How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  The sculptures decorated what was an unusual private dining room, foundations of which may be seen today (Fig. 45). Guests reclining on couches upon a rectangular island had a view into the cave, which would have been lit by torches. Four statue groups featuring Odysseus, each in a different location, were to be seen. One showed the hero rescuing the body of his fellow warrior Achilles from the battlefield. Another, situated as if rising out of the water, represented the ship of Odysseus beset by Scylla, a monster from the deep (Fig. 47).Yet another represented a daring act of theft – Odysseus and a comrade stealing a precious image of Athena from the citadel of Troy. But the main image of this spectacle was surely the scene of Odysseus directing a great wooden pole into the eye of a slumped and slumbering Polyphemus.

  47 Head of Odysseus, his ship under attack from the sea monster Scylla, as represented at Sperlonga.

  The group has been partly reconstructed in the nearby museum (Fig. 46), and its original effect may be imagined.The very setting, of course, evoked the cave in which Odysseus and his men found themselves trapped. As if departing from that initial advantage, the sculptors have spared no exuberance in making the fabulous episode as lifelike as possible. So Polyphemus is indeed gigantic and laid out in the typical sprawl of a drunken stupor, while the postures and facial expressions of Odysseus and his crew are studies of mingled fear and determination.We naturally reach for the word ‘dramatic’ to describe the storytelling climax that has been frozen by this sculpture. But no doubt the artists who made it prided themselves that such a powerful and violent event could never be so effectively conveyed upon the theatrical stage.

  TRAJAN’S COLUMN AND THE INVENTION OF ‘CONTINUOUS NARRATIVE’

  Most Greek storytelling, verbal or visual, was mythical in subject. A typical narrative focused upon the biography or ‘life description’ of a hero such as Herakles or Theseus. These were, however, full-time heroes. (In the case of Herakles, prodigious acts of strength were being accomplished almost as soon as he was born, and continued well into old age.) Literary compositions might run on for hundreds or thousands of lines in poetry or prose. Given the obvious limits of their allotted materials, logistics and space, how could painters or sculptors possibly match this sort of continuity? Some early visual narratives in Greek art attempt a synoptic approach – giving an overview all at once of a story’s beginning, middle and end. Another solution was to reduce a particular epic or heroic career into a cycle or series of various episodes, usually featuring the same principal character. For example, if the architectural design of a temple offered 12 separate compartments for carved scenes, then a dozen different exploits of Herakles might be selected for representation (this is, in fact, what happened c. 460 BC with the decoration of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia). Mostly, however, Greek artists contented themselves with ‘monoscenic’ images: that is, a single ‘snapshot’ of narrative action, such as Herakles wrestling with a lion, or holding up the skies.

  This evocative method of storytelling relied very much upon the ‘beholder’s share’: counting on viewers who were mentally primed and equipped to supply further details – what had caused the action, what happened next, and so on. How and why Herakles had found himself in these exciting situations, and how they were eventually resolved, were taken as read and left to the imagination. So long as visual stories were drawn from a pool of commonly known myths or folktales, artists could assume such general knowledge on the part of their clients. But what if the story to be represented were not mythical, but some narrative of history or current events?

  It was the pressure to concoct a sort of visual history – something like a documentary in television terms – that led to a further development in Classical art: the technique, predominantly in sculpture and painting, of continuous narrative.

  Whether Greeks or Romans invented this visual mode is debatable. It may, however, be a futile debate, since most artists working at Rome were Greek by ethnic origin. But there is no doubt that continuous narrative was an artistic device highly suited to the needs and expectations of Roman patrons, especially those Roman emperors who wished to follow the example of Augustus (see page) in broadcasting to the public their account of res gestae (things done). Military adventures, political reforms, negotiations, acts of magnanimity – these may have been Herculean tasks, but it was essential to convince viewers that they had really happened and were not the stuff of myth.The Roman general Julius Caesar set the tone when he compiled a stern, meticulous and credible account of how he conquered the province of Gaul (France) c. 50 BC, written as a supposedly third-person commentary on how those Gallic Wars were waged.The challenge was for artists to match this lucid exposition of events, using images instead of words. Logic, accuracy, accountability – these were now paramount criteria of a good story.

