Epilogue

Among the many records of the art of antiquity made by Peter Paul Rubens during his Italian journey in the early seventeenth century is a description of the unusual Aphrodite and Adonis sarcophagus with the inset scene of the healing of Aeneas’s wounds, now at the Casino Rospigliosi (cf. Figs. 6 and 73). Rubens recorded the work in his “itinerary”:

The intact relief of Adonis: first dissuaded by Venus from going on the hunt, to which he goes afterward, assisted by hunters (petasati), himself armed with the hunter’s spear (iaculum venatorium). The combat against the boar, his wounding in the thigh, which someone tends with a sponge, Venus holding his head. His death while Cupid again tends his wound with the sponge. He expires and gives up his soul as if into the mouth of Venus, who comes to his side to receive it.^[1]

Rubens’s description begins with the scene at the far left of the relief, follows with the next to its right, then skips the central image only to return to it out of sequence, as the logical sequel to the episode of the boar hunt. His great stature in the history of art, together with his renowned training in philology and his knowledge of the classics, made Rubens among the greatest “image readers” of his age; nevertheless, he failed to recognize that the central scene of this relief did not belong to the myth. His brief account not only attempted to incorporate the scene into the fabric of the tale, despite its obvious contradiction of the literary versions of the myth, but sought as well to preserve in its conventional manner the temporal sequence of a visual narrative that had been so evidently disrupted.^[2]

That Rubens failed to recognize the Aeneas scene on this sarcophagus relief is of merely antiquarian interest; within the scope of the present work, what is significant is that he was unable to take his interpretive cue from the obvious distortion of the mythological tale. The full and significant structure of this ancient visual narrative remained opaque to him—Rubens saw only the conventional form of a continuous narrative series and assumed that one scene was intended to be followed by the next in the sequence. The flexibility of the paratactic form in which the various scenes were related, allowing not only the juxtaposition of the two different stories but the evocation of an analogy between their typologically related heroes—all of this seems to have escaped Rubens’s scrutiny. What remains the most complex and idiosyncratic treatment of the Adonis myth on all the surviving sarcophagi was for him merely one more conventional presentation of a familiar story.

Such an anecdote demonstrates subtly yet forcefully how some characteristics of the art of the distant past may remain rooted in the cultures and times from which they sprang. Thus it confirms the necessity of a historical reconstruction such as the present one. Our hope of comprehending the objects of cultures long past in the fullest sense possible is not, and has never been, open to any other form of detailed scrutiny.

While the study of the sarcophagus reliefs provides only one among many possible examples that could be drawn from the history of visual narration, nevertheless it offers rich material for the examination of—and evidence for the importance of—the fundamental visual and intellectual structures that provide the foundations upon which artists have always built their various inventions. For the formative role played by the main foci of this study—analogy, typology, and memory—did live on in the tradition of visual narrative. These characteristics survived the great change from classical to Christian imagery: at times the old pagan forms were borrowed and adapted to provide the basis of the new Christian imagery; in some instances pre-Christian metaphors served as vehicles for Christian truths, as old ideas were reused to new purpose. Yet beyond the obvious affinities at the level of either form or content, the basic structures that have been studied here proved indispensable, not only for Christianity’s new narratives but for its new conception of the world. Typology was transformed as it became an all-encompassing biblical typology. Memory found new purpose in charting the history of the Faith. Above all, however, the fundamental importance of analogy knew no bounds, as was pointed out long ago by Meyer Schapiro:

In the Christian’s effort to comprehend the whole of his world within a single system of thought, every new object and situation was submitted to a process of analogical interpretation. For late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and particularly for religious thought, analogy was perhaps the most significant relationship between things.…analogy and purpose became the key concepts in explaining the world. A similarity of form, even a purely verbal one in the names of things, was already a bond between things.…The discovered analogies in turn serve a hidden purpose of the divine being. Every event or stage is an announcement and a preparation of a subsequent stage.…the universe—nature and history—is saturated with Christian finality, everything points beyond itself to a formal system evident in the analogical structure of things, due to a divine intention working itself out in time.^[3]

The history of these narrative structures and their development is, however, another story, one outside the scope of the present study. Yet it must be remembered that Christian theology is profoundly unlike classical mythology—indeed they are in many respects opposites. Christian theology could not tolerate the consistent reshaping and re-elaboration that lay at the heart of the mythological tradition, as myth underwent metamorphosis amid the development of culture. Nor could it be served by typological ambiguity in the visualization of those narratives fundamental to its doctrines. For these two factors of the narratives found on some of the Roman sarcophagi—the transformation of the myths and their representation with forms that alluded to other, related, stories—characterize most vividly the flexibility and potency of the classical conceptions and distinguish them from the Christian.

All the variations in the way the ancient tales were represented on the mythological sarcophagi demonstrate the sophistication that lent continual life to the mythological tradition. Its stories were given new vitality as they were reconceived by a creative imagination that gleaned the essence of individual myths as well as recognized the parallels between different tales. The variants reveal the extent to which artists and patrons of the sarcophagi might refashion these famous tales according to their own desires. On monuments marked by such transformations of the myths, patrons were not limited to likening themselves to the gods and heroes of myth, consecrating themselves in their images: the myths and images had become, more than ever before, the vehicles that announced a hope for the future that lies “beyond the shores of fate.” Those funeral monuments that distinguish themselves among the corpus and repertory of each myth by the unique visualizations of the tales they recount illuminate for us the real function of sarcophagus imagery: to allow the beholder to draw from these depictions the meanings not only of the myths but of the lives they were meant to represent.

Notes