Prologue

Elsner, Jaś

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Prologue

Jaś Elsner

Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text

MY EPIGRAPH, A BRIEF POEM by Browning from about 1872 entitled “Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of the Judgment of Paris,” captures many ramifications of the issues I want to address in this book.The epigraph is from Cunningham (2000), 378. I am most grateful to Val Cunningham for...

Author

Jaś Elsner

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32009

Prologue

He gazed and gazed and gazed and gazed,

Amazed, amazed, amazed, amazed.

—Robert Browning (1812–1889)

My epigraph, a brief poem by Browning from about 1872 entitled “Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of the Judgment of Paris,” captures many ramifications of the issues I want to address in this book.1The epigraph is from Cunningham (2000), 378. I am most grateful to Val Cunningham for drawing this poem to my attention. We may think that art is an objective matter of material objects to be studied, appreciated, and collected in the world out there—in the case of Browning’s poem, a painting of the Judgment of Paris. But when we turn to the gaze, we move from the material and the objective into the world of subjectivities. This is a realm of impression, fantasy, and creativity—framed, certainly, by the particular objects on which the gaze may fasten in specific contexts—but nonetheless subject to all kinds of psychological (and indeed psychopathological) investments, both collective and individual, to which our historical, documentary, and visual sources usually fail to give access.

Of Browning’s epigram, we may ask, is the reiteration of the gaze in the first line relentlessly intensitive, with the crescendo of amazement overwhelming the mind in line 2 as its result? Or do the “ands” of line 1 string together a range of gazes—different in kind, feeling, effect—which give rise to a variety of amazements,2The very first lecture I attended at university, in Cambridge in the Michaelmas of 1982, consisted of Michael Lynn-George affirming (more than once) that “repetition is difference,” a view expressed with more complexity in Lynn-George (1988), 91–92, 105–6. The second lecture I went to, in the same week, was John Henderson’s (never published) bravura account of the poetics of “and” (Latin et) in Catullus 85. I see that my beginnings here have my past catching up with me. discretely separated by the commas of line 2? Is the boy—perhaps for the first time sexualised in his confrontation with female nudity—caught in the eddies of his own gaze, so that, Narcissus-like, he falls into a whirlpool of amazement, a maze of wonder from which the poem offers no extrication? In this reading the child’s youth, indicated by the poem’s title, and gender become significant. Or do the “ands” of the first line indicate a dynamic and creative activity of investment (“he gazed ánd gazed ánd gazed ánd gazed”), inverting the normal emphasis of the iambic rhythm, so that the boy fashions, Pygmalion-like, out of the picture an object worthy of his amazement? And what of the focalization? The title deliberately marks out not only a whole picture (and the long mythological ancestry of the “Judgment of Paris” in literary and art historical tradition) but also a specific element in that picture. Naked Venus too—the focalization of Browning’s child’s looking and amazement—evokes a long art historical ancestry of famous artists and famous works, reaching back to Praxiteles and Apelles. But in looking at Venus, is the child amazed by her nudity—the sexuality of Naked Venus—or by her divinity, the dazzling epiphany of an ancient god clothed in her usual accoutrements of nudity? Is the poem’s gaze and wonder directed at a specific picture (never exactly identified, never illustrated—like so many ladies addressed in love poems from antiquity to Browning’s own English heritage)? Or is it, following the epigram’s literary and textual dynamic as poetry, not rather a gaze of amazement at Classical themes in general (as much literary as visual) from the author of the Browning Version of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon?

The gaze, in Browning’s recognition, is more than an object or an activity of the subject. It is active (“he gazed” in line 1), but its results are passive (“[he was] amazed” in line 2). The process cannot be separated from its effects; the viewer’s subjective link via the gaze to that which he sees (never stated in the poem, but only in its title) causes an internal effect—amazement—which may or may not alter that initial act of gazing. That processual linkage, a constant subjectivizing of the object so that what naked Venus provokes is all the intimations of four-fold “amazement,” is both the difficulty and the attraction of studying the gaze.

