Da vincis ghost, p.3
Da Vinci's Ghost, page 3
The body of empire. The very concept was an Augustan innovation. Before Augustus the Latin word imperium (“empire”) had signified an abstract power—a right of command held temporarily by an elected official or military commander. Many people had been able to possess this power at once, much as today many people can be said to possess media “empires.” The related term imperator (“emperor”) described nothing more than a commander’s fleeting status as a victor and could be used only between the time of a great victory and a return home in triumph. To claim it after that, he had to return to the battlefield and earn it again.
Augustus changed all that. By the time he took power Romans had already begun to imagine that their imperium, won year after year on the battlefield with the help of the gods, might allow them to become masters of the world. But they hadn’t thought of this imperium as something innately geographical or physical—as a world body, that is, made up of different member provinces, all set permanently in their rightful place and controlled by a single head of state. But that’s exactly what Augustus wanted Rome to become: a perfect body—his perfect body—of empire.
AS A PHYSICAL specimen, Augustus fell considerably short of anybody’s ideal.
Small and lame, with bad teeth, a crooked nose, and eyebrows that had grown together, he suffered from kidney stones and bladder trouble. Spots, birthmarks, and ringworm scars covered his body. Coins struck early in his career, when he still called himself Octavius, probably preserve the best surviving image of what he actually looked like—and they appear to depict a real person, imperfections and all (Figure 4). But coins struck after he renamed himself Augustus, in 27 B.C., present him with a bold new look (Figure 5).
Figures 4 and 5. Left: Octavius, the individual, before 27 B.C.
Right: Caesar Augustus, the ideal, after 27 B.C.
It was all part of his larger campaign of transformation. He had succeeded in bringing an end to civil war because, the story went, he was divi filius: the son of a god. The title derived from his uncle Julius Caesar, who, two years after having been murdered in 44 B.C., had been the only Roman other than Romulus ever to be officially deified by the Roman Senate. Not long before his death, Caesar had secretly adopted Octavius as his rightful heir, which in the eyes of the law did indeed make him the son of a god—and after consolidating power Augustus seems to have decided he should look the part.
Coins offered Augustus a way of introducing himself to Romans all over the world, literally by putting his new image into the hands of the people. A mint, it’s easy to forget, was an early version of the printing press, and it made possible for Augustus a feat that Johannes Gutenberg often is mistakenly given credit for: the cheap and easy distribution of the exactly repeatable image. Coins, Augustus and his supporters realized, were a powerful means of broadcasting his new look and all that it symbolized. As citizens carried his likeness all over the Roman world, they would spread the message that prosperity and increase derived from one source alone: Caesar Augustus. No longer would the forces of ugliness, imperfection, disease, and disorder tear Rome apart. Just as Octavius had remade his own body in an august new form, he would now remake his body of empire. And its coherence and harmony would derive from one source above all: the ideal human form.
Augustus turned to the art of ancient Greece to find models of that ideal. “He was interested in Greek studies,” his biographer Suetonius wrote, “and in these he excelled greatly. … There was nothing for which he looked so carefully as precepts and examples instructive to the public or to individuals.” The most celebrated model appeared in the work of the sculptor Polykleitos, revered by the Greeks and Romans alike as one of the greatest artists ever to have lived. Some four centuries earlier, Polykleitos had written a book titled the Canon, now lost, in which he laid out the mathematical—that is, “canonical”—proportions of the perfect human figure. Needless to say, it was male.
Polykleitos had done more than codify those proportions in writing. He had embodied them in a statue. Also called the Canon, the statue took the form of a nude athlete holding a spear and resting his weight on one foot, in a position of perfect equipoise: a pose designed to suggest a combination of tranquility and strength, motion and rest (Figure 6).
The Spear Bearer of Polykleitos, copied again and again in antiquity, was a timeless classical ideal. Romans knew it well. Cicero described it as an exemplar of the beautiful, to be emulated and learned from. The first-century authority Quintilian described it as “full of dignity and holiness”—the very traits embedded in the name Augustus. The great Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder weighed in, too. “Polyclitus,” he wrote, “made a statue that artists call the Canon, and from which they derive the principles of their art, as if from a law of some kind. And he alone of men is deemed to have rendered art itself in a work of art.”
Figures 6 and 7. Left: Roman copy of Polykleitos’s Spear Bearer, embodying the ideal proportions of the human form. Right: The Prima Porta statue of Augustus, based on the model of the Spear Bearer (c. 19 B.C.).
Few people outside elite circles in Rome ever had a chance to see Augustus in person. So somebody—perhaps Augustus himself, or perhaps a sculptor commissioned to make a statue of him—had a brilliant idea. The familiarity of the Spear Bearer as an icon made it a potentially powerful propaganda tool. Why not make the bodies of the Spear Bearer and Augustus one and the same? Why not, with the help of sculptors throughout the empire, erase Augustus’s imperfections and instead demonstrate to the Roman world that he incorporated a timeless ideal?
