeed, the city of Rome was a city defined by its emperors (Hope 2000). It is no coincidence that if surveys of Roman art focus on the capital city, they will thus necessarily construct a history that follows the lives of the emperors, thereby “erasing” “Arte Plebea” and Non‐elite Roman Art 217 from history what does survive of those individuals of ordinary means in Rome; namely, the large numbers of tombs and their artifacts. Beyond these funerary monuments, however, Rome preserves precious little of the non‐elite inhabitants of the city. For this material, one needs to look outside Rome, to urban centers and communities within Italy and beyond. This evidence can be overwhelmingly voluminous, nevertheless. The territories of the Roman empire were vast and complex, but fixedly on the margins of the capital city and thus in scholarly thought— until recently. Moreover, the somewhat pejorative terms that historians invoke to explore the patronage of art produced by and for those outside elite circles—non‐elite, sub‐elite, plebeian, subaltern, and so on—reveal a clear bias toward the elite. These artistic commissions tend to be defined monolithically by what they are not (i.e., non‐elite), in part because their histories do not readily fit into the narrative constructed for Roman art, which emphasizes the artistic patronage of and for the emperors. All of these biases aside, what the early imperial dynasties produced was an artistic vocab­ ulary that largely looked to the Hellenic world for its inspiration, and scholars have long recognized the rich legacy that the Romans inherited from the Greeks (e.g., Beard and Henderson 2001; Gazda 2002; Marvin 2008). For example, Augustus’ Ara Pacis (9 BC; Figures 10.4–10.5) is often referred to as reviving fifth‐century BCE ideals of classicism, whereas the interior relief panels of the Arch of Titus (81 CE) looked more to Hellenistic models, with their dramatically deep carving and depiction of lively movement. However, as we know, not all Roman art imperial forms took their cues from the Greek visual tradition, such as the previously mentioned decursio reliefs of the column base of Antoninus Pius. Recognizing that artistic production of the later imperial period (post 150 CE) looks differ­ ent from its early imperial counterpar ts, art historians of the first half of the twentieth century sought to explain the motivations behind and the sources of the fundamental stylistic change—what is called the Stilwandel—citing it as a late antique style that was deliberately unclassical (and non‐Hellenic), with its rigid frontality and comparatively unnaturalistic figural proportions. (It was a style that scholars would eventually link to non‐elite artistic production; see Brendel 1979 and Clarke 2003, 2–3, for a historiography of attitudes to Roman art.) Implicit in discussions of the Stilwandel is the scholarly desire to locate Roman art within theories of stylistic development that could be mapped out in a way somewhat analogous to the perceived trajectory of Greek art, which was accepted as the norm, thus permitting Roman art to “fit” into larger art‐ historical narratives. As late as the mid‐twentieth century, Bernard Berenson’s (in)famous attack on the Arch of Constantine (315 CE) reveals that biases that favored Greek‐inspired form persisted in no uncertain terms; he could find no justification for the seemingly barbarous departure from Greek models in the art of Constantine.