Set in stone - the image of Augustus

Whilst we are on the topic of Roman sculpture I am reminded of a post in the Smithsonian Magazine website last week about the discovery at Isernia in central Italy of a portrait bust of the Emperor Augustus. The illustrated report can be seen at Archaeologists in Italy Unearth Marble Bust of Rome's First Emperor, Augustus

Fine as the head of Augustus is, and it is something that adds to knowledge about the town in which it was set up, the character of the piece is perhaps more interesting as an insight into the cult and presentation of the Emperor himself. 

I briefly mentioned this in my post The Glory that was Rome about the Primaporta statue of Augustus and its symbolism that would have spoken clearly to contemporaries but needs teasing out for us today.

In particular I pointed to the way in which Augustus was always depicted in the prime of young manhood, the handsome, assured and confident master of his world. This image remained that of the Emperor for forty odd years.

In this he was not the first ruler to fix his public image - in the Hellenistic world Alexander the Great had stamped his youthful image on the world ( and died young to secure it forever ) whilst Egyptian, Persian and other eastern rulers did the same, even when, as with Akhenaten they were defying the artistic as well as the cultural norms of their society.

If the actual portrait of the individual Roman Emperor was standardised during his reign with Constantine it was produced on the grand scale as the new Augustus of a reunified, revivified Christian Empire.

If in Byzantium the image of the Emperor became literally iconic in the west, as traditions of portraiture revived, the image of the King once more became just that - an image of the ruler. From simple coin portraits there began a tradition that followed a standard depiction of the monarch, one that increasingly aimed to depict them, but in a hieratic and symbolic pose. These were not just a king, but the king. So in England in the reign of King Richard II it does look as if artists worked to a standard format as to what the king was shown wearing,  his hair and colouring, and paid attention to his  stylistic choices. This can certainly be seen with King Henry V, King Edward IV and King Henry VII, and probably King James III of Scots, that is before the great age of portrait painting that impressed the images of King Henry VIII and his three children, King Francis I,  Emperor Charles V and King Philip II indelibly on their subjects consciousness. Having Holbein, Clourt and Titian around certainly helped, but it was not a new idea. Nor was, I am sure, the idea of imposing a standard image as Queen Elizabeth I did with her portraits from relatively early in her reign. 

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued that tradition, and photography may have given us the individual snapshot of royalty and public figures but it has also continued the royal icon - think of the official Diamond Jubilee photograph of Queen Victoria or the Cecil Beaton Coronation photograph of Queen Elizabeth II. These are not just photographs but photographic images that convey a vision of rulership that transcends the passage of the years.

Augustus was by no means the first, and certainly not the last, monarch to use public art to convey his vision of himself. His particular success was both to give us but one dominating, enduring image of him, and to transmit the concept to his successors and to those who came after.