Small World?

In my own specialism (I haven’t a clue what happens in English or Modern Languages, let alone in Science), there are two basic types academic conference. The one squashes as many papers as it can into the time available: 15+ papers in a day, with as many participants speaking as many different languages as the organizers can muster, with hardly a moment for proper discussion – but if you’re lucky a good party, and generous quantities of alcohol at the beginning and end of proceedings. 

The other is a more gentlemanly affair. A small group of experts round a table, just a handful of papers, and hours and hours of discussion, to which everyone is expected to contribute. As a rule of thumb, you consume less alcohol but learn a lot more, and have to work harder, at this sort of occasion.

The conference at Williamstown, hosted by the Research Institute attached to the Gallery, was emphatically of the second type. There were just ten of us and we had each submitted a written paper in advance. Some of these were weighty foot-noted affairs; mine, I must confess, was rather lighter. At the conference we were given just fifteen minutes to re-introduce what we had written; I was more obedient on this time-limit than some, I can boast. Then it was just discussion for two days --  fortified by copious amounts of healthy food, fruit-juice and mineral water.

The subject was the “Art of Spoliation”. It wasn’t actually quite as relevant to modern geo-politics as that title might imply.

Some of your emails have asked what this was all about. So here goes.

As art historians now use the term, “spoliation” is the re-use and re-incorporation of some earlier work of art in a later one. The idea goes back to the heart of the Roman world and the display of captured weapons and booty (spolia) in Rome. But the key monument that set the whole academic ball rolling is the triumphal Arch of the emperor Constantine, built in Rome in the early fourth century AD, just after Constantine had defeated in battle his rivals for the throne, with the help it was said of the new Christian god. (I've shown it at the top of this post.)

It’s the arch that stands next to the Colosseum. And what most visitors probably don’t notice is that many of the sculptures that decorate it were not carved in the early fourth century, but rifled from earlier Roman monuments, put up by earlier Roman emperors, Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. (In this picture taken from the arch the roundels are Hadrianic, the relief below Constantinian.)

The question is: why?

One view is that it was an admission of cultural defeat. The sculptors of the fourth century had the sense to realize that they simply weren’t as good as their predecessors (just look at the bits they did do on the arch!) and so resorted to outright borrowing – re-carving, in the process, the features of  the earlier rulers to make them look like Constantine.

The other main view is that the whole thing was deeply ideological. Constantine – or his artists – didn’t  just go randomly to whatever monuments could easily be despoiled. They specially chose sculptures from the great tradition of “good” Roman emperors, so as to underline the fact that Constantine was following in their footsteps. It wasn’t artistic deficiency, in other words, but clever PR.

There, in a nutshell, is what we talked about for two days. But we didn’t stop with the ancient world. The same issues came up with works of art of much later periods. I was particularly intrigued by a marvellous gold medieval crucifix, with the head of Christ made out of a blue lapis lazuli head of (probably) the empress Livia.

  But what really got us academics talking was an advert for body lotion from the New York Times, which dispayed an elegant modern model in the same pose as Ingres’ Odalisque. Was this spoliation in a contemporary guise? Was it honouring Ingres’ original? Or neutralizing it? Were advertising images the site of the most ambitious modern artistic practices?

Constantine would have turned in his grave.

Comments

[William Storage]

On the subject of Roman spolia, a really fine writer is Eric Varner. His "Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture" (2004) is hard to come by, but very worthwhile and is free of the obtuse language that plagues much of art history. A related (inexpensive and available) book by Eric is an exhibit catalog, "From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny & Transformation in Roman Portraiture".

[Mary]

Various comments here:

1) Oliver's point about the invented Latin. Well in this sense "spolia" is an invention (in classical Latin it means 'spoils"). I think there is an interesting subject in the academic use of invented Latin. One example that is close to my heart is "triumphator", which is always used to mean "triumphing general" .... but is not found in classical Latin. "Romanitas" is another.

2) Greg. Thanks. I like the idea about modern IT examples of spoliation. The whole idea of re-use stretching back to antiquity and on to post-modernism is nice.

[Greg Shue]

Just posting to say thanks for your posts! Very interesting topic. I must admit that I had never heard of spoliation before reading here, but I think it touches on the old battle of new vs. old, preservation (physical and cultural), and the value of good art/architecture. When it comes to *why*, I think there could be endless reasons to incorporate something of value into new work.

How does this relate to good computer software (or internet code) being incorporated into new applications?

Thanks again!

[Oliver Nicholson]

Actually Alex, marble goes all too well into the incinerator to make lime for dressing fields - that might well have happened to the Parthenon Marbles had Lord Elgin not stepped in.
Am I right in thinking that the Latin word 'spolia' (like 'lachrymatorium') is not actually classical, but was made up in the Renaissance - perhaps as a back-formation of Italian spoglie ? Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini.

