Portrait of the Lover: A Brief Summary of
the Book
There are many ancient stories about the lover, the beloved, and the portrait:
Pygmalion and the statue that
comes to life is surely the most famous story, but there are many others.
The plots of these stories reveal
a great deal about ancient Greek and Roman concepts of love, desire, death,
art, and representation.
Laodamia is united with the dead shade of her husband Protesilaus, and keeps
a statue of him in their bed;
Admetus keeps a statue of his dead wife Alcestis in his bed: the portrait
of the lover thus becomes a
consolation for lost love, a paradoxical sign of both absence and presence.
In other stories, men actually
fall in love with images, conflating the beloved and the portrait into a
single character - and in the story of
Narcissus, all three characters collapse: Narcissus is lover, beloved, and
portrait simultaneously. These
portraits are more than a reproduction of a person: they are the representative
of that person, a component
part of that person's identity. Stories about the portrait of the lover thus
provide a metalanguage for ancient
culture, an exploration of human life through an anthropology of the image.
Translator's Introduction
One of the central themes of this book is that of "worsened" reproductions:
what Augustine calls
resemblance in deterioribus, the lamentable situation that arises when a
copy fails to resemble its original
perfectly and instead resembles it only roughly, partially, insufficiently.
As examples of reproductions in
deterioribus, Augustine lists such phenomena as dreams and optical illusions,
family resemblances
between parents and children, along with portraits, sculptures, and other
works of art. But he could also
have included translations under this same heading. Much like the legendary
painters and sculptors whose
adventures constitute the main subject of this book, translators are likewise
condemned to create
reproductions that are always in deterioribus. Of course, if a goddess were
to intervene - as Venus did
for Pygmalion, bringing his beloved statue to life - this English Portrait
of the Lover might become as
bright and vibrant as Maurizio Bettini's Ritratto dell'amante. But in the
absence of divine intervention, I
would like to explain something about the original Italian context of this
book, and to say a few words
about what inevitably gets lost in the translation.
First, Maurizio Bettini represents a school of Italian classical studies
that may be rather unfamiliar to
American readers, even to American classicists. His focus is on the anthropology
of ancient Greece and
Rome, and in this effort to elucidate the meaning of ancient cultural models,
every bit of textual evidence
becomes potentially significant. The canonical authors all have their place
here, of course, and the pages
of this book are filled with references to Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Cicero,
Vergil, Horace, and so on.
But side by side with Homer and Vergil the reader will find such authors
as Palladius, Censorinus,
Scribonius Largus, Fulgentius, Hesychius, Pollux, and Minucius Felix, not
to mention all the anonymous
scholiasts of late antiquity who provide Bettini with some of his most precious
insights into the cultural
models of ancient Greece and Rome. The results yielded by such an approach
are dazzling and extremely
persuasive - but the reader may find it disconcerting at times to confront
this crowd of oddly named
strangers and unfamiliar sources. At such moments, it might be helpful to
invoke a metaphor that Bettini
often uses to describe this sort of work: what we are looking at is a cultural
mosaic made up of thousands
of textual tiles, oddly shaped, varicolored, all of which must be continually
combined and recombined, so
that we are always having to re-read each time that we read something new,
taking a fresh look at
everything over again as we assemble some different part of the puzzle.
Of course, to take such a synthetic approach to these ancient texts (and
bits of texts) depends on a
particular assumption: in Bettini's words, "this sort of dialogical mosaic
implies that there is a given
structure in culture, that beliefs are part of a system of meaningful signs."
And this is the second point of
departure, the other major difference between Bettini's work and that of
many American classicists.
