The brilliance of gold, its intrinsic value and connotations of immortality,
made gold, and to a certain extent silver a treasured material for
portraiture. Literary sources inform us that different emperors rejected
the erection of their images in gold because it implied divine honours.
In his Res Gestae Augustus records that he had 80 statues of himself in
silver melted down for better purposes. These examples demonstrate that
gold and silver were materials which had connotations of immortality
and extravagance and which the emperor used or accepted only cautiously.
Some of the images in gold representing the emperor were
certainly life-size or even colossal but most may have been of small scale or in the bust format.
Archive for January 23rd, 2010
23
Jan
Portraits of rulers
To the ruling elite, portraiture has always had an important function.
These indiv
iduals were fallible human beings with bodies that aged and
died like any others. But they also held highly visible public roles, and,
according to ancient ideas of rule, the physical body of the ruler was
symbolically overwhelmed by the powerful nature of the office that they
assumed. The division between the frail human body and the ideal
symbolic body of the monarch is what the historian Ernst Kantorowicz
has called ‘the king’s two bodies’. Portraitists had to engage with the
co-existence of both physical and ideal in the body of the monarch; representations of the visages and forms of people who held power needed
to signal their authority.
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