! "! A Double Triple Play: Roman Images of Diana Bettina Bergmann Mount Holyoke College John Miller’s study of Augustan Apollo inspired me to return to Paul Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (1988), a book that demonstrated the immense potential of an interdisciplinary approach rather than exclusive focus on any one artistic mode. Nearly a quarter of a century later, this session continues to grapple with the challenges of interdisciplinarity and assessment of the Augustan era. Miller’s subtle analysis of poets’ intricate language invites a renewed consideration of the relationships among texts, sites, and images. The operations that he describes -- conflating, juxtaposing, allusion, correspondence, association – can be related directly to the analysis of topography and monuments as well. I also would like to extend his recommendation to “analyze variations in light of one another” and consider visual images of an elusive figure in his book, the divine twin Diana. The goddess appears, often as an afterthought, literally placed in parentheses after a mention of Apollo, until she assumes prominence in Miller’s insightful treatment of the saecular games (Chapter Five). As I will argue, however, in the visual environment of Augustan Rome, she would have been impossible to bracket out. While the goddess, fiercely independent, often appeared alone, in the second half of the first century B.C.E. she became a faithful companion of Apollo. Diva triformis The late republic and early empire saw an explosion of images of the divine sister, who, like Apollo, evolved into a dynamic, shape-shifting deity, slipping from one identity to another: Hecate, Trivia, Luna, Selene, even Juno Lucina. The reverses of denarii minted by the Arician Publius Accoleius Lariscolus in the year following Caesar’s death, September–December 43 B.C.E., depict a new visual type in Italy, the threefold unity of Diana as huntress, the moon goddess Selene, and Hekate, goddess of the underworld (Fig.1). The three figures stand before a grove of cypresses (the grove of Aricia, home of Octavian’s mother Atia), connected by a ! #! horizontal bar behind their necks.12 In these years, the triple-form goddess, diva triformis as Horace called her, became a ubiquitous feature in the newly popular depictions of sacred groves, where, like Priapus and Pan, Trivia/Hecate marks intersections and the consecrated boundaries of sanctuaries. One painting in this new genre of sacral-idyllic painting deserves closer attention, and that is a faded fresco in the so-called “House of Livia” on the Palatine (Fig.2).3 As we now know, identification of the structures as an Augustan residence is ever more problematic, which means that the paintings cannot necessarily be associated with the imperial family. Much has been written about the painted walls in the “House of Augustus”, less about those from one room in the “House of Livia” called the “Triclinium” or “Room of Landscapes”, which was excavated in 1869-1870 and recorded in watercolors now in the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. As in the “Room of the Masks”, the central panels of three walls “opened” onto outdoor sanctuaries. A monumental column decorated with offerings forms the center of one panel, an aniconic baetylos the center of another. The latter scene is of particular interest (Fig.3). What distinguishes this sacred grove, one of the best examples of the genre, is the specificity of the offerings. In a pine grove, three statuettes of Hecate holding torches stand on a semi-circular schola. Attached to the central, conical monument, a baetylos, are three naturalistically rendered animal heads: a boar, a goat, a stag, making the deity’s identity as the huntress Diana unmistakable. The same hunting trophies are dedicated to her in epigrams and in Vergil’s seventh eclogue, addressed to Delia, announcing gifts of the head of a bristled boar and the branching horns of a mature stag (7.29-32). Whether or not the paintings in the “House of Livia” were executed for Augustus’s family, the material splendor of the depicted precinct resonates with other dedicatory offerings !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! 2 A. Alföldi, "Diana Nemorensis," AJA 64 (1960) 137-144; C.M. Green, Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia (Cambridge 2007) 30-32; 112-144. The statue type of three goddesses adjoined to a pillar, their heads facing in three different directions, was one of the earliest archaistic images created and was erected by Alkamenes about 425 B.C.E. on the bastion of Athena Nike in Athens: Mark Fullerton, The Archaistic Style in Roman Statuary (Brill 1990) Chapter Two “Artemis/Diana”. 