But beyond the poem’s specific immersion in the act of gazing and its amazing effects, the title signals a further and crucial dimension of the gaze. By making his epigram a “rhyme for a child viewing . . . ,” Browning opens the possibility of disjunction between the gaze as such and the gaze observed. Is the child fully and ideally immersed in his gaze, or is he aware of the gaze of another watching him as he looks? Does every “and” in line 1 signal an increasing self-consciousness, so that the amazements are the effects of not simply the subject in confrontation with naked Venus but of the subject’s performance of a socially conditioned and expected amazement for the benefit of an observing gaze of which he is consciously or unconsciously aware? If he is consciously aware of being observed, are his gaze and its results altogether an act? Has he turned himself into a picture to create an effect on the viewer he knows is watching him? If he is unconsciously aware—that is, if the act of gazing always carries the implicit sense that it may be observed and even reciprocated, then even in his most spontaneous and intimate response of amazement, is there a conditioned (even a policed) element of the sort of reaction a child in an art gallery ought to be offering when confronted with “great art”? The shift from the poem’s own apparent unselfconsciousness to a title which emphasizes looking at another’s looking cannot but suggest the problem of the consciousness of being looked at while looking. Alongside this move from the entirely subjective gaze to the gaze in an expanded sphere of reciprocal gazing, the poem performs a shift from looking to words about looking—from the preverbal response to art (gazed and amazed) to the artfully formulated expression of that response as a “rhyme for a child.” The opening of the epigram’s title, “Rhyme for a Child Viewing . . . ,” makes clear this move to the verbal and again undermines the apparently unmediated directness of the poem’s two lines with the reminder that they are a rhyme—the careful exposition of experience through textual artifice. Again Browning implicitly raises the complex problems of the verbal nature of the gaze—its dominance by words (at least when we think, talk, or rhyme about it) and the difficulty of ever conceiving it as free of words. In terms of both the place of the gaze in the wider field of gazing and the relation of the gaze to its verbal articulation, the juxtaposition of rhyme and title offers a potential series of worries highly pertinent to the problems of the gaze in connection with the art of the Roman world.

The wonder of Browning’s poem is how many potential readings its four words (all but “he” much repeated), plus the title, are capable of bearing without strain. The gaze is indeed like the poem—apparently simple, but so diverse, intricately textured, emotionally calibrated, and differentiated even in a single individual at different times let alone across numerous people and cultures. Of course we must be wary of overgeneralizing beyond a particular nineteenth-century context the specifically Romantic construction of the subject which Browning effects. His child appears to be in a culturally charged setting like a museum (they were all built to look like Greek temples in Browning’s day) and to be engaged in an act of visual contemplation indebted to Kantian aesthetics.3On Kantian contemplation, see Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), 204–5, 211 (= Meredith, 1952, 42–44 and 50, and Pluhar, 1987, 45–46 and 53), with, for example, Guyer (1997), 148–83. Even if we remember that the Elder Pliny too seems to talk of Kantian moments in first-century Rome,4See Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.27: “The multitude of official functions and business activities must, after all, deter anyone from serious study [of art], since the appreciation involved needs leisure and deep silence in our surroundings.” ancient Romans would not have focused (at least not in the same ways as moderns) on the undercurrents of innocence and experience or on the kind of mythology of childhood and education implicit in the historically specific charge of Browning’s poem.

Although there has been a large literature on the gaze in theoretical and art historical writing since the 1970s,5The classic theoretical texts are Foucault (1970), 3–17, and Lacan (1979), 67–119, the latter drawing on Sartre (1956), 254–302, all now with vast commentarial literatures. Significant art historical and film theoretical accounts include Mulvey (1989 [1975]), 3–26; Bryson (1983), 87–132; Bryson (1988); Crary (1990); Gandelman (1991); Jay (1993); Silverman (1996), 125–93; Jay and Brennan (1996); and Nelson (2000b). to which much of my discussion of Browning’s poem is indebted, in Classical studies little was said until the mid-1990s.6In the study of Roman art, one thinks of Elsner (1995), Platt (2002a), and Fredrick (2002). There has been more discussion in literary and cultural studies—for instance, Bartsch (1989, 1994), Goldhill (1994, 2001b), Hardie (2002b), Henderson (1991, 1996, and 2002), Morales (1996a), G. Zanker (2004), and the essays in the second part of Ancona and Greene (2005), 113–268. This book traces some aspects and variables of the gaze (at works of art) in Roman antiquity. It focuses on objects and on texts that describe objects and their viewing. It largely proceeds by means of close readings (of texts about viewing, or of objects, or of both together) without giving excessive space to overt theorizing. It suffers, to be sure, from all the inevitable shortcomings of reliance on this kind of evidence, particularly a bias toward the elite (who wrote and read most of what survives of ancient literature relating to art, and who owned and commissioned most of the objects)7This is true even of the so-called Skoptic epigram, a “low” subgenre of satirical poems whose authors are nonetheless largely from an elite circle. See Nisbet (2003). and an emphasis on male viewers (since men comprise the vast majority of ancient authors and artists). Moreover, because the “controls” which can be applied to our interpretative takes on the evidence are so limited—effectively constrained by that most dangerous of guides, “common sense” (which means only the current collective prejudice of the moment), we can never be wholly sure whether we are “pushing” an interpretation of an object or text well beyond what would have been credible in antiquity or not far enough. But this problem is also an advantage. For it highlights the fact that however deeply we may attempt to ground our interpretations in the ancient context, they are—like the gaze of Browning’s child—our own. In meditating on the visualities of antiquity, we confront them with our own (more or less examined) ways of viewing, and in this confrontation there is perhaps a charge of genuine value.8One area where we shall be persistently confronted by the history of modern interpretative engagements is in Campanian wall painting, where many pictures survive only in the versions of nineteenth-century draftsmen and watercolorists, some of whom seem radically to contradict one another even in the depiction of the same original.

