The Capitoline Museums, Rome Located in the political and religious center of ancient Rome, site of the Temple of Jupiter and overlooking the Forum, the Capitoline Museums sit atop one of the Seven Hills of Rome and were erected between the 1200s and the 1400s. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV inaugurated the collection by donating to the Roman Senate four ancient bronze sculptures, including the famous She-Wolf, with the expressed wish to establish an institution for ancient masterpieces that would testify to his zeal for antiquity. Sixtus’ donation represented the Thesaurus Romanitatis, an invaluable collection treasured by the Church and safeguarded from pillaging throughout the Middle Ages. For the occasion, Sixtus IV commissioned Michelangelo with the redesign of the façades of the Palazzo Senatorio and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which, together with the newly erected Palazzo Nuovo (also a project of Michelangelo) enclosed a vast trapezoidal square. At its center stood the monumental equestrian sculpture of Marcus Aurelius, spared from the common medieval practice of melting down artworks for the procurement of bronze, solely because it was deemed to be a representation of the first Christian emperor, Constantine. Eventually relocating from the Palazzo dei Conservatori to the Palazzo Nuovo, the Capitoline Museums were established officially in 1734 to the display of the legacy of Imperial Rome. The complete Hall of Emperors in the Palazzo Nuovo contains 67 busts at present, the result of a nineteenth-century curatorial choice to create a survey of Roman portraiture from the Republican period to the late Roman empire. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Enel Green Power North America, a leading owner and operator of renewable energy plants in North America. In Oklahoma, the company owns and operates four wind farms, with two additional wind sites under construction.
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art University of Oklahoma 555 Elm Avenue, Norman, Oklahoma 73019
Above: Portrait of Augustus, (31-15 B.C.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome Right: Portrait of Octavian, (31-15 B.C.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Front panel: Portrait of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
September 4 – December 6, 2015
Overleaf: Portrait of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) Greek Red Portavenere Alabaster Capitoline Museums, Rome
The Capitoline Museums, Rome Located in the political and religious center of ancient Rome, site of the Temple of Jupiter and overlooking the Forum, the Capitoline Museums sit atop one of the Seven Hills of Rome and were erected between the 1200s and the 1400s. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV inaugurated the collection by donating to the Roman Senate four ancient bronze sculptures, including the famous She-Wolf, with the expressed wish to establish an institution for ancient masterpieces that would testify to his zeal for antiquity. Sixtus’ donation represented the Thesaurus Romanitatis, an invaluable collection treasured by the Church and safeguarded from pillaging throughout the Middle Ages. For the occasion, Sixtus IV commissioned Michelangelo with the redesign of the façades of the Palazzo Senatorio and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which, together with the newly erected Palazzo Nuovo (also a project of Michelangelo) enclosed a vast trapezoidal square. At its center stood the monumental equestrian sculpture of Marcus Aurelius, spared from the common medieval practice of melting down artworks for the procurement of bronze, solely because it was deemed to be a representation of the first Christian emperor, Constantine. Eventually relocating from the Palazzo dei Conservatori to the Palazzo Nuovo, the Capitoline Museums were established officially in 1734 to the display of the legacy of Imperial Rome. The complete Hall of Emperors in the Palazzo Nuovo contains 67 busts at present, the result of a nineteenth-century curatorial choice to create a survey of Roman portraiture from the Republican period to the late Roman empire. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Enel Green Power North America, a leading owner and operator of renewable energy plants in North America. In Oklahoma, the company owns and operates four wind farms, with two additional wind sites under construction.
