by David D. Horowitz.
Ancient Roman sculpture is probably best known for realistic portrait busts. While Greek-inspired youthful beauty, perfect proportion, and calm expression find their place in Roman sculpture, the busts often represent—and highlight—wrinkles, warts, moles, furrowed brows, double chins, baldness, frowns, tight-lipped rage, and anxiety and concern concentrated behind intense stares. Here is a world of worry, feuding, arrogance, anger, and ambition—conveyed via a stern stare, a grave brow, a menacing silence.
For many, “eternity” in the visual arts suggests perfect serenity or grandeur: a cathedral’s rose window or a snowy mountain range during a golden sunset. And yet, how contemporary, and timeless, these fiercely detailed Roman busts appear: this emperor’s furrowed brow, that senator’s stern stare, the bags beneath the eyes of this weary but perseverant old woman, that philosopher’s bravely questioning eyes. The Roman busts of wrinkles, baldness, ferocity, worry, furrows, and frowns still whisper and haunt. Yes, looking at the amazing gallery of busts in a book like Roman Portraits (Phaidon, 1940; photographs: Ilse Schneider-Lengyel; text: Ludwig Goldscheider), I feel these Ancient Romans share the room with me. They inhabit my thoughts and inflame my empathetic curiosity: what were these people really like? Indeed, here is something at once ancient and contemporary. Here is resonance across millennia. Here is human nature in all its grandeur and delusion, pathos and pettiness.
Near the end of Roman Portraits are portrait bust images 102 and 103, both listed as having been sculpted around 300 A.D. They face each other on opposite pages. One is of the emperor Diocletianus (ruled 284-305 A.D.): regally self-contained, comfortably in power. And facing him is one of the book’s—and antiquity’s—most intense sculpture busts. A thick-necked, round-headed middle-aged fellow stares bitterly: deep furrows; eyes ablaze with blame and suspicion; fury around a pursed, shut mouth. And, in this book at least, he stares forever at Diocletianus. I hear the man’s silence, as he looks at the emperor: A god?! You’re from the underworld! You ordered the murder of several of my friends; you bribe, lie, spy, and manipulate; you treat Romans like slaves and servants; and yet you appear so smugly blameless! You would have me killed, too, Diocletianus Augustus, were I to have spoken… But I fear for my wife, my children, my friends… Murderer! Oh, I mean “god.”
Great art can tend toward beautiful idealism or warts-and-all realism. Both reach and teach us, as humans participate in larger tensions between idealism and pragmatism, anger and restraint, anxiety and serenity. Ancient sculpture seems to have captured these tensions in busts both idealistic and realistic. I frequently return to photographs of them for insight, nourishment, deepening silence.