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 19^th century’s 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 Sometimes outdated nomenclature can trap us in the ruts of outdated inquiry, almost as if we kept searching for an element named Caloric or limited ourselves to Linnaean genetics.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 Caracalla’s ‘honeymoon’ 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 ‘nickels’ with the Landsdowne Herakles as their reverse type. Whether a statuary type in a tetrastyle naos is evidence of that god’s 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 Septimius’s son Caracalla has the same type on a coin of his own.

“Ancient Copies”

The ancient Latin word for the general usage in which art historians came to use ‘copy’ is exemplum. The Latin word copia (through medieval French the etymon of ‘copy’) means ‘abundance’; imitatio was not used as we use ‘copy’. 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 Louisiana’s 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 Rome’s 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 don’t want to imply that ‘ancient copies’ 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 ancients’ 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 18^th century, and developed in the 19^th 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 writer’s own lifetime that the futility of pursuing the “really true copies” 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. “Ancient copies” 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 Furtwängler, 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, ‘copy’, 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.

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What distinguishes a Type?

For the statuary Type that Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in Rome, so to Americans “The Marble Faun” (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. Helbig’s assessment of the former cannot be improved upon: “a Hadrianic copy of a Greek statue of the time of Praxiteles”, though, since it is hopeless, for many reasons, to limit the word ‘copy’ to very expensive, very carefully produced pointed replicas, I shall try to avoid the word. “Hadrianic” is based on the technique; though it probably came to the Capitoline from the Villa d’Este, and is one of the first acquisitions of the first civic museum, its finding place is unknown. We shall never know, and it doesn’t 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 ‘cultural literacy’ required that one knew of. So far as I know (and it is not in Léon 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, “nature boy”, 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 20^th-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 doesn’t matter whether it is admirable or contemptible to be uncompromising; the 20^th century’s understanding of ancient arts is conditioned by their regarding most of what the Greco-Roman world most valued as virtual pastiche. That is, “nothing before Cézanne” was matched, symmetrically, by “nothing after Pheidias”. 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 it’s 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 “Narcissus”, a very young boy athlete, perhaps resting after winning a competition, one of the earlier “resting poses” 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 “Narcissus” to show more plainly that the coin has the same figure composition. But none of the surviving marble “Narcissus” 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 (“Feb”, as Varbanov spells Phoebus even in the English edition). Why, however, is the pose reversed? One way it could happen was the engraver’s 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 5^th 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 ‘French Braid’ 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 ‘not the sort of thing you put on coins’, 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) ‘Apollos’. The Athenian mid-5^th-century stance, with the free leg forward, recurs not only in mechanically produced (“pointed”) 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 citharode’s 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 “in the pose of the Kassel type”, 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 doesn’t matter. The important fact is that this Type from the middle of the 5^th century was very popular. The famous Apollo of the Belvedere, practically nude, also was an Athenian type; he wasn’t 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 Euphranor’s 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 7^th 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 2^nd century after Christ or at Corinth or at Ephesos or, for that matter, the Cnidian Aphrodite herself, are proud cities’ 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 ‘families’ (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 Arvello’s 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 ‘daughters’ of the Aphrodite of Knidos (such as the Capitoline type and her variants and the title statue of the thesis, the Aphrodite de’ Medici) as well as the coins that show them as reverse types.

The statue at left above (a marble ‘copy’), found at Epidauros, as well as the coins that might go with her, however, are clothed. Some scholars think that this Aphrodite in “wet” 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 deity’s 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 sculptor’s creation. Probably, therefore, we are right in recognizing Corinth’s 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).