erected by Manius Valerius Maximus Messala in the senate house in 263
bce; the painting in the shape of Sardinia, with “representations of bat-
tles” on it, dedicated in 174 bce by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in the
Temple of Mater Matuta; and those pictures exhibited in the Forum by
Lucius Hostilius Mancinus in 145 bce showing the “site of Carthage and
the various attacks upon it”—beside which Mancinus stood, giving a
running commentary on the campaigns and so endearing himself to his
audience that, according to Pliny, he won the consulship at the next
elections.91 The usual argument is that these pictures started life as pa-
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rade objects at their generals’ triumphs, that they ended up on perma-
nent display in various locations of the city when the celebration was
over, and that they inspired that whole Roman “documentary” tradition
in art, which captured historical events using such techniques as bird’s-
eye perspective and continuous narrative (where different episodes of
the same story are depicted within the same overall composition).
In fact, this plausible argument is a decidedly flimsy one. No evidence
exists, beyond modern wishful thinking, that the paintings commis-
sioned by Valerius Messala and the rest were ever carried in triumphs be-
fore finding a permanent place of display. And that would certainly have
been impossible in the case of Mancinus’ painting of Carthage, for he
never celebrated a triumph at all (despite what is sometimes erroneously
claimed for him in modern literature). Besides—although the evidence
is admittedly rather thin—the triumphal paintings, as they are very
briefly described in ancient accounts, appear to feature significantly dif-
ferent themes from the historical paintings on permanent display.
Where historical paintings seem mostly to focus on the victorious
campaigns of the Roman armies and their general, the triumphal images
are most often said to depict the defeated enemy and the devastation of
the conquered territory. Of course, this could be a matter of the differ-
ent emphasis, or focalization, of the different accounts: the same paint-
ing of a battle can, after all, be described from the point of view of the
conquerors or the conquered. But the stark insistence on the fate of the
defeated in the references we have to the images carried in the triumph
(the disemboweling of Cato, the deluge of blood through Judaea) hardly
supports any argument that would link them to those other traditions of
historical painting. There is, in fact, very little to be said for putting tri-
umphal painting at the head of the genealogy of the narrative and docu-
mentary tradition in Roman art.
Yet there are connections between the ceremony of triumph and Ro-
man arts of representation at a rather more significant level. Just as the
traditions of Roman aristocratic funerals and the commemoration of an-
cestors provided a social context for the development of portraiture,
even in the absence of any direct link between the origins of the genre
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181
and death masks (or any other sort of mask for that matter), so too tri-
umphal culture as a whole provided a crucial arena within which issues
of representation were explored and debated. Ancient authors focus not
only on the plunder and the spectacular images in the procession; they
return repeatedly to how the display was staged, as if representation it-
self—its conventions, contrivances, and paradoxes—was a central part of
the show. The triumph is, in other words, construed as being a cere-
mony of image- making as much as it is one of images. It is the place
where, in many written versions, representation (or mimesis) reaches its
limits, and where the viewer (or reader) is asked to decide what counts as
an image or where the boundary between reality and representation is to
be drawn.
The poet Ovid explores these issues with particular verve. In one of
his poems from exile on the Black Sea (from 8 ce to his death nine or so
years later) he conjures up the image of a triumph in Rome, lamenting
his own absence from the spectacle and his reliance on his “mind’s
eye”—in contrast to, in Ovid’s words, “the lucky people who will get the
real show.” Part of the joke, for us at least, is that the triumph he pre-
dicts, for the heir-apparent Tiberius to celebrate his victories over the
Germans, never actually took place; it was never a “real show” at all. But
there is another joke, too, on the idea of reality. For “what exactly,” as
one critic has recently asked, “is the ‘real spectacle’ on show? Largely
a parade of feignings, images of events and places far off, pictures,
tableaux, personifications, imitations which supply the matter for the
second-order fictive imitations of the poet.” The “real” procession, in
other words, is no less fictive than Ovid’s “fictive imitations.”92
In another of his poems from exile, written—we usually assume—to
mark the triumph of Tiberius over Illyricum, celebrated in 12 ce, Ovid
hints at the problems of triumphal illusion even more economically,
in just three words. Here he lists the highlights of mimetic ingenuity
featured (he imagines) in the procession, including “barbarian towns,
mimicking their sacked walls in silver, with their painted men.” With
their painted men (cum pictis viris)? The question this raises for the
reader goes directly to the heart of the representational flux of the (repre-
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sentation of the) triumph. Are these men painted on the images of the
towns being paraded (like the silver walls)? Or are they images of painted
men—men smeared with woad or tattooed, after the habit of northern
barbarians? Is the paint a means of representation or is it what is repre-
sented, the signifier or the signified? And how could the reader tell the
difference?93
Ovid is not the only writer—determined as he so often is to exploit
the lurking ambivalences of Roman culture—who directs our attention
to the triumph’s representational complexity. Historians too take up
these issues. Appian’s account of Pompey’s triumph of 61, for example—
at first sight a relatively straightforward narrative of the procession—in
fact leads the reader through a series of reflections on representation and
its limits, both in the triumph itself and in its written versions. When he
notes that one of the paintings on display depicted the “silence” of the
night on which Mithradates fled, he is not only emphasizing the extraor-
dinary realism of this art. By introducing this literary paradox (for only
in writing can a painting show sound or its absence) Appian is also
pointing to the inevitable mismatch between the visual images and his
own written description of the ceremony—and at the same time he is
prompting his readers to consider where the mimetic games of the tri-
umph plunge into implausibility, if not absurdity.94
A different aspect of the representational paradox follows almost in-
stantly in Appian’s account, with the mention of the “images [eikones] of
the barbarian gods and their native costume.” In this case, as with Ovid’s
“painted men,” the very nature of the representation and the mimetic