  The style of continuous narrative that ensued has historically been regarded as the great accomplishment of Roman art. And of all the works of Roman art exhibiting that style, none is more monumental than a marble pillar rising over 40 metres (130 feet) high in the centre of the city of Rome (Fig. 48).We call it Trajan’s Column; it happens also to be the tomb of the emperor Trajan, who died in the summer of 117 AD and who surely never saw the final glory of his tombstone. Some scholars believe that it was his successor, Hadrian, who ordered the column to be decorated with a carved frieze in commemoration of Trajan’s campaigns in Dacia – a region equivalent to modern Romania, along the lower reaches of the Danube. It is also possible that this carved frieze was indebted to painted scrolls, done by war artists attached to Trajan’s army and perhaps displayed on the occasion of a triumphal procession to mark victory over the Dacians (in 107 AD).Trajan himself had left a testimony, in the style of Caesar, of how Dacia (and its lucrative mineral resources) had been won. In any case, the carved narrative was executed in such a way as to leave viewers with a strong impression of verisimilitude. Modern scholars use Trajan’s Column as a primary source of information not just about the Dacian campaigns, but about how the Roman imperial army routinely operated, down to the smallest details of logistics, weapons, battledress and impedimenta. Ancient onlookers were reassured. Here, in Trajan – who appears 59 times in the frieze, and whose statue once adorned a small dome on top of it all – was a commander visibly in control of a great collective enterprise. He was there, in the thick of things: these scenes were honest, direct dispatches from the front line.

  48 Trajan’s Column in Rome, erected in 117 AD, with its carved narrative frieze spiralling up from the emperor’s tomb.

  As a masterpiece of ancient visual storytelling,Trajan’s Column appears to have everything. Running unbroken over some 200 metres (660 feet), it was once brightly painted ‘in glorious Technicolor’. Its hero, of course, must be Trajan, but the emperor is not some fantastic, flowing-haired hero like Alexander the Great (see page); rather he is a calm and solemn figure conducting sacrifices, addressing his troops, receiving embassies, supervising supplies, and so on.There is a villain, too – the Dacian leader Decebalus, who fought and schemed hard to save his country’s gold mines from falling into Roman hands.The climactic moment of the frieze comes when, deep in woodland, Roman cavalry is closing in on Decebalus, who shows his defiance to the last by cutting his own throat and so denying Trajan the triumph of parading him as a captive to the people of Rome.There is also an epic supporting cast of some 2500 extras, whose actions and expressions are all carefully rendered.

  Using the language of film here may be anachronistic, but it is irresistible because the designer of Trajan’s Column was anticipating certain film techniques familiar to studio directors.Trees, for example, appear not just as elements of landscape, but serve to divide distinct scenes, as today a director would use a visual cut.The frieze also makes adroit use of multiple viewpoints, especially the aerial perspective or bird’s-eye view, to heighten the drama of battle, and also to give extra narrative information. Like a camera mounted on a helicopter, the view from above permits us to see what is taking p
lace behind high walls – a scene of mass suicide, in one case, or the covert non-compliance with treaty terms. And for those passers-by daunted by the prospect of gazing up at a spiralling frieze, it seems that the creators of Trajan’s Column thoughtfully provided a sequence of narrative highlights – something like a cinematic trailer – up the column’s northwest vertical axis.This introduces Trajan, emphasizing that he undertakes military action only after due rites of sacrifice to the gods; tells us that Decebalus and his followers will stop at nothing – torture, arson, betrayal – to antagonize the forces of law and order; and predicts that the winners of this contest will be those who have divine support.

