Battle of the Romans and Barbarians (Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus)

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] It’s clear, looking at this, who the Romans are, the good guys, and who their enemy is, likely the Goths.

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:12] The Romans are portraying themselves as the good guys here, and they look more noble, more heroic. Their features are more ideal and the Goths, their enemy, look almost caricatured, with puffy noses and cheeks and wild expressions on their faces.

Dr. Zucker: [0:28] Well, they’re the barbarians, and it’s interesting because that’s something that the ancient Romans are borrowing directly from the ancient Greeks. And yet this is a style that is pulling away from the traditions of classical antiquity.

Dr. Harris: [0:41] In that we have none of that clear sense of space around them. Instead, they’re piled one on top of another.

Dr. Zucker: [0:48] That’s right. They’ve lost their autonomy in the world. They don’t have room to move. Instead, we have this dense carpet of figures. We’re looking at the “Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus.” It’s this large tomb. A huge piece of marble that has been carved in this incredibly deep relief.

Dr. Harris: [1:06] The skill of the carving, I think, is one of the most remarkable things here.

[1:10] Not only is every area of this sarcophagus covered with figures, and horses, and shields, but there are some places where the carving is so deep that the forms, the limbs, the heads of horses are almost completely offset from the background. There two to three or four layers of figures and forms.

Dr. Zucker: [1:31] Well, it’s such a dense tangle that it actually takes us a moment to be able to follow each body and understand where each person’s body begins and ends.

Dr. Harris: [1:40] When we look closely, what we see in the center at the top is obviously the hero. He’s coming in on his horse. He’s twisting around opening his right arm, bringing his horse along with him. But look how he’s offset against his horse, who looks almost wild and passionate, but he looks calm.

Dr. Zucker: [1:58] His body is splayed out, and the drape of his armor creates this radiating sense. He’s almost like a sunburst in the center of this composition.

Dr. Harris: [2:07] Yeah, and moving at the same time. In fact, everything here is moving.

Dr. Zucker: [2:10] It’s almost impossible to remember that this is just static rock, because the surface is so activated.

Dr. Harris: [2:17] When we look closely, we see that the Romans look stern and serious. For example, the figure at the far left, he’s charging into battle. There’s a sense of the seriousness of battle.

Dr. Zucker: [2:27] There are these moments of moral decision making. Look at the Roman soldier who has a captured Goth bound at the wrist. He’s holding his chin, he’s holding the back of his head, and you have the sense that he’s making a decision as whether to be merciful or to slay this prisoner.

Dr. Harris: [2:43] Strangely, as we look toward the bottom of the sarcophagus, the figures get smaller instead of larger, which we might expect. The horses along the bottom are smaller. The figures who are slain or wounded along the bottom are also slightly smaller.

Dr. Zucker: [2:58] It’s as if we are looking down from above somehow. We have a kind of interesting perspective that’s constructed in here. Certainly not linear perspective, but a kind of organizing perspective that makes sense of this complex surface.

[3:10] One of the issues that I find most interesting is the way in which the shields and other elements create canopies that frame individual figures and bring our eye deeply into this composition.

Dr. Harris: [3:22] Look at the figure who we see in profile, whose head is framed by two shields.

Dr. Zucker: [3:27] That’s right, peeking through. It’s this wonderful moment.

Dr. Harris: [3:29] And that dark shadow behind him. What’s really wonderful about the sarcophagus is the alternation of light and dark that animates the surface. Where we see the most shadow and the most deep carving is in the hair of the Goths, in their faces. The smooth surface of the marble is reserved for the Romans, who are less deeply carved.

Dr. Zucker: [3:49] That’s right. That texture is associated with the enemy and a kind of roughness.

Dr. Harris: [3:53] We see more and more sarcophagi — the plural of sarcophagus — beginning in the 2nd century in Rome and continuing into the 3rd century.

Dr. Zucker: [4:02] Right. Previously, the Romans had cremated their dead, but we know that by the 2nd century, it had become fashionable to bury the dead in a sarcophagus. After all, it does give one an opportunity to create these monumental sculptural forms.

Dr. Harris: [4:15] Art historians have been trying to identify the figure whose sarcophagus this is. They have one or two ideas, but we’re not really sure. It must have been someone wealthy and powerful, because this is an enormous piece of marble that would have taken a very long time to carve.

Dr. Zucker: [4:31] What we can see here is a choice to move away from the high Classical Greek carving that we associate with the great sculptures of the Parthenon that we know the Romans also loved. Instead, we see the attention being put on the interaction between these figures.

Dr. Harris: [4:47] It’s important to remember that in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the empire was not as stable as it was in the 100 or 200 years after Augustus. There’s civil war, there’s instability in the empire generally. It’s possible to associate this style with these political and historical changes.

Dr. Zucker: [5:05] It might be too much to say that the chaotic qualities of the surface seem to mirror the chaos of the empire. But I think it is appropriate to say that we see a turning away from the high Classical tradition, and the invention of a more complex style that is less concerned with the elegance of the individual human body.

[5:23] [music]