Bettini is deeply influenced by structuralism and the semiotic theory of
signs; consequently, the reader will
find frequent references in these pages to such scholars as Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Jean-Pierre Vernant,
Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas,
and Umberto Eco, among
others. It is these scholars who provide the methodological assumptions according
to which Bettini
proceeds, and it is from these authors that he derives some of the key terms
of his argument. In particular,
Vernant's work on the anthropology of the image in ancient Greece is an essential
element in the project
which Bettini undertakes in this book. Fortunately for English-language readers,
many of Vernant's
relevant essays on this topic have recently been translated in a collection
entitled Mortals and Immortals
(edited by Froma Zeitlin). But - I hasten to add - there are no required
readings, no prerequisites for this
book. The important thing to keep in mind is simply that Bettini's work here,
like that of Vernant,
Lévi-Strauss, Benveniste and the rest, is based on a fundamental belief
in the meaningfulness of human
culture. The resulting combination of structuralism and semiotics is thus
quite different from other varieties
of post-structuralism with which English-language readers may be more familiar,
as represented by such
scholars as Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, to name only a few. When Bettini
uses the terms "signifier" and
"signified" he is not preparing to launch into a deconstructionist spiral
of philosophical abstraction; instead,
he is speaking about meaning, and the way that meaning is communicated between
one person and
another. Accordingly, I have often chosen to translate his significato as
"meaning" or "message" rather
than simply as "the signified" (the Italian significato is not as technical
as the English "signified"), so as not
to imply a deconstructionist program which would be very out of place in
the pages of this book. But by
and large the reader will find that Bettini writes an almost jargon-free
style of scholarship. In fact, the
form in which Bettini most often makes his argument is that of a story, and
of the meanings that stories
can convey: as he himself explains, the Portrait of the Lover is a story
about two lovers and a portrait,
and all the variations that ancient culture played upon this famous theme.
The entire book is built around
such stories (and of course one story leads to another story, and another...
as stories tend to do). Along
the way, Bettini makes a series of complex arguments about the many different
meanings of `the image' in
ancient Greek and Roman societies, and the different cultural models (religious,
political, psychological,
etc.) in which images could become involved. But the guiding thread of the
discourse always takes the
form of a story, and it is the succession of stories that gives the book
its shape and structure.
This leads to the third and final observation in this apology of the translator:
Maurizio Bettini is not only an
extraordinary scholar, but he is also a writer of immense talent, and a very
inspired teller of stories. This,
more than anything, is what gets lost in translation. In many cases, I have
simply had to resign myself to
not being able to translate the elegant word play and boundless humor of
Bettini's original Italian, with its
sly irony and often elaborate allusions. As a rule, when forced to choose
between the scholarship and the
writing, I have always chosen the scholarship, preferring to make the argument
and the method as clear as
possible. This was the only choice that I could make, at least according
to Augustine's pessimistic (but
probably correct) theory of resemblances in deterioribus. Because this Portrait
of the Lover is a
translation, it cannot help but prove inferior to the original. But if I
have been able to present Bettini's main
arguments clearly, I hope that this English version will be of some use to
anyone who shares an interest in
ancient Greece and Rome, so that we might thus bring to life - again like
the lucky Pygmalion - those
cultures that have for so long been presented to us only in the frozen inertia
of marble statues. The statue
that comes to life is just a fantasy, of course, a fairy tale, a story...
but these are stories that we cannot do
without. In the end it is the stories that matter most of all: which is perhaps
the principal lesson that this
book has to teach us, and the secret of its success.
Summary: Part One. The Portrait of the Lover
(Chapters One - Twelve)
There are many ancient stories about the portrait of the lover, with plots
involving a lover, a beloved, and a
portrait. These stories are made possible by specific cultural models, revealing
ancient Greek and Roman
beliefs about love, desire, death, art, and representation. The first portrait
of the lover was created to
replace an absent lover, by tracing his shadow on the wall: the portrait
of the lover is thus connected with
shadows, and also with the "shades" of the dead, like the archaic Greek kolossos
which was a physical
embodiment of the psyche or eidolon of the dead person in the form of a stone
image. Laodamia is united
with the dead shade of her husband Protesilaus, and she keeps a statue of
him in their bed; Admetus
keeps a statue of Alcestis in his bed, and so on. In other stories, men fall
in love with actual statues: the
beloved and the portrait are conflated into a single character (as is also
the case in Lucretius's philosophy
of love). In the story of Narcissus, all three characters collapse: Narcissus
is lover, beloved, and portrait
simultaneously. The portrait is more than a reproduction of a person: it
is that person's representative, and
forms of a part of that person's identity. The portrait of the lover functions
as a sacralizing object, the
embodiment of a vow of fidelity: if that vow is broken, the image can come
to life and seek revenge.
