The Capitolium and Augustan Architectural Representation
The cup shows a tetrastyle temple with no side colonnade on a high substructure of ashlar masonry (pl. 9, 23). A long garland is suspended from the corners of the architrave, its ends hanging down on either side of the temple facade. In the pediment is an eagle upon a globe, which identifies the structure as the Capitolium, for the eagle of Jupiter commanding the orbis terrarum could designate no other god than Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Note the great care that has gone into the symbolism of this scene, rendering this tiny detail so as to be legible. It is fitting that this aspect of Jupiter should be stressed on a cup depicting triumph and the prayers connected with it; the symbolism matches the allegory of BR I:1, where Augustus holds a globe in his own hand; and the eagle, Jove's agent, as instrument of domination, is a metaphor for Augustus in relation to Jove and Augustus' stepsons in relation to himself. Though this detail is tiny, I do not think I read too much into it: since the artist could have put a laurel wreath here, much easier to carve and with its own triumphal associations, the choice of this particular symbol must have been deliberate. On the monumental relief postulated as prototype, such a detail, suitably picked out in paint/metal, would have been very noticeable.
The BR Capitolium is a simplified image of the monument, evocative of such sensory data as its dominance of the Capitoline hill, its massive foundations, and its basic form, rather than an exact rendering of the temple architecture; the Capitolium itself had a hexastyle porch with three rows of columns and side colonnades. This kind of abbreviation of architectural detail is typical of small-scale architectural representations in Roman art, as a legion of frustrated scholars of the numismatic corpus of architectural images could testify.[16]
Republican coin images of the Capitolium offer instructive parallels. M. Volteius' denarii of ca. 76 B.C. (fig. 97)[17] use the same scheme of a
tetrastyle facade and a symbolic attribute of Jupiter in the tympanon, here the lightning bolt. On the coin the temple's identity is further confirmed by the careful rendering of the three doors of the triple cella. This is actually a good, careful image; the next Capitolium type, on denarii of Petillius Capitolinus (37 B.C.), gives more "real" detail (six columns on the facade, attempt to show actual pedimental and akroterial sculpture), but it is a much worse image of the temple, very crudely cut and esthetically unappealing.[18] The BR artist has tried not only to show the temple but to convey its presence on the rocky eminence of the Capitoline hill; compare the denarii of C. Considius Nonianus of ca. 63/62 B.C. showing the Temple of Venus on the mountain of Eryx with its ring walls below (fig. 98).[19]
I do not affirm that the BR representation draws directly on numismatic conventions. Rather, the comparison shows how late Republican and early imperial artists in Rome found similar solutions to the problem of creating an evocative, recognizable architectural image on a very small physical scale. This brings up a point that helps to date the BR cup scene and its prototype: that is, the small scale on which the Capitolium is represented on the cup; for the artist, quite easily, could have enlarged the temple facade to use it as an architectural backdrop for his human figures; this is in fact how architecture is characteristically treated in Roman historical relief from the Villa Medici reliefs (fig. 9) (Tiberian/Claudian) into late antiquity. The same tendency is observable on imperial coinage beginning under Caligula with the first type to show human action (emperor and entourage) in an event (sacrifice) in front of a temple, here shown as a facade behind the figures, reaching slightly higher than the participants' heads.[20] The confident execution of this new numismatic convention indicates its derivation from monumental relief conventions, as illustrated by the late Augustan Sorrento base (fig. 15) and the Tiberian Villa Medici fragments (the Caligulan coin supports a pre-Claudian date for these).[21] Together, the coin and the extant sculpture point to a late Tiberian or Caligulan start to this distinctive way of combining human figures with an architectural representation. This argument means that the BR scene cannot be later than the Augustan or early Tiberian period.
