Venus
This Venus (pls. 1, 2, 3) derives from a well-known Roman figure type, a Neo-Attic creation of the late Republic incorporating sculptural conventions of late fifth-century and early fourth-century Athenian "Rich Style."[21] Its salient features are a chiton with slipped strap that clings to the torso in flattened ribbon folds and a mantle draped from the left shoulder so as to form a heavy roll of drapery at hip level that bares the upper curve of the right hip, while a single layer of cloth wraps the lower body down to or near the ankle. Venus can wear instead of a chiton a Roman woman's tunic, belted at the waist, with full loose sleeves reaching nearly to the elbow; this variant is a slightly later adaptation of the original type to a conception of Venus that is more decorous and matronly, for use in contexts where sensuality as a distinguishing feature of the goddess was to be elided. In an alternative and independent type, the goddess's torso is
naked, but she retains the distinctively draped mantle forming a heavy roll at the hips; Venus Genetrix/Victrix is so depicted on Caesarian coinage and at Boscoreale (see below).
In the Roman sphere, Venus mantled in this way is Venus Genetrix: that is, the avatar of Venus that was first made an object of cult by Julius Caesar. She was given exemplary form by the cult statue that Caesar commissioned from the prominent Neo-Attic sculptor Arkesilaos for his temple of Venus Genetrix (Pliny HN 35.155–56), centerpiece of his new Forum Julium (plan 122). This Venus was Venus Victrix as well, the patroness of Caesar's success;[22] Romans were used to thinking of Venus as a goddess of victory, by virtue of her status as consort to Mars, and as the mythic cycle that credited the founding of Rome to Aeneas and his people became more widespread, she was seen as a goddess having a very personal and motherly interest in the fate of her son's people and thus was linked more closely in the Roman imagination to Mars, "father" to the Romans as parent of Romulus. By the late second century B.C. (we do not know how much earlier) the clan of the Julli claimed direct descent through the Alban kings from a son "Iulus" of Aeneas, and thus descent from Venus herself. Caesar went public, as it were, with this claim and established a cult that at once honored the goddess as mother to all the Roman people and pointedly singled out his own family status as favorite son, special mediator of the goddess's favors to the Roman people.
Venus Victrix had been worshipped as a giver of success to Rome in her battles with foreign enemies; she had already been claimed as a special patroness by successful Roman conquerors, such as Sulla, the Epaphroditos, and Pompey. When he "trumped" Pompey's theater-temple to Venus Victrix with his Forum, Caesar celebrated Venus as genetrix not only to claim divine descent as well as sponsorship: it gave him a way to laud his success in the sphere of civil war, success that could not be openly celebrated in Rome in the same way as could the slaughter of foreigners. Lucretius' prologue to his great De rerum natura would by this time have been firmly embedded in the consciousness of upper-class Romans: it invoked Venus, as the great genetrix of the natural world, to grant Romans the gift of peace, the cessation of the murderous civil wars already raging; her power to do so, like her power to give victory, was based on her special relation to Mars, for she could persuade him to stop slaughter. Caesar thus celebrated himself as a special agent of the goddess for the resolution of civil strife.
This aspect of the goddess as genetrix did not necessarily color patronage of her cult by emperors later in the first century A.D., but naturally it
was still very strong in the reign of Augustus, who embedded the cult firmly in the political theology by which he justified his own special status in the state, as Caesar's son and avenger on the one hand and as the man who had ended civil war on the other. This political theology pervades the visual arts and building programs of the Augustan period; its most famous paradigm, combining the two themes just described with the attribution to Venus Genetrix/Victrix of responsibility for successful conquest,[23] is of course the Aeneid .
Caesar had already started building the Temple of Venus Genetrix; besides completing it in Caesar's name, how was Augustus to make plain his own sponsorship of Venus' cult? He did so by including her in the two greatest temple projects of his reign, in association with her divine consort Mars, whose worship in a "personalized" form Augustus elaborated along the lines of Caesar's veneration of Venus. Best known is the later of these two temple projects, the inclusion of Venus in the cult group inside and in the pedimental group outside of the Temple of Mars Ultor, dedicated in 2 B.C. as the centerpiece of Augustus' Forum, itself an obvious pendant to Caesar's Forum (fig. 122). Indeed, to get into Augustus' Forum one had to pass through the colonnades of Julius' Forum from the precinct of Venus Genetrix into the precinct of Mars Ultor (echoing the kind of deliberate accretion of temples that established a joint cult of Honos and Virtus, described above). Well in advance of the Temple of Mars Ultor, however, the Pantheon was consecrated in 25 B.C. and dedicated in 19 B.C. (plan 124). Its central triad consisted of Venus, the divus Julius Caesar, and Mars (Dio 53.27.2–3);[24] statues of Augustus and its builder, Agrippa, in the foreporch framed the door, and to an approaching spectator would have framed the central statues seen through the door.[25]
There is no firm evidence for Arkesilaos' statue or for the Venus in either the Pantheon or the Temple of Mars Ultor; we have only a later imperial relief (fig. 9b) depicting the pediment of the Temple of Mars, on which the goddess can be distinguished wearing mantle and chiton/tunic, with a baby Amor perched on her right shoulder, herself standing at the right hand of the central Mars.[26] We also have from outside the capital reliefs from Ravenna (fig. 8)[27] and from Algiers (fig. 6),[28] the first showing Venus in a loose tunic with an Amor on her shoulder, the latter grouping Venus in a chiton with a bearded Mars.[29] The Ravenna relief shows Livia as Venus Genetrix; contemporary and similar to it is a freestanding portrait of Antonia, wife of Drusus, from an imperial portrait group at Baia.[30] These figure types are taken (correctly) as early Julio-Claudian
echoes of major sculpture groups in the capital, and subsidiary monuments and works of art with Venuses on them are grouped with one or the other in a long modern debate that has tried to reconstruct (a ) Arkesilaos' cult statue and (b ) the cult statue in the Temple of Mars Ultor.[31]
The problem is that the reliefs differ from each other,[32] as well as from the representations on the Cherchel cuirass statue (fig. 5)[33] and the Boscoreale cup,[34] to name the best comparanda —chiton/tunic, Amor on shoulder/off shoulder,[35] these four variables occur in differing combinations.[36] We have no idea whether Augustus would have preferred that the pediment group on his Mars temple differ from the cult group inside—which is to say that the diagnostic value of the known pediment group is ambiguous. Meanwhile the important cult triad in the Pantheon, like the BR Venus-Mars group, seldom or never enters the debate, even though its Venus-Mars-Divus Julius seems the most appropriate model for the Cherchel cuirass group, for example.[37]
I do not propose to solve the problem of the sculptural prototypes for Julio-Claudian relief depictions of Venus. It suffices to say that the BR Venus, though Neo-Attic enough, does not match any of the previously posited replicas or depictions of important Venus statues, as no Amor sits on her shoulder (figs. 9b, 8; Temple of Mars Ultor, Ravenna),[38] and she wears the slipped-strap chiton and not the sleeved tunic (fig. 8, Ravenna). Indeed, the BR Venus' pose and Amor's placement are determined by the action of the broader scene; one cannot tie her down to a single freestanding prototype. Also, she must be considered in relation to the Mars who is her counterpart here as elsewhere, and he is not the bearded middle-aged Mars Ultor of the Pantheon and the Forum Augustum temple.