It may be worth asking, at least for clarity’s sake, what this book is not. It is neither specifically an art history of surviving monuments and artifacts nor a literary account of various (mainly Roman) texts that relate to art. But the study of visuality is relevant to both these subjects—especially when one wants to ground them in their contemporary ideological contexts.9Indeed, as Whitmarsh (2001), 234–36, implies, beyond the specifics of art and text, visuality has much to tell us, about issues such as pedagogy and the dialectics of power. In terms of Roman art, a field still dominated by the study of official monuments (and rightly so, in that the survivals are so impressive), I rather bypass the public sphere.10On some aspects of this, see Elsner (1995), 161–76, 192–210; P. Zanker (1994, 1997); and J. R. Clarke (2003b), 19–67. This is not to say that civic monuments and statues, with their complex culture of donation, propaganda, and patronage (both local and central), have no interesting visualities to offer. But I have been led by our texts (a problematic gesture to the priority of the literary over the material in the eyes of some art historians and archeologists, I admit) to the spheres where ancient writers locate special problems, fissures, and traumas in the Greco-Roman gaze. These texts highlight the intensity of the personal gaze—its problems with delusion in a regime of naturalism and its self-consciousness when found to be itself under the gaze of others. The texts take us into the arena of sexuality and identity, and ancient Roman meditations on these matters—whether related to the social, mythological, or aesthetic spheres—find remarkable parallels with the visually formulated concerns of art in the domestic context. Particularly in Campanian painting, with its overt insistence on gazes and in staging the observation of the gaze by what formalist art historians somewhat drily call “supernumerary figures,” the verbally expressed visual concerns of texts find a fascinating foil in a visually expressed pictorial commentary on issues and themes that cannot be wholly divorced from those of Hellenistic and Roman poetry or fiction. Sculpture and silverware offer further visual support for these cultural reflections.

Beyond sexual identity, our texts show a remarkable culture of visual investment in religion—both the personal choices of second-century initiates such as Lucius in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, or the orator Aelius Aristides, and the more public culture of civic religion. The world of religious art—cult statues, dedications, wall paintings which both decorate sacred space and demarcate it as special, even sanctified, for the group that uses that space—offers a rich seam of visually conducted commentary on other religions and on the world outside as seen through the special lens of an initiate cult. Here the naturalism so assiduously developed by Greek art, so fondly exploited by Roman art, and so playfully interrogated by Greco-Roman art writing is interestingly eschewed for much more symbolic and self-consciously schematic visual choices. Both religion and sexuality, while never immune from the potential appropriations of moral rhetoric, apologetic indulgence, and polemical condemnation, could in different ways figure as countercultural claims to personal and collective sectarian identity against the perceived prevailing attitudes of the time. In this sense, despite my general avoidance of public monuments, the latter chapters (especially chapters 9 and 10) of the book nonetheless examine an implicit politics in what may at first sight seem apparently unpolitical religious art.

I focus on the era of the Roman empire, including its Greek and near eastern provinces as well as the west, between Augustus (second half of the first century B.C.) and Theodosius (toward the end of the fourth century A.D.). Of course this period encompassed many diachronic changes—not least the granting of universal citizenship in A.D. 212 and the rise of Christianity as an official religion after A.D. 313 (though not yet the banning of pagan polytheism).11In cultural terms this period was one of growing hellenization of the Roman empire, culminating in the so-called Second Sophistic (from about A.D. 50 to well into the fourth century), on which see further chapter 6, text at note 5, and note 7. On the citizenship question, see Garnsey (2004) with bibliography. For the complex coexistence of pagan polytheism and Christianity throughout the fourth century, see Beard, North, and Price (1998), 1:364–88, and J. Curran (2000), 161–259 (on Rome); on the moves against paganism in the 390s, see, for example, Williams and Friell (1994), 119–33. But in terms of the social ideals envisaged by the elite within a broadly similar geographical scope, there is a good deal of continuity amid the change—enough continuity, I hope, for my study of the relations of visuality and subjectivity within these boundaries to hold water.

The question of how viewing and visuality may give rise to subjectivity, whether individual or collective, is a big one. I do not here get immersed in a philosophical exploration of these issues. Rather, this book both takes for granted the amazement in the gaze and assumes, further, that some sense of who one is (that is, subjectivity) cannot be denied either to the results of that amazement or to the impetus that got the gaze going in the first place. But I do not pursue any simple or rigid categorization: one of the interesting complexities of visuality is that the desires in the gaze can shift so swiftly in relation not only to different objects but even to the same object (for example, Naked Venus, whether seen as an available woman or as a potent deity).

