Historical Background. Welcome to “History through Art”

Welcome to “History through Art”. Today we’ll be looking at the history, art and culture of Ancient Rome. To understand how works of the imagination mirror their times, let’s look at some of the events that influenced Romanoists.

According to Roman legend, the city of Rome was founded in 753 BC by twin warrior brothers Romulus and Remus who were raised by wolves. By the 3d century BC, Rome, the empire that began in the hills of central Italy not only controlled all of the Italian peninsula, including the Greek colonies in the south, but had spread its influence to nearby lands in the Mediterranean basin. The Romans saw themselves as mighty warriors, and indeed they were. By 133 BC, once-powerful Greece had become a mere province in Rome’s empire. Through continued trade and expansion, the Roman Empire spread and became a land richly diverse in culture.

Not only were the Romans successful conquerors, they also proved to be excellent diplomats, managers and amalgamators. They frequently were able to turn their former enemies into allies. They also took the best ideas of the cultures that they conquered and adapted them to Roman life. For example, Roman historians, such as Cato and Sullust, based much of their writings on Greek models. And we credit the Greeks again for the basic elements of Roman religion and philosophy. Eventually, Rome adopted a new religion – Christianity – born in the conquered land of Judea.

This is not to say that Rome did not find a way to leave a mark of its own. Its legal system, bureaucracy, and engineering projects, such as aqueducts and roads, were second to none. Even the United States Senate is based on the Roman model. Roman poets, such as Ovid and Virgil, produced some the world’s most powerful and original works. And the speeches of Cicero have long been considered premier works of Latin literature. Perhaps you’ll become familiar with these and other authors in a literature class.

The Romans maintained their empire for over 600 years. At its height, about AD 200, the empire was so extensive that it included Britain and Asia Minor. To say the least, the Roman Empire was enormous. Too great, in fact, for one central authority to maintain control and keep all its people free from ethnic and religious conflicts. Even after Constantine legalized the practice of all religions, including Christianity, the situation did not improve. In AD 395, the Empire was split in two: the capital of the West remained in Rome, while the capital of the East was Constantinople. This division, however, did not solve all the problems. A lack of unity among the people meant that the Romans were vulnerable to attack from outsiders who were eager to control some of their vast territories. This led to the fall of the Empire in AD 475.

You’ve seen how extensive and powerful the Roman Empire was. It’s not surprising then that even after its collapse Roman laws and artistic traditions persisted in many parts of Europe. Roman architecture is one example. It is characterized by the use of semicircular arches and domes. It’s evident in this aqueduct that brought water to Rome from many miles away, and in this Roman temple. The style was used well into the Middle Ages. Even today, Roman type arches and domes can be seen in many of our government buildings as well as in the magnificent villas, temples, and austere Christian basilicas in Europe. These examples serve to remind us of the contributions that the Romans made to Western civilization. As you will see these contributions were considerable and have continued to influence the artists and architects of today.

Part I

The art of Ancient Greece is one of her greatest gifts to posterity. But when one thinks of Ancient Rome, her gladiators, her government, or, perhaps, her armies are the conspicuous mementos. True, the vividly coloured murals at Pompeii are spectacular. So are the murals in neighboring towns, also preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. But Pompeii and its neighbors were gay seaside resorts, only provincial cousins of Rome. According to descriptions by Roman historians, the wall paintings in Rome itself far surpassed these from Pompeii. Indeed, it is probably because there is little else that survives to compare with it, that we prize the art of Pompeii and its neighbors so highly. Is this to say, then, that Roman art has little merit, that it is a second-rate rerun of the glorious Greek art which preceded it?

The relative merits of Greek and Roman art have been debated by scholars for centuries. Let’s leave the debate to the scholars and turn instead to a more meaningful way in which all art may be judged – that is, as a reflection of the culture that produced it. Just as pop art, like it or not, will give future ages a meaningful image of our society and its values, so Roman art is an excellent indicator of what mattered to people in Roman times. And just as our tastes change and develop in succeeding generations, so did those of Ancient Rome. The changes were reflected in simple things like hair styles, and dress, and in more complicated things like housing, places of worship, and imperial monuments. Changes in taste can also be seen in portraiture – from the idealistic, on the left, to the realistic on the right – and in the subject matter depicted in household and public decoration – from elaborate mythological scenes to simple decorative motifs. As you follow this brief discussion of the development and decline of Ancient Rome, you’ll be able to spot many other aspects of this civilization where new ideas supplanted old and then often were returned to.