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art University of Oklahoma 555 Elm Avenue, Norman, Oklahoma 73019
Above: Portrait of Augustus, (31-15 B.C.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome Right: Portrait of Octavian, (31-15 B.C.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Front panel: Portrait of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
September 4 – December 6, 2015
Overleaf: Portrait of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) Greek Red Portavenere Alabaster Capitoline Museums, Rome
The Capitoline Museums, Rome Located in the political and religious center of ancient Rome, site of the Temple of Jupiter and overlooking the Forum, the Capitoline Museums sit atop one of the Seven Hills of Rome and were erected between the 1200s and the 1400s. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV inaugurated the collection by donating to the Roman Senate four ancient bronze sculptures, including the famous She-Wolf, with the expressed wish to establish an institution for ancient masterpieces that would testify to his zeal for antiquity. Sixtus’ donation represented the Thesaurus Romanitatis, an invaluable collection treasured by the Church and safeguarded from pillaging throughout the Middle Ages. For the occasion, Sixtus IV commissioned Michelangelo with the redesign of the façades of the Palazzo Senatorio and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which, together with the newly erected Palazzo Nuovo (also a project of Michelangelo) enclosed a vast trapezoidal square. At its center stood the monumental equestrian sculpture of Marcus Aurelius, spared from the common medieval practice of melting down artworks for the procurement of bronze, solely because it was deemed to be a representation of the first Christian emperor, Constantine. Eventually relocating from the Palazzo dei Conservatori to the Palazzo Nuovo, the Capitoline Museums were established officially in 1734 to the display of the legacy of Imperial Rome. The complete Hall of Emperors in the Palazzo Nuovo contains 67 busts at present, the result of a nineteenth-century curatorial choice to create a survey of Roman portraiture from the Republican period to the late Roman empire. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Enel Green Power North America, a leading owner and operator of renewable energy plants in North America. In Oklahoma, the company owns and operates four wind farms, with two additional wind sites under construction.
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art University of Oklahoma 555 Elm Avenue, Norman, Oklahoma 73019
Above: Portrait of Augustus, (31-15 B.C.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome Right: Portrait of Octavian, (31-15 B.C.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Front panel: Portrait of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
September 4 – December 6, 2015
Overleaf: Portrait of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) Greek Red Portavenere Alabaster Capitoline Museums, Rome
Lissa and Cy Wagner Gallery Sept. 5 – Dec. 6 Immortales: The Hall of Emperors of the Capitoline Museums, Rome, brings to the United States for the first time a selection of 20 busts from the collection of the world’s oldest museum. The exhibition offers a survey of Roman portraiture from the age of Augustus to the late Roman Empire (1st century B.C. - 5th century A.D.). Sculpted busts of emperors, empresses, and patricians reveal how portraits helped craft private and public images of distinguished individuals for ancient Roman audiences as well as for posterity. The two Octavian Augustus portraits, for example, suggest the first emperor’s aspirations and achievements in distinct moments of his regency. Prior to the acquisition of the title of Augustus, the young and ambitious consul sought in his portraits a sense of pathos epitomized by the heroic imagery of Alexander the Great, as embodied by the Capitoline bust of Octavian. After obtaining the title of first emperor, he pursued a more austere and increasingly idealized image of himself informed by Classical Greek models of portraiture (480 B.C. to 323 B.C.)
Female Portrait (Fonseca Bust) (110-130 A.D.) White Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
evident in the Capitoline portrait of Augustus (31 B.C.-15 B.C.). The combination of idealized features from Greek sculpture with a realistic style favored during the Hellenistic era and early Roman Republic ultimately established a model for portraiture until late antiquity. Despite variances that made each portrait unique, carefully arranged hair locks remained a signature of Augustus’ representation throughout the decades, and influenced subsequent rulers to incorporate these features into their own portraits as an allusion to the first emperors’ political stances. Following Emperor Domitian’s autocratic regency, his successor Nerva promoted a return to more liberal policies on censorship favored by Augustus. As a subtle visual reminder of his stance he adopted the Augustan and Julio-Claudian cap of hair as part of his private and public image. Almost immediately after Augustus, Vespasian (6970 A.D.), returned to the naturalism of the previous Republican era. The meticulous, almost cartographic rendition of wrinkles, flaws, and ruggedness validated male virtus, or moral rectitude, as a sign of maturity, experience, and for Vespasian specifically, successful leadership and military achievements. The