ined to be “platforms” or “floats,” Mantegna has pictured them as two-
tiered paintings or banners, reflecting in one case (bottom right of the
The Art of Representation
157
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 29:
Triumphs of Caesar, Canvas I: The Picture-Bearers. Mantegna launches his triumphal procession with a blast of trumpets and elaborate images of the destructive success of the Roman campaigns, which he seems to have derived from Josephus’ account of the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in 71 ce, rather than from any account of Caesar’s celebrations in 46 bce.
second banner) the scenes of devastation that Josephus claims were de-
picted: here we can just make out the sack of a city and a row of gallows.
Throughout the series, the impression is one of lavish display, wealth,
and excess.28
Mantegna’s paintings take a prominent place in modern views of the
triumphal procession. Indeed, they are not infrequently reproduced to
accompany, and bring to life, even the most technically academic discus-
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R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 5 8
sions of the procession.29 For these Triumphs offer a much more evoca-
tive vision of the procession of spoils than any images that survive from
antiquity itself, with the exception perhaps of the main relief sculptures
from the Arch of Titus. No other ancient image of the procession even
hints at the profusion, the dazzling array of treasures, or the seething
mass of riches. We are usually faced instead with some frankly rather
subdued evocations of the parade of plunder: some modest placards; a
few fercula bearing nothing more exotic than despondent prisoners, an
occasional model of a river god, golden crowns, or a couple of dishes—
not a miniature town, siege engine, or statue in sight, still less pÃgmata
or elephants (Fig. 30).30 Admittedly, these representations are often on a
relatively small scale or in a subordinate position on an arch or other
major building; they were not ever intended to be the center of attention
in the way that Mantegna’s were. Nonetheless, the contrast is striking.
Whatever other versions of the parade of spoils there were, and how-
ever paltry most of the “real life” celebrations may have been compared
with what is shown in the Triumphs of Caesar, the image of wealth and
excess hovers over the ceremony for ancient and modern commentators
alike. Ironically, though, there is another, very different sense in which
these paintings offer a model for our understanding of the triumph.
However vivid and dramatic they may appear when reproduced in mod-
ern textbooks, they are in fact a fragile, half-ruined palimpsest of re-
peated restoration and radical repainting that has gone on since at least
the seventeenth century.
The interventions have been drastic, including a wholesale covering
of the original egg-tempera with oil paint around 1700, a botched resto-
ration by Roger Fry in the early twentieth century (which, among other
things, restored the black face in the first canvas as white), and complete
waxing in the 1930s, followed by an only partially successful attempt to
get back to the genuine article in the 1960s.31 What we now see and ad-
mire is in almost no part the original fifteenth-century brushwork of
Mantegna. Instead, it is the historical product of centuries of painting
and unpainting. As such, it may stand better as a symbol of the complex
processes of loss, representation, and reconstruction through which we
The Art of Representation
159
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 30:
Part of a triumphal frieze from the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. To
judge from his appearance and attributes (bearded, naked to the waist, leaning on a vessel from which water flows) the figure on the ferculum is a river god: presumably the river Jordan over whom the Romans had been victorious.
must try to understand the triumphal procession than as the vivid evo-
cation of the ancient parade that it is often taken to be.
THE PROFITS OF EMPIRE
The various riches of the triumph have taken a prominent place in the
modern academic imagination. Economic historians have used the fig-
ures recorded for the coin and bullion paraded through the city to track
the growing wealth of Rome, as conquest delivered new imperial territo-
ries.32 Art historians have lingered longingly on the masterpieces cap-
tured as booty in the Greek world starting in the late third century bce
and first seen in Rome by a mass audience in triumphal parades. One
conservative modern calculation has estimated that by the first century
ce fourteen statues by Praxiteles had arrived in Rome, eight by Skopas,
four by Lysippos, three each by Euphranor, Myron, and Sthennis, plus
two each by Pheidias, Polykleitos, and Strongylion—a good proportion
of which would have played their part in some victory parade or other.33
Such works of art, it is commonly argued, heralded and catalyzed the
“hellenizing” revolution in Roman art and culture of the last centuries of
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the Republic. It was to be a spiraling effect. Triumphal booty as it was
displayed after the ceremony itself changed the visual environment of
the city and whetted the Roman appetite for more. Among the trium-
phal captives were artists and craftsmen who brought with them the ar-
tistic expertise of the Hellenistic world, and the cash that was paraded
by the wagonload provided the means of acquiring exactly what new
taste (or political expediency) demanded.34
At the same time, and no less important in the art historical narrative,
the other representations on display in the procession—the paintings of
the conflict, the models of towns or the defeated enemy—also made a
significant contribution to the practice of Roman art and image-mak-
ing. In part, the usual story runs, these were influenced by the tech-
niques and devices of processional display developed in the Greek world:
so that, in a perhaps uncomfortable paradox, the conquered territories
provided the artistic inspiration for the celebration of their own defeat.
But in part the artistic style adopted in these images of the campaigns
was a distinctively “native” tradition, driven by Roman imperatives and
their concern for documenting and publicizing their victories. In this
sense, the art of the triumph, both in subject matter and style, has been
seen as the direct ancestor of that distinctive strand of “documentary re-
alism” in Roman art best known from Trajan’s column or the battle pan-
els on the Arch of Septimius Severus.35
Other historians, more recently, have moved beyond the specifically
financial, visual, or artistic impact of the ceremony to emphasize the
wider importance of the triumph in the culture of Roman imperialism
and in the imaginative economy of the Romans. Parading the varied
profits of conquest—from heaps of coin to statues, trees, and all manner
of precious novel bric-à-brac—the procession served as a microcosm of
the very processes of imperial expansion; it literally enacted the flow of
wealth from the outside into the center of the Empire. The glaring
foreignness of some of the spoils of war, along with the various represen-
tations of the conquest, delineated a new and expanding image of im-