Their Inherited Images: Statuary and
Pictorial Types on Greek Imperial Coins
First some
often bypassed general considerations will the presented, followed by questions
raised by specific Types on particular coins. The coin used as a heading is from Deultum; the portrait is
Macrinus and his is one of several that show Perseus freeing Andromeda from the
rocky cliff. This composition,
also found in four sizes at Pompeii, very likely was the invention of the famous
Nikias, the Late Classical Athenian painter who tinted the Aphrodite of Cnidos
for Praxiteles.
Our background
Recent scholarship, either
art historical or numismatic, is no longer concerned to use coins as evidence
for the appearance of lost works of art, though of course the documentary evidence,
as of the minor types on Athens New Style tetradrachms, remains. It is not that the 19th
centuryÕs work was useless, but we cannot carry such work further, and by and
large it can tell us no more.
Besides, we now understand much more about the use and production of the
statuary and pictures that proliferated, especially in the Late Hellenistic and
Empire periods. Therefore, we need
to be more careful of how we discuss the recognizable inherited images that we
see on coins, especially with the availability of so much out-of-copyright
great scholarship on line: great scholarship of great value and utility, but
just as with archaeology or paleontology or medicine we must keep in mind what
was unknown. Sometimes outdated
nomenclature can trap us in the ruts of outdated inquiry, almost as if we kept
searching for an element named Caloric or limited ourselves to Linnaean
genetics.
It is perhaps even more
important to ask what our numismatic concern with these miniature
representations of already ancient art ought to be. It is not primarily that we are looking for illustrations to
Pausanias or the younger Pliny, nor, usually, do they illustrate religious
belief as distinct from traditional cultural identification (as Orpheus in
Thrace). It was one thing to take
a cure at a major Asklepieion, another to visit Alexandria Troas to see its
statuary. When Knidos suddenly
issued unprecedented coinage of her famous Aphrodite on the occasion of
CaracallaÕs ÔhoneymoonÕ visit (see below), she honored the Imperial family more
than her goddess—and the famous statue, besides, was not her ancient cult
statue but an adornment of the sanctuary.
Anyhow, when Marcianopolis consistently preferred the Apollo Lykeios type for Apollo, whether alone or in a tetrastyle
naos, it is rather as if Malibu, California, issued five-cent ÔnickelsÕ with
the Landsdowne Herakles as their reverse type. Whether a statuary type in a tetrastyle naos is evidence of
that godÕs cult or is rather a representation of a neokoria with an appropriate
choice of statue in the naos is another question. The choices of types for recently founded cities may not be
quite comparable with those of cities even of Hellenistic date, let alone the
most ancient. The very ancient,
especially if no longer as important economically as they once had been, could
hardly avoid their literary fame: Ilion must use a Palladion, Knossos a
labyrinth. Xoana often were used on alliance coins, but it is the
adornments of cities and their sanctuaries, the agalmata, that are frequent and important on Greek Imperials
from Hadrian through the Severans and, finally, for Gordian III. We seldom can specify the reason for
the choice of a particular art work, but, apart from the venerable xoana, they all seem to have been famous as art works. I want, among other questions, to test
that conclusion here. It means
that the period in question expressed cultural pretension on their coins in
terms of valuing these mostly Classical, partly Hellenistic, recognizable works
of art: what Pliny called opera nobilia.
Thus, it is less important in
the case of a coin showing a deity holding a baby whether it is the one by
Praxiteles or the one by his father than to register the fact that the statue
in question was one of the well known ones.
This small
coin of Nicopolis ad Istrum shows Septimius Severus with a reverse type of the
Weary Herakles, best known in the monstrous copy now in Naples from the Baths
of Caracalla: it had to be to scale for its setting. This head of Herakles is the most commonly used on coins all
over the Greco-Roman world; here at Nicopolis SeptimiusÕs son Caracalla has the
same type on a coin of his own.