same naturalistic attention to individuality distinguishes Nerva’s (96-98 A.D.) and Plotina’s (110-117 A.D.) portraits. The honest portrayal of Plotina’s slight double chin and sagging eyes connotes modesty of character and disinterest in embellishment or idealization. Her somewhat passé hairstyle, the only one ever adopted by the empress for her official portraits, shies away from fashion and frivolity, while tension in her eyebrows confers a sense of contained grief that likely situates the portrait in the years of Plotina’s widowhood. Idealized beauty returned temporarily in the portraits of Plotina’s husband, emperor Trajan, who is depicted in the Capitoline bust (108 A.D.) with paludamentum (military cloak) and balteus (baldric) on a nude torso. Soon after, Greek culture seduced the erudite and refined Hadrian, nicknamed “The Greekling” (128-130 A.D.). He was the first emperor to adopt the customary Greek full beard and, like Trajan, was depicted always as an ageless adult. Despite a momentary interest in the Greek ideal, a desire for verisimilitude brought significant enhancements in drilling techniques, in turn yielding new coiffure trends in female portraiture. Unlike the portraits of Livia or Agrippina the
Elder, which display superficial shaving of the marble through the use of chisels and only occasional puncturing through the employment of the drill, the Female Portrait, or Fonseca Bust (110-130 A.D.) presents in its copious curls considerably more invasive interventions on the marble. A display of sculptural virtuosity attesting to both the patrician woman’s means and her assertive beauty, this exuberant and almost irreverent hairstyle could be hardly concealed by a veil, the expected cover for women’s hair in public, and is thus a conscious display of power in a society that often interpreted women’s beautification as a form of manipulation over men. Immortales also focuses on the familial relationships that tied these historical characters to one another, and on the role of marriage, divorce, and adoption in the structuring and preservation of the fabric of Roman society. Women and men married and divorced according to the political needs of the moment, and adoption helped establish legacies and the succession to the throne for almost a century. Hadrian’s adoption of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.), immediately followed by Antoninus’ adoption of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) and Marcus Aurelius (140 A.D.), established a practice of non-hereditary succession that required popular support. The portraits of Antoninus, Lucius, and Marcus, are fitting examples of how visual cues served the ideological and political needs of those in power. The profuse use of the drill for the curls in both hair and beards became an identifying trait of the Antonine family and one that Antoninus wished to include in the portraits of his two adopted sons, Lucius and Marcus, as visual corroboration of continuity and legitimacy of power. Multiple re-workings of a single bust and the use of different materials would often lead to stylistic eclecticism, a peculiarity of Roman portraiture. From the early second century B.C. on, sculptors in Rome began to employ imported marble from Greece. After Julius Caesar’s death (44 B.C.), Luna marble (modern Carrara), a finegrained white marble with a blue-gray tint, acquired great popularity as a medium for portrait manufacture in Rome and central Italy. Variedly colored imported stone, such as gray granite from Egypt or red marble from Greece, appears in portraits under the Flavians, Trajan, and Hadrian. The bust of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) employs
Portrait of Plotina (110-117 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Hadrian (128-130 A.D.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Greek red alabaster, known as Portavenere, for an assemblage of maculated flounces and folds, a luxurious rendering of the red paludamentum. Multi-toned, semitransparent yellow alabaster from Egypt creates a layering of diaphanous pleats on Livia’s stola (30-54 A.D.), the women’s equivalent of the toga. The alabaster takes on auburn tones as it transitions to the palla, or mantle, heavily draped over her shoulders, wrapped around the stola, and fastened in a lateral fold. Portrait heads in Luna marble, like the one of Livia, would often be mounted on imported colored marble busts, thus effectively rendering the texture contrast between skin and fabric. While the Greeks considered a sculpture a unified whole, Roman portraiture could be created with interchangeable components. Workshops crafted body types, such as the cuirassed general or the togate man, but left head manufacturing to more skilled portraitists. In the portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.), sculptors married the head with a Hadrianic-era bust sporting an opulent display of military garments, including a lorica (muscled cuirass) with central Gorgoneion (Medusa head) and a fibula-clasped paludamentum. Portraits throughout the Imperial age were a means to affirm and sustain an individual’s identity in both the private and public sphere. The title Immortales, which echoes Hippocrates’ aphorism, Ars Longa, Vita Brevis (art lasts forever, while life ends), expresses the idea that these sculptures through their artistic virtuosity serve as an effective material testimony to some of the most exceptional individuals in Western history.
