Commentary: The Nature of the Image

In contrast to BR I:1, an allegory whose only human participant is the emperor himself, BR I:2 is a classic example of Roman documentary historical relief. an image that presents itself as the literal transcription of an actual and singular event as it would have been visible to a real observer. The only concessions to the artistic limits of the relief panel are, first, the shorthand by which seven lictors, two soldiers, and three barbarian parents with children do duty for what will have been larger numbers in actuality and, second, the spreading out of the participants to afford a point of view that, though evocative of "real" perspective, would not in fact have been available to any single spectator of the actual audience.

Real space and time are indicated here, in contrast to the panel on the other side. In that allegory single figures predominate, isolated in space, spread out in paratactic disposition, exhibiting neoclassic conservatism in the illusionistic exploitation of relief planes to suggest penetration into the depths of the relief ground. These figures breathe some Olympian air that reaches far above their heads, as they stand frozen in gracefully static poses, even those meant to be in motion. Thus not only the subject and

iconography but the mode of depiction as well lift this event into some extratemporal realm of essential reality. The submission scene, on the other hand, has only human actors, who crowd all three dimensions, massed in complex groups deep into the background, cramming the width and height of the panel.^[4] Here is no lofty, over-arching atmosphere: the full height of the relief is filled with heads and intersecting lictors' rods. The actors seem caught in the midst of spontaneous, rather than posed "balletic," movement. The interplay of their various gestures and poses implies an immediate past and future: the foremost infant has just thrust its arms out and smiled, the adult of the second pair has just started to stoop in moving forward toward the kneeling presentation of his child, as the father behind him waits still at rest to take his turn in line; the legionary at far right is caught moving with realistic lack of grace around the back of Augustus' dais.

Note how though the same figure type is used to depict Augustus in both scenes, the context gives that figure a very different flavor in either case. In the allegory, the emperor with his globe seems a serenely poised figure who has been waiting thus and will continue to pose thus for an undefinable extent of time. In the documentary narrative, his gesture seems a responsive motion toward the approach of the barbarians, especially toward the gesture of the child at his feet. In both compositions the lines of motion conform to a series of curves. While those in the allegory loop rhythmically across the field in a symmetrically balanced pattern, in the bustling crowd scene those curves make up a single dominant arc, curving down from the top left to swing up suddenly at a much sharper angle to the central figure of the emperor; the line of motion in the crowd scene is an individually modulated and asymmetrical curve in place of cool symmetry. If BR I:1 has its literary counterpart in the panegyric odes of Horace, then BR I:2 is artistic cousin to the prose of the Roman historians, the ostensibly "straight" narrative of historic achievement of Caesar's De bello Gallico or Augustus' Res gestae .

I have just been at pains to emphasize the differences between the two panel compositions of BR I; what most immediately strikes the viewer is, of course, the compositional similarities, principally anchored by the togate, seated figure of Augustus, who is approached by at least one infant figure, beyond whom stands a frontally posed young male with nude (or seemingly nude) torso. This chapter demonstrates how BR I:2 locates in real time and history, as we experience it, the transcendent reality explicated in the allegory BR I:1. It is as if the viewer looked at history as an annalist and as a poet at once, his shifting between the two panels a kind

of shifting between different sensations of temporality and modes of vision focused on the same central object, Augustus. In this realm, style becomes iconography. The meaning of the individual panels, and of the cup as a whole, is predicated not least on formal correspondence between specific figure types embedded in specific compositional structures.

Such graceful binary pairings can be recognized as characteristic of other works of Augustan art, major and minor. An Arretine ware matrix of ca. 30 B.C. preserves a comparable cup pattern:^[5] on one side Hercules-Antony and on the other Cleopatra-Omphale are drawn in a triumphal centaur chariot led by a straining servant, followed by appropriate attendants—young men with Hercules' weapons, maidens with flowers, fan, and parasol. The compositions function in a mythic-allegorical mode to comment on Antony's self-proclaimed roles as New Dionysos and New Hercules, though whether the humor is meant to be gentle or savage is not clear. The Casa del Menandro skyphoi pair the couplings of Mars and Venus with the couplings of a human pair on the other side—the latter familiar from Arretine cups.^[6] Such compositional pairing is just as characteristic of Augustan monumental art (to which Arretine ware was closely linked). The Ara Pacis (fig. 71), a staple of introductory slide lectures, furnishes the best example: a correctly angled view takes in Augustus and Aeneas as figures identical in pose and gesture, both capite velato, in an obvious equation of Augustus with his own ancestor. Here, as on the cup, Augustus' historical, real actions are depicted for the viewer as having a different temporal dimension, in this case an identity with events of the far past; and Augustus' own unique, semidivine persona is explicated by this pendant figure.

As the panel BR I:2 purports to narrate a historical event, it needs historical analysis. Reading an allegory, one looks for the concept conveyed by the sum of the elements present, adding up their individual significance, and the significance of their joint presence, as if setting up the equation for a chemical reaction. Historical time exists only as the setting for the making of the artifact itself. At what point in time could this idea have been formulated? At what time was it most likely to have been formulated? In a depiction of a historical event, however, historical time is part and parcel of the subject of the depiction. Whatever the extrahistorical significance of the themes located in the depiction, to read that image is to search for an individual historical moment. In a documentary scene, the identities of the participants are dependent one upon the other. We do not ask of the allegory, Given that this is Venus, when did she meet Augustus? Here we do ask, Given that this is Augustus, who are the barbarians, who

is this young general, and at what point could they all have participated in this event?

The first fixed point is the emperor. He is outside the city of Rome, as the lictors have axes bound into their rods; he is in a military encampment, for he is seated on a military commander's stool, and the participants are limited to his own lictors, and to foreigners and military figures. Augustus is abroad, then, in an encampment in the territory of the foreigners represented and must be commander in chief, as he sits in the commander's place on a tribunal/dais; however, as he is in civilian dress, he must be understood to be presiding in a sphere under the immediate supervision of the young commander who presents subjects for audience and acts under Augustus' consular auspicia . Once we identify the young general and the barbarians and explain what they do with the children we can discuss the implications of the event and its portrayal.