“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” After years of civil war, Rome had finally entered an age of peace, and as part of trying to build a new image of himself as well as establish his dominion and power, Augustus invested in a building program, erecting great statues of himself - and perhaps the most famous of these statues was the Augustus of Prima Porta.
Today, politicians think very carefully about how the public perceives them. If we were to look at some of the posters, leaflets and commercials we’re bombarded with around election time, we see that at the core of it, we are told three things. Who the politician is, what they stand for and what agendas they intend to promote. Similarly, Roman art was very much intertwined with politics and propaganda, with the Augustus of Prima Porta being no exception.
This statue has been dated to the beginning of the 1st century A.D. It was found in the ruins of the Villa of Livia, Augustus's wife, at Prima Porta on the via Flaminia. It is almost certain that the statue was originally painted, but so few traces remain today (having been lost in the ground and having faded since discovery) that historians have had to fall back on old watercolours and new scientific investigations for evidence. Vincenz Brinkmann of Munich researched the use of colour on ancient sculpture in the 1980s using ultraviolet rays to find traces of colour. Today, the Vatican Museums have produced a copy of the statue so as to paint it in the theorized original colours, as confirmed when the statue was cleaned in 1999.
Since at least the 18th century, the familiar sight of Roman sculptures that lack their original paint has encouraged the idea that monochromy is the natural condition for classical sculpture, but surface treatment to discover how a statue was originally painted, is now recognized as being integral in finding out just what the overall effect of the sculpture would have been.
The statue is thought to have been based on another statue created by Polykleitos, known as the Doryphoros. It is a typical Greek sculpture depicting the beauty of the male body.
Polykleitos sought to capture the ideal proportions of the human figure in his statues and developed a set of aesthetic principles governing these proportions that was known as “Canon.” Though we do not know the exact details of Polykleitos’s formula, the end result, as manifested in the Doryphoros, was the perfect expression of what the Greeks called symmetria. This statue was sculpted in the fifth century B.C.E, and Augustus saw this period as “the golden age” of architectural and sculptural design and was obsessed with recreating it - which is why his statue is modelled after Doryphoros.
We see that both have a similar contrapposto stance (leaning on one leg) and both are idealized. That is to say that both Augustus and the Spear-Bearer are portrayed as youthful and flawless individuals: they are perfect. The Romans often modeled their art on Greek predecessors. This is significant because Augustus is essentially depicting himself with the perfect body of a Greek athlete: he is youthful and healthy, despite the fact that he was middle-aged at the time of the sculpture’s commissioning.
Augustus is wearing a military breastplate along with a senatorial toga displaying his control and power over the Roman military and Roman politics. The breastplate itself is covered with figures that communicate additional propagandistic messages. Scholars debate over the identification of each of these figures, but the basic meaning is clear: Augustus has the gods on his side, he is an international military victor, and he is the bringer of the Pax Romana, a peace that encompasses all the lands of the Roman Empire.
In the central zone of the breastplate are two figures, a Roman and a Parthian. On the right, the enemy Parthian returns military standards. This is a direct reference to an international diplomatic victory of Augustus in 20 B.C.E, when these standards were finally returned to Rome after a previous battle. Surrounding this central zone are gods and personifications. At the top are Sol and Caelus, the sun and sky gods respectively. On the sides of the breastplate are female personifications of countries conquered by Augustus. These gods and personifications refer to the Pax Romana. The message is that the sun is going to shine on all regions of the Roman Empire, bringing peace and prosperity to all citizens. And of course, Augustus is the one who is responsible for this abundance throughout the Empire.
Beneath the female personifications are Apollo and Diana, two major deities in the Roman pantheon; clearly Augustus is favoured by these important deities and their appearance here demonstrates that the emperor supports traditional Roman religion. At the very bottom of the cuirass is Tellus, the earth goddess, who cradles two babies and holds a cornucopia. Tellus is an additional allusion to the Pax Romana as she is a symbol of fertility with her healthy babies and overflowing horn of plenty.
Augustus is depicted as barefoot, a pose reserved specifically for heroes and gods. To the Romans, a living man could not be a god. Along with this, at the feet is a small cupid riding a dolphin. The dolphin became a symbol of Augustus’ great naval victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, a conquest that made Augustus the sole ruler of the Empire. The cupid astride the dolphin sends another message too: that Augustus is descended from the gods. Cupid is the son of Venus, the Roman goddess of love. Julius Caesar, the adoptive father of Augustus, claimed to be descended from Venus and therefore Augustus also shared this connection to the gods - emphasising his key concept of Pax Deorum - the peace of the gods.
The Augustus of Primaporta is one of the ways that the ancients used art for propagandistic purposes. Overall, this statue is not simply a portrait of the emperor, it expresses Augustus’ connection to the past, his role as a military victor, his connection to the gods, and his role as the bringer of the Roman Peace.
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