Roman triumphal painting: its function, development, and reception

In 211 B.C. the great general M. Claudius Marcellus returned to Rome after his decisive defeat of Syracuse. With him came a vast booty of Hellenistic artifacts. Remaining outside the sacred precincts of Rome, he supplicated the Senate for the purification and glory of a triumphal procession. Plutarch wrote that, receiving the Senate's permission for the celebration, Marcellus paraded "many of the most beautiful public monuments from Syracuse, realizing that they would both make a visual impression in his triumph and also be an ornament for the city."(1) He opened his triumph impressively with an allegorical painting of Syracuse made prisoner.

Paintings carried in triumphal processions, specifically commissioned to commemorate victorious military campaigns, not only added immensely to the celebratory nature of the rite, they also increased its sociopolitical power. Roman triumphal painting also served to acquaint Romans with novel artistic conventions, previously foreign to their experience. Ancient literary sources reveal most of what we now know about the contemporary Roman reception of triumphal paintings. Although none of the paintings commissioned by victorious Roman generals to decorate their triumphal processions survives, the testimonia provide crucial alternate evidence to determine their role in shaping Roman political and artistic culture in the Republican period. This article examines that evidence to explore the significance this genre of propagandistic art held in Roman society, to ascertain what triumphal paintings may have looked like, and finally to assess how Roman audiences responded to them. As the example of Marcellus indicates, the military victories that could lead to political advancement also carried with them (as spolia, or as captured craftsmen and slaves) the very objects and skills that created triumphal painting. The genre thus demonstrates the dense interplication of Roman military expansion, Hellenistic artifacts and attitudes that were fundamentally the booty of that expansion, and the rising political ambitions of great generals.

During the Republic, Roman paintings with historical themes commemorated the empire's expansion: for example, the conquests of Carthage in 201 B.C., Sardinia in 174 B.C., and Macedonia in 168 B.C. Subjects included, at one end of the spectrum, pared-down iconic personifications and, at the other end, full-fledged battle scenes in landscape settings. Roman historical paintings not only secured the private memories of participants in actual events, they also served a didactic and propagandistic function in the public sphere of Roman political and religious institutions. The Roman governing class commissioned historical paintings to inform a specifically Roman audience of its achievements, to educate that audience about its policies, and thus to persuade that audience to adopt its views and follow a particular course of action. It used historical paintings to implement ideology.

Ancient Rome inherited arguments, already old, for the superiority of painting over any other form of communication to affect and manipulate an audience.(2) In his treatise De Oratore, Cicero states that the "keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and that consequently perceptions received by the ears or by reflection can be most easily retained in the mind if they are also conveyed there by the mediation of the eyes."(3) Valerius Maximus writes about the ability of painting to aid the memory and about its consequent role in instruction; in both instances he found painting superior to literature.(4) In the Ars Poetica Horace argues that "less vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance through the ears than by what is brought before the trusty eyes, and what the spectator can see for himself."(5) How can we understand these statements in reference to the beliefs of the ancient Roman audience for history painting? Although such notions may be viewed as mere topoi, David Freedberg recognizes that "topos becomes a telling index of belief and behavior, not merely the unthinking repetition of learned or critical commonplaces."(6)

To what extent can we depend on the veracity of literary testimonia for accurate reconstructions of Roman historical paintings? The genres of those textual sources and the extent to which those genres may affect the reliability and detail of their accounts present constant problems for historical interpretation. We might assume that a scholar or encyclopedist, such as Varro or Pliny the Elder, who cites and occasionally questions his sources, is fairly reliable.(7) A poet like Ovid or Horace, on the other hand, may be more imaginative and tendentious.(8) Roman biographers and historians were either members of the ruling class themselves or in their service;(9) annalists like Polybius and Livy had strong family or political biases for and against certain subjects.(10) Although literary works were the products of a restricted social class and thus share its limited vision, they are also revealing of its assumptions and preconceptions. The ancient textual records therefore are not themselves transparent; they, too, have ideological and political points to make, and thus require careful handling.