Portrait of Trajan (108 A.D.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Lissa and Cy Wagner Gallery Sept. 5 – Dec. 6 Immortales: The Hall of Emperors of the Capitoline Museums, Rome, brings to the United States for the first time a selection of 20 busts from the collection of the world’s oldest museum. The exhibition offers a survey of Roman portraiture from the age of Augustus to the late Roman Empire (1st century B.C. - 5th century A.D.). Sculpted busts of emperors, empresses, and patricians reveal how portraits helped craft private and public images of distinguished individuals for ancient Roman audiences as well as for posterity. The two Octavian Augustus portraits, for example, suggest the first emperor’s aspirations and achievements in distinct moments of his regency. Prior to the acquisition of the title of Augustus, the young and ambitious consul sought in his portraits a sense of pathos epitomized by the heroic imagery of Alexander the Great, as embodied by the Capitoline bust of Octavian. After obtaining the title of first emperor, he pursued a more austere and increasingly idealized image of himself informed by Classical Greek models of portraiture (480 B.C. to 323 B.C.)
Female Portrait (Fonseca Bust) (110-130 A.D.) White Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
evident in the Capitoline portrait of Augustus (31 B.C.-15 B.C.). The combination of idealized features from Greek sculpture with a realistic style favored during the Hellenistic era and early Roman Republic ultimately established a model for portraiture until late antiquity. Despite variances that made each portrait unique, carefully arranged hair locks remained a signature of Augustus’ representation throughout the decades, and influenced subsequent rulers to incorporate these features into their own portraits as an allusion to the first emperors’ political stances. Following Emperor Domitian’s autocratic regency, his successor Nerva promoted a return to more liberal policies on censorship favored by Augustus. As a subtle visual reminder of his stance he adopted the Augustan and Julio-Claudian cap of hair as part of his private and public image. Almost immediately after Augustus, Vespasian (6970 A.D.), returned to the naturalism of the previous Republican era. The meticulous, almost cartographic rendition of wrinkles, flaws, and ruggedness validated male virtus, or moral rectitude, as a sign of maturity, experience, and for Vespasian specifically, successful leadership and military achievements. The same naturalistic attention to individuality distinguishes Nerva’s (96-98 A.D.) and Plotina’s (110-117 A.D.) portraits. The honest portrayal of Plotina’s slight double chin and sagging eyes connotes modesty of character and disinterest in embellishment or idealization. Her somewhat passé hairstyle, the only one ever adopted by the empress for her official portraits, shies away from fashion and frivolity, while tension in her eyebrows confers a sense of contained grief that likely situates the portrait in the years of Plotina’s widowhood. Idealized beauty returned temporarily in the portraits of Plotina’s husband, emperor Trajan, who is depicted in the Capitoline bust (108 A.D.) with paludamentum (military cloak) and balteus (baldric) on a nude torso. Soon after, Greek culture seduced the erudite and refined Hadrian, nicknamed “The Greekling” (128-130 A.D.). He was the first emperor to adopt the customary Greek full beard and, like Trajan, was depicted always as an ageless adult. Despite a momentary interest in the Greek ideal, a desire for verisimilitude brought significant enhancements in drilling techniques, in turn yielding new coiffure trends in female portraiture. Unlike the portraits of Livia or Agrippina the
Elder, which display superficial shaving of the marble through the use of chisels and only occasional puncturing through the employment of the drill, the Female Portrait, or Fonseca Bust (110-130 A.D.) presents in its copious curls considerably more invasive interventions on the marble. A display of sculptural virtuosity attesting to both the patrician woman’s means and her assertive beauty, this exuberant and almost irreverent hairstyle could be hardly concealed by a veil, the expected cover for women’s hair in public, and is thus a conscious display of power in a society that often interpreted women’s beautification as a form of manipulation over men. Immortales also focuses on the familial relationships that tied these historical characters to one another, and on the role of marriage, divorce, and adoption in the structuring and preservation of the fabric of Roman society. Women and men married and divorced according to the political needs of the moment, and adoption helped establish legacies and the succession to the throne for almost a century. Hadrian’s adoption of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.), immediately followed by Antoninus’ adoption of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) and Marcus Aurelius (140 A.D.), established a practice of non-hereditary succession that required popular support. The portraits of Antoninus, Lucius, and Marcus, are fitting examples of how visual cues served the ideological and political needs of those in power. The profuse use of the drill for the curls in both hair and beards became an identifying