The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History Guy P.R. Métraux Lauren Hackworth Petersen. The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 294, 8 colour plates, 140 black and white illustrations. ISBN 13 978-0-521-85889-2 (cloth), 10 0-521-85889-5 (paper). Lauren Petersen addresses one of the most difficult questions that historians and art historians can ask themselves: how can we tell “good” taste from “vulgar” taste in any given historical epoch? Seneca thought he could tell: he disdained “freedmen’s baths” (balnea libertinorum; Ep. 86,7). In societies as much stratified by status as by wealth, to denote something as “vulgar” to identify inferior social background and/or doubtful personal choices is a pretty subtle judgement. In addition, judging something as “vulgar” or stereotypical of a less-than-distinguished social class is a real and very volatile problem in modern history-writing: historians do have to consider what the exercise of snobbery might mean in history as well as what it means in their own interpretations. [End Page 160] Tacitus defines the exercise of taste as studio magnificentiae: it involved the exterior signs of wealth (ops), a house (domus), and “extras” (paratus). Tacitus goes on to contrast “good” taste with what he considers to be excess in domestic decoration among the plebs and provincials (Ann. 3.55). For him, vulgarity (which he does not name but defines as the opposite of moderatio) had abounded in the 20s CE, as it presumably did in his view in the late first century. Cicero tells us that Lucullus had to maintain a great state of luxury in his villa at Tusculum to keep up with his neighbours, a knight and a mere freedman (Leg. 3.30). As the social weight of freedmen (libertini) increased in Italy in the late Republic and early empire, defining and despising them also increased in Latin literature, even though many had become rich, bought and decorated houses in up-to-date taste, got Augustus’ encouragement with the civic priesthoods of the Augustales, and could hold high municipal or even imperial positions. Disdain for freedmen also appears in the modern interpretation: what seemed unusual in decoration was deemed typically vulgar, and what was nicely done was considered mere striving by otherwise low-class men (6), in a “damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t” situation. This is the problem that Lauren Petersen addresses: the place of the libertini in the material culture of Rome and, just as important, the historian’s ability to assess that place. Her method is a “case-study approach” (2) centered on monuments, houses, and tombs in the Bay of Naples, Ostia, and Rome; this approach is conspicuously effective in giving voice, from material remains, to individuals and families, as many scholars (notably Paul Zanker and John R. Clarke) have shown. There is a larger historical picture here: how to explain the disparities and varieties of Roman visual art and domestic decoration, and how to assess these varieties and disparities in social terms. Were they in conflict, in “trickle-down” relationship, in comfortable parallel, or in some other association? Was there a visual habit associated with freedmen that determined some of these varieties and disparities? Ultimately these questions are of great art-historical import, because in their determination lies the answer to the next great transition, namely the sources of the styles and iconographical strategies of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In her introduction (1–13), Petersen posits a “Trimalchio Vision” in modern historiography (10), namely “belittling or reductive [commentary] about those outside elite circles [which] limit our appreciation of Rome’s complex past,” and she calls for a more nuanced picture of both Trimalchio and his fellow-freedmen as well as for a fresh look at their choices in the visual arts, architecture, patronage, commemoration, and social participation. [End Page 161] The volume is in two parts. The first part has three case studies, the first on the Iseum of Pompeii, the second on houses of freedmen Augustales in Pompeii, the third on the Tomb of Eurysaces at the Porta Praenestina in Rome. The second part...