Statues of Augustus cast in this new mold began to proliferate all over the Roman world after 27 B.C. Along with the coins minted after that date, they defined him visually to a degree that’s hard to appreciate today, when political leaders are on constant public display in the media, warts and all. And nothing defined him more fully than the statue known as Augustus of Prima Porta, a work often copied in Roman times that is well worth pondering as an expression of the Augustan ideal (Figure 7).
In the statue Augustus poses as an emperor in triumph, clad in military regalia. With his right arm raised in the pose of an orator, he addresses the world, a pose that, in the language of classical sculpture, suggests an aura of divinity. Superficially, the statue looks quite different from the Spear Bearer—but in fact the resemblances are numerous and would have been obvious to educated Romans. The two statues correspond very closely in size and proportion; both have hair cropped symmetrically, in the classical Greek style; both have soft, idealized facial features; both possess a peaceful, remote look that conveys a sense of power calmly restrained; and both are cast in that characteristic one-footed stance. The message would have been hard to miss: Augustus embodies the Polykleitan ideal.
There’s more. Unlike the Spear Bearer, Augustus wears clothes, including a glorious breastplate depicting an event that justifies his pose as temporary emperor: his recent victory of the Romans over the Parthians, in modern-day Iran. The breastplate shows not only the Parthians in the east but also other peoples and provinces in the south, west, and north. It’s an allegorical world map, in other words, made an official part of the Roman body of empire.
The statue also has cosmic dimensions. A number of classical deities appear on the breastplate, among them, at the top, the twins Apollo and Diana, the gods of the sun and the moon. Romans looking at the statue would have understood the symbolism: Augustus and his body of empire mirror the divine perfection of the cosmic order.
Based on the ideal human form, reaching out in all directions to encompass the known world, and aligned with the cosmic order, Augustus in the Prima Porta statue sets in stone a powerful new Roman ideology of empire. His perfect form embodies Rome—and Rome’s perfect form, in turn, embodies the world. This was an idea that would animate Roman political thought for generations. Seneca would capture it best, in an address to the emperor Nero. “Your spirit will spread little by little through the whole great body of empire,” he declared, “joining all things in the shape of your likeness.”
AUGUSTUS, SOME SCHOLARS claim, had a special fondness for style guides and rule books, works that wove disparate strands of information into a corpus, or complete body of knowledge. This was precisely what Cicero had just done for the art of oratory, in On Rhetoric, and what Varro had just done for Latin grammar, in On the Latin Language. But when Augustus took power and began rebuilding Rome, no such guide existed for architecture. Even the idea of the field as a theoretical discipline, rather than as just a manual craft, had only begun to emerge. The term architectura itself—a Latin coinage probably derived from Greek roots—dates only to the 40s B.C. or so.
Observing from the sidelines as Augustus began to create his empire, Vitruvius must have sensed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He could fill this void. If at the outset of the greatest building campaign the world had ever known no comprehensive guide to architecture existed—well, then, why shouldn’t he be the one to write it? How better to help set the empire in order, curry favor with the world’s most powerful ruler, and make a lasting name for himself? Why not, as he would soon put it, “bring the whole body of this great discipline to complete order”?
Even during his active career, Vitruvius seems to have stolen time from his official duties to study architectural theory. He found it a fascinating but frustrating pursuit. Over the years—especially late in his career, after Augustus, for reasons unknown, granted him a stipend that allowed him some leisure in his retirement—he managed to locate a number of specialized treatises, primarily by Greek authors: commentaries on individual buildings, discussions of specific technical problems, guides to systems of proportions. But they were “incomplete drafts,” he complained, “scattered like fragments.” He felt he could do better—and so he set to work. By the mid-20s B.C. he had produced De architectura libri decem, or Ten Books on Architecture—which, naturally, he dedicated to Augustus.
The Ten Books is a curious hybrid. At one level, it’s a rich repository of technical information for practitioners, divided, as its title suggests, into ten discrete books, each of which addresses a different subject. Vitruvius provides advice on just about everything he can think of: how to determine sites for new buildings and new cities; what kind of sand to use in mixing concrete; where to find different kinds of timber; how to construct arches, retaining walls, courtyards, villas, bathhouses, theaters, and temples; what to consider when installing floors and ceilings; ways to find water and build aqueducts; and how to make different kinds of machines—odometers, cranes, hoists, water pumps, catapults, siege engines, and more. The book is much studied in architecture programs today because it was also the first to codify the famous architectural orders used by the Greeks: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian.
But all of this practical information had limited uses. A true architect can’t just be a master of his trade, Vitruvius insisted. He had to be the kind of well-rounded person who, centuries later, would come to be known as a Renaissance man. “He ought to be both naturally gifted and amenable to instruction,” he wrote, and then continued, “Let him be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.”
Why such a broad definition of the architect—and, by extension, architecture? Because, according to Vitruvius, architecture is the defining human art. It creates civilization. It constructs homes and lays out cities, bringing people together. It designs temples, revealing the will of the gods and aligning the man-made with the divine. It produces machines, guaranteeing victory in times of war, and prosperity in times of peace. In sum—as Vitruvius described it and as Augustus was practicing it—it builds empire.