In fact, there is a direct parallel to the BR compositional scheme in the field of monumental relief, and this parallel helps to fix the BR composition firmly in the Augustan period. The Aeneas panel of the Ara Pacis (fig. 99)[22] incorporates the Temple of the Dii Penates into the composition exactly the way the Capitolium is incorporated into the BR sacrifice: the
temple stands on a high stone outcrop at the far edge of the panel (here, left) to frame the action, so that the sacrificant faces toward the temple and its gods view his sacrifice to them; it is physically very small, set near the top of the relief field; it is shown in flattened three-quarter view, in contrast to the frontal representations of Republican and imperial coinage and of most imperial relief, and its side and front share a single horizontal ground line; its drafted ashlar masonry is carefully delineated on the side of the building, larger than to actual scale, with no side colonnade. The prevalence of this convention is apparent in the late Republican/Augustan "Grimani reliefs" from Praeneste, four panels that each show a particular animal curled up before a landscape outcrop; the barn in the sheep panel (fig. 101)[23] is rendered as if it were a temple, along the lines described.[24] Another Augustan "bucolic" relief employs the convention in a sacrificial context: the Munich "peasant panel" (fig. 100) shows an old man on his way to a sacrifice, with a chapel of Priapus on a crag at upper left, the statue of the god appearing in the doorway, much as the Dii Penates appear at their door in the Aeneas panel (the similarly rendered crags have already been remarked).[25] The Praeneste relief seems to reflect an earlier stage in the motif or convention where the building shown is not quite as small in proportion to the human figures, so "elevated" or "far," and in which it is not yet used so explicitly as a framing element. To this earlier phase belongs the Bern Dionysiac cock-sacrifice relief,[26] which locates a temple of our type in the background cityscape near the center, a temple of similar proportions to the Praeneste temple-barn; the convention survives in an early imperial decorative relief with dramatic masks from Pompeii.[27] The Ara Pacis, or perhaps more correctly its atelier, may in turn have influenced bucolic/sacro-idyllic decorative relief manufacture, if it is right to date the Munich panel by the evolution of its rock forms from those of the Aeneas panel.[28]
Such reliefs are echoed in the later first century B.C. and early first century A.D. on Dionysiac silver (amphora from Gaul,[29] Casa del Menandro skyphos[30] ) and on intaglios with idyllic and Bacchic subjects (usually worship).[31] Quite significant are two superb gems in Vienna that narrate monstrous mythic slayings, datable to the later first century B.C. On one (fig. 103) a temple of Diana hovers at left over the dying Actaeon as he is torn by a hound; the scene is ironic, for such little temples otherwise indicate a deity being worshipped by the human in the foreground—here Actaeon himself is the sacrifice to the image in the doorway. The substitution of a temple for the "living" goddess recalls the Ara Pacis panel, where the Penates are anachronistically indicated as cult statues in a
temple.[32] On a superb large sardonyx (fig. 102) (by Philon)[33] Theseus escapes from the Labyrinth, its mouth a masonry arch in a construction of Cyclopean blocks in three-quarter view, upon a rocky cliff, he looks back to where the dead Minotaur sprawls half out of the dark gate, having crawled in his death throes. The proportions, perspectival structure, and detailing of masonry are those of my architectural motif, and the artist's transposition of these conventions to a mythic "Dark Tower" is proof of their strength. Complex allegories on luxury vessels in silver and precious stones also utilized the motif. On the early Julio-Claudian Berlin cameo vase (fig. 7) from a court workshop, such a temple at left frames the symbolic narratives;[34] similarly, on an early imperial beaker from Berthouville an allegorical tableau about the Isthmian Games[35] is framed by the actual Temple of Aphrodite atop Acrocorinth.[36]
We have then an artistic convention of the late first century B.C./early first century A.D.: temples of those gods involved in the main event appear very small, in three-quarter view, elevated at one edge of the composition on a built or natural outcrop.[37] The especial narrative locus seems to be sacrifice and/or worship, being performed or about to be performed. This convention might be thought to have originated in landscape painting, especially sacro-idyllic landscapes, which typically incorporate shrines; but in fact there are few parallels in the surviving corpus of wall painting and none in the related stucco compositions. Several panel paintings in the first century B.C. show flattened three-quarter-view temples or pedimented buildings to one side, in either a mythical narrative (e.g., Boscotrecase),[38] a sacrificial tableau (e.g., Palatine house of Augustus),[39] or an epiphany (e.g., Boscoreale Venus) (fig. 4).[40] In these panels, however, the scale of the buildings relative to the human actors is more "correct"—they do not generally appose large foreground figures with small buildings, as does relief. The House of Augustus panel, significantly, is most similar; note an epigram by the contemporary Antipater of Thessalonika that describes a similar compositions.[41]
The tendency has been to attribute the origins of reliefs like the Grimani reliefs, and the bucolic genre characteristics of the Ara Pacis end panels, for example, to a lost school of Hellenistic landscape painting centered in Alexandria. Conveniently, no examples of such painting survive to disprove this thesis. If the Republican bucolic and sacro-idyllic reliefs indeed derived from a Hellenistic painting genre, one would expect their Greek craftsmen to have produced such work also in the Hellenistic East; however, there is not in fact anything comparable from the Eastern Mediterranean.[42]
It seems clear that by the Augustan period the framing temple on a crag is a convention of marble relief, not of any dominant mode of painting; its roots are in the architectural conventions of Republican sacro-idyllic decorative relief.[43] From this genre (with many other aspects of "domestic" decoration) the motif was assumed on the Ara Pacis into the sphere of monumental commemorative relief.[44] Indeed, it may have been its use on the Ara Pacis which transformed it into a consciously deployed framing device, set firmly to one side of a picture, rather than being located vaguely in the middle or slightly off center. Some such step was the necessary precondition for its use in narrative historical compositions like those of the BR cup and the Berlin vase. Already in the Augustan or Tiberian period, the Sorrento base (fig. 15)[45] has elements of the "stageset" background of the type described above on the Caligulan coin. This use of architecture as a backdrop screen, familiar from Hellenistic relief, painting, and engraving (e.g., Praenestine cists), was at some point in the Tiberian period to become the dominant mode.[46] The temple-on-a-crag motif had limited temporal parameters, from ca. 50 B.C. through the reign of Augustus (its Antonine revival does not concern us); its use in historical commemorative and the exact correspondences in scale and detailing between the BR sacrifice and the Ara Pacis Aeneas panel (fig. 99) are close enough to date the cup (prototype) very near the altar complex (13-9 B.C.). As I have already shown how BR I:2 is closely tied to the Ara Pacis in its content, iconography, compositions, and date, this further link between the Ara Pacis and the cups is not surprising. The artistic interdependence of the cup panels is highlighted by the fact that they have significant artistic parallels with the same major monument.