Stories about the portrait of the lover thus provide a metalanguage for ancient
culture, an exploration of
human life in terms of the anthropology of the image.
Summary: Part Two. Other Adventures of the Image
(Chapters Thirteen - Eighteen)
Stories about the portrait of the lover make it clear that the ancient
Greeks and Romans treated the image
differently than we do, and the second part of this book considers these
cultural practices in greater detail.
Images had to be treated with respect because they were considered an actual
representative of the
person, and the way that images were treated was of profound concern in ancient
society, and there are
many anecdotes, myths, and social regulations pertaining to the involvement
of images in the life of the
human community. Because images are somehow a perfected form of reality,
they can also foretell the
future: like visions in prophetic dreams, paintings and other artificial
images were ominous harbingers of
the future. Images were thought to somehow convey identity in a profound
and deep sense, which is not
surprising, given that ancient identity was very often constructed in terms
of resemblance, especially the
family resemblances shared between fathers and sons. Sons are in some sense
the "portraits" of their
fathers, and all the anxieties and uncertainties of these family relationships
could be displaced into the
world of images, and the stories that were told about them in ancient Greece
and Rome.
Chapter Summary: Chapter One. Introduction
Francesco Petrarch possessed a portrait of his beloved, Laura, and
in a lyric poem (Canzoniere 78) he
compares himself to Pygmalion, who was able to bring to life the statue of
his beloved. The stories of
Pygmalion and Petrarch are examples of the "fundamental story" that is examined
in this book: the many
different stories that can be told about a lover, a beloved, and a portrait.
Petrarch's words about Laura's
portrait exemplify some of the qualities that will typically characterize
the paradoxical, fundamentally
ambivalent status of the portrait in this relationship. The portrait engages
and attracts the lover, and is
often a superior, idealized version of the beloved - but it cannot engage
in reciprocal relations, it cannot
speak, it cannot love; the portrait exists in the absence of the beloved,
it is a replacement for the beloved,
so that the lover does not feel himself to be alone - but the lover is, in
fact, very much alone. The portrait
simulates the life, the presence of the beloved, and brings consolation -
but it is also an inanimate object,
proof of the beloved's absence, and hence a source of despair. These are
the basic qualities of the
relationship between the lover, the absent beloved, and the portrait. By
considering these stories and their
variations it is then possible to ask a series of essential questions about
the cultural models that make these
stories possible: the meaning of love, death, desire, art, and representation.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Two. A Potter Who Was
Not Jealous
The portrait of the lover is a consolation, a substitute for the absent beloved,
and is produced from regret,
unsatisfiable desire (Greek pothos, Latin desiderium). The Greeks and Romans
said the first portrait was
made by a woman about to lose her lover: she traced his shadow and her father,
the potter, modelled it in
clay. The portrait is linked with the shadow (Greek skia, Latin umbra), and
with the shade of the dead
(Greek eidolon or psyche, Latin umbra). In the famous story of Laodamia and
Protesilaus, Protesilaus's
shade returns from the Underworld to rejoin his wife; in other versions,
Laodamia keeps a statue of
Protesilaus in their bed. This connection between the shade and the statue
is parallelled by the archaic
Greek kolossos, an uncarved stone statue that represented the dead person's
afterlife. The portrait is also
linked to dreams, another partial representation that can console the bereft
lover (Laodamia dreams of
Protesilaus). In Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Menelaus's grief over losing Helen
is expressed through statues
and dreams, and also prints (Greek stiboi), either Helen's footprints, or
the bodily impressions she left in
their bed. Pythagorean texts also consider footprints and bodily impressions
as signs that identity and
"represent" an absent person. These cultural synonyms - portrait, shadow,
shade, dream, footprint - yield
many variations on the story of the portrait of the lover. The portrait represents
the absent beloved, in a
dense emotional atmosphere of grief, loss, desire, and hope.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Three. The Story of Admetus,
and the True Portrait of the Lover
After Alcestis has traded her life for his, Admetus dreams about Alcestis
and keeps a statue of his dead
wife in their bed (the parallel presence of portraits and dreams). In Euripides's
version, Admetus says that
embracing the statue he "has his wife, yet not having her." Euripides's Helen