trait of the Antonine family and one that Antoninus wished to include in the portraits of his two adopted sons, Lucius and Marcus, as visual corroboration of continuity and legitimacy of power. Multiple re-workings of a single bust and the use of different materials would often lead to stylistic eclecticism, a peculiarity of Roman portraiture. From the early second century B.C. on, sculptors in Rome began to employ imported marble from Greece. After Julius Caesar’s death (44 B.C.), Luna marble (modern Carrara), a finegrained white marble with a blue-gray tint, acquired great popularity as a medium for portrait manufacture in Rome and central Italy. Variedly colored imported stone, such as gray granite from Egypt or red marble from Greece, appears in portraits under the Flavians, Trajan, and Hadrian. The bust of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) employs
Portrait of Plotina (110-117 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Hadrian (128-130 A.D.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Greek red alabaster, known as Portavenere, for an assemblage of maculated flounces and folds, a luxurious rendering of the red paludamentum. Multi-toned, semitransparent yellow alabaster from Egypt creates a layering of diaphanous pleats on Livia’s stola (30-54 A.D.), the women’s equivalent of the toga. The alabaster takes on auburn tones as it transitions to the palla, or mantle, heavily draped over her shoulders, wrapped around the stola, and fastened in a lateral fold. Portrait heads in Luna marble, like the one of Livia, would often be mounted on imported colored marble busts, thus effectively rendering the texture contrast between skin and fabric. While the Greeks considered a sculpture a unified whole, Roman portraiture could be created with interchangeable components. Workshops crafted body types, such as the cuirassed general or the togate man, but left head manufacturing to more skilled portraitists. In the portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.), sculptors married the head with a Hadrianic-era bust sporting an opulent display of military garments, including a lorica (muscled cuirass) with central Gorgoneion (Medusa head) and a fibula-clasped paludamentum. Portraits throughout the Imperial age were a means to affirm and sustain an individual’s identity in both the private and public sphere. The title Immortales, which echoes Hippocrates’ aphorism, Ars Longa, Vita Brevis (art lasts forever, while life ends), expresses the idea that these sculptures through their artistic virtuosity serve as an effective material testimony to some of the most exceptional individuals in Western history.
Portrait of Trajan (108 A.D.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Lissa and Cy Wagner Gallery Sept. 5 – Dec. 6 Immortales: The Hall of Emperors of the Capitoline Museums, Rome, brings to the United States for the first time a selection of 20 busts from the collection of the world’s oldest museum. The exhibition offers a survey of Roman portraiture from the age of Augustus to the late Roman Empire (1st century B.C. - 5th century A.D.). Sculpted busts of emperors, empresses, and patricians reveal how portraits helped craft private and public images of distinguished individuals for ancient Roman audiences as well as for posterity. The two Octavian Augustus portraits, for example, suggest the first emperor’s aspirations and achievements in distinct moments of his regency. Prior to the acquisition of the title of Augustus, the young and ambitious consul sought in his portraits a sense of pathos epitomized by the heroic imagery of Alexander the Great, as embodied by the Capitoline bust of Octavian. After obtaining the title of first emperor, he pursued a more austere and increasingly idealized image of himself informed by Classical Greek models of portraiture (480 B.C. to 323 B.C.)
Female Portrait (Fonseca Bust) (110-130 A.D.) White Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
evident in the Capitoline portrait of Augustus (31 B.C.-15 B.C.). The combination of idealized features from Greek sculpture with a realistic style favored during the Hellenistic era and early Roman Republic ultimately established a model for portraiture until late antiquity. Despite variances that made each portrait unique, carefully arranged hair locks remained a signature of Augustus’ representation throughout the decades, and influenced subsequent rulers to incorporate these features into their own portraits as an allusion to the first emperors’ political stances. Following Emperor Domitian’s autocratic regency, his successor Nerva promoted a return to more liberal policies on censorship favored by Augustus. As a subtle visual reminder of his stance he adopted the Augustan and Julio-Claudian cap of hair as part of his private and public image. Almost immediately after Augustus, Vespasian (6970 A.D.), returned to the naturalism of the previous Republican era. The meticulous, almost cartographic rendition of wrinkles, flaws, and ruggedness validated male virtus, or moral rectitude, as a sign of maturity, experience, and for Vespasian specifically, successful leadership and military achievements. The same naturalistic attention to individuality distinguishes Nerva’s (96-98 A.D.) and Plotina’s (110-117 A.D.) portraits. The honest portrayal of