  The entire story is, in a sense, predictable.The viewer on the ground needs only to glimpse the lower scenes to apprehend that the very method of the Roman army mobilizing – setting up supply bases on the Danube, building forts and bridges and so on – is enough to guarantee ultimate victory.This is one huge military machine, whose force will prove irresistible wherever it is deployed. If this is the core message of Trajan’s Column, then as a piece of Roman imperial propaganda it seems perfectly effective. Later in the second century, the name of another emperor – Marcus Aurelius – would be honoured with a similar monument, also still standing in the heart of Rome. However, to acknowledge the ingenious features and imposing effect of Trajan’s Column is not the same as admitting it to be a thoroughly engaging piece of storytelling.

  It may be hailed as an epic frozen in stone, the greatest visual narrative produced by the ancient world. But quite apart from the practical impossibility of following the helical trail of events, can anyone claim to be transported by Trajan’s Column to the killing fields of the Roman Empire? For all that its artists have anticipated certain storytelling devices of the modern cinema,Trajan’s Column lacks the power to captivate. This is not just because the figures are not moving, and the continuous thread of storyline keeps vanishing from sight. Some fundamental element seems to be missing.

  INTERWEAVING WORDS AND PICTURES

  The same individual appearing more than once in a single composition: that is one way of defining continuous narrative as an artistic strategy. It is a fundamentally unnatural device because ordinarily we cannot be in two places at the same time.This peculiarity was elaborated both as an achievement of Roman art and as a problem of later European art by a group of Viennese scholars at the end of nineteenth century. In late antique and early medieval Europe there was, it seemed, tacit acceptance that stories needed illustrations, and that tales told by images must also carry words.A fifth-century manuscript in Vienna contains tales from the Hebrew Book of Genesis, with 48 ‘illuminations’ leading from Adam and Eve to the death of Jacob.This appears to indicate artists aware of the Roman tradition of continuous narrative, yet is a text with pictures, not a story told by images alone. And when, some 500 years later, a bishop of the town of Bayeux commissioned a 70-metre (230-foot) tapestry to celebrate the successful invasion of England by his half-brother, William, Duke of Normandy, embroidered Latin inscriptions in capital letters were deemed necessary to make sense of the continuous sequence of images (Fig. 49).

  49 A detail of the Bayeux Tapestry showing King Harold being fatally wounded at the Battle of Hastings, late 11th century. Harold is probably the figure falling in front of the horse.

  So had the inherently unnatural device of representing one figure repeatedly in the same scene proved unworkable? The art historians of Vienna (notably Franz Wickhoff) earnestly debated the question, perhaps aware that the recent invention of moving images on film was rapidly developing as an art form in its own right. At the same time, however, discoveries were being made on the other side of the world that would reveal a storytelling tradition that predated Trajan’s Column, the Vienna Genesis and the Bayeux Tapestry by many thousands of years. And only by understanding the long-sustained vigour of that tradition, ‘old yet always new’, would it become clear why the movies have become the most powerful mode of storytelling in the modern world.

  ‘Whatever may have been the age of these paintings, it is scarcely probable that they could have been executed by a self-taught savage.’The first Europeans to come across Aboriginal images in Australia, such as Sir George Grey, a British explorer of the Kimberley region in the 1830s, were either sceptical that such art was done by indigenous people, or else inclined to dismiss it as nothing but childish daubings and doodles.There was a sense that these images were very old, but the colonists had little notion of what was represented, and little interest in finding out.

  It was not until the early twentieth century that attitudes began to change. In the summer of 1912 a biologist and anthropologist by the name of Baldwin Spencer arrived at a small settlement called Oenpelli, in Arnhem Land, just across from the East Alligator River. Spencer had lately been appointed Chief Protector of Aboriginal interests, a belated official recognition that colonization had done terrible damage to the indigenous communities of Australia. Although he was hosted at Oenpelli by a cattle-farming settler of European descent, Spencer’s sojourn there was motivated by a serious concern to make a record of local folklore and customs.