ÒAncient CopiesÓ
The ancient Latin word for
the general usage in which art historians came to use ÔcopyÕ is exemplum. The
Latin word copia (through medieval
French the etymon of ÔcopyÕ) means ÔabundanceÕ; imitatio was not used as we use ÔcopyÕ. In antiquity, there were a lot of exempla of well known types of, for example, Aphrodite. Indeed there was a great copia of such images, just as older Roman Catholic churches,
like the one in New Iberia in LouisianaÕs Evangeline country, have the standard
Maries and Josephs and the Prague Infant in plaster and the saints, besides
very traditional Stations of the Cross; just as conquerors on horseback are
seen all over the world thanks to the survival above ground of RomeÕs great
Marcus Aurelius, and a Renaissance-inspired Mercury for nearly a century
adorned the cover of every telephone directory in the USA. Consider the Infant of Prague: the Type
with his curls and ruffle of a princeling could be bought in Church supply
houses in several sizes and many grades, both of manufacture and fidelity of
detail. Even I was unprepared for
the copia I found in Google
Images; Wikipedia shows the Prague one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_of_Prague But I donÕt want to imply that Ôancient
copiesÕ were all devotional, and anyone who turns to commercial art can find
innumerable uses of our own inherited image bank that are not religious.
The ancientsÕ use
of their inherited images (as of inherited literary topoi) was very like ours, and like ours it
played a dominant role in their visual (and verbal) concepts and fantasies.
When modern art
history was born in the 18th century, and developed in the 19th
century, resting on the shoulders of Renaissance study of ancient authors that
printed editions made widely available, a crying need was felt for the recovery
of what had been lost. Coins,
which supply their own copia, and even their own inscriptions, put Eckhel (not only the right
man at the right time but in the right place) in an enviable position that a
lesser mind and character might have squandered. The new students of ancient sculpture, even the few who
could live in Rome, were much worse provided for. The younger Pliny, Vitruvius, Cicero, Pausanias, just to
name four, spoke of masterpieces such as left no doubt that Pheidias had been
as great as Michelangelo, Apelles as great as Raphael, for example. Vasari and the whole Renaissance had
primed them to undertake what they did.
Digging in Rome, first, turned up some very impressive statuary. It took generations (it took, finally,
the Elgin marbles and several major excavations in Greece and Asia Minor)
before the realization that the Belvedere Apollo was not a Greek original and
the indubitably Greek Aphrodite of Melos was a pastiche did sink in. It is within this writerÕs own lifetime
that the futility of pursuing the Òreally true copiesÓ was generally
admitted. There are direct
off-casts in bronze, to be sure, but they present their own problems: which are
they, how much diddling was there, and so on. ÒAncient copiesÓ were made for a variety of applications, in
a wide range of grades, in many variants, all important and interesting to
study, and, like all those Prague Infants in Google Images, they are seldom
what Johannes Overbeck and even Adolf FurtwŠngler, even Margarete Bieber
(1879-1978), hoped that they were.
In sum, we are
now in a position to study the inherited images on coins in their own terms. To
define those terms is the goal of this essay. The very word, ÔcopyÕ, in this discussion, must be
abandoned. When images are
involved that certainly do go back to a single original work, I shall call them
Types (using the uppercase initial to distinguish this special usage): for
example, the Farnese Herakles is the Type whose head was used on the little
coin above. What distinguishes a
Type can be
ascertained.
*******
What distinguishes a Type?