Plotina’s slight double chin and sagging eyes connotes modesty of character and disinterest in embellishment or idealization. Her somewhat passé hairstyle, the only one ever adopted by the empress for her official portraits, shies away from fashion and frivolity, while tension in her eyebrows confers a sense of contained grief that likely situates the portrait in the years of Plotina’s widowhood. Idealized beauty returned temporarily in the portraits of Plotina’s husband, emperor Trajan, who is depicted in the Capitoline bust (108 A.D.) with paludamentum (military cloak) and balteus (baldric) on a nude torso. Soon after, Greek culture seduced the erudite and refined Hadrian, nicknamed “The Greekling” (128-130 A.D.). He was the first emperor to adopt the customary Greek full beard and, like Trajan, was depicted always as an ageless adult. Despite a momentary interest in the Greek ideal, a desire for verisimilitude brought significant enhancements in drilling techniques, in turn yielding new coiffure trends in female portraiture. Unlike the portraits of Livia or Agrippina the
Elder, which display superficial shaving of the marble through the use of chisels and only occasional puncturing through the employment of the drill, the Female Portrait, or Fonseca Bust (110-130 A.D.) presents in its copious curls considerably more invasive interventions on the marble. A display of sculptural virtuosity attesting to both the patrician woman’s means and her assertive beauty, this exuberant and almost irreverent hairstyle could be hardly concealed by a veil, the expected cover for women’s hair in public, and is thus a conscious display of power in a society that often interpreted women’s beautification as a form of manipulation over men. Immortales also focuses on the familial relationships that tied these historical characters to one another, and on the role of marriage, divorce, and adoption in the structuring and preservation of the fabric of Roman society. Women and men married and divorced according to the political needs of the moment, and adoption helped establish legacies and the succession to the throne for almost a century. Hadrian’s adoption of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.), immediately followed by Antoninus’ adoption of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) and Marcus Aurelius (140 A.D.), established a practice of non-hereditary succession that required popular support. The portraits of Antoninus, Lucius, and Marcus, are fitting examples of how visual cues served the ideological and political needs of those in power. The profuse use of the drill for the curls in both hair and beards became an identifying trait of the Antonine family and one that Antoninus wished to include in the portraits of his two adopted sons, Lucius and Marcus, as visual corroboration of continuity and legitimacy of power. Multiple re-workings of a single bust and the use of different materials would often lead to stylistic eclecticism, a peculiarity of Roman portraiture. From the early second century B.C. on, sculptors in Rome began to employ imported marble from Greece. After Julius Caesar’s death (44 B.C.), Luna marble (modern Carrara), a finegrained white marble with a blue-gray tint, acquired great popularity as a medium for portrait manufacture in Rome and central Italy. Variedly colored imported stone, such as gray granite from Egypt or red marble from Greece, appears in portraits under the Flavians, Trajan, and Hadrian. The bust of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) employs
Portrait of Plotina (110-117 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Hadrian (128-130 A.D.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Greek red alabaster, known as Portavenere, for an assemblage of maculated flounces and folds, a luxurious rendering of the red paludamentum. Multi-toned, semitransparent yellow alabaster from Egypt creates a layering of diaphanous pleats on Livia’s stola (30-54 A.D.), the women’s equivalent of the toga. The alabaster takes on auburn tones as it transitions to the palla, or mantle, heavily draped over her shoulders, wrapped around the stola, and fastened in a lateral fold. Portrait heads in Luna marble, like the one of Livia, would often be mounted on imported colored marble busts, thus effectively rendering the texture contrast between skin and fabric. While the Greeks considered a sculpture a unified whole, Roman portraiture could be created with interchangeable components. Workshops crafted body types, such as the cuirassed general or the togate man, but left head manufacturing to more skilled portraitists. In the portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.), sculptors married the head with a Hadrianic-era bust sporting an opulent display of military garments, including a lorica (muscled cuirass) with central Gorgoneion (Medusa head) and a fibula-clasped paludamentum. Portraits throughout the Imperial age were a means to affirm and sustain an individual’s identity in both the private and public sphere. The title Immortales, which echoes Hippocrates’ aphorism, Ars Longa, Vita Brevis (art lasts forever, while life ends), expresses the idea that these sculptures through their artistic virtuosity serve as an effective material testimony to some of the most exceptional individuals in Western history.
