Images of power: An emperor puts himself in the right light

An the beginning, the visitor looks into the marble-cold eyes of the gravediggers of the Roman Republic: Lined up are the heads of Pompejus, Caesar and Crassus, the triumvirs whose power struggles finally shattered the rotten res publica. Next to them, almost twice as big, is the bust of Cicero – glorious rhetorician and failed politician – whose loyalty to the old form of government cost his life, like thousands of others. When the head and hands of the murdered man’s corpse were cut off in order to be exhibited on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum, the triumph of a weak-looking youth named Octavian had already begun. He became Augustus, the first and most famous of the Roman emperors.

The Hamburg Bucerius Forum is dedicating an excellent exhibition with 220 exhibits from Italian, French, German and Austrian museums to the art of his age. The opportunity to see so many exquisite pieces from this era gathered in one place is unlikely to return any time soon. The sculptures, murals, reliefs, coins and ceramics evoke an age that was already perceived by contemporaries as “golden”, while the bloody trail of its beginning soon faded in the collective consciousness. The need for propaganda at the imperial court, the prosperity of a society finally at peace, but also new sources of material such as the marble quarries of Carrara, which had just been developed, set in motion an unprecedented boom in pictures and construction.

The exhibition, curated by Annette Haug and Andreas Hoffmann, describes the forms it took in several sections, covering the imperial personality cult and the visualized narratives of his rule, the structural transformation of Rome, the illustrations of cult buildings and altars and the role of art in private life address.

Augustus kept the republic as a backdrop to console the supporters of the old freedoms for the real loss of their chances of political participation. The exhibition shows the many roles in which he staged himself and his autocracy on this stage by allowing the visitor to walk through a trellis of statues and busts. However, the contrast created by the white marble against the anthracite background is a modern effect. In ancient times, as is well known, parts of the statues were painted, while other parts were left white to show off the marble.

The sculptures present Augustus through facial expressions and hairstyle, head position, pose and clothing as the first citizen of Rome, as a military triumphant, as a prince of peace, almost a god or a spiritualized philosopher, depending on the strategic goal. While portraits in the days of the republic were mostly unique, a developing copyist industry now ensured that imperial portraits were reproduced thousands of times. The omnipresence of the ruler was reinforced by the coins embossed with his image, a large selection of which is presented in the exhibition. The image of Empress Livia was also carefully designed. In order to de-scandalize her marriage to Octavian, which she considered disreputable, she was portrayed as an emphatically conservative Matrona. After her husband’s death, she rose to become the figurative deity that guaranteed the legitimacy of the dynasty.

The exhibition impressively demonstrates how the imperial pictorial policy determined the design of public space – from the “marbling” of Rome to the decoration of temples and altars. But the picture boom of the Augustan age was not only the result of the political instrumentalization of art. This is shown by the colorful murals, statuettes, reliefs, ceramics and richly decorated fountains from the houses and gardens of the rich. The majority of these pictures dealt with the sensuous world of Bacchus and Venus. Augustan statesmanship did not play a major role here – and if it did, then sometimes as a parody. The exhibition shows this using the example of a Pompeian fresco that depicts Aeneas and his son as dog-headed monkeys fleeing Troy – the caricatured were none other than the mythical founders of Rome, who were also claimed by Augustus as the ancestors of his family and at the newly built Augustus Forum were honored by statues.

Often it is not possible to say clearly where the boundary between political and non-political art runs in this epoch. This is also the case with three filigree fountain reliefs from Palestrina, which are among the highlights of the exhibition: They show a sheep, a wild boar and a lioness suckling their young. It cannot be decided whether the commissioners, creators and viewers saw these depictions as a symbolic expression of the blessed reign of the princeps or whether they simply enjoyed the bucolic motifs and their masterful execution. For them, as for many other exhibits in this exhibition, the following applies: if it was statecraft, then it was of a significantly more pleasant kind than what later times produced in this genre.

The new pictures of Augustus. Power and Media in Ancient Rome. Bucerius Forum Hamburg, until January 15, 2023. The catalog costs 39.90 euros.