Venus and Emperor Compositions

To sum up, Venus as victrix and genetrix brings Victory / the Augustan Victory to her mortal son, followed by her divine son. Augustus' peaceful world rule—note that he wears the toga, not armor—is attended by love and fertility. Venus' role in the scene is parallel and pendant to that of Mars on the other side of Augustus.^[72]

To the architectural complexes described above as comparanda should be added the Ara Pacis, with its pendant panels containing Roma, the Genius, a syncretistic Venus, and Mars;^[73] besides these, some other examples from the major and minor arts are worth citing. The two finest Augustan cuirass statues, the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64) and the Cherchel statue (fig. 5) (marble copies after bronze originals) associate images of conquest with Amor (Primaporta statue support) or Venus with Amor (Cherchel cuirass): this would seem then to have been one of the standard motifs available in the creation of such imperator portraits. The Primaporta statue's bronze prototype would have had the same little Amor, though not needing support; this dolphin rider complements the cuirass imagery to refer to victory by sea as well as by land and to refer also to Augustus' particular great sea victory, the battle of Actium.^[74]

The Cherchel statue was not until lately so widely known, though its cuirass decoration is as singular and as finely executed as that of the Primaporta statue; the fact that the head is missing may have something to do with its past omission from the handbook canon. As on the Primaporta cuirass, the figure decoration is in three zones (fig. 5): (above) Mars Ultor in the heavens gazes upward; (middle) from our left, Amor as a youth holds his bow, Venus carrying the weapons of Mars gazes at the half-nude Caesar, who faces her with a Victory in his hand, as a full-size Victory moves to set a corona civica on his head; (below) two Tritons, one fish-

bodied with an akrostolion (part of a ship's prow), the other with fish tail turned to acanthus scrolls and holding a cornucopia.^[75] The program in sum praises the vengeance vowed by Augustus to Mars Ultor on behalf of his murdered father, Julius, depicted here as divus, by means of the sea victory at Actium, which has had the effect of establishing civil peace by land and sea (fish Triton:vegetal Triton) under the aegis of Venus, presiding over the laying aside of arms.

This Augustan work can only have portrayed Augustus himself.^[76] Particular points of comparison with the BR scene are, of course, the stressed line of descent from Venus by way of Caesar (himself shown as savior of Roman lives through military triumph; note, for example, the Victory with corona civica ); the fusion of peace and triumph imagery, focused about the person of Venus Genetrix/Victrix; and the depiction of the Julio-Claudian protagonist with Victory in his hand. (A fine glass signet in Florence of ca. 20 B.C. on which Augustus in a cuirass, laurel-crowned, holds in his left hand a trophy-bearing Victory, a portrait probably derived from a statue, should be mentioned in this context.)^[77] The central composition on the Cherchel cuirass (Victory, standing imperial honorand, Venus) was current in Augustus' reign; witness its adaptation for an imperial cult altar at Tarentum where the honorand is the togate Augustus (fig. 31).^[78] A Republican relief from Selinus made for a Roman imperator offers now a prototype (fig. 10) where the general is crowned by Victory, though here Venus has yet to turn to her protégé.^[79]

One should address S. Weinstock's interpretation of the BR group of Venus-Victory-Augustus. Discussing the ways in which Caesar linked Venus and Victory, he postulated three sculptural prototypes created for Caesar, which were fused to constitute the BR group. "It is certain that there was a statue of Venus holding Victoria," "almost certain" that there was "one of Caesar" holding Victoria, "and in addition a group of Venus handing Victoria to Caesar."^[80] This last hypothesis is based on the BR cup itself: "It makes better sense if it depends on a Caesarian composition; Venus handing over victory to Caesar is natural, to Augustus only if it follows Caesarian precedent." Weinstock's first hypothesis makes sense, particularly in conjunction with some of Caesar's coinage; there is, however, no Caesarian parallel whatsoever for his second hypothesis; and as for his third, it should be dismissed as illogical. The BR scene certainly evokes Caesarian ideology, specifically descent from the goddess, but we do not need to invent a pre-Augustan statue group to explain this—on these lines of reasoning the Aeneid 's picture of the relationship of Venus,

Caesar, Augustus, and their triumphs would have to be based on a Caesarian poem.

