The ‘Problem’ With Nude Honorific Statuary and Portraits in Late Republican and Augustan Rome

Extract

In his seminal work, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Paul Zanker wrote of a problem with nude honorific statuary in Late Republican Rome and of ‘conflict and contradiction’ in the style of Roman portraits during the same period. The ‘problem’ was a matter of nudity and style; it also had a moral dimension. Under political or social pressure, there was a tendency at Rome to express the effects of cultural change in moral terms: viz., literary works concerned with political or social attitudes of the Romans tended to describe elements like luxuria and adulatio(‘luxury’ and ‘sycophancy’) as ‘Greek and decadent in contrast to good, honest, ‘Roman’ values and traditions, such as virtus (‘courage’), fides (‘good faith’), and pietas (‘devotion’). Taking his cue from such attacks on aspects of the hellenization of Rome, Zanker gave a moral dimension to the ‘conflict and contradiction’ he discerned in the style of Roman honorific statues and portraits of the second and first centuries B.C. This idea that art can express moral values, even moral conflict, is of great interest and fundamental significance. The present paper focuses upon the way Zanker applies it to Late Republican statues and portraits in the light of recent scholarship. In particular, it will be argued, firstly, that the form of the art does not really make sense if there was as much conflict with Greek ideas and styles as generalizations from the literary sources might imply; secondly, that a nude or partially nude portrait statue of a living noble or emperor was not as problematic at Rome as is commonly believed; and thirdly, as a consequence, that Zanker's views about moral conflict in the style of Late Republican statues and portraits, and about the stylistic resolution of this ‘conflict’ under Augustus, should be substantially modified.