It’s hard to begin at the beginning, for there’s much controversy over just where and when that is. Most likely, the original Latin people who settled Rome came from north of the Alps, prior to 1000 BC. Sometime before 800 BC, another mass of people, this time from the east, moved into the area north of Rome known as Tuscany. Hence, they were called Etruscans. During the 7-th century BC, these people moved south into Latin territory and took over the rule of Rome. And by the sixth century BC, the Greeks had begun settling in southern Italy and Sicily. Here are two of the temples they built there. But in 509 BC, the Etruscan kings who had been ruling Rome were tossed out by the Latin populace. For the next few centuries, it was the Romans’ turn to make conquests – and this they did with great success. Two hundred years before Christ, they controlled all of Italy and the entire Mediterranean coast in Europe and in part of North Africa.

But it’s time to take a closer look at the culture and the structure of the Republic which the Romans developed once they had ousted the Etruscan rulers. In essence, the Latins were a bourgeois, agricultural people. They remained basically unsophisticated, practical, and earthbound, no matter how many different cultures they assimilated during the course of their expansion. Hence, the art form in which they made their most distinctive contribution was architecture, the most utilitarian of the arts. The invention of concrete and the use of the arch on a monumental scale enabled them to build roads, bridges, and amphitheatres on a scale never before contemplated. And, like many basically middle-class societies, including our own, great size and scope were valued above painstaking detail.

In the other arts, too, we can see the matter-of-fact character of the Roman mind. The realism of Roman portrait sculpture is often surprising, especially when compared with the Greek. The idealized innocence of the Greek face on the left contrasts dramatically with the careworn Roman face on the right. The old cliché that “one cannot imagine any Greek statue carrying on an intelligent conversation” seems all the more true when compared with a typical Roman portrait. While the Greeks sought the ideal, the Romans preferred the ordinary and everyday. The Greeks used analogies of man and god to describe historical events while the Romans preferred to see the actual events in complete everyday, factual detail. Here are some Roman soldiers erecting a fortress prior to battle, for example.

In painting and mosaic, too, we find the Romans including such commonplace subjects as a donkey being brought his dinner. And to lend credibility to a human portrait, the Roman artist located his subject within a tangible setting. Like other land and tradition-bound societies, the Romans had a terrific knack for organization, illustrated here by the complex plan of the Roman Forum.

The organization of the Roman Republican government is still a model for modern societies. Their Senate, like ours, consisted of the most learned or influential people in the country. As a ruling body, both the strength and the weakness of the Senate was its capacity to prevent any one person’s obtaining strong individual powers. The loyalty of the well-organized and efficient Roman armies also contributed to the stability of the early Republic. So did the good judgment the Romans exercised in allowing conquered peoples to maintain their way of life almost completely intact.

In the early Republican Period the religion of the Romans, like other aspects of their culture, was essentially earth-bound. Here is the Roman goddess of spring, the Primavera. Roman religion really amounted to a superstitious nature worship: here, for example, is Flora, goddess of flowers. The concept of family was also worshipped with elaborate ritual and ceremony. A symbolic national fireside was watched over by Vesta, goddess of the domestic hearth. Here is one of her temples. Since the Romans readily adopted anything that struck their fancy in the customs of the people they conquered, they collected an astounding array of Greek and other Eastern gods during the Republican Period. Here is Hercules, translated from the Greek, Herakles. This is a follower of Bacchus, who was the Greek god, Dionysus. And here is Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus.

During the Imperial Period, after the death of Christ (who is seen here as the Good Shepherd), Christianity began to threaten the personality cult that surrounded the Emperor. From that time on the Roman leaders tried to control religion and make it a tool of the state. But until then, tolerance for foreign religious practices, such as the funeral dance seen here, and tolerance for foreign ideas in general, was a significant virtue of Roman civilization. And in art, the powerful influence of foreigners was never seriously threatened. Notice the Greek style in the symmetry of this 1st-century Roman work, in the deeply cut draperies on these 2nd-century Roman figures, and in the classical poses in this 3d-century Roman work. As you will see time and again the Romans consciously returned to their acknowledged masters in the field of art and culture, the Ancient Greeks.