Weinstock did not know the Cherchel statue. Here indeed is Caesar with Victory in his hand (fig. 5), but this is the figure type for divus Julius and was created under the sponsorship of Augustus.^[81] The BR composition is a purely Augustan creation; moreover, a cameo fragment shows that it was not created solely for this cup (which could hardly have gone on to inspire other works of art) but existed either as a template in the imperial ateliers or as a monumental prototype somewhere on public view. This early Julio-Claudian cameo (fig. 18) preserves the central part. of a scene where a mural-crowned goddess draped like Venus moves to hand Victory to an enthroned emperor (mostly broken away).^[82] The goddess wears the crown of Oikoumene but is depicted after the exact figure type of the BR Venus, performing the same action toward the same protagonist, a seated emperor.

The BR composition belongs to monumental relief, not freestanding statuary, though it is Augustan statuary types that are slotted into the composition. The key is the Victory, who herself actively reaches to the emperor. Augustus' artists borrowed a stock composition from public, honorific relief, not from the minor arts; they adapted a classic theme of Athenian stelai of the fourth century B.C. (figs. 24–25), where Athena holds out a little Victory, who in turn reaches to crown or garland a mortal honorand (in fourth-century Athens shown much smaller than the state goddess), who himself raises a hand (in prayer).^[83]

Héron de Villefosse, the last scholar who examined the cups closely at firsthand, thought that he recognized a portrait of Livia in the BR Venus.^[84] This cannot be accepted without a chance to reexamine the cup, a chance now lost (this figure has been destroyed since 1899). The small mouth and delicate rounded chin could as easily result from an abstract classicizing standard of beauty, while the hint of Livia's distinctive aquiline profile visible in the existing plates could be a trick of light, a dent in the cup, or whatever. If this is taken as a portrait of Livia in the guise of Venus, it would not be very surprising, for there are several parallels for such representations in Augustus' own lifetime. A bronze plaque in Bonn from the Rhine (fig. 114), a piece of mass-produced (matrix-stamped) accoutrement for the Rhine armies, shows Livia/Venus with Drusus and Tiberius; the two princes are depicted as boys reaching to Venus' shoulder and are dressed as young imperatores . On a turquoise emblema in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (fig. 113) Livia/Venus Genetrix exchanges a doting

glance with the young general Tiberius, his head against her shoulder. The fine court gem and the crude bronze plaque from the government managed military workshops draw on the same composition, to the same ends of dynastic propaganda (see chapter 8, p. 173); hence the Livia/Venus on the later Ravenna relief (fig. 8), which honored Claudius' father, Drusus, her son. (Compare the Belvedere altar,^[85] one of the altars set up by each vicus in Rome for imperially sponsored cult under Augustus, where Julia may appear as Venus with her sons Gaius and Lucius.) Livia on the BR cup would function within this one scene as consort, but since the other side of the cup celebrates her son Drusus, and the companion cup, BR II, celebrates Tiberius, her conflation with Venus Genetrix as mother to the imperial line would parallel the three examples cited above.

Such compositions inject specific imperial personalities into a more general political theology where Venus Genetrix/Victrix attends the generation of future Julio-Claudian conquerors and rulers, as on an Augustan cameo vase in Berlin that must have been commissioned for the birth of some member of the dynasty:^[86] here, Venus sits with a Gorgoneion shield by a trophy with a captive at her feet, watching the lustration of a new-born princeling by a trio of birth goddesses (fig. 7). This vase with its "messianic" imagery should be compared to the fresco cycle of Room H in the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, where Venus Genetrix/Victrix (fig. 4) is the centerpiece of a room whose long sides adapt a Hellenistic palace painting cycle acclaiming the birth of a royal child in connection with the conquest of Asia. The ensemble, from the early 40s, is tied to Caesarian political ideology by its celebration of Venus Genetrix and its allusions to Eastern campaigns (cf. Caesar's planned Parthian campaign). The hopeful celebration of the Julio-Claudian boy-prince who will grow up to conquer resurfaces as one of the subthemes of the Grande Camée de France (boy imperator with his parents before Tiberius and Livia, with a Persian captive huddled by Livia's throne).^[87]