Thus this book does not provide a series of unequivocal facts about certain events or monuments, about who commissioned, made, or looked at what, and when. Nor does this book offer any “authoritative” readings of selected texts and objects, readings whose purpose would be to define unequivocally how these things were experienced in their time. On the contrary, I explore, first, the discussion, appreciation, and viewing of art current in Greco-Roman antiquity; and second, some case studies of the gaze that indicate the wide and remarkable range of visualities and viewings that ancient Greeks and Romans under the empire were able to apply to what they looked at. It is within this range—from illusionistic naturalism to more schematic abstraction on the formal side of objects, from the personal psychological appropriations of wish-fulfillment fantasy to the acceptance of a shared subjectivity of cult initiation on the side of viewers, from looking as such to being aware of being looked at while looking—that Roman eyes were trained, and it is to this range that they responded. My focus then is on the pattern of cultural constructs and social discourses that stand between the retina and the world, a screen through which the subjects of this inquiry (that is, Greek and Roman people) had no choice but to look and through which they acquired (at least in part) their sense of subjectivity.12I am indebted here to the definition of visuality in Bryson (1988), 91–92. Just as that screen—what I am calling “visuality”—was itself made up of subjective investments while being limited by the material and ideological constraints of the ancient cultural context, so our examination of it must depend upon a certain amount of empathetic imagination as well as critical analysis.13For empathetic imagination and critical analysis as key weapons in the historian’s armory, see Hopkins (1999), 2.

1 The epigraph is from Cunningham (2000), 378. I am most grateful to Val Cunningham for drawing this poem to my attention. »

2 The very first lecture I attended at university, in Cambridge in the Michaelmas of 1982, consisted of Michael Lynn-George affirming (more than once) that “repetition is difference,” a view expressed with more complexity in Lynn-George (1988), 91–92, 105–6. The second lecture I went to, in the same week, was John Henderson’s (never published) bravura account of the poetics of “and” (Latin et) in Catullus 85. I see that my beginnings here have my past catching up with me. »

3 On Kantian contemplation, see Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), 204–5, 211 (= Meredith, 1952, 42–44 and 50, and Pluhar, 1987, 45–46 and 53), with, for example, Guyer (1997), 148–83. »

4 See Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.27: “The multitude of official functions and business activities must, after all, deter anyone from serious study [of art], since the appreciation involved needs leisure and deep silence in our surroundings.” »

5 The classic theoretical texts are Foucault (1970), 3–17, and Lacan (1979), 67–119, the latter drawing on Sartre (1956), 254–302, all now with vast commentarial literatures. Significant art historical and film theoretical accounts include Mulvey (1989 [1975]), 3–26; Bryson (1983), 87–132; Bryson (1988); Crary (1990); Gandelman (1991); Jay (1993); Silverman (1996), 125–93; Jay and Brennan (1996); and Nelson (2000b). »

6 In the study of Roman art, one thinks of Elsner (1995), Platt (2002a), and Fredrick (2002). There has been more discussion in literary and cultural studies—for instance, Bartsch (1989, 1994), Goldhill (1994, 2001b), Hardie (2002b), Henderson (1991, 1996, and 2002), Morales (1996a), G. Zanker (2004), and the essays in the second part of Ancona and Greene (2005), 113–268. »

7 This is true even of the so-called Skoptic epigram, a “low” subgenre of satirical poems whose authors are nonetheless largely from an elite circle. See Nisbet (2003). »

8 One area where we shall be persistently confronted by the history of modern interpretative engagements is in Campanian wall painting, where many pictures survive only in the versions of nineteenth-century draftsmen and watercolorists, some of whom seem radically to contradict one another even in the depiction of the same original. »

9 Indeed, as Whitmarsh (2001), 234–36, implies, beyond the specifics of art and text, visuality has much to tell us, about issues such as pedagogy and the dialectics of power. »

10 On some aspects of this, see Elsner (1995), 161–76, 192–210; P. Zanker (1994, 1997); and J. R. Clarke (2003b), 19–67. »

11 In cultural terms this period was one of growing hellenization of the Roman empire, culminating in the so-called Second Sophistic (from about A.D. 50 to well into the fourth century), on which see further chapter 6, text at note 5, and note 7. On the citizenship question, see Garnsey (2004) with bibliography. For the complex coexistence of pagan polytheism and Christianity throughout the fourth century, see Beard, North, and Price (1998), 1:364–88, and J. Curran (2000), 161–259 (on Rome); on the moves against paganism in the 390s, see, for example, Williams and Friell (1994), 119–33. »

12 I am indebted here to the definition of visuality in Bryson (1988), 91–92. »

13 For empathetic imagination and critical analysis as key weapons in the historian’s armory, see Hopkins (1999), 2. »

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