In the age of Caesar, official architecture, sculpture and painting were still deeply imbued with a baroque and Hellenistic dramatic force, but they also recalled the distant experiences of the artistic culture common to the Etruscan and Italic world (the koine) of the third century в.с. This is especially discernable in the formal duality of the portrait. In portrait sculpture, an art deeply imbued with local ideology, the spare, incisive, 'realistic' aspects of the Italian portrait in fact co-existed with the distinctly psychological features, full of pathos, of the late-Hellenistic portrait. The point can be made quite simply by comparing the basic,
F. Coarelli, DArcb г (1968) joiff; id. DArcb 4-5 (1970-1) 24iff: id. St. Miscell. 15 (1970) 85ff; id. in Zanker 1976 (e 141) 2 iff; id. in L'art decoratif a Rome (Rome, 1981) 2296".
Zanker 1988 (f 633); Simon 1987 (f 577); Kaiser Augustus tmd die verlorem Republik 1988 (f443), the catalogue of an exhibition at Berlin.
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linear countenances of the 'Arringatore' (The Orator, c. 100 в.с.)[1125] and of Caesar (с. 50 в.с.)4 on the one hand, with the soft, shaded features of the so-called Postumius Albinus (convincingly identified as Cato the Censor, c. 150 B.C.) and of Pompey (c. 60 в.с.) on the other.[1126] The two formal approaches continued to co-exist in the second half of the first century B.C., but the 'Italic' modes tended increasingly to denote municipality or provincial patronage, and they spread eventually to the lowest social and cultural levels of so-called 'plebeian art'. We shall return to this later.
In the official art of the court and the great aristocracy of Rome, the moment of transition from this ambiguous coexistence of 'Italic' with late Hellenistic forms to the decisive selection of Classicism may be situated in a brief period of political and cultural setdement, that is, in the decade which followed the constitudonal change of the year 27 в.с. Shortly before that date, characterisdc late republican tendencies are sdll clearly in play. Portrait sculpture continues to produce masterpieces with a flavour of Hellenistic dynasticism, such as the 'Actium'-type portrait of Octavian[1127] or the 'Gabii'-type of Agrippa.[1128] Decorative painting continues to develop the long established themes of the Second Style, with its characteristic 'open walls' and wide scenic perspectives,[1129]while public and private architecture operate within the framework of models developed between the end of the second and the middle of the first century в.с.[1130] The last decade of the first century was, however, already dominated by the Classicizing language of the Augustan regime.10 The 'Prima Porta'-type portrait of Augustus embodies the propaganda message of the new convictions of the Principate.[1131] In painting, plain, undisturbed tapestries, across which run slender cande- labras and minute friezes in the Third Style, support reproductions of the great Classical Greek panel paintings;[1132] while architecture and architectural ornamentation in marble and stucco echo - in the context of consolidated building types - the Attic, or at least Classical, models of the fifth and fourth centuries в.с.13 By now imperial Roman Classicism is completely formed and functioning.
As we have seen, the new style was not in fact entirely new: behind it lay over 15 о years of history. A work like the pediment in Via San Gregorio[1133] sufficiently conveys with its decidedly classicizing character the andquity of neoclassical experience in the city, under the sdmulus of the strong classicizing element in the late Hellenism of Pergamum and Athens. What was new was the pervasive, all-embracing aspect of Classical forms, which freed buildings and their decoration, official sculptures, and urban planning from all that unrestrained baroque freedom (licentia) which came from the effrontery (,audacia) of the Alexandrians. New also was the nostalgic recovery of a Roman and Italian national past onto which was grafted the formal, Classicizing message; and new too was the general and enthusiastic support of the Roman aristocracy and of the local magnates of Italy, the domi nobiles, for the unique programme developed in the capital. Baroque, Hellenistic experiences were thus pushed to the side, to be looked for in the narrow confines of private consumption of art, in silverware and fine pottery, and in the minor genre paintings, landscapes and still lifes, which were placed side by side with copies of classical or great classicizing paintings in the Arcadian gardens of urban villas.
Consistently with the assumptions of the Augustan programme for restoration, all these non-Classicizing forms were assigned to the representation of idylls and escapes, trifles (nugae) and erotic themes, that is, modes and fashions outside of reality, pseudo-messages void of content. But the very limiting of private and public luxuria imposed by the policy of the princeps ended by incorporating such developments, however devalued of meaning they may have been, so that often the Classicizing idiom, which tended to eliminate such risky departures from the austere and ubiquitous realm of official ideology, came to the surface even in the private consumption of art.
The ban on baroque language was accompanied by censure of any element that did not conform to the central plan of moral restoration. Once the military triumphs of the nobilitas were done away with (to be reserved for the princeps and his family), the great public building activity which had been financed by the generals' spoils of war (ex manubiis) came also to an end, along with all the dynastic ideology which it had carried in the last century of the Republic. The grandiloquent decorative programmes, both public and private, which had been aimed at individual glorification - using Hellenistic forms of self-representation - gave way in the public arena to imperial initiative alone, and in private to less compromising 'galleries' populated by the images of philosophers, or athletes or of gods, where otium (leisure) either had exclusively intellectual connotations or merely expressed a desire for escape.
This profound 'renewal', then, had its programmatic foundations in the ideology of the state. That was carefully fashioned by the great intellectuals within the circle of the princeps, from a singular mixture of Classicizing ideals, which were developed from the 'inimitable models' of the Greeks, and of national, Romano-Italian traditions, which were organized within the framework of a revival of Archaizing customs and native memories. The new figurative culture constituted a formidable vehicle for the propagation of the religious, political and symbolic elements of this revival in the most remote municipalities of Italy and among the lowest levels of society.
The instrument for the remarkable diffusion of this programme was above all a favoured group of sculptors in marble and bronze of the neo- Attic school. These men had already become established in Italy during the late Republic, working in Rome or Campania in a number of workshops, and controlled either directly or indirectly by such Roman aristocrats as Junius Damasippus, the Cossutii, or the notorious Gaius Verres. First among these workshops in both organization and quality was that directed by Pasiteles, who was head of a school which was well known for at least three generations.[1134] There were, moreover, a large number of lesser, anonymous stone-cutters as well as legions of fresco- painters, also anonymous, to whom the whole of Italy, from the princeps to the humblest municeps, entrusted the decoration of their houses. Along with the even humbler crafters of small-scale work in metal and terracotta, these sculptors revived and developed Classical and Hellenistic models in the new spirit, operating within a capillary-like network of workshops, each with its own rules of apprenticeship and instruction, and within a no less capillary circulation of moulds, casts and clay models {proplasmata). Thanks to new discoveries, we now know far more about these than was revealed to us by the well-known anecdote about the plaster models used by Pasiteles.[1135]