uses the same words to
describe the ghost which Paris takes to Troy (he "has her yet not having
her"). Dreams, ghosts, and
portraits are all paradoxical examples of having and not having, of presence
and absence. Embracing the
statue of his dead wife, Admetus calls out her name: the name is another
image that identifies and
represents an absent person. Most importantly, Admetus swears undying fidelity
to his wife: the portrait is
a pledge, a vow. Admetus will love only the statue; he will take no other
wife. Ancient Roman inscriptions
provide non-literary evidence for the portrait as a sign of fidelity. Allius
consoles himself with a portrait of
his dead wife, Allia Potestas, vowing he will take it with him into the tomb
when he dies (much like
Admetus); Cornelia Galla adored the effigy of her dead husband (much like
Laodamia). The "true"
portraits of the lover and their poetic variations are constructed on the
basis of the same cultural model:
the image represents the absent beloved, serving as consolation for the surviving
lover and as an
expression of devoted faithfulness, even after death.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Four. A Plaster Dionysus
Apuleius's Metamorphoses features a portrait of the lover: Thrasyllus
murdered Charite's lover
Tlepolemus in order to marry her, but Charite is instead devoted to a portrait
of the dead Tlepolemus, an
image made to resemble the Roman god Liber (Greek Dionysus). Tlepolemus then
appears to Charite in a
dream, and tells her about the murder. Charite avenges his death, and then
kills herself: a tragic Laodamia
who also avenges her dead husband. The practice of representing the dead
in the form of Dionysus was
widespread in Rome, and is criticized by Statius in a poem written to console
the widow of the poet Lucan.
She keeps a portrait of her husband, calls out his name, dreams about him:
but she does not confuse him
with Dionysus. Why worship the image of the dead in the form of Dionysus?
The religion of Dionysus was
linked to resurrection and rebirth: the Titans dismembered the infant Dionysus
and cooked his body, but his
heart was preserved in a plaster statue until the god returned to life. Plaster
was symbolically connected to
birth, generation, and preservation; according to some myths, mankind itself
originated from the plaster-like
substance that was produced when Zeus blasted the Titans with lightning as
a punishment for having killed
Dionysus. The plaster in which the god's heart was preserved is a variation
on the portrait of the lover: a
memorial to the departed dead, and a hope for that person's miraculous rebirth
and return.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Five. The Sign Stained
by Reality
The portrait of the lover is a metalanguage for ancient cultural models
of death and fidelity. The first
portrait was a consolation for an absent lover; portraits were also supposed
to provide consolation to those
grieving for the dead: in Fulgentius's false etymology, the idol is idos
dolu (Latin species doloris), an
"image of grief," and many Christian authors (Minucius Felix, Lactantius)
considered idolatry to have
begun with cults of mourning for dead kings. Imbued with emotion, the portrait
is considered more than a
likeness of a person: it "is" that person, a part of that person, based on
both similarity and contiguity,
metaphor and metonymy. Likewise, the ghost of the dead is more than a likeness:
it "is" that person, in a
debilitated, partial state - like the portrait. In Peirce's terminology,
the portrait is iconic (similar to its object)
and indexical (physically connected to its object). This indexical quality
allows the portrait to function as
the sacralizing object in the swearing of a vow (Greek horkos, following
Benveniste's analysis): the
sacralizing object is a metaphorical reminder of the absent person, but it
embodies that persons' agency,
and can punish violators of the oath. For Dio Chrysostom, the person has
a "son" or a "wife" in his portrait,
and it is an act of adultery to rededicate an old statue to a new recipient,
a violation of the fidelity
embodied in the image.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Six. Incredible Loves
Ovid's Pygmalion loved a statue that came to life at his hands, but other
versions say that Pygmalion was
an insane tyrant engaged in a repulsive affair with a lifeless statue. There
are many stories about men who
loved statues: unhappy, even disgusting stories, because the statues can
never reciprocate love. Historical
tyrants like the Roman emperors Tiberius and Caligula were also notoriously
infatuated with images
(frequently obscene). Jensen's novel Gradiva (made famous by Freud's analysis)
provides a modern
version of love for a statue: like Ovid's Metamorphosis, the Gradiva has
a happy ending in which the statue
becomes a woman in the end. In terms of the "fundamental story" of this book
- stories about the lover, the
beloved, and the portrait - these examples show that the beloved and the
portrait can combine: the beloved
