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Ancient Mediterranean + Europe
Course: Ancient Mediterranean + Europe > Unit 9
Lesson 9: Late empire- Emperor or athlete? Rethinking a modern attribution
- Portraits of the Four Tetrarchs
- Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine
- The Colossus of Constantine
- Colossus of Constantine
- Arch of Constantine
- Arch of Constantine
- Arch of Constantine
- Holding on to pagan traditions in the early Christian era: The Symmachi Panel
- Mosaic decoration at the Hammath Tiberias synagogue
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Emperor or athlete? Rethinking a modern attribution
Bronze statue of the emperor Trebonianus Gallus, 251-53 C.E., bronze, 241.3 cm high (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Speakers: Dr. Elizabeth Marlowe and Dr. Beth Harris.
Want to join the conversation?
- It's not up to the standard of earlier sculptures. A fake, or a sign of Imperial degeneracy? Maybe even a mediocre artist?(4 votes)
- Is it possible that the sculptor was editorializing? That is, by making the head small in scale to that of the body, he was saying Gallas was strong of body, but weak/small of mind?(3 votes)
- That is an interesting and creative interpretation. It's neither more nor less likely to be accurate than anything else we heard in the video. You should consider a career in advertising!(3 votes)
- Brainstorming Trebonianus:
- Emperor's head propped/grafted upon a "foreign" torso (seams?)?
- Hand gestures similar to Marcus Aurelius' horse riding statue (Campidoglio)? Standardized posture/gestures?
- "Hercules"? Commodus as gladiator precedent?
- Later Empire "Big is Beautiful" ideals?(2 votes) - Maybe the head is smaller because it was replaced; could this be an example of a damning of memory?(1 vote)
- The statue is made of bronze, and any change in its structure would be very obvious. Cutting the head off would be a tremendous effort, and then you would have to attach another head that isn't the right size. If you replaced the head, you wouldn't have such smooth seams.
I'm not saying it couldn't have been replaced, but it just doesn't seem possible.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(classical piano music) - [Dr. Marlowe] We're here in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at a large bronze
ancient Roman figure that the Met identified
as Trebonianus Gallus, who was a Emperor in the third century. - [Dr. Harris] During a
period of military anarchy when Emperor's were no longer
rising through the ranks of the Senate but rather
were military commanders. - [Dr. Marlowe] Trebonianus
was only Emperor for two years, and that was typical in the third century, there was a tremendous amount
of political instability during this period in the Roman Empire. - [Dr. Harris] And during those two years, because of all the chaos and the breakdown of various Roman systems, one of the things we
don't have are very many securely-identified
stone portraits of him, and even his coin portraits
are pretty generic looking and not a lot
of consistency from one mint to another, so we
don't really have a clear idea of what his official
Roman image looked like. For the first two centuries of
the Roman Imperial Government we know exactly what
every Emperor looked like, any anyone who's studied
Roman portraits can identify a portrait immediately on first glance, because those image types
were so well established, that whole system falls
apart in the third century. - [Dr. Marlowe] Art historians
have thought he's an Emperor because of his heroic size, his nudity, the fact that is gesturing with his right arm up, on the other hand there are things that are with anomalous about him. - [Dr. Harris] The most
striking thing about this is how unclassical it looks, the proportions seem very off, the head seems much
too small for the body, the contrapposto stance is very awkward, the muscles in the torso look flabby, very different from what we associate with the classical ideal. - [Dr. Marlowe] Where
figures would be idealized, where they would look
youthful and athletic, and what I'm noticing
about his contrapposto is that although I see his left knee bent, I don't see the associated
shifting in his hips, and there's not that
sense of natural movement and flow to the body that we would expect in contrapposto. - [Dr. Harris] - So this
sculpture appeared only in the early 19th century, it's
said to have been excavated in Rome near the Church
of Saint John Lateran, but we don't know that for certain, there's no specific archeological record, that's a story that was told. - [Dr. Marlowe] That's a
story that's told by later owners who have a vested
interest in telling a good story about where this came from, a story that would enhance
it's value and it's prestige. If we knew where this statue came from, it might help us understand
it's very strange bodily feature, the unclassical style, those huge muscles, to me the closest
comparison for this statue is not other statues of Roman Emperors, it's a particular set of mosaics that show very large bodied wrestlers from the Baths of Caracalla who often
have these enormous torsos, and who often have faces
that are creased with lines that seem to convey some
kind of worry of fierceness. - [Dr. Harris] But it's
much more prestigious for the museum and the collector to say that this an Emperor, and one of the things that
happens when we talk about the Emperors of the third
century is we tend to read their biographies in
the way that they look, so that this more coarse
looking face with some emotion to it is subscribed to
the lower class origins of the Emperor's of the third century. - [Dr. Marlowe] This has always been, I think really a subconscious
assumption in the scholarship because of
course scholars know that Roman portraits were
set-up to honor the sitter, so you always want to
represent someone according to the ideals of the moment. Nevertheless there still
is often this assumption that images of soldier
Emperors are going to show them as lower class brutes, and that has fed the
interpretation of this statue and that circular reinforcing set of interpretations and prejudices. - [Dr. Harris] So he looks this way, therefore he must be a Roman
Emperor from the third century, and Roman Emperor's from the
third century look this way. - [Dr. Marlowe] That's
right, and all of that reinforces scholars assumptions about the relationship between class
and the classical ideals, and the problem with a statue
like this where we just don't know where it came from, we don't have any evidence
about this statue, external to the statue
itself that could help us break out of that interpretive circle, as long as we assume that soldier Emperors are not going to have a
classical looking body then there's no reason to doubt
the identification of this. So one of the things that's
so key about the alleged find spot of this statue in the region of Saint John Lateran in Rome, is that was the location
of a Military barracks. So the standard
interpretation of this is that he would have been set-up
in a Military environment where soldiers would have
actually been the primary audience for it and they
wouldn't have cared about the lack of it's classical
qualities but unfortunately that find spot has no secure foundation, it's just a rumor and of course it's been extremely convenient for scholars . - [Dr. Harris] We so often
study objects that don't have a secure find spot
when we interpret objects based on how they look, on their style, on their relationship with other objects. The only thing we can do
is reinforce things we already have an understanding about, and we don't ever learn anything new. - [Dr. Marlowe] That's right. If we knew that this was in fact set-up in a very prestigious place, say in the Roman forum, it would force us to rethink
a lot of our assumptions about the classical ideal
and what that meant at various moments in history, but without that secure
information about where this came from, this is
only going to reinforce what we think we already know, it can only reinforce our prejudices, not help us get past them. (classical piano music)