For the statuary Type that
Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in Rome, so to Americans ÒThe Marble FaunÓ (more
plainly The Leaning Satyr), there
are dozens of marble replicas, most of them nearly the same size, very few as
expensive work as the Capitoline statue or the really beautiful torso, from the
Palatine, in the Louvre. HelbigÕs
assessment of the former cannot be improved upon: Òa Hadrianic copy of a Greek
statue of the time of PraxitelesÓ, though, since it is hopeless, for many
reasons, to limit the word ÔcopyÕ to very expensive, very carefully produced
pointed replicas, I shall try to avoid the word. ÒHadrianicÓ is based on the technique; though it probably
came to the Capitoline from the Villa dÕEste, and is one of the first
acquisitions of the first civic museum, its finding place is unknown. We shall never know, and it doesnÕt
matter, who made the original, only that it could not have been so popular
unless those who bought the type, usually for their gardens, had thought of it
as famous, an opus nobile, a Type
that Ôcultural literacyÕ required that one knew of. So far as I know (and it is not in LŽon Lacroix, Les
reproductions de statues sur les monnaies grecques), it does not appear on any coins. Perhaps, indeed, it really owes its
ancient popularity to garden and landscape design rather than to civic
adornment, let alone cult-specific adornment of sanctuaries (such as the coins
of Caesarea Panias attest to for the boy Pan playing a flute). If so, that fact underscores what
surely is true, that it is not the iconographic genre, Ònature boyÓ, that as
such does or does not recommend the choice of a statuary type for coins. Note that one can name the Type just as
confidently from a garden variety edition as from the exquisitely finished
torso from the Palatine.
Pastiche was not
contemptible
The temper of some 20th-century
criticism was strenge, severe,
puristic, Puritan, Calvinist, uptight: label it as you will. So were the movements that existed
concurrently, Dada or Pop or Abstract Expressionism, for example, as much as
Cubism or Social Realism or Minimalism or resolute Naturalism, and in music as
well as in visual arts: consider the terms in which Jules Massenet was
judged. All were uncompromising,
left, right, and middle alike. It
doesnÕt matter whether it is admirable or contemptible to be uncompromising;
the 20th centuryÕs understanding of ancient arts is conditioned by
their regarding most of what the Greco-Roman world most valued as virtual
pastiche. That is, Ònothing before
CŽzanneÓ was matched, symmetrically, by Ònothing after PheidiasÓ. Of course, like so much in the
Renaissance and its aftermath, this severity rooted in insecurity goes back to
the Hellenistic world: after Alexander, deinde cessavit ars, to the intelligentsia who engendered the history of
art, so that itÕs wise for our discipline to know its own genome.
This paragraph does nothing
like justice, however, to all the writers and friends who have constituted my
own mental environment. So to speak,
they did not choose the soil in which some seeds took root.
The coin from Deultum,
Varbanov (Engl.) II, no. 2625 with a boy Apollo standing with his right
shoulder high, the right side of his head inclined to it, resting his weight on
his right leg and supporting this leaning pose on his right hand on a pillar
the height of his thigh, but holding a bow in that hand, his left arm bent and
the back of his left hand on the small of his back, is unique in coinage
(though the coin is not quite so rare as Varbanov thinks). In Illus. 4, above, it is shown with
two replicas of the statuary type called ÒNarcissusÓ, a very young boy athlete,
perhaps resting after winning a competition, one of the earlier Òresting posesÓ
of c. 410 BCE that added interest and variety to simple contrapposto. The nickname, Narcissus, is of course
not ancient. (J. Boardman, Greek
Sculpture: the Classical Period, fig.
234, shows the Louvre statue, at left above). The pose is unique to this Type. I have flipped the photos of the Berlin ÒNarcissusÓ to show
more plainly that the coin has the same figure composition. But none of the surviving marble
ÒNarcissusÓ statues have anything in the hand on the pillar; the figure on the
coin, unless he is a boy archer who has competed in some Thracian variant of
ancient Games, must be an Apollo (ÒFebÓ, as Varbanov spells Phoebus even in the
English edition). Why, however, is
the pose reversed? One way it
could happen was the engraverÕs working from a gem or a sketch or a painting;
the design, put as he saw it into the intaglio die, would produce the flipped
design when the coin was struck.