"is" the portrait. The portrait does not represent an absent beloved, but
is a love object unto itself. But this
was not considered appropriate behavior: men in love with statues often suffered
the same mythical fates
as men who committed incest. To love a statue violates the rules: the statues
are defenseless, and must be
protected from undue aggression. Precisely because they are physically passive,
they become objects of
desire in cultures where the male sexual subject values most highly a passive
sexual object: these ancient
stories about "incredible love" for portraits are stories about men, and
their desire for perfectly passive,
mute and beautiful objects of desire.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Seven. The Story of the
Cruel Painter
In many stories about the lover, the beloved, and the portrait, the lover
is an artist: lover of the beloved, and
author of the portrait. Pausias loved Glycera, who was famous for making
garlands. In his devotion to her,
he learned how to paint every kind of flower: Glycera perfected both his
love and his art. In contrast,
Arellius was a notorious Roman painter who painted goddesses with the faces
of his girlfriends, profaning
the sacred with his own amours. In Poe's story "The Oval Portrait," a cruel
artist marries a beautiful
woman and decides to paint her portrait: as he paints, he gradually steals
the life and vitality from his wife,
until finally he has finished the perfect portrait (which he loves desperately),
only to discover that his wife
is dead. The narrator of Poe's story is obsessed by the painting's perfect
"life-likeliness" of expression: as
the painter exclaims when he finishes the portrait, "this is really life,
life itself." In Poe's aesthetic, such
"life-likeliness" was an undesirable quality: "The mere imitation, however
accurate, of what is in nature,
entitles no man to the sacred name of `Artist.'" The artist who confuses
life and art (or loves art more than
life) commits a terrible error. In the case of Poe's cruel artist, it is
as if the portrait were an adulterous
woman, an unworthy concubine, acting as the artist's accomplice in the referent's
assassination.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Eight. Lucretius
In Lucretius's analysis of simulacra in De Rerum Natura, the portrait replaces
the beloved even when the
beloved is still present. The lover may embrace his beloved, but he is grasping
at an image, an illusion. For
Lucretius, the wounds of love are real wounds, lovesickness is a real disease.
The lover's body is purely
physical, grotesque and disgusting. Unlike the light-hearted fictions of
Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia
amoris, Lucretius's love is hideous and real. Lucretius's theory echoes the
story of the portrait of the
lover, but now the presence of the beloved in the form of images (dreams,
the beloved's name, etc.) is only
a continual torture. In the Aeneid, Vergil's Dido is also tormented by images
of the absent Aeneas. For
Lucretius, even when the beloved is present, the lover still grasps at simulacra,
scraping the surface of the
beloved body, wounding and wounded in return. Love is a hopeless devouring:
but unlike food and drink,
the beloved cannot be properly consumed. The lover is a toy in Venus's hands,
who excites in him an
empty craving for images. Epicurus's views on love were apparently not so
harsh; Lucretius has taken the
Greek theory of eidola and developed a tormented theory of impossible love.
In the legend of Lucretius's
biography, he was supposedly the victim of a love potion, and died from desire:
the poem and the legend
(even if it is not true) are both desperate stories of love.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Nine: Narcissus and the
Twin Images
Ovid's Narcissus loves his own image: here lover, beloved, and portrait
become one. When Narcissus sees
himself, he is fatally afflicted with love. In ancient erotic theory, the
eye was a locus for emotional
emanations, and also for jealousy (as in the evil eye: Greek baskanon, Latin
fascinum). The Narcissus
story is a warning about the dangerous powers of the erotic gaze. But there
is a less famous version:
Pausanias says Narcissus loved his twin sister, and when she died, Narcissus
stared at reflection to see his
lost twin. Dead twins are also replaced by images in the stories of Romulus
and Remus, and Athena and
Pallas (and the Palladium). The practice of replacing a dead twin with an
effigy is widespread in traditional
cultures. Twins are essentially a pair, and the absent brother or sister
must be replaced by an image, just
as the portrait of the replaces the absent half of a romantic pair. In Roman
culture, lovers could be seen as
siblings; a male lover could be called "brother", a female lover "sister"
(as in examples from Plautus,
Propertius, Petronius, Martial), with no implications of incest. Siblings
have a reciprocal relationship of
affection and identity, and as such can stand outside or even in opposition
to the standard married couple.
