Identifying Ancient Art - A game of smoke and mirrors?

History resource article by Mary Harrsch © 2012

Today, I watched a fascinating lecture "Mistaken Identities: How to identify a Roman emperor" by Mary Beard recently delivered at Stanford University.  As a "fan" of Julius Caesar, I thought her critique of a number of heads identified as Caesar over the years was very enlightening.

I also found her overall discussion of the rather tenuous nature of sculpture identification particularly interesting because lately, I have been re-editing a number of images I shot of Roman sculpture at the Capitoline and National Museums in Rome back in 2005.  I had just started my crusade to photograph historical art and make my images freely available to teachers, researchers and students and had not yet developed my current practice of photographing the identification placards in a sequence with the sculpture to enable me to properly identify the artwork once I returned home to my office.  So, on that first trip to Rome, I ended up with dozens of photographs that all I could say for sure were portraits of Roman men or women until I had a chance to research them further to label them properly.

With the internet and our current technology, I naively believed that proper identification would be a relatively straightforward process.  I have since learned that not only is it not straightforward, even what is thought to be accurate identification at the time changes as different scholars apply different interpretations or museums reliant on governmental support become subject to various political agendas seeking some kind of historical confirmation through a culture's art legacy.

It gets even more confusing when identification displayed at a museum differs from the museum's own collections catalog. I recently received a request from a publisher in Denmark for an image I took back in 2007 of a fresco at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples that, at the time, was labeled "Cleopatra greets the god of the Underworld'.  But, when I looked the image up in the collections book that I purchased at the museum, I noticed that it said it was Io being welcomed upon her arrival to Egypt by the goddess Isis to her sanctuary of Canopos.  The fresco was unearthed in 1764 in the Temple of Isis in Pompeii in a room dubbed the Ekklesiasterion.

The satyr-looking creature bearing up Io looks like it could be Hades but the catalog says it is a river god.  Io is identified by the vestiges of horns she still retains from her time as a heifer.  Isis appears to be dressed in the Greek fashion and holds a cobra coiled around her arm.  The catalog tells us that the painting originated from the court of the Ptolemies in Alexandria "in order to legitimize their dynasty by rooting it in ancient Heraclean and Argive origins which embraced the dual ethnic components of the new kingdom, the Egyptian and the Macedonian".  The fresco is thus dated to the the early Ptolemaic dynasty after a 3rd century BCE prototype .  This all sounds quite carefully researched and definitive.  However, there is no mention of technical dating examinations so I must assume this is educated conjecture.  The only thing that nags at me is the prominent display of the cobra and the knowledge that the fresco was apparently once thought to represent Cleopatra VII in the role of Isis.

In the historical record, Cleopatra VII represented herself as the living embodiment of Isis and the cobra was known to be not only a sacred creature but a pharaonic symbol.  When I check the "king's list" of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, I find a few females mentioned as co-rulers, usually regents for under-age male inheritors, beginning with Cleopatra II Philometora Soteira in 131 BCE, but you really don't find a woman ruling with the trappings of pharaoh until you reach Cleopatra VII in 51 BCE.  So the possibility that Cleopatra VII as Isis is the welcoming figure in the fresco cannot be totally dismissed.  I also can't help but think the widespread publicity surrounding Cleopatra and her death by the bite of a cobra in the 1st century BCE could easily have influenced a Roman artist charged with decorating the walls of a temple to Isis in Pompeii during that period.

Another confusing identification I encountered recently was a picture of a sculpture said to be Apollo of the Anzio type at the Capitoline Museum:

Call me crazy but it looks like remnants of grapes and grape leaves in the hair which would make me think it was Dionysos.  Many sculptures of Apollo also have an iconic knot in the hair on top of the head so I am baffled by the identification associated with this piece.

Reviewing my images from the Hall of Emperors in the Capitoline Museum, I came across the following bust:

After reviewing hundreds of images of Roman emperors (or said to be Roman emperors), I cannot find a single one that looks like him.  He appears to be wearing a laurel crown and in 2005 was positioned close to the busts of  Vespasian, Domitian and Titus (based on the photo time stamp).  This would make me think he may have been one of the emperors in the Year of the Four Emperors after the assassination of Nero but I checked images of Otho, Galba and Vitellius and he doesn't resemble any images identified as them.  Although I thought the museum positioned busts in relationship to the sequence of their reigns, this may not be the case either.  So, I would appreciate any information anyone could offer that would help identify this Roman.  

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Naples Archaeological Museum Exhibit to Feature Ancient Roman Fabrics

Some of the greatest discoveries pulled from the ruins of the ancient Vesuvian town of Herculaneum have been reunited under one roof for the first time for a major new exhibition that opens here today.

Statues, skeletons, artefacts and textiles go on show from the small seaside town south of Naples, which was destroyed in the same eruption that buried Pompeii on August 24, 79 AD.

''It's an extraordinary collection of 150 works that restores to the world the richest existing testimony of the classical age,'' said Campania President Antonio Bassolino at the show's inauguration.

While Pompeii was covered by hot ash and lava, its less famous neighbour disappeared under an avalanche of molten rock, which mingled with mud and earth and solidified, allowing fragile organic matter like wood, fabrics, wax tablets and papyrus rolls to survive.

Archaeologists began digging at the site at the beginning of the 1700s and continue to make discoveries today. Among the highlights of the show are sacks, little bags, and pieces of material thought to have belonged to tunics and cloaks that were dug from the town and which form part of the museum's little-known collection of 180 ancient Roman fabrics - the largest in the world.

On display for the first time ever is fabric from a mass of organic material discovered in July 2007 on what was once the terrace of a large thermal bath complex. A fragment of cloth made from hemp was among the material, discovered alongside a leather bag, carbonised wood belonging to a boat and a fishing net with lead weights. - ansa.it

The biggest crowd-puller is likely to be the skeletons of ancient Romans in the act of fleeing the town - one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of the last few decades.

Men, women and children were fleeing to the ancient beach when the first volcanic surge hit.

While at Pompeii bodies decomposed in the ash (allowing archaeologists to make plaster casts of the spaces left by the bodies), Herculaneum's solidified mud preserved the skeletons intact, providing a rare treat for researchers because of how frequently ancient Romans cremated their dead.

The exhibition is divided into three sections, focusing first on the magnificent statues of gods, heroes and emperors found among the ruins.

The second section is dedicated to the noble Herculaneum families such as that of the proconsul Marcus Nonius Balbus, one of the town's main benefactors, and showcases many statues found at the Villa of the Papyri.

The villa, the largest and most sumptuous found outside Rome, is thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father of Calpurnia, Julius Caesar's wife.

Only partially excavated, the villa has so far yielded 1,800 papyri, half of which have been deciphered to reveal Epicurean philosophy, and some experts say there may still be lost literary treasures of antiquity hidden in the ruins.

In the third section, the skeletons of fleeing townspeople are on show with other objects putting the daily life of the common people under the microscope, while fabrics go on display in the final section.

Herculaneum: Three Centuries of Discoveries runs at the Naples Archaeological Museum until April 2009.Technorati Tags: Herculaneum, archaeology, fabric, ancient, Villa of the Papyri, exhibit, Naples Archaeological Museum, skeleton, eruption, Vesuvius

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