* Recent scholarship in portraiture has been concerned with the interpretation of portraits as a system of signs functioning within a specific context which explains the visual patterns. This explanation fails to establish a clear conception of the social function of art.
* Art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relations, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in ways that other cultural forms can't.
* The Roman veristic style consists of a "cartographic realism" that carefully describes the distinguishing features of the sitter, laying particular emphasis on physiognomical peculiarities.
* Hellenistic kings are almost always represented as youthful, while civic benefactors are portrayed similar to the philosopher model and following closely the classical ideal.
* The Republic was conflictual and contradictory; the Romans valued age as a sign of political authority.
* The existing approaches of studying Roman portraits (art as propaganda or a reflection of society, by Zanker; or art as ideology, by Smith; or art as rhetoric, by Giuliani) can't explain the timing of the development of verism; the values that give rise to the style were part of Roman society for centuries (since the fourth century B.C., at least) prior to the establishment of verism as a style; also, there is a substantial group of portraits that combine veristic heads with ideal, Hellenistic nude bodies, like the Tivoli general shown below.
Detail of portrait of a Roman general, Tivoli, c. 70 B.C.
Portrait of a Roman general, Tivoli, c. 70 B.C.* Nudity in these veristic portraits was a striking choice in both Roman and Greek portraiture of the second and first centuries BC; the default type was more fully draped and corresponded to civic benefactors.
* Iconographic studies of these portraits have given us a clearer idea of the particular choices being made in selecting body models for particular statues and has allowed for a more detailed decoding of their meaning within the Hellenistic Greek (and hellenizing Roman) art.
* The sensuous material of a sign means nothing until it evokes a certain meaning-laden response in an individual.
* Following is a series of assumptions made on the basis of Cicero's writings on honorific portraiture: a) the spatial setting of honorific portraits was controlled by the Senate and the People; b) an honorific portrait is a gift, which had the effect of setting up an obligation on the part of the honorand towards the state; c) the portrait articulates an internal relationship between the Senate, the People and the honorand via the size, placement, posture, and other factors that were decided by the Senate; d) the act of giving an honorific statue presupposes the existence of a system of institutionalized norms that is shared between the honorand and the state.
* Verism invokes meanings at several levels: a) at a cultural level, the style does not reflect Roman values in general, but values that are relevant to the relationship of patronage (values which the portrait both objectifies and sustains); b) at a social level, verism functions as a visual metaphor that invokes the shared normative culture; and c) verism is the material basis that makes possible the generalization of meanings and sentiments proper to the relationship.
Sheldon Nodelman, "How to Read a Roman Portrait". Roman Art in Context: An Anthology. ed. Eve D'Ambra (Englewood Cliffs, 1993), 10-26
* Roman artists invented a new kind of portraiture, as unlike that of Greeks as it was unlike their own local tradition; this new art was capable of articulating the interior processes of human experience and made possible in the following centuries the most extraordinary body of portrait art ever created;
* Roman portraiture and art can both be described as a system of signs; Romans often reached into the realm of contemporaneous political and social ideas for themes that entered the context of particular portrait modes;
* This class of portraits consists exclusively of men in later life, often balding and with grim expressions, and whose faces are wrinkled, blemished, and creased; the portrayals are unequivocally grim, haggard and ungenerous; they can be described as attempts to plasticize a seen reality without idealization or programmatic bias;
* One could suppose that these faces closely reflect the prevailing temperament of the society and class to which they belong, and the pained expressions testify the terrible emotional strains of a society torn apart by war;
* The pattern of recurrence of these physical traits makes these portraits look very much alike; it soon becomes apparent that these portraits are part of a conventional type that intended to convey a forceful and polemical content;
* The emphasis on the marks of age calls attention to the subject's long service to the state and their faithfulness to constitutional procedures (contrasting the quick rise to power of men like Caesar, Pompey, Antony, etc.);
* The seeming indifference or frankness with which the subjects acknowledge or proclaim their ugly-ness is surely a defiant response to the propagandistic glamorization of physiognomy and character in the portraits of quarreling war-lords that stood in opposition to inherited Roman values;
* In the veristic portraiture of the first century B.C. the new image-structure will determine the operations of the Roman portrait as a system of communication whose content is defined positively by the evocation of desired associations and negatively by implied contrast with other images bearing an opposing content;
* The Augustus of Prima Porta evidences a system of construction of independently meaningful parts, with a) a body type inherited from the Doryphoros with a noble equilibration of the pose, juxtaposed with b) a raised arm, independently conceived and carrying a well-established meaning in Roman society; c) the military costume describes Augustus as an imperator or commander and invokes his martial success to justify his authority; the omission of the boots helps formalize the military meaning into a separate unit while recalling both the normative Roman heroic nudes and d) the subject's existence on a higher-than-mundane plane; his cuirass illustrates his military achievements in Parthia against a cosmic panorama (representing a restoration of the natural order and the elevation of Rome to a kind of universal sovereignty) and the little Cupid by his feet that reminds the viewer of Augustus's divine descent from Venus;
* This image exists not for itself but for the spectator of whom an intellectual cooperation is certainly demanded;
Marble portrait of Augustus, from Livia’s villa at Primaporta, after A.D. 14
Doryphoros, marble statue by Polikleitos, from Pompeii, ca. 450-40 B.C.* The god-like youthfulness of his face stands in deliberate contrast to the exhausted, old faces that the veristic style represented (it's important to note Augustus's apparent inability to age, as portrayed in his many busts and statue types); this contrast seems to be intentional - old faces convey hopelessness, while Augustus offers the boundless possibilities of youth; Augustus's portraits borrow more than "youth is godliness" from the Hellenistic period - through his gaze, from which the force of his personality pours out, he becomes superhuman, heroized; this is all done with great restraint, especially for public portraits, to avoid the common Roman reaction of distrust and resentment against overly exultant portrayals of rulers; the gaze recalls the intensity and self-control of the Capitoline Brutus, shown below;
So-called Capitoline Brutus, fourth to second century B.C.* The neoclassical style of the head (broad planes, severely contrasted verticals and horizontals) ties everything together to create a portrait with density of meaning and cogency.
