The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus

"The only time I’ve actually met Professor Zanker he mistook me for a wine waiter. I was wearing a very sharp black suit and white shirt and he came up to me and said: ‘Mineral water.’ And lacking any dignitas at all I went and got him one. This is an odd choice because I disagree with almost all his conclusions. He argues that the reign of Augustus sees the Roman élite finally dealing with the problems of the Greek culture that they love and the nasty Greeks they rule. He’s just wrong. They don’t. They carry on loving the culture and despising Greeks. I don’t agree with his methods. He doesn’t argue things. He just tells you stuff. He’s obsessed with the shock of the new. He imagines the ordinary Romans in the forum looking up at the new buildings and wonders what effect it has on them. He never speculates about the big old buildings that were also there and what would be the effect of the new building in its context with the old buildings. That’s my main problem with it. Yes. It is one of those rare books that changes a whole field of study. Before Zanker art history was just for aesthetes like Brian Sewell and obscure art history departments. If you studied the ancient world you didn’t really have to engage with visual images. But he brought art history back where it should be – connected to political power, social history, economic history. Now you can’t write about Rome or any part of the ancient world without drawing on visual imagery, architecture, town planning. I think so. Even though I don’t like being mistaken for a wine waiter and I don’t like his methods. It’s one of those books you half enjoy and half hate. My favourite is Aeneas. So, one of the key images promoted by the new order of Augustus’s new monarchy, dressed up as a return to the Republic, is a sculpture group, a big sculpture group of Aeneas, the sort of founder of Rome, escaping from the ruins of Troy, carrying his aged father on his shoulders, leading his small son by the hand. It’s meant to symbolise a lot of concepts: piety, familial duty and being a warrior too. We don’t have the original but it was replicated again and again by private patrons. They had terracottas of it, paintings of it. One image in the book that Zanker reproduces is a wall painting from a villa outside Rome and it has this standard image, very recognisable, except that Aeneas and his father and son have been turned into apes with dogs’ heads and huge penises. This is, clearly to my mind, a patron of art, a well-off man who has commissioned a work of subversive art. He’s asked for something that is deliberately mocking the autocracy and its ideology. They weren’t all swallowing what the new leader was telling them. Zanker isn’t interested in possible objections to the party line. Also, he never considers the possibility of the average man just ignoring these things. It might be because he’s German and of an age when Albert Speer redesigning Berlin probably kind of mattered."