![]() ![]() More difficult to get the kind of fine features It's quite hard and so unlike marble, this would have been much Reserved for the emperor, it was a very rare stone, This is a purple porpyhry and it's a stone that was Have to do with the fact that this is carved in porpyhry. Has inherited the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome and yet there is clearly this rejection of all of the naturalism Of the musculature of the bone structure? This is the art that Where is the contrapposto? Where is the understanding And it's not just the faces, it's the structure of the body. Of the way that our faces really look in the world. Where facial features have none of the subtlety Look at their faces, their eyes have been That it's the augusti who were bearded, these are the elders, whereas the clean shavenįigures are the caesars. That idea of the beards for just a moment. Sizes, aside from the fact that in each pair one is bearded and one isn't, their faces look exactly the First ofĪll the figures stand in very similar positions, their bodies are the same This period of the tetrarchy that is completely gone. Yes they might be idealized, but there was alwaysĮnough specificity so that you could recognize, inįact, their very purpose was so that the likeness of the emperor could be distributed And they hadīeen very individualized these were real portraits, There are portraits of emperors going back to the first emperor Augustus. To put this in the context of the history of portraits of emperors. To tell who's who, and I think it's important ![]() Think that the four figures that we see here represent theįour emperors and co-emperors Diocletian, Maximianus, That is two senior emporors and then there were twoĬaesars, two junior emperors. And so what he did, is he set up a structureĬalled The Tetrarchy, which means four and Might be more stable if he divided power. The Emperor Diocletian decided that the empire In the thirdĬentury the Roman Empire suffered tremendous civil wars. ![]() This is sculpture from the last phase of polytheistic Roman culture. Important to remember is that The Tetrarchs are not byzantine The Tetrarchs are not even Christian. So theyīrought back enormous spoils and The Tetrarchs likelyĬame in that group. Sacked other Christians in Constantinople. Which we know were spoils from the Fourth Crusade when the Venetians who had tried to get to the holy land, didn't make it and instead That's absolutely right, we see all kinds ofįabulously colored marbles as well as columns, On the side of the basilica that seem to have been just added. That's true,Īnd there is a sense in which there are a lot of things here And they reallyĪre embedded in the corner of the church, they Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice is a sculptural group, actually two pieces of stone put togther that show the four tetrarchs. The statues hold out a shaky unity, due to paranoia over the Empire's previous break up, but they also illustrate a fatal denial of the competing interests that would quickly destroy this political experiment. History gave lie to the four "equal," faceless, emasculated emperors. The Tetrarchy was only as good as Diocletian's sheer will. There is a hint of hierarchy, if we accept that the bearded figures are the senior emperors "protecting" and/or "delegating to" the juniors, but why don't we see three men honoring Diocletian? That was the political reality. Are they truly equal? Must we suppress identity to achieve stability? Why not a four-way embrace? Does this foreshadow the Tetrarchy's demise? Another sense of falseness comes from the unrecognizable faces. ![]() There is also an internal division created by the two embraces. Compared with the alpha male statues of Augustus, the Tetrarchs look as if they're huddled together ready to die! Gone are the Classic, masculine command of space and the idealization of the imperial, muscular body. The Empire had broken apart before being reunited, but Rome still suffered chronic problems with plague, drought, periodic wars of succession, and resulting economic problems.Ībove all, the Four Tetrarchs can be seen as an expression of crisis. Yes, the two pairs' embraces could communicate solidarity, but they could also ironically reflect defensive postures. This is clearly a Post-Classic abstraction. ![]()
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