How
to
Read
a
Roman
Portrait
How
to
Read
a
Roman
Portrait
SHELDON NODELMAN from E. D’Ambra, ed., Roman Art in Context. NY: Prentice Hall. 1993 pp. 10‐20 Like all works of art. the portrait is a system of signs; it is often an ideogram of “public’ meanings condensed into the image of a human face. Roman portrait sculpture from the Republic through the late Empire-the second century BCE. to the sixth CE -constitutes what is surely the most remarkable body of portrait art ever created. Its shifting montage of abstractions from human appearance and character forms a language in which the history of a whole society can be read. Beginning in the first century B.C., Roman artists invented a new kind of portraiture, as unlike that of the great tradition of Greek Hellenistic art (whence the Romans had ultimately derived the idea of portraiture itself and a highly developed vocabulary of formal devices for its realization) as it was unlike that of their own previous Italo-Hellenistic local tradition. This new conception, conferring upon the portrait an unprecedented capacity to articulate and project the interior processes of human experience, made possible the achievement in the ensuing six centuries of what is surely the most extraordinary body of portrait art ever created, and forms the indispensable basis for the whole of the later European portrait tradition, from its rebirth in the 13th and 14th centuries to its virtual extinction in the 20th. No clear account of the nature of this reformulation of the structure of representation or of its historical significance has so far been given. That the portraiture which it engendered is strikingly “realistic” in the sense of evoking the presence of an astonishingly concrete and specific individuality, to a degree previously unknown and rarely equaled since, has been the universal experience of every observer. But this question-begging term (first used to characterize Roman portraiture, in opposition to the “idealism” imputed to the Greeks, three
SHELDON NODELMAN from E. D’Ambra, ed., Roman Art in Context. NY: Prentice Hall. 1993 pp. 10‐20 Like all works of art. the portrait is a system of signs; it is often an ideogram of “public’ meanings condensed into the image of a human face. Roman portrait sculpture from the Republic through the late Empire-the second century BCE. to the sixth CE -constitutes what is surely the most remarkable body of portrait art ever created. Its shifting montage of abstractions from human appearance and character forms a language in which the history of a whole society can be read. Beginning in the first century B.C., Roman artists invented a new kind of portraiture, as unlike that of the great tradition of Greek Hellenistic art (whence the Romans had ultimately derived the idea of portraiture itself and a highly developed vocabulary of formal devices for its realization) as it was unlike that of their own previous Italo-Hellenistic local tradition. This new conception, conferring upon the portrait an unprecedented capacity to articulate and project the interior processes of human experience, made possible the achievement in the ensuing six centuries of what is surely the most extraordinary body of portrait art ever created, and forms the indispensable basis for the whole of the later European portrait tradition, from its rebirth in the 13th and 14th centuries to its virtual extinction in the 20th. No clear account of the nature of this reformulation of the structure of representation or of its historical significance has so far been given. That the portraiture which it engendered is strikingly “realistic” in the sense of evoking the presence of an astonishingly concrete and specific individuality, to a degree previously unknown and rarely equaled since, has been the universal experience of every observer. But this question-begging term (first used to characterize Roman portraiture, in opposition to the “idealism” imputed to the Greeks, three