Fig. 9.10 Vatican City. Cancelleria reliefs. Detail of head of Vespasian. (Musei Vaticani)
Fig. 9.11 Vatican City. Cancelleria reliefs. Detail showing how head of Domitian was transformed into that of Nerva. (Musei Vaticani)
Here archaeological ingenuity again goes to work. The two sections of the total relief obviously (from the similar technique and the recurrence of conventional figures in both) belong together. The presence of Vespasian places both sections in the Flavian age. Of the three Flavians, only Domitian was sufficiently hated to have had damnatio memoriae practiced upon him, to alter his portrait into another’s. And the most conspicuous alteration of the head consists in hacking off a fringe of curls on the forehead; such a fringe was Domitian’s characteristic hair-style. It remains to inquire whose the new profile is. In the context, it must be an Emperor. The most likely candidate is Domitian’s successor, Nerva, the first of the “five good Emperors.” The new profile, with its irregular nose, lined forehead, and sunken checks, suits the known iconography of that tired old man. Left with the question why, then, the portrait of Domitian on the other section of the relief was left undamaged, Magi argued that the Senate, on second thought, had considered the alteration into Nerva not enough: the relief was dismantled altogether, and its slabs carefully stacked against Hirtius’ tomb for the future use of one of the stonecutters whose yards are known to have been numerous in the area.
Two questions remain: the occasion for carving the relief in the first place, and the building that housed it. The occasion for greeting Vespasian must be the most memorable one of his reign: his triumphant return from Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The occasion for greeting Domitian must be an equally memorable one, almost certainly his setting out on a campaign, or his return from a military victory (because of the prominence of the winged figure and the Mars on the relief). Domitian’s military successes were not many; the likeliest is his campaign of A.D. 83 against a German tribe, the Chatti. If carving the monument would take a year, as competent sculptors report, the earliest possible date for the finished relief would be A.D. 84; on grounds of style one authority, Miss Jocelyn M. Toynbee, would date it eight or nine years later. To celebrate the same victory, Domitian built the Temple of Fortuna Redux (Good Luck and Safe Return), and this temple, Magi thinks, is a reasonable place to suppose the reliefs to have been displayed. In them the whole Roman state is portrayed as asking of the founder of the Flavian dynasty and of his son the peace and prosperity which the Julio-Claudians had failed to give. Like the fresco of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, the relief is not great art but a great document, a measure of the distance Roman sculpture had travelled in the scant century since the Altar of Peace. It is a courtier’s exaltation of a monarch; a solemn, highly rhetorical affirmation of Imperial sovereignty and pride in Rome’s dominion. And perhaps there is a moral in it, too: it summarizes the history of the dynasty, from the triumphant reception of the first Flavian to the explosion of hate which damned the memory, by altering the face, of the last. And these slabs, the expression of a despot’s pride, end leaning against the simple tomb of a lieutenant of Julius Caesar who died fighting, he would have said, to save for his fatherland its free institutions.
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In A.D. 86 Domitian set about continuing the work begun by Vespasian on the narrow Forum between the Forum of Peace and that of Augustus, which we have had occasion to mention earlier. (The final dedication was not to occur until Nerva’s reign.) In effect this Forum was an ingenious device to monumentalize the street which led from the old Republican Forum to the unsavory Subura district and workers’ quarter to the north. Caesar’s Forum was Venus’ precinct; Augustus’ belonged to Mars. A convention had been established, a canonical way of doing things: hence Vespasian dedicated his larger Forum to Peace, the Forum Transitorium to Minerva. Domitian, his devotion to Minerva already established by his having given her prominence on the Cancelleria relief, now remodelled Vespasian’s temple to her, raising it on a high podium. The podium alone remains, with its relieving arch marking where the Cloaca Maxima or great sewer passed below. But the original monumentalizing of the street by Vespasian had involved building a colonnade, of a type common in the frescoes of the Pompeian Third and Fourth Styles. Along its architrave, which was richly decorated on its under side, ran a continuous frieze whose technique resembles that of the Cancelleria relief on a small scale, for the art of the Flavian reigns is recognizably related. The dentils in the cornice show between them the characteristic “spectacles-signature” of the architect Rabirius, who may have worked for Vespasian as well as for Domitian.
The surviving section of the frieze portrays Minerva among the nine Muses, and the punishment of Arachne, who for presuming to rival Minerva’s skill at weaving was turned into a spider. The sculptor took the occasion to carve artisans (the figure of a fuller survives) and household scenes, of spinning, weaving, and dyeing, all under Minerva’s special patronage. One sees the wool basket, the upright loom, the scales for weighing the day’s stint, the proud display of a finished roll of cloth. In the attic above the surviving section of the frieze stands the goddess in relief, wearing the characteristic cloak of a Roman general!
Recent excavation has added little to earlier knowledge of this Forum, but it is of absorbing interest for what it adds to our portrait of the Flavians. Domitian takes over his father’s plan, and pushingly insinuates himself, as it were, between his father and the Empire’s founder, both of whom he envied and tried to emulate. But it was beyond even his effrontery to associate himself with the Minerva who was patroness of artisans; nothing could be more incongruous than his connecting his elegant dilettantism with the homely arts of the household. The frieze is probably a part of Vespasian’s plan: its theme suits his plain personality, and the references to handicrafts suit its location on a street leading to a worker’s quarter. The support of the workers (and of their wives, whose influence was all the more important to win because it was indirect) was worth having, and meanwhile Minerva’s connection with the Muses (the creative arts and literature) could be turned by Domitian to his purpose: he desired to be known as a patron of the arts.
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