The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (34 page)

Titus’s capture and sacking of Jerusalem in
A.D
. 70–71, when he was his father’s commander, was commemorated in the so-called Arch of Titus, built in
A.D
. 81 by his younger brother and successor Domitian (reigned
A.D
. 81–96, last of the Flavians). This sensational display of Roman imperial jingoism depicts on one side the spoils of the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem (including conspicuously the sacred seven-branched candelabrum) carried in procession, and on the other the heroic emperor driving his chariot past the lances of his soldiers, accompanied by Victory. Titus had brought back to Rome from Jerusalem another trophy, lovely Berenice, the daughter of the Jewish king Herod Agrippa I. He never married her, and when Romans objected to the liaison of a son of their emperor with a Jewess, Titus dismissed her—(in Suetonius’s phrase)
invitus, invitam
, the unwilling dismissing the unwilling. Their unhappy separation survived as the theme of Racine’s tragedy
Berenice
(1670). Among Roman emperors Titus also had the distinction of dying a natural death, whereafter he was promptly deified by the Roman Senate.

Titus’s successor Domitian became famous for his passion to be celebrated in sculpture. He especially enjoyed seeing himself depicted as Hercules. “He permitted no statues to be set up in his honor,” Suetonius
reported, “unless they were of gold and silver and were of a certified weight. He also built so many arcades and arches, complete with the insignias of triumphs, throughout all the regions of the city that on one of them someone added the following inscription in Greek:
‘Arci
.’ ” This was a pun: on the Latin
arcus
for arch, and the Greek
arkei
, “It is enough.”

If statues could perpetuate memory, destroying them could erase memory. So the Romans developed the institution of
Damnatio memoriae
. It grew out of the penalties in the primeval XII Tables for the ancient Roman crime of treason. In addition to execution and confiscation of property the
praenomen
(first name) of the condemned could not be perpetuated in his family, images of him were to be destroyed, and his name was to be erased from all inscriptions. The only way the accused could escape these indignities was by committing suicide before the charge was formally lodged.
Damnatio memoriae
became a favorite weapon of retribution by the Senate, to be wielded by nervous upstarts against their predecessors. The Senate used it against Nero during his lifetime, and it was enacted posthumously against the ruthless Domitian. As a consequence the statues of Domitian were defaced or destroyed. The only statue of Domitian that survived, according to Procopius, was the one his wife set up after his death. In order to provide the sculptors a model for this statue she had to piece together the emperor’s body, which had been dismembered by his murderers.

The Roman passion for creating and preserving the historical record in sculpture left us a grand and bizarre monument. Trajan’s Column is perhaps the most complete visual record of any military event in antiquity. It has few rivals before photography. Though erected (
A.D
. 106–113) in the heart of Rome, its images are curiously inaccessible. Dedicated in Trajan’s Forum in 113, it commemorated his victories over the Dacians, as the ancient inhabitants of Romania were called. The Column, 125 feet high, was also intended to provide a lookout for admirers of Trajan’s public buildings, his forum and the nearby markets that had been cut into the slope of the Quirinal Hill. The interior contained a spiral staircase, with loopholes to admit light. Relief sculptures carved on the outside told the story of Trajan’s two campaigns against the Dacians (101–102 and 105–106) in archival detail. This was, of course, a record for the ages, but no one has figured out how it could have been examined by contemporaries. It is just possible that the upper figures could have been observed from the tops of a surrounding two-story arcade.

A spiral band of carved Parian marble three feet wide winds up the Column. If it could be unwound it would stretch to 656 feet in length, considerably longer than the whole frieze of the Parthenon. A spectator trying to trace the story up the twenty-three spirals will be dizzied by circumambulating. As the spiral reaches upward the viewer on the ground
cannot discern the figures. The designer was probably Apollodorus of Damascus, who had planned Trajan’s Forum and his basilica. And he did what he could to help the straining spectator at ground level. The carving was kept shallow so shadows would not obscure figures below. To make the men and animals clear from a distance he exaggerated their size in relation to the landscape in a kind of inverted perspective. He had the figures painted in bright colors, and attached metal for the weapons and the ornaments and harness of the horses. This was the same Apollodorus who, some years later, offended Hadrian by his sarcasm about Hadrian’s “pumpkin” design and was banished and perhaps executed as a result.