3 G.E.Rizzo, Le pitture della "Casa di Livia" (Palatino) (Rome: 1936); M.A.Tomei, Scavi francesi sul Palatino: le indagini di Pietro Rosa per Napoleone III (1861-1870) (Rome 1999) Chapter 9 “La casa paterna di Tiberio Cesare, 1869-1870”; Erika Simon, Augustus: Kunst und Leben in Rom um die Zeitenwende (Munich, 1986) 188- 191. ! $! to Diana and Apollo on the Palatine. The aniconic baetylos, which had a long history in the imagery of Apollo and was revived after the Battle of Actium, appears in a fresco in the “Room of the Masks” (Fig.4) and on terracotta plaques from the Temple of Apollo complex, where it is decorated with the god’s quiver and lyre, signalling his roles as avenger and civilizer (Fig.5). The painted precinct alludes to yet another aspect of the goddess. To the right of the baetylos sits an enormous, golden, rayed crown, an attribute of Diana’s cult at Tauris (Fig.3). A few years before the introduction of the triple-bodied Trivia/Hecate, images of the cult statue wearing the crown appeared on a denarius struck by L. Hostilius Saserna in 48 B.C.E. to commemorate Caesar’s siege of Massilia, where the cult of Diana was especially prominent (Fig.6); on the reverse the goddess faces forward, the rayed crown on her head, holding a stag by the base of the antlers and an upright hunting spear for hunting wild boar, a venabulum, a new attribute of the goddess and an Italian innovation. As is the case with the diva triformis, the frontal image of a crowned Diana wearing a quiver and holding torches recurs on painted walls in the second half of the first century B.C.E., multiple times in the cubiculum of the Villa of Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, where the viewer has the impression of glimpsing an epiphany of the goddess in her open shrine (Fig.7).4 The fresco on the Palatine, then, represents a sacred space where Diana presides in manifold manifestations, indicated by prominent visual signs. Goddess of the wild is celebrated with dedications of hunters’ prey; three torch-bearing Hecates guard the shrine; and the foreign deity Diana, recipient of a magnificent crown, all co-exist with Apollo’s aniconic baetylos in a multi-referential combination not unlike one of the many webs of allusions that Miller charts in Augustan poetry. Triad: Apollo, Latona, Diana As Miller has pointed out, the Sorrento Relief represents the cult images from Augustus’s Temple of Apollo Palatinus erected in 28 B.C.E. (Fig.8). Each statue was the work of a different master of the fourth century B.C.E.: Apollo at center with his kithara, by Skopas; Latona right with her scepter, by Kephistodotos; and Diana left wearing a quiver and holding her torch as light-bringer, Lucifera, by Timotheos (Plin.N.H.36.32, 24). At the lower right !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 P.W. Lehmann, Roman wall paintings from Boscoreale in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an appendix by Herbert Bloch (Cambridge, Mass., 1953) 109-115; 124-125; 196-197. ! %! kneels the shrouded Sibyl, whose books now are sheltered inside the temple. Miller also illustrates another representation of the Palatine triad (Fig.9), one of a long series of Augustan reliefs depicting mother and twins, where the attributes indicate who is who: Apollo leads, holding his kithara, towards a libation-pouring Victory, Diana follows with her torch, and their mother Latona behind lifting her veil and holding a scepter. I would like to pause here to compare the styles of these two representations. The Sorrento base depicts three, free-standing statues by famous Greek artists, recycled for the new Palatine temple. The gods face outward, as they would from inside the cella. On the other relief, the same three gods stride in profile in an archaistic manner, a style that found new purchase under Augustus as invoking the past and signaling pietas. The antiquated look perfectly expressed the reverential character of Apollo and Diana. In this form on aureii struck in Lugdunum between 10-8 B.C.E. to celebrate Augustus’s victories, Apollo signals Actium (ACT. written in the exergue) and an archaistic Diana the defeat of Sextus Pompey at Naulochos (SICIL.), this perhaps representing another famous statue, the Diana of Segesta (Fig.10). The proliferation and co-existence of artistic styles should not be seen as evidence of random looting, collecting, or copying. Rather, they accompany the many new figural types and attributes being generated in Augustan art and are equally as expressive. Indeed, such conscious appropriation and creative combination can be seen as another kind of intertextuality, or intervisuality, namely an active dialogue with past styles that resonates with poets’ invocation of Homeric phrases. Twinning: Apollo and Diana In Augustan Rome I also would underscore the twinning of Apollo and Diana in the visual arts. Brother and sister appeared together elsewhere on the Palatine: in their fighting mode on the ivory doors of the Temple of Apollo, slaughtering the Niobids, and rising majestially from a chariot atop the Arcus Octavii, a statue said to have been carved out of a single block of marble (Pliny N.H.36.36).