Irrespective of the existence of this pose in a work actually at Deultum
or its execution for this coin from some intermediary, at some stage the
iconography was altered by the addition of the bow. A family statue set up very likely at Olympia at the end of
the 5th century BCE, for the victory of their boy, by now (as
numerous replicas indicate) a famous opus nobile, is now a young Apollo. Pastiche, we say; a brand-new work, they say. Some statuary compositions were useful
for making so many brand-new statuary Types that, though we can see that a
single masterpiece was the basis of them all, we cannot be sure which
attributes, which iconographic interpretation, the original will have had.
The Leaning Poses
Here is the Type of Pothos, a
late Classical leaning pose. It
was created by Skopas of Paros. In
this case, as in several others, the identification of the Type, and so the
name of its sculptor, is certain.
The Conservatori Museum Pothos is one of the best. The Leaning Pose was a means of
imparting motion, variety, and expressiveness to a figure; it requires a major
external support, another figure, a pillar, a tree rather than a tree trunk,
but for this reason it also makes sculpture more pictorial, a composition that
fills a wide rectangle. Pothos
(Yearning) has his hair in a sort of ÔFrench BraidÕ from front to back on the
crown of his head and bands of the rest of his hair twisted from front to back,
all the ends gathered into a soft bunch at the back. This is not to make him girlish but to convey his adolescent
emotionality. When Apollo is shown
equally young, he has a comparable hairstyle. If the young athlete, above, were really a Narcissus, he
would not have the sensible short hair of a mortal boy athlete that he
has. Pothos is not shown on coins,
even at Megara. It is not because
what he personifies is Ônot the sort of thing you put on coinsÕ, and the whole
composition of which he was a part would have fit a flan, but Megara had many
statuary Types to choose from (see Head, HN, p. 394) and did not use this one. In any case, we have other leaning
Types to study.
A Wealth of Apollo Types
Apollo young and nude (not
counting the kouros type, which,
when it is Apollo, is apt to be post-Archaic) is best represented by the Kassel
Apollo, an Athenian Type known in
many replicas, but, in the same early stance as a kouros, by the representations of the statue by Kanachos and
the cult statue at Alexandria Troas, which led old art historians to call kouros statues (regularly votive in sanctuaries and funerary
on graves) ÔApollosÕ. The Athenian
mid-5th-century stance, with the free leg forward, recurs not only
in mechanically produced (ÒpointedÓ) replicas, beautifully published by E.
Schmidt in Antike Plastik V, but
in numerous variants, some of them holding a lyre (a Classical Apollo holding a
lyre would be in a citharodeÕs robe) as the bronze from Pompeii and the Apollo
(marble) from the Tiber probably did.
Therefore, when we see an Apollo on a coin and say Òin the pose of the
Kassel typeÓ, we cannot say when a representation of a pointed replica, or a
faithful freehand statuette, was meant and when one of the variants was
intended. And here it doesnÕt
matter. The important fact is that
this Type from the middle of the 5th century was very popular. The famous Apollo of the Belvedere, practically nude, also was an Athenian type; he
wasnÕt often copied and does not appear on Greek Imperial coins. In a knee-length chiton, since southern
Asia Minor avoided adult male nudity, Apollo appears at Side, for example, but
not on Greek Imperials. From the
Late Classical onward, the Apollo as citharode, with a cloak hanging down his
back as on EuphranorÕs statue from the Athenian Agora and on tetradrachms of
Antiochos IV, richly garbed at Antioch if we can believe the Tetrarchic coins
of Antioch:
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/view.asp?key=Colored%20Statues
Here, too, he is a citharode. A citharode also can be half draped, as
the Early Hellenistic Type in the British Museum is. The nude Apollo Lykeios, named for the statue at the Lyceum in Athens, was a popular Type all
over the Empire in numerous variants and sometimes was shown in a tetrastyle
naos. On Greek Imperials, however,
an anecdotal statuary Type, a leaning pose, is among the most important, either
as a Sauroktonos (lizard slayer) or in a pose like his, but without a tree or a
lizard. In the assortment of
Apollo statuary types that Apollonia ad Rhyndacum evidently collected, one is
in the leaning pose, adapted from the pose of the Sauroktonos The Apollo that appears on Cilician
coins with wolves and represents their cult of Apollo is unknown in the record
of replicated statuary types and unrelated to the popular Type based on the
statue at the Lyceum in Athens, the School named for the near-by shrine of the
imported cult, going back probably to the 7th century BCE.
