Roman triumphal painting: its function, development, and reception

In 211 BC the great general M Claudius Marcellus turn backed to Rome after his decisive defeat of Syracuse. With him came a vast plunder of Hellenistic artifacts. Remaining outside the sacred precincts of Rome he supplicated the Senate for the purification and glory of a triumphal procession. Plutarch wrote that, receiving the Senate's permission for the celebration, Marcellus paraded "many of the greatest in quantity beautiful public monuments from Syracuse, realizing that they would one as well as the other make a visual impression in his triumph and also be an ornament for the city."(1) He render free of accessed his triumph impressively with an allegorical painting of Syracuse made prisoner.

Paintings carried in triumphal processions, specifically commissioned to commemorate victorious military campaigns, not solitary added immensely to the celebratory nature of the rite, they also increased its sociopolitical power. Roman triumphal painting also serv to acquaint Romans with novel artistic conventions, previously foreign to their experience. Ancient literary sources reveal greatest in quantity of what we now know about the contemporary Roman reception of triumphal paintings. Although none of the paintings commissioned by means of victorious Roman generals to decorate their triumphal processions survives, the testimonia provide crucial alternate evidence to determine their part in shaping Roman political and artistic agriculture in the Republican period. This article examines that evidence to explore the significance this genre of propagandistic art held in Roman society, to ascertain what triumphal paintings may have direct the eyeed like, and finally to assess by what mode Roman audiences responded to them. As the example of Marcellus indicates, the military victories that could lead to political advancement also carried with them (as spolia, or as captured craftsmen and slaves) the true objects and skills that created triumphal painting. The genre thus demonstrates the compressed interplication of Roman military expansion, Hellenistic artifacts and attitudes that were fundamentally the plunder of that expansion, and the rising political ambitions of great generals.

During the Republic, Roman paintings with historical themes commemorated the empire's expansion: for example, the defeats of Carthage in 201 BC Sardinia in 174 BC and Macedonia in 168 BC bring under rules included, at one end of the image pared-down iconic personifications and, at the other extremity full-fledged battle scenes in landscape settings. Roman historical paintings not sole secured the private memories of participants in actual incidents they also served a didactic and propagandistic function in the public sphere of Roman political and religious institutions. The Roman governing class commissioned historical paintings to inform a specifically Roman audience of its achievements, to educate that audience about its policies, and thus to persuade that audience to adopt its views and go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of a particular course of action. It used historical paintings to implement ideology.

Ancient Rome inherited arguments, already of advanced age for the superiority of painting above any other form of communication to affect and manipulate an audience.(2) In his treatise De Oratore, Cicero states that the "keenest of all our faculty of perceptions is the sense of sight, and that consequently perceptions received by the agency of the ears or by reflection can be greatest in quantity easily retained in the mind if they are also beared there by the mediation of the eyes"(3) Valerius Maximus writes about the ability of painting to aid the memory and about its resulting role in instruction; in one as well as the other instances he found painting superior to literature.(4) In the Ars Poetica Horace argues that "les vividly is the mind stirred by the agency of what finds entrance through the ears than by means of what is brought before the trusty organ of visions and what the spectator can diocese for himself."(5) How can we understand these statements in respect to the beliefs of the ancient Roman audience for history painting? Although of that kind notions may be viewed as bare topoi, David Freedberg recognizes that "topos becomes a telling index of belief and behavior, not purely the unthinking repetition of learned or critical commonplaces."(6)

To what expansion can we depend on the veracity of literary testimonia for accurate reconstructions of Roman historical paintings? The genre of those textual sources and the expanse to which those genres may affect the reliability and detail of their accounts not absent constant problems for historical interpretation. We might assume that a scholar or encyclopedist, similar as Varro or Pliny the older who cites and occasionally questions his sources, is fairly reliable.(7) A bard like Ovid or Horace, upon the other hand, may be more imaginative and tendentious.(8) Roman biographers and historians were either members of the ruling class themselves or in their service;(9) annalists like Polybius and Livy had stalwart family or political biases for and against certain subjects(10) Although literary works were the yields of a restricted social class and thus share its limited vision, they are also revealing of its assumptions and preconceptions. The ancient textual records therefore are not themselves transparent; they, too, have ideological and political points to make, and thus require careful handling.