In cinematic fashion (the technique of a silent wordless film, for there were no inscriptions) the scenes dissolve one into another. This was novel both in scale and in style, for the early Assyrian battle reliefs give us nothing so grand or so vivid. Here the star, the emperor Trajan, appears in one scene after another, having changed his costume to suit the action. Altogether there are about twenty-five hundred figures in 150 episodes moving upward from left to right. The narrative is divided in half, with a figure of Victory to mark the truce between the first and second Dacian campaigns. The Column scarcely depicts the melee of battle but, like Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
, offers an orderly chronological résumé of the social, geographic, technical, logistic, and human aspects of this war. No stage in the planning, the preparations, or the supply is omitted—from the emperor addressing the army, through the sacrifices offered for victory, the building of pontoon bridges and engines of warfare, the crossing of mountains, the capturing and interrogating of prisoners, the removal of booty, and finally the suicide of the Dacian chief Decebalus while being pursued by Roman cavalry. Dramatic counterpoint shows the delight of soldiers at receiving a prize from Trajan juxtaposed with the torture of Roman prisoners by Dacian women, and then the decent treatment of Dacian prisoners in a Roman camp, rounded off in the last scene by herds grazing in an idyllic landscape. Seldom before or since has there been so comprehensive and circumstantial a visual record of war by contemporaries. Yet this costly and dazzling historical record, in scrupulous and elegant detail, was mostly invisible to contemporaries! As it is to us on the ground today, Trajan’s Column was History for History’s sake.

The Column had its own lives and afterlives. Its role as a lookout was displaced by its function as a war memorial, to become at last a historical record. Originally supposed to be topped by an eagle, it was finally surmounted by a statue of Trajan, whose ashes, with those of his spouse, were buried beneath. Trajan’s statue was mysteriously removed in the Middle Ages to be replaced in 1588 by the present statue of Saint Peter.

C
HRISTIANITY
began as an enemy of images. Inspired by their Hebrew inheritance, the Fathers of the Church were haunted by the fear of idolatry. The Second Commandment had condemned images. Again and again the Old Testament forbade the worship of foreign gods or the making of images to represent the God of Israel. The words of the Book of Exodus (20:4–6) went much further:

The Greek words for “idolatry” originated in the New Testament and in Christian literature in the first centuries. Paul elevated “idolatry” into a sin and listed it among those to be shunned by Christians.

When Rome fell to the barbarian hordes of Alaric on August 24, 410, Christians were accused of inciting the malice of the gods who had long protected the city, and whose images they had destroyed. But Saint Augustine’s
City of God
(413–426) attacked the idolatry of the Romans and even tried to enlist the authority of enlightened pagans against images. The great sin, according to Augustine, was worshiping the creature in place of the Creator. Since idols became vehicles for demons, “worshipers of idols are worshipers of demons.”

Except for a brief relapse under Julian the Apostate (331–363; emperor, 361–63), the early Christian emperors all attacked the worship of idols. Emperor Theodosius the Great (346?–395; reigned 376–95) closed the pagan
temples in 391, forbade idolatry as the horrendous crime of lèse-majesté, and encouraged the destruction of idols. His energetic piety reached out to the Empire’s far provinces, as Edward Gibbon recounts with eloquent nostalgia:

The power of images had been recognized by Saint Augustine (354–430) himself when he denounced their demonic capacity. Still, practical men of piety could not deny that images could inspire and sustain Christian faith. “Lest what is reverenced and adored be painted on the walls,” they at first dared show their Lord only obliquely, as a lamb or a shepherd, or in a bodiless hand reaching from above. But to provide ancient satisfactions for worshipers in the new faith somehow there had to be Christian images, too. And by the sixth century the Christian fear of images had much abated. Theologians had come to the rescue, showing that images were useful, or even necessary, vehicles of divinity.

