The learned societies of Renaissance Europe adopted the term ‘academy’ in imitation of the Academy established by Plato, whose school was named after Academus, the mythical hero who was sacred to the grove on the outskirts of Athens where Plato taught. The first Renaissance academies were established in Florence and Naples.
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Nicola Salvi and the Trevi Fountain
Alongside serious official architectural works on major ecclesiastical
sites, eighteenth-century Rome also sustained a flourishing activity in
more lighthearted but no less meaningful works.The Trevi Fountain
ranks perhaps as the most joyous site in Rome. Built from 1732 to
1762 under the patronage of popes Clement XII, Benedict XIV, and
Clement XIII, the great scenographic water display is often described
as the glorious capstone of the baroque era.This is indeed where
most architectural histories (and tourist itineraries) of Italian
architecture end. It is one of those places, like the Pantheon, where
the entire sweep of Rome’s culture can be read.
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The pantheon revisited
The Pantheon is one of the most celebrated and most carefully
studied buildings of Western architecture. In the modern age, as it
had been in the Renaissance, the Pantheon is a crucible of critical
thinking. Preservation of the Pantheon had been undertaken in the
seventeenth century and continued in the eighteenth during the
pontificate of Clement XI.
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The public buildings in a Roman city were the most prominent features that would have been noted by a visitor to the city. For example, when Pausanias described Panopeus, he did not wish to describe the settlement as a polls, because it lacked public buildings. Therefore, public buildings were considered to be important: more than that, they created an identity for the inhabitants. Above all, they reflected the needs of the population with respect to the gods. Most public buildings were associated with a religious aspect, whether they were temples, theatres, amphitheatres, basilicas or macella (markets). However, there is also a secular dimension to these buildings. Their construction by an individual enhanced that person’s prestige and position in society. Their name was clearly displayed upon the structure. The public buildings, as monuments, offered each inhabitant of Pompeii an image of their position in relationship to the power of others, the state and the gods . For example, a temple would have exalted a god and the builder of the temple, and emphasised the social distance and divisions of the community. This makes monuments very different from domestic structures.
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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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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.
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The traditional local building materials of the Roman Republic, travertine, tufa and limestone were also employed for portraits in Rome and
in Italic cities during the Republican period. They seem, however, to have gone out of fashion for portraiture by the end of the Republic when
they were replaced by either marble or by the more dense limestone.
Limestone of varying quality was quarried throughout the Mediterranean
often on or very close to the habitation or cult site itself and it was used
extensively for portraiture, particularly in rural sanctuaries and tombs.
Unlike marble and bronze, limestone is not mentioned in inscriptions
as a material for honorific statues set up by the public. The silence in
the inscriptional evidence, however, may be because it was so prevalent
that it was considered ‘not worth mentioning’. However, there is evidence
that limestone was even used for representing the emperor in areas with
no marble resources. As different limestones have their own specific
character, local sculptors developed special skills and styles in carving
the stone, or they continued working in a tradition developed generations
before.
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These two very different materials are treated together here because they
were the most important, most common, and most competitive materials
used for both the honorific statue and portrait displayed in a private
context. In the current context, any white stone, marble or (technically
more correct) limestone, which takes a polish is understood as
marble. Marble is by far the dominant surviving material for portraits.
However, although it was quarried around most of the Mediterranean,
the high quality marble which was desired for statuary was only supplied
by a relatively limited number of quarries in Italy, Greece and Asia
Minor.
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From material remains we receive few glimpses of the importance of
painting as a portrait medium.Most of the evidence derives from mural
painting, whereas portraits painted on wooden panels or linen have disappeared almost entirely, except in Egypt where preservation conditions
have been exceptionally good. However, portraits painted on wooden
panels were a mode of representation that was probably as significant
as marble or bronze. An abundance of evidence, both inscriptional and
literary, demonstrates that paintings were a significant portrait medium
in all parts of the Empire, including Rome. Dio, for example, first mentions
painted portraits when he explains that in A.D. 45 Claudius found
the public spaces in Rome so overcrowded with portraits that he had
them moved somewhere else.
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Bearing in mind the basic aspects of public honour and private commemoration outlined above focus is now on modes of representation.
Materiality, technique and the choice of material as giving meaning to
portraits are often overlooked. Material enhanced the aesthetic appeal
of a portrait and it carried cultural, contextual, social and economic
properties that changed with time.
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Alongside serious official architectural works on major ecclesiastical