Portrait of Trajan (108 A.D.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Lissa and Cy Wagner Gallery Sept. 5 – Dec. 6 Immortales: The Hall of Emperors of the Capitoline Museums, Rome, brings to the United States for the first time a selection of 20 busts from the collection of the world’s oldest museum. The exhibition offers a survey of Roman portraiture from the age of Augustus to the late Roman Empire (1st century B.C. - 5th century A.D.). Sculpted busts of emperors, empresses, and patricians reveal how portraits helped craft private and public images of distinguished individuals for ancient Roman audiences as well as for posterity. The two Octavian Augustus portraits, for example, suggest the first emperor’s aspirations and achievements in distinct moments of his regency. Prior to the acquisition of the title of Augustus, the young and ambitious consul sought in his portraits a sense of pathos epitomized by the heroic imagery of Alexander the Great, as embodied by the Capitoline bust of Octavian. After obtaining the title of first emperor, he pursued a more austere and increasingly idealized image of himself informed by Classical Greek models of portraiture (480 B.C. to 323 B.C.)
Female Portrait (Fonseca Bust) (110-130 A.D.) White Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
evident in the Capitoline portrait of Augustus (31 B.C.-15 B.C.). The combination of idealized features from Greek sculpture with a realistic style favored during the Hellenistic era and early Roman Republic ultimately established a model for portraiture until late antiquity. Despite variances that made each portrait unique, carefully arranged hair locks remained a signature of Augustus’ representation throughout the decades, and influenced subsequent rulers to incorporate these features into their own portraits as an allusion to the first emperors’ political stances. Following Emperor Domitian’s autocratic regency, his successor Nerva promoted a return to more liberal policies on censorship favored by Augustus. As a subtle visual reminder of his stance he adopted the Augustan and Julio-Claudian cap of hair as part of his private and public image. Almost immediately after Augustus, Vespasian (6970 A.D.), returned to the naturalism of the previous Republican era. The meticulous, almost cartographic rendition of wrinkles, flaws, and ruggedness validated male virtus, or moral rectitude, as a sign of maturity, experience, and for Vespasian specifically, successful leadership and military achievements. The same naturalistic attention to individuality distinguishes Nerva’s (96-98 A.D.) and Plotina’s (110-117 A.D.) portraits. The honest portrayal of Plotina’s slight double chin and sagging eyes connotes modesty of character and disinterest in embellishment or idealization. Her somewhat passé hairstyle, the only one ever adopted by the empress for her official portraits, shies away from fashion and frivolity, while tension in her eyebrows confers a sense of contained grief that likely situates the portrait in the years of Plotina’s widowhood. Idealized beauty returned temporarily in the portraits of Plotina’s husband, emperor Trajan, who is depicted in the Capitoline bust (108 A.D.) with paludamentum (military cloak) and balteus (baldric) on a nude torso. Soon after, Greek culture seduced the erudite and refined Hadrian, nicknamed “The Greekling” (128-130 A.D.). He was the first emperor to adopt the customary Greek full beard and, like Trajan, was depicted always as an ageless adult. Despite a momentary interest in the Greek ideal, a desire for verisimilitude brought significant enhancements in drilling techniques, in turn yielding new coiffure trends in female portraiture. Unlike the portraits of Livia or Agrippina the
Elder, which display superficial shaving of the marble through the use of chisels and only occasional puncturing through the employment of the drill, the Female Portrait, or Fonseca Bust (110-130 A.D.) presents in its copious curls considerably more invasive interventions on the marble. A display of sculptural virtuosity attesting to both the patrician woman’s means and her assertive beauty, this exuberant and almost irreverent hairstyle could be hardly concealed by a veil, the expected cover for women’s hair in public, and is thus a conscious display of power in a society that often interpreted women’s beautification as a form of manipulation over men. Immortales also focuses on the familial relationships that tied these historical characters to one another, and on the role of marriage, divorce, and adoption in the structuring and preservation of the fabric of Roman society. Women and men married and divorced according to the political needs of the moment, and adoption helped establish legacies and the succession to the throne for almost a century. Hadrian’s adoption of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.), immediately followed by Antoninus’ adoption of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) and Marcus Aurelius (140 A.D.), established a practice of non-hereditary succession that required popular support. The portraits of Antoninus, Lucius, and Marcus, are fitting examples of how visual cues served the ideological and political needs of those in power. The profuse use of the drill for