Christians were reminded that Saint Paul had called Christ the Image of God (2 Corinthians 4:3; Colossians 1:15). Saint Basil (330?–379?) explained that “the honor rendered to the image passes to the prototype.” Just as Christ the Son of God “as an image is absolutely without difference, as generated he preserves the same essence as the Father.” Just as “an Emperor’s image is the Emperor” and does not cause two emperors to exist, so it was with Christ, the supreme emperor. While the emperor’s image made of wood, wax, and colors was “a corruptible image, an imitation of something corruptible,” Christ’s image was “the splendor of the glory” of God.

Still, a Christianity without images was clearly conceived by the revered Fathers of the Church. The Iconoclastic Movement of the eighth century shows how deep were the aniconic currents. Why was this outburst so late in coming, and why did it end so suddenly? These events in Constantinople and the Eastern Empire punctuate with a giant question mark the whole history of Christian art.

The champion of the battle against images was the Byzantine emperor Leo III (680?–741; emperor, 717–41), ambitious and energetic founder of the
so-called Isaurian (or Syrian) Dynasty. He seized the throne from Theodosius III by enlisting the aid of besieging Arab armies on the pretext that he would subdue the Eastern Roman Empire for them. Then, much to the Arabs’ chagrin, his first achievement as emperor was to organize the defense of Constantinople against them. He drove off Caliph Suleiman in 717 and broke the siege of the city. Leo then turned his organizing energies to the reform of his Eastern Empire. He suppressed mutinies, established discipline in the army, imposed taxes to support his vast defensive military operations, enacted an agrarian code to protect small farmers, and reorganized the whole provincial bureaucracy. His most durable reform was to “humanize” and Christianize Justinian’s
Corpus Juris
in his own brief
Ecloga Legum
(726) by changing the law of marriage and property, and substituting amputation and mutilation for some death penalties.

Reforming Christianity, for Emperor Leo III, meant destroying religious images and opposing all who tolerated them. The sources of his purifying passion are obscure. Enemies accused Leo of infection by Muslim dogma when he was a boy in northern Syria. Or we may, in wider perspective, see him as a champion in the historic battle between the Greco-Roman classical tradition and the mysticism and monotheism of the Eastern provinces. In that battle of “Athens against Jerusalem” Leo III spoke for Jerusalem. There was a political element, too, in the Byzantine attitude toward images, for the worship of the emperor’s image had not been interrupted by the progress of Christianity. The image of the emperor continued to do duty for the emperor himself in courtrooms, theaters, and public assemblies to the far reaches of his Empire. Juxtaposing the image of Christ suggested the emperor’s heavenly authority. In the late seventh century Emperor Justinian II revolutionized Byzantine coinage by putting on one side of his coins the image of Christ and on the other the image of himself as “Servus Christi.”

Cults of images grew in the centuries just before Leo III, and by the sixth century they had developed a full-scale theological defense that helped icons survive savage persecution and the onslaught of saints and theologians. After Emperor Justinian I (483–565; reigned 527–65), Christian images played a magic role in the chronicles of pilgrims. Cures and miracles multiplied from sacred images in Christian households. Gregory of Tours told how Christ Himself appeared to demand that he be decently covered in the painting of His crucifixion at Narbonne. Even the candles lit before images would perform miracles and cure illnesses. One patient, as a seventh-century life of Saint Theodore of Sykeon recounted, was cured by dewdrops that fell from an icon of Christ, and another was healed by a mysterious sweetness, sweeter than honey, tasted in the mouth when praying before an image of Christ.