Aristophanes's speech in Plato's Symposium gives a mythical origin to the
pair of lovers: Zeus divided the
primordial humans in two, so we are always seeking our other half.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Ten. The Insult
After her funeral, Propertius's lover Cynthia visits him in a dream. She
criticizes him for not observing her
funeral rites; she is jealous of the new woman that has taken her place in
Propertius's house. This woman
has insulted Cynthia's image by melting it down for gold; she punishes the
slaves for mentioning Cynthia's
name (the name is also an image). Cynthia is especially fearful that Cynthia's
mirror will be filled with the
new woman's image. Cynthia is very concerned about how her images will be
treated after her death, and
whether the surviving lover will be faithful to the portrait of the lover.
Cynthia's mirror does not just reflect
images, but retains traces of her presence; like the portrait, the image
in the mirror is tangibly connected
by sympatheia to the person (as in Statius's poem about the image of Flavius
Earinus captured in a
mirror). Real mirrors, as Eco has shown, do not work this way; but these
are the mirrors of myth and
stories. In another poem by Propertius, the Roman matrona Cornelia returns
from the dead to visit her
husband. She is not worried that her images will be mistreated, and she asks
her husband to engage in a
dialogue with her image, as if it were able to reply. The portrait of the
elegiac lover is threatened by
betrayal and infidelity, but in the ideal Roman family, the portrait of the
wife is regarded with dignity and
respect.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Eleven. Seduction and
Vendetta
Names, power, riches, even physical features are passed from father to son
in patriarchal societies, but the
reproductive process involves women. In such societies, the women are like
images: women have an
autonomous, self-contained meaning, but they always "refer" to men. They
embody the men's honor, and
the men will defend the women (their honor) at all costs. In The Stone Guest,
Pushkin's version of Don
Juan, the Commendatore is Donna Anna's husband, not her father: but she is
still "his" woman. When Don
Juan seduces her, he invites the statue of his dead rival to act as his accomplice;
the offended statue
comes to life and murders Don Juan (the opposite of Perseus, who defeats
his wife's lover and punishes
him by turning him into stone). The statue embodies fidelity (so Ovid's Dido
venerates a statue of
Sychaeus), and if the statue is insulted, it can exact punishment. Many ancient
stories describe the statue's
revenge, especially the revenge of heroes' and athletes' statues. A medieval
story tells how a man
accidentally married a statue of Venus by placing a ring on her finger. He
could not marry his human bride
until Venus relinquished her claims. A similar story tells how a man accidentally
pledged himself to an
image of the Virgin: but Mary insists on her claims and the man becomes a
monk. The images are
"binding," with serious consequences for the lover who associates too closely
with them.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Twelve. The Justice
of Death Standing Up
Because the image is the embodiment of a vow, it also the power to
enforce that vow: the image is
justice. Statues are especially able to exact revenge: they increase in size,
and free themselves from
immobility in order to pursue the offender and punish him. In the cultural
imagination, the statue operates
along two symbolic axes: it is "death standing up" (death made to look like
life), and it is "mummified life"
(a living creature that looks dead). As such, the statue is a truly uncanny
object (following Freud and
Jentsch's terminology): it looks like a living creature but seems dead, or
it is a dead thing that seems
suspiciously alive. Jakobson analyzes the statue in similar terms: the statue
is an embodiment of life in a
durable exterior form; it is an image of continuing life. By definition,
the statue thus combines both life and
death, like the paradox of absence and presence in the portrait of the lover.