MUCH OF WHAT Vitruvius has to say in the Ten Books involves some very basic principles. Again and again, whether the matter at hand is the assembly of a retaining wall or the layout of a city, everything comes down to the manipulation of squares and circles—or, as Vitruvius put it, “the use of the rule and compasses.” But in writing about circles and squares he was writing about more than just geometry, as his readers knew full well.
Philosophers, mathematicians, and mystics in the ancient world held the view that the circle possessed special symbolic powers. It represented unity and wholeness, the cosmic and the godly. Plato, for example, in one of his most influential and widely read works, the Timaeus, had likened the cosmos to a single world body animated by a world soul, the entirety of which was contained within a sphere, which he described as “a figure the most perfect and uniform of all.” This idea appealed to many Romans in the age of Julius Caesar and Augustus, especially as they developed their twin obsessions with order and empire. “I can see nothing more beautiful,” Cicero wrote not long before Vitruvius produced the Ten Books, “than that figure which contains all others, and which has nothing rough in it, nothing offensive, nothing cut into angles, nothing broken, nothing swelling, and nothing hollow.” Only circles and spheres “have the property of absolute uniformity in all their parts, of having every extremity equidistant from the center,” he continued; “there can be nothing more tightly bound together.”
Cicero had not just Plato but Aristotle in mind. Aristotle had described the cosmos as a concentric set of spheres, each of which spun at a different rate around a central axis. The word cosmos, meaning “order” in Greek, implied all of this—as does the word universe, with its suggestion of a giant single turning entity. The earth was the midpoint of the whole system. It didn’t move, but around it rotated the spheres of the moon, the sun, the planets, and finally the stars, together creating the apparent motions of the heavens.
Vitruvius devoted considerable time to describing this system in the Ten Books. “The cosmos,” he wrote, “is the all-encompassing system of everything in nature, and also the firmament, which is formed of the constellations and the courses of the stars. This revolves ceaselessly around the earth and sea.” The shape of the cosmos would seem to have little to do with the practice of architecture, but in fact, according to Vitruvius, it had everything to do with it—in the design of the cosmos, as he put it, “the power of nature has acted as architect.” And what the power of nature, or God, had done for the cosmos, he suggested, the human architect should for his creations—which is why some of the earliest surviving illustrations of the geocentric cosmos appear not in works of ancient astronomy or philosophy, as one might expect, but in the practical treatises of the very kinds of people Vitruvius worked closely with as an architect: Roman land surveyors (Figure 8).
God as the architect of the world: this was an idea that would echo down through the ages. Cicero himself had made a similar point not long before. The geometrical perfection of the cosmos suggested to many the presence of “not only an inhabitant of this celestial and divine abode,” he wrote, “but also a ruler and governor—the architect, as it were, of this mighty and monumental structure.”
The analogy made perfect sense to Vitruvius, who, after all, had dedicated his book to Rome’s divine ruler and governor, Augustus. The job of the architect, he proposed, was to survey the cosmic order of things, grasp its circular animating principles, and then bring them down to Earth. And the way to do that, he went on, was with the help of the set square.
In human affairs as in architecture, Romans in the Augustan era fixated on the idea of the square as a complement to the idea of the circle. A good citizen had to be not only well-rounded in the liberal arts but also a model of physical and moral rectitude: “foursquare in hands and feet and mind, and fashioned without a flaw,” as one Greek writer had put it. Rome itself had supposedly been plowed in a circle at its founding, hence the relationship that Varro, for one, suggested between the words urbs (city) and orbis (circle)—but in founding the city, the story went, Romulus had divided the circular city into quarters for the purposes of augury, setting in order what future Romans would proudly call Roma quadrata (squared Rome).
Figure 8. One of the earliest surviving depictions of the spherical cosmos, set square against the horizon with the earth (terra) at its center. From a sixth-century copy of a Roman land-surveying treatise.
So how would Romulus, in the mythical role of augur-surveyor, have squared his city? Imagine him on a hilltop late one evening, gazing out at the circular horizon. Looking up at the sky, he would have easily located the north celestial pole—“the pivot of the universe,” as one Roman surveyor would later describe it. This would have allowed him to divide the sky into quadrants based on the four cardinal directions. A sense of how he might have worked survives in a description by the Roman historian Livy, who wrote in the age of Augustus. “The augur, with his head veiled,” Livy recorded, “holding in his hand a crooked and knotless staff called lituus … prayed to the gods and fixed the regions from east to west, saying that the southern parts were to the right, and the northern to the left.” The Romans called each quadrant a templum: a sacred space carved out of the sky, subject to the act of contemplatio. These four parts they would often then divide into twelve smaller sections, each associated with a god who corresponded to the celestial bodies contained in that part of the sky, as in the templum of Mars—which, by extension, led to the idea of a temple as we now understand it, and the original sense of religious contemplation.