  He had spent time with other Aboriginal communities in central Australia and the Northern Territory, but nowhere had Spencer so far encountered such a lively practice of painting as at Oenpelli, among the people he called the Kakadu (Gagudju). It was facilitated, perhaps, by an environment offering plentiful food – thanks to the annual monsoon rains from November to April – and the abundant local supply of artists’ materials.A length of frayed bark served as a brush to apply a background wash, while outlines and details were painted with a piece of trimmed sedge. Pigments were derived from organic sources, such as haematite and kaolin, and comprised black, white, red and yellow. Collecting these colours might involve a long journey, but the surfaces for painting were nearby. Broad slabs and overhangs projected from the sandstone escarpment extending across Australia’s ‘Top End’, with many rocks densely covered with layer upon layer of images. In western Arnhem Land it was also customary for painting to be done on strips of eucalyptus bark (Fig. 50). Bark pieces were used to construct shelters during the wet season, so the painting provided a sort of interior decoration.

  As Spencer recalled: ‘Today I found a native who, apparently, had nothing better to do than sit quietly in the camp, evidently enjoying himself, drawing a fish on a piece of string-bark … ’ Although his tone sounds slightly disparaging, and he specified a measure of ‘play-about’ in the local habit of making images, Spencer took care to acquire and commission a number of paintings on rectangular bark pieces for conservation and display in the Museum of Victoria at Melbourne. So Aboriginal art therefore became portable and collectible, and gradually outsiders became aware of the remarkable longevity of the cultural tradition to which this art belonged.The artists witnessed at Oenpelli by Baldwin Spencer in 1912 were, for example, painting images of estuarine fish, such as barramundi, which had entered the artistic repertoire when the very estuaries formed – about 8000 years ago. Not only subject, but style and execution had changed very little over thousands of years.

  Awareness of this longevity came in various ways. Certain animals depicted on the rock surfaces were species that had become extinct, such as the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, which disappeared from the Australian mainland some 4000 years ago. Other large fauna recorded, such as the marsupial tapir, had roamed the area in even more remote, pre-estuarine times. Since the images were layered, one upon another at many sites, it became possible to surmise that some stencilled hands and other marks were left by early human inhabitants – about 50,000–40,000 years previously. Further ecological changes could be traced from shifts in the repertoire, as (for instance) freshwater swamps became seasonal habitats for waterfowl, such as egret and ibis. Later still, there were depictions of animals introduced in historical times, notably the buffalo, and clear references to at least a visual acquaintance with people from elsewhere. So there were images of the sa
iling ships of the Macassan traders from Indonesia, fishing off the coast for trepang or sea slugs; and eventually, of course, spectres of the colonists with their horses and flintlock guns.

  50 Painting bark at Oenpelli, northern Australia, 2004.

  51 Images of barramundi on the rock walls at Injalak Hill, near Oenpelli, Arnhem Land, Australia. Date uncertain.

  52 The Rainbow Serpent: detail of a rock painting near Mt Borradaile, Arnhem Land, Australia. Date uncertain.

  In terms of quantity, the images that dominate the output of Aboriginal artists in western Arnhem Land relate to elements of the local diet – birds, turtles, fish, marsupials, crocodiles. It was (and is) a particular feature of regional style to represent the innards of these creatures. Subsequently dubbed the ‘X-ray style’, this feature lends support to the general notion that the imagery offers an illustrated menu of subsistence, with the anatomical revelations prescribing, perhaps, how portions of fat and protein were to be distributed among those sharing this food.We know that refuge had to be taken in bark shelters or under rock crags when the wet season prevailed, and that the best time for catching turtles or barramundi was as the waters receded. So when we see the clustered images of turtle and barramundi on a rock wall in the cliffs above Oenpelli (Fig. 51), we might suppose they simply reflect wishful thinking about the next meal. But, as anthropologists came to realize, the image of a barramundi was not, to Aboriginal eyes, simply the depiction of an eminently edible fish, occurring in creeks and water-holes as a natural phenomenon. Rather, it was a symbolic form intricated into a cryptic network of law, land, ancestry and myth, and it could not be understood in isolation from the complementary media of story, song and dance.