In sum, what we usually find
on Greek Imperials are the Types known in copious exempla, apart from the Archaic Smintheus and Didymaios,
which were not chosen as art treasures but in some cases were touted as
age-old. This coincidence seems
significant. Most of the
exceptions, as at Athens in the 2nd century after Christ or at
Corinth or at Ephesos or, for that matter, the Cnidian Aphrodite herself, are
proud citiesÕ own claim to fame.
Aphrodite types
One best known, one little known
It is much more than an
academic courtesy to say that teachers in general and professors privileged to
work with graduate students in particular learn more than they can ever
acknowledge to teaching seminars and working as thesis advisers. It may have become a platitude to say
the teachers learn as much from pupils as pupils from teachers, even when the
pupils are in Kindergarten. Of
course, in the latter case, the teachers learn about the minds of the children
they are teaching, and the children learn about what numbers are, how words are
spelled in ÔfamiliesÕ (as I did in 1940 and the Annenberg Foundation has on
film today), and how words and things, ideas, and feelings mesh. But with a MA thesis, the professor
starts out with more reading, etc., but the graduate student quickly catches up
and surpasses him or her in the special subject of the thesis.
Therefore, thanks to .pdf on
line, I can offer you all the riches of Angel ArvelloÕs thesis at Louisiana
State University: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04142005-032052/ Since she then lived more than a
hundred miles southwest of the university, she could not enroll in a current
seminar on coins in ancient art, but she could work with a few of them by
choosing a thesis topic on nude Aphrodite types. So, in her Chapters II–IV, you will find more pictures
than you may have known existed of the ÔdaughtersÕ of the Aphrodite of Knidos
(such as the Capitoline type and her variants and the title statue of the
thesis, the Aphrodite deÕ Medici) as well as the coins that show them as
reverse types.
The statue at left above (a
marble ÔcopyÕ), found at Epidauros, as well as the coins that might go with
her, however, are clothed. Some
scholars think that this Aphrodite in ÒwetÓ drapery, with her woolen himation
slipping so as to reveal her body, but wearing a baldric to hold a weapon, is a
replica of the Armed Aphrodite at Corinth. If so, and if that statue was by Naukydes, it was Argive
work and in the tradition of Polykleitos; these sculptors usually worked in bronze,
and the marble replica itself suggests a metal original. Some have thought that the helmeted
head on Corinthian staters is Aphrodite rather than Athena. There is no reason for one image to
preclude identification of the other (many sanctuaries had more than one
creation representing their deity), but the Armed Aphrodite in the Athens
National Museum found at Eptdauros and the helmeted goddess on the staters
unquestionably are two different images.
The Corinth coin of Septimius
Severus certainly shows a Corinthian statue, but its stance is partially
reversed relative to the statue above: the weight is on her left leg, and her
head turns to the right. On the
other hand, we have emphasized that the images on the coins do not always
render works of art as a photographic postcard does. Recognizability of the deityÕs image—the falling
woolen himation, the practically bare body, the combination of sensuality with
militant purpose, her bare head—might matter more than rendering the
graceful movement of the sculptorÕs creation. Probably, therefore, we are right in recognizing CorinthÕs
Armed Aphrodite in both the marble replica and the bronze coin. In such a case, however, the coin is
better evidence for the nature of the cult than for the style of the lost
statue.
(To be continued, as occasion
demands. The purpose here,
however, is to consider how the Imperial heritage of Classical images were
variously used on coins, so as to understand that they often tell us more about
the coinage than about the irrevocably lost easel paintings and mural paintings
and statues that they employ for imagery).