The latest blockbuster at Seattle Art Museum is an anomaly: 50 tons
of Roman art from the Louvre, much of which has never before been moved
from its final resting place in Paris. The Louvre put it on the road in
order to raise money. SAM, which refuses to say how much it paid for
the show but is charging a special required fee of $20 as opposed to
its suggested-donation general admission of $13, is hoping to draw
crowds and to prove its new facility is a home worthy of the gods.
There’s marble, glass, and gold, divided into rooms separated by theme:
Citizenship; Foreigners, Slaves, and Freedmen; The Emperor; Death. It’s
a terribly restrained, sexless, official view. Here are some keys that
unlock it a little:
1. Almost half of what’s in the show got to the French
capital through Napoleon’s sticky hands. Invading Italy in 1797, he
grabbed art from the Vatican Museum and leading families, but he didn’t
need to steal from the best of the private collectors, the Borghese
family. Camillo Borghese was in debt and he was Napoleon’s
brother-in-law, so he sold hundreds of sculptures, reliefs, and busts
to Napoleon. (After his fall, some of the stolen art was returned and
some kept, in exchange for French works.) The wheeling and dealing of
the distant past doesn’t open up the Louvre to claims on its collection
today: Its Roman art was amassed before the invention of international
laws that govern how antiquities are collected.
2. How all this art got to Seattle is a secret, says Anna
Hayes, a registrar with the American Federation of Arts, which planned
the high-security trip. She can say that it came to the United States
in four shipments by cargo plane. She won’t say exactly how it moves
inside the country (it has been in Indianapolis and will go to Oklahoma
City). Augustus may already have been on I-5.
3. According to architect Rem Koolhaas, the Roman empire had
an “operating system.” Like a franchise, it repeated architectural
elements in all its cities: a forum, a coliseum, aqueducts, and two
intersecting central roads. You see its corporate branding in the map
of Carthage at the show’s entrance. The emperors disseminated copies of
official portraits of themselves in full-length marble. Portraits of
regular people, meanwhile, stood in public in order to demonstrate the
right ways to dress and behave as citizens.
4. Emperors can be identified by hair alone. Augustus, for
instance, wore a fork in the middle of his bangs and two claw-like
pinchers to the right, as evidenced in a youthful, larger-than-life
official sculpture of him in the show that was stolen from the Vatican
Museum and kept in France by treaty agreement. It would have been one
of many identical sculptures. (Women’s hair, given its own entire
salon-like room in the exhibition, was both elaborate and tightly
controlled.)
5. The relationship between the sculptures and the emperors
was political and largely fantastical. Augustus made himself look
younger while Caligula, who reportedly resembled livestock, made
himself beautiful. In the aftermath of Caligula’s excesses, Claudius
emphasized his advanced age in his sculptural portraits (he was known
to fall asleep at meetings).
6. In contrast to architects, artists in the Roman empire
were thought of as lowly craftsmen, and sculptures were often made on
assembly lines—one guy would make the foot, another the face, and
so on, according to University of Washington assistant professor of
Roman art Margaret Laird. Only one of the sculptures in the show is
signed.
7. These sculptures weren’t intended to be seen as creamy
monochromes. They were originally painted, especially to highlight the
eyes, the hair, and the clothing. On the head of a young priest in the
“Religion” section, you can make out the faint trace of an iris in the
right eye.
8. Roman religion was, above all, accommodating. It
continually had to make room for newly annexed heathens. There were all
sorts of gods for all sorts of things, culminating in Mithraism, the
final, doomed competitor with Christianity for religious dominance in
the empire. No one knows quite what Mithraists practiced (its failure
may be attributable to the fact that it was only open to men), but we
do know that they met in caves. One relief, discovered in present-day
Lebanon and featuring Mithras, his helper animals, the four seasons
personified, and the signs of the zodiac, is the epitome of the
jumble.
9. Despite the fact that one of the few colored-stone
sculptures in the show is a black-marble figure who looks to be of
African descent and is labeled as a slave, Roman slavery applied to all
races. In addition, it’s even possible that this figure—and the
small figure next to him, wearing a charm that usually was reserved for
citizens—doesn’t represent a slave at all, Laird says. The reason
is that it’s almost impossible to determine who’s a slave, as opposed
to, say, a worker, in Roman art. They have no definitive identifying
marks (like citizens or soldiers do), unless they’re wearing the
patterns of particular owners.
10. Most of these sculptures don’t look like fragments
because they’ve been fixed up, whether recently or in the 1700s or
1800s. The boy Nero’s head, for instance, is mounted on an alien body.
You can see the break in his neck. A marble head of his mother,
Agrippina, is missing a nose and a chin. It seems fitting. Nero did,
after all, have to try several times before finally killing her.