The statue has the same
motionless, cold character of someone who is dead, with the exterior aspect
of someone who is actually
alive. The statue of the Commendatore that can uncannily come to life to
punish Don Juan ("mummified
life") and the kolossos that functions as the double of death in archaic
Greek culture ("death standing up")
define the two ends of that symbolic range which the statues inhabit in our
cultural imagination.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Thirteen. The Gaze
Pygmalion's statue opens her eyes and turns to look at her lover. In
the beginning, Greek statues had legs
that were welded together and eyes that were shut. they lacked motion and
vision, two essential signs of
life. As soon as the statues were given free-standing legs, they could run
away, and had to be tied down
with chains (Pausanias describes several such examples). Daedalus was the
first to open the statues'
eyes, and many legendary images were supposedly able to return the spectators'
gaze. In Roman culture,
the act of looking back and returning someone's gaze - respicere - is a fundamental
component of social
contact and communication. Love relationships also demand this reciprocity;
gazes of love must be
returned. But Ovid's Anaxarete refuses to return her lover's gaze; he commits
suicide, and Anaxarete
turns into stone when she sees his corpse. As she stands and stares out the
window - prospiciens -
Anaxarete becomes a statue. It is an aetiology of the Venus prospiciens of
Salamis, the Greek Aphrodite
parakyptousa. Ovid's prospiciens belongs to the Roman paradigm of the reciprocal
gaze, respicere; the
Greek parakyptein instead means winking or glancing. This Aphrodite parakyptousa
derives from the
Near Eastern "woman in the window", a cult representation of Astarte connected
with sacred prostitution.
Over time, the Near Eastern image became a Greco-Roman story: in Ovid's version,
a woman who only
agreed to pro-spicere out of the window at her lover's corpse, never returning
- re-spicere - his gaze of
love.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Fourteen. Respect
Because portraits are representatives of people, they command respect. Tiberius
punished anyone who
took Augustus's image (on a coin, on a ring) into a latrine or a brothel.
Tiberius's obsessions are paralleled
by the superstitions expressed in the rules of Pythagoras: images should
not be taken into unclean places,
etc. One's own image also commanded respect: Scribonius Largus complains
that people are more careful
in choosing a portrait painter than in choosing their own physician. Because
of this close connection
between person and image, the fate of the image foretells the person's fate,
as in historical anecdotes
about Caesar, Vitellius, Domitian, Galba, Otho, etc. Caligula even kept a
cult statue of himself which was
dressed in the same clothes as the emperor. The image and the referent were
made to exist in simultaneity
(the image as a mirror of life). Statues could also represent entire classes
of people, as in Quintilian's
dilemma: "The image of a tyrannicide should be placed in the gymnasium; the
image of a woman should
not be placed in the gymnasium: a woman killed a tyrant." A woman's image
could not appear in the male
gymnasium; images of men could not appear where the cult of the Bona Dea
was being celebrated.
Conversely, the impious matronae of Juvenal's sixth satire insulted an image
of their own womanhood by
urinating on a cult image of the goddess Pudicitia. The images command respect
(or are the victims of
disrespect) for a culture's fundamental categories of identity.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Fifteen. Premonition
In Terence's Eunuch, the hero sees a picture of Jupiter committing adultery,
which inspires him in his own
amorous escapades. The picture is a premonition of his own fate. In Plautus's
Mostellaria, the tricky
slave Tranio invents a similarly ominous picture: a crow plucking the feathers
of two old vultures, just as
he is plucking the feathers of two foolish old men. In Plautus's vocabulary,
the word graphicus - "like a
picture" - means "perfect." Against Plato's insistence on the inferiority
of the images, Plautus considers the
picture an ideal form of reality. Such images can disclose the future, as
in historical anecdotes told about
images of Galba, Pompey, etc. There is a contrast here between Homer's Odysseus,
who hears his
adventures in a song on Phaeacia, while Vergil's Aeneas sees his adventures
decorating a temple in
Carthage. Petronius's Encolpius also sees his unhappy love affair depicted
in paintings, and Clitophon (the
hero of Achilles Tatius's romance) sees his love for Leucippe prefigured
in a painting. Likewise, when
Leucippe is about to be kidnapped, the hero is warned by two omens: the flight
of a hawk pursuing a
sparrow, and a painting of the story of Tereus and Philomela. The image is
an enigma that announces the
future, like images of prophetic dreams, or the premonitory words of omens.
