Roman
Juno
Description:
Juno bust
Period of Original: Roman
Origin of Original: Roman Empire
Location of the Cast: 20 W. 44 St. New York, NY USA
Provenance: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Condition: The cast has been thoroughly cleaned and restored.
Additional Information:
N/A
Article
Alissa Ardito, Ph.D.
Juno
“Captive Greece took captive her conqueror.” At first glance, this cast of an austere and regal bust embodies Horace’s wry observation. This empyreal queen, a Romanized adaptation of the Greek goddess Hera, was carved as a Greek, exemplifying the distant gaze from an anonymous ideal face, the noble simplicity that was thought, before Nietzsche, to pervade all Greek art. Rome, establishing itself as an autonomous political and military force, remained culturally dependent on Greece.
Roman art was held in thrall by Greece, especially after the capture of Corinth, and splendid was the array the Romans returned with in 149 B.C. from the loveliest of Greek cities. To meet Rome’s high demand for such works, copies of bronze and marble were produced from plaster casts, which remind us of the venerable ancient tradition of plaster casting. Henceforth, Greek classical models held sway, refining and elevating the pragmatic politicians. And yet, a searching gaze of this cast betrays qualities uniquely and indubitably Roman.
It is generally accepted that Roman art stems from native Etruscan and Italic art. This bust, however, neglects the graceful naturalism so characteristic of the Etruscans. Rather it exhibits features that are distinctively Roman. Roman art gave us the portrait bust, replete with the sagging skin, asymmetrical features, deep set or protruding eyes, furrowed or expressive brows that characterize the individual rather than the ideal. The origin of Roman realism lurks not in the practical character of the Romans as some art historians have insisted but in alchemy of religious, in particular funerary, ritual and formal invention. Until the modern age, all works of art found inspiration in religious ritual, as Walter Benjamin suggests.
From the time of Rome’s establishment, it was customary to create death masks, taking wax impressions of the faces of Rome’s deceased elite. The Greek historian Polybius wrote of Roman funeral rites, so singular to the Hellenic eye, in which the death masks, carefully preserved for generations, would be paraded by descendants in the funeral procession. It was perilously close to ancestor worship and fraught with political meaning for in honoring a lineage of virtuous public service, the funeral procession served to remind Romans of an inheritance that made one fit to govern. It is significant that the masks preserved how a person really looked rather than how he wished to be seen. In that manner, “the brittle creaturality” of the human person, with all his flaws and imperfections, was preserved.
From the death masks we trace the portraits busts and honorific portrait statutes of generations of republican senators and emperors. There was an interregnum of flattering idealization during the reign of Augustus, followed by a steady rhythm of alteration, a return to old veristic traditions during the reign of Claudius, which dominated from Tiberius to the Flavians; Trajan, Hadrian and later the Antonines reinstated artistic idealism only to return to the painfully perceptive portraits of Caracalla. The portrait bust continued to offer sculptors the opportunity for incisive portrayals of character, such as those revealed in Bernini’s Cardinal Scipione Borghese and Innocent X.
At first glance, this Juno appears aloof, the unfeeling goddess of the Aeneid. But look closely and notice that she is both stern and sorrowful, goddess and mother. Consider the great delicacy with which the sculptor portrays the effect of aging on the skin, through the lines so lightly carved on the neck and throat. Her lips, thin with age, droop ever so slightly at the corners. (Compare to School of Praxiteles, head of a girl from Chios) Such minute details render stone into flesh. Juno wears the polos, her high crown, and the simple, deeply chiseled folds impart the weight of fabric. The curving drape of the cowl neck, another opportunity to chisel deeply recessed folds, frames the lower half of the composition and softens the harder lines of the face. The hair is relatively simple, which is telling, since Roman busts can be dated by coiffure. During the Flavian period, for example, ornate hairstyles were in fashion for women. Consequently, sculptors began to use the drill with remarkable precision, the result being elaborate curls and braids, rivulets and cascades of locks of extraordinary sensory refinement. Later, in the Antonine and Severan period, beards became popular for men, resulting in more virtuosic use of the drill.
This is the bust of a Roman matron. In Rome, unlike Greece, women could possess civic virtue and play a part in the political realm with all its grandeur, its stratagems and spoils. The annals of Rome are filled with mothers, redoubtable matrons such as Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, Venturia, mother of Coriolanus, Livia, wife of Augustus, the list ranges from the Sabine women to the ever patient, ever understanding Octavia. The leap from mother and queen to mater dolorosa was not too great. Not in vain did Edmund Burke write that Marie Antoinette, that most girlishly frivolous of monarchs, on her way to guillotine carried herself like a Roman matron.
Alissa Ardito, Ph.D.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Kleiner, Diana E.E. Roman Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992
Polybius, The Histories, Loeb Classical Library, W.R. Paton, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1922
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/citylife/imagesr/chios_head.jpg
http://100falcons.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/roman-bust.jpg
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/vaticano/SC-Augustus.jpg
http://www.scultura-italiana.com/galleria/Bernini%20Gian%20Lorenzo/images/Gian%20Lorenzo%20Bernini%20-%20Scipione%20Borghese%20(Roma,%20Galleria%20Borghese,%201632).jpg
http://www.humanitiesweb.org/gallery/154/23.jpg
An instance of imputing non-formal causes to formal effects, See Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
“Brittle creaturality” is an expression coined by Johann Huizinga in The Autumn of the Middle Ages.
See the Augustus of Prima Porta, the pose is Greek, the face improves upon reality, but the gesture is Roman.