the curls in both hair and beards became an identifying trait of the Antonine family and one that Antoninus wished to include in the portraits of his two adopted sons, Lucius and Marcus, as visual corroboration of continuity and legitimacy of power. Multiple re-workings of a single bust and the use of different materials would often lead to stylistic eclecticism, a peculiarity of Roman portraiture. From the early second century B.C. on, sculptors in Rome began to employ imported marble from Greece. After Julius Caesar’s death (44 B.C.), Luna marble (modern Carrara), a finegrained white marble with a blue-gray tint, acquired great popularity as a medium for portrait manufacture in Rome and central Italy. Variedly colored imported stone, such as gray granite from Egypt or red marble from Greece, appears in portraits under the Flavians, Trajan, and Hadrian. The bust of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) employs
Portrait of Plotina (110-117 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Antoninus Pius (140 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Hadrian (128-130 A.D.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Greek red alabaster, known as Portavenere, for an assemblage of maculated flounces and folds, a luxurious rendering of the red paludamentum. Multi-toned, semitransparent yellow alabaster from Egypt creates a layering of diaphanous pleats on Livia’s stola (30-54 A.D.), the women’s equivalent of the toga. The alabaster takes on auburn tones as it transitions to the palla, or mantle, heavily draped over her shoulders, wrapped around the stola, and fastened in a lateral fold. Portrait heads in Luna marble, like the one of Livia, would often be mounted on imported colored marble busts, thus effectively rendering the texture contrast between skin and fabric. While the Greeks considered a sculpture a unified whole, Roman portraiture could be created with interchangeable components. Workshops crafted body types, such as the cuirassed general or the togate man, but left head manufacturing to more skilled portraitists. In the portrait of Commodus (180-192 A.D.), sculptors married the head with a Hadrianic-era bust sporting an opulent display of military garments, including a lorica (muscled cuirass) with central Gorgoneion (Medusa head) and a fibula-clasped paludamentum. Portraits throughout the Imperial age were a means to affirm and sustain an individual’s identity in both the private and public sphere. The title Immortales, which echoes Hippocrates’ aphorism, Ars Longa, Vita Brevis (art lasts forever, while life ends), expresses the idea that these sculptures through their artistic virtuosity serve as an effective material testimony to some of the most exceptional individuals in Western history.
Portrait of Trajan (108 A.D.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
The Capitoline Museums, Rome Located in the political and religious center of ancient Rome, site of the Temple of Jupiter and overlooking the Forum, the Capitoline Museums, which were erected between the 1200s and the 1400s, sit atop one of the Seven Hills of Rome. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV inaugurated the collection by donating to the Roman Senate four ancient bronze sculptures with the expressed wish to establish an institution for ancient masterpieces that would testify to his zeal for antiquity. Sixtus’ donation represented the Thesaurus Romanitatis, an invaluable collection treasured by the Church and safeguarded from pillaging throughout the Middle Ages. Michelangelo was later commissioned with the redesign of the façades of the Palazzo Senatorio and the Palazzo die Conservatori, which, together with the newly erected Palazzo Nuovo (also a project of Michelangelo), enclosed a vast trapezoidal square. At its center stood the monumental equestrian sculpture of Marcus Aurelius, spared from the common medieval practice of melting down artworks for the procurement of bronze, solely because it was deemed to be a representation of the first Christian emperor, Constantine. Eventually relocating from the Palazzo dei Conservatori to the Palazzo Nuovo, the Capitoline Museums were established officially in 1734 to the display of the legacy of Imperial Rome. The complete Hall of Emperors in the Palazzo Nuovo contains 67 busts at present, the result of a nineteenth-century curatorial choice to create a survey of Roman portraiture from the Republican period to the late-Roman empire. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Enel Green Power North America, a leading owner and operator of renewable energy plants in North America. In Oklahoma, the company owns and operates four wind farms, with two additional wind sites under construction.
Above: Portrait of Augustus, (31-15 B.C.) Grechetto Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome Right: Portrait of Octavian, (31-15 B.C.) Greek Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Front panel: Portrait of Lucius Verus (160-170 A.D.) Luna Marble Capitoline Museums, Rome
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art University of Oklahoma 555 Elm Avenue, Norman, Oklahoma 73019
September 4 – December 6, 2015
Overleaf: Portrait of Vespasian (69-70 A.D.) Greek Red Portavenere Alabaster Capitoline Museums, Rome