[postblogger]

Well, since Alex has weighed in (and, given the length of that comment, I use the word literally), could I ask whether 'spoliation' is the re-use of the actual physical original (a la Arch), or just the idea of the original (a la Ingres)?

[Jackie]

Thank you Alex for putting into words what had been worrying me a little! Why the big word 'spoliation'? I am not an art historian, but I know a few. Why does something in a painting have to 'mean' something? Couldn't it just be there because the artist thought it looked good? Equally, the reuse of sculpture in the Arch of Constantine could mean that the sculptors were a) not very good as Mary suggests, or b) just bone idle and chose to fill in a space with someone else's work. The Ingres rip off could be because some advertising executive thought it would sell his/her product. The reason is fairly irrelevant, the point is it will sell. Why this urge to read an inner meaning into everything?

[Mary]

I had some of the same feelings as Alex at the conference itself. If every "borrowing" is spoliation (and you could include literature here too??), then, the term got a bit emptied. But the issues of 'hommage to' or 'pillage from' the original source still remained.

For me the most puzzling object was the cross. How far was the head recgonized in the Middle Ages as an antique (pagan) head? If so, was it a sign of Christinity's triumph over, or debt to, the antique past?

I must say that it is a bit rich of you guys who have been swapping bons mots about Cuvier and Aristotle to start objecting the spoliation is a bit technical! (You're not going to be let off for Christmas yet Alex - what about next week?)

[Alex Drace-Francis]

Bit scary this one, even for a dedicated blogshitter like me, as few of us had the option to do Spoliation Studies at school & you’ve set us something of an end-of-term exam, with the added fear that the cream of the world’s spoliologists are logging on to contradict our flippant free-time fumblings. But I wouldn’t want you to be out for a duck after a series of long innings so here’s my two kopeks’ worth.
Romans, like everybody else, made stuff. Like most stuff, it fell apart. That’s called the Ikeology of the Aesthetic. What do you do? Bit difficult to incinerate chunky marble bas-reliefs. Council won’t take ‘em. Can’t even plonk them in the back of your Fiesta and go down the dump – they’re too heavy.
So it gets re-used. Especially in olden times before flat-pack & internet ordering & you-dial-we-deliver culture got going.
A lot of the time people don’t think anything of it. Who knows that the columns fronting the National Gallery in London formerly adorned Carlton House, a palace once in the middle of the terrace of that name? Even if you do know, you might not take the trouble to remember every time. Their ‘spolitude’ remains uninvested with meaning, non-radioactive, Wikipedically inert.
Meanwhile, people making new stuff often want to hide the recycledness of the components. They market a future-oriented, self-generated, free product that knows no past.
But other people precisely want to draw attention to the pastness of the bits. They feel the need to situate themselves in some temporal sequence. According to dead Frenchman Lucien Febvre, history is ‘a way of organising the past so that it rests more lightly on our shoulders’. I like that one because despite present trendy opinion history doesn’t really have to have anything to do with words. But if it’s a crucifix, it might well rest upon someone’s shoulders, & not more lightly but more heavily.
‘Nice crucifix’
‘Yes, isn’t it? It’s medieval, but do you realise that lapis lazuli head is of much earlier date, & represents the Empress Livia?’
‘Oh really? How very interesting’
‘Not really. It’s just my way of checking you’re paying attention. Actually it’s Livia’s granddaughter Livilla, the intriguing poisoner.’
‘How very rude. Goodbye’

So why call it spoliation? Well it seems the spoliologists are themselves spoliators. Not satisfied with the label ‘Recycling Studies’, they need a resonant prestigious signifier, & being art historians they ransack the texts of Vasari & Raphael, just as someone might rip off the Next label and sew an Armani one in its place. They need some Founding Fathers for their concept & they like the idea of reconstructing a single intentionality, so they authorize themselve to expound Constantine’s ‘true’ intentions. Then he becomes Spoliator Number One. As he’s influential guy, founder of Byzantium & Christianizer of the Empire, that’s quite good as intellectual ancestor. Besides ‘recycling’ is too literal & ‘spoliation’ has what my friend Andi calls ‘the unifying function of metaphor: […] a way to compare without drawing conclusions, and bring out coincidences, superimpositions, identities. It is a discourse based on the presupposition of a deeper unity among things, beyond the apparent differences between them.’ It’s a process of historification that both specifies and hides meanings. It’s also neat because their work will be googled by lawyers & other people interested in the more famous subject of 20th-century dictators stashing loot. OK that’s as pedantic & obscure as I can manage but someone had to set the ball rolling. & I never got to Ingres’s odalisque & the perfume advert, which strikes me more as repertory performance than spoliation. I may not be able to reply much as now term’s ended I’ve got to do things like housework & heaven nose even some real research. Merry Xmas everyone.