The Statues of Rome - Part One

In Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the old Oxford don Walter Pater rejected the notion that the various forms of high art were essentially interchangeable in their expressive capacity. Rather, he theorized that different arts were more appropriately suited for different kinds of expression. While "[a]ll art has a sensuous element," he explained, nevertheless, "one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of its experience." (The experience he was speaking of was the ancient Greek ideal, which Pater felt - with some justification - was most sublimely expressed in sculpture. Then again, no Greek music and precious little Greek painting has survived to our time, so our perspective may be skewed.)

Pater found sculpture to be the art form best suited to a depiction of man that is not self-analytical. I think he means, by this, that sculpture captures the intrinsic beauty of man - the beauty that is not relative, but rather is inherent - better than the other arts. Pater also found that sculpture was a weak medium for expressing situations, or what might be described as a narrative. "In poetry and painting," he declared, "the situation predominates over the character; in sculpture, the character over the situation." He continued:

Excluded by the limitations of its material from the development of exquisite situations, [sculpture] has to choose from a select number of types intrinsically interesting, interesting that is, independently of any special situation into which they may be thrown. Sculpture finds the secret of its power in presenting these types in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it. All that is accidental, that distracts the simple effect of the supreme types of humanity, all traces in them of the commonness of the world, it gradually purges away.

What to make of Pater's theory? Let's start with what he is not saying. He is emphatically not saying that there is a hierarchy of the arts - merely that the several arts have different capacities, and in this he is most probably right. He is not saying that sculpture cannot be allegorical or conceptual; and he is certainly right in his observation that the medium - any medium - imposes certain limitations that it would be folly to ignore.

And yet, Pater seems to have examples from ancient Greece too much in mind when he says that sculpture best achieves its purpose not by "accumulation of detail" but by "abstracting from it." One need only look at some of the riotous works of the Baroque to conclude that not everyone at every time took a "less is more" approach to sculpture. While Pater's theory might well describe the aesthetic values that the ancient Greeks ascribed to sculpture, it does not seem to fit so well on the aesthetic values of other places or eras.

More fundamentally, though, I believe Pater may be mistaken when he deprecates the narrative potential of sculpture. Allegorical sculpture can most certainly describe a situation, and, as such works do not depict any specific person, the situation (or at least the concept) predominates over the character. But even when specific characters are shown, the work can depict the "special situation into which they may be thrown," as well - sometimes to brilliant effect.

To put it simply, I suspect that Pater's theory suffers from a lack of universality. While I only read his book after returning from Italy, my still-fresh memories of the sculpture I saw there sprang immediately to mind as refutation. Italy is littered with such refuting sculpture, expressing very clearly the interiority of man and the situations in which he finds himself. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in Rome, where a wild confusion of styles and periods abounds - in sculpture, certainly, but in all of the plastic arts as well.

What follows is a brief tour of some of the sculptural highlights of my time in Rome. While my favorite sculptures from my Italian tour are actually in Florence, those of Rome are more variegated. And while they do nothing to counter Pater's suggestion that sculpture is the ideal art form for an objective, extrinsic depiction of man (and he may in the end be right on this anyway), they do at least suggest that sculpture's depiction of man can penetrate to his interior life or can capture his relations with the world around him - and can do either very well. Sculpture can, in other words, depict man in a self-analytical way.

More importantly, though, sculpture can be beautiful - and that's the real purpose of this post. This will be the first of several posts treating the sculpture of Rome, and I have decided that we should begin with depictions of the active, the moving - the heroic. Let's get started.

The Heroic

Here are two images of one of the most famous statues in the world: the Apollo of Belvedere.

This statue is a Roman copy of a Greek original from the 4th century BC. It stands in the Vatican Museum. It depicts Apollo, just after he has let fly an arrow that will kill Python, a monstrous serpent that lived near Delphi. (For this reason, it is also known as the Pythian Apollo.) The god is not captured in a moment of tense activity, as one would suspect; rather, he maintains a calm and poised demeanor. Even the folds of his cape, while realistically depicted, are remarkably unruffled. This statue is an exquisite rendition of elegance in action.

Much the same can be said of this work as well - which shows Perseus holding aloft the severed head of Medusa. This statue, also in the Vatican, dates not from antiquity, but from 1801, and is the work of the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova. Canova's Perseus, like the Apollo before, is gracefully restrained. And once again, the folds of the cape betray only the merest hint of action. But the head of Medusa, by contrast, is a frightful thing. She wears a face not of wrath or hatred, but terror - not unlike, one must imagine, the faces of those unfortunates who caught her eye while she was living. How neatly, by Canova's hand, have the tables been turned on her!

The heroic is not always so confident, as this grouping shows. It flanks the northern edge of the gargantuan, bombastic, and unloved monument to Victor Emmanuel II, first king of a united Italy. Begun in 1911 and completed in 1935, the pompous monument expresses the insecurity of a nation late to statehood and to the imperial game that was then beginning its wretched decline. The central figure, a warrior, brazenly struts, spear in hand and chest thrown forward. (In his arrogance, he seems to have forgotten the purpose of the shield he holds.) He barges before the two other figures, one pensive, the other watchful - action pushing its way to the front. And he brings to mind another Italian of the same era who also liked to puff his chest out.

Let's return to a more credible expression of the heroic - and for that, what could be better than the famous Laocoön, in the Vatican, dating from the first century BC? Laocoön was a Trojan priest who warned his countrymen against accepting the Greeks’ gift of a wooden horse (“beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” he said); they ignored his advice, with dramatic consequences. Spiteful even in victory, Athena, the protector of the Greeks, sent two serpents to kill him and his sons. This sculpture was discovered near Rome in the early 1500s, and Michelangelo was present for its unearthing. It helped to fuel the revival of classical notions of aesthetics in the late Renaissance.

The drama in this sculpture is breathtaking – especially in the sinuous movements of the snakes, which seem to come from everywhere. The fear on the face of the son to the viewer’s right is, I think, especially moving. When I read Pater's statement that, in sculpture, the character predominates over the situation, I immediately objected: "but what about the Laocoön?" Pater must have anticipated this, for a page after making that observation, he noted:

The Laocoön, with all that patient science through which it has triumphed over an almost unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture has begun to aim at effects legitimate only in painting.

It is, he seems to say, the exception that proves the rule - though a remarkable exception, he implicitly concedes. Perhaps he is right; though I would consider any painting that achieves half the level of drama as this sculpture achieves to be a resounding success. Contrary to Pater's suggestion, this work - notwithstanding the limitations inherent in sculpture - does indeed capture an "exquisite situation" - exquisitely terrifying.