In both literature and life,
images of vision and of sound are signs to be interpreted; we ignore them
at our peril.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Sixteen. Resemblance
Augustine considers dreams, mirrors, and family resemblances to be resemblances
"in deterioribus",
inferior copies. Family resemblance was a Roman obsession. Catullus hopes
Torquatus's son will resemble
him perfectly; Ovid's Hypsipyle and Seneca's Andromache praise their sons
for resembling their fathers
(unlike Martial's Cinna, whose children resembled his wife's lovers). The
male factor governs
reproduction: patres patribus, as Lucretius says. But images perceived during
conception also produce
resemblances: in Heliodorus's Ethiopica, the daughter of Ethiopians is white
because her mother looked at
a painting of Andromeda when she was conceived. Body fluids can also produce
resemblances.
Breast-milk even produces paternal resemblances because milk supposedly derives
from insemination.
Faustina was sprinkled with a gladiator's blood when she conceived Commodus,
who later played the
gladiator. Commodus had a twin, and Fronto praises their resemblance to Marcus
Aurelius: the
philosopher-king needed twins to reflect both sides of his identity. Roman
nobles acquired cognomina from
actors who physically resembled them, a practice apparently related to the
"double" of Roman funeral
rituals, in which an actor played the role of the dead man. Chariton's Callirhoe
holds Chaereas's image to
her womb, anticipating that their son will resemble his father. The son is
a portrait of the lover: Vergil's
Dido wishes Aeneas had given her a son, and she embraces Ascanius in Aeneas's
absence. Phaedra
claims to love the "young Theseus" in her stepson Hippolytus. In Artemidorus's
Oneirocritica, dreams of
portraits and mirrors symbolize children: images and reflections of their
parents.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Seventeen. The Doll
In 1889, a sarcophagus was excavated in Rome. It contained the remains of
Crepereia Tryphaena and her
beautiful doll. The word for doll in Latin is pupa, in Greek kore - and both
of these words also mean the
"pupil," the "girl" in the eye. The doll is a tiny mirror that reflects the
world at large, and dolls were often
interred with miniature tables, chairs and other small utensils. Unlike other
images, the dolls' articulated
joints simulate movement; the castanets in their hands simulate sound. The
doll has a nude body that can
be dressed; like a person, the doll can change her external appearance. Dolls
do not have referents as
other images do. The doll is an auto-referential sign: the simulacrum of
a girl that pretends to be a girl.
These physical features imply certain behaviors: the girls would play with
their dolls, dressing them,
combing their hair, making them walk. Lactantius thus mocked pagan religion
as nothing more than men
playing with big dolls of the gods. On the eve of their wedding, Roman and
Greek girls dedicated their dolls
in a temple of the goddess (as Juvenal tells us). This is why Pascoli called
Crepereia's doll a "doll denied to
Venus"; Crepereia did not live long enough to see her wedding. By giving
up their dolls, their `virginal'
double, girls renounced their childhood. The doll is another kolossos: an
image that captures a person's
fleeting identity in a permanent form.
Chapter Summary: Chapter Eighteen. Image,
Mirror, and Homo Suus
Seneca gives a lurid description of Hostius Quadra's use of mirrors to heighten
his sexual pleasures (a
debauched autoscopy). Accused of witchcraft, Apuleius had to defend himself
on the charges of
possessing a mirror, and his Apology also contains an apology of the mirror
itself: Apuleius claims the
mirror image is superior to manufactured images because it changes to perfectly
reflect its referent at
every moment. But the image in the mirror is impermanent; manufactured images
have the virtue of
durability. The mirror image is impossibly close to its referent, which is
why Narcissus's reflection cannot
be brought to life like Pygmalion's statue: Narcissus is already that living
image, the homo suus (as
Apuleius says) of his reflection. In Plautus's Amphitruo, Sosia confronts
his double on the same stage
(that ille ego, his alter ego), and there is a struggle for identity. The
image is a substitute for its referent;
but the double is a rival. Heracles attacked a statue of himself, and the
statue attacked him in return.
Images, on the other hand, are intended as a replacement for the absent person.
But Plato (in the
Phaedrus) argues that portraits, like writing, suffer from the absence of
their "father", from the living
voice or living person which they reproduce. The dying Agesilaus did not
want to leave images of himself
behind for precisely this reason: the homo suus is exposed to all sorts of
dangers in his representation as
an image.
