The danger of golden statues

Alongside the many complaints about the “Trump Gaza” video posted on Truth Social, my own email inbox and social media feeds have been full of one simple question: did Roman emperors really have golden statues of themselves, as Mr Trump does in this video? The answer is a clear: “Yes, but…”.  For it is, of course, more complicated than that.

One thing is certain. The image we have now of Roman imperial statues – as a line-up of white marble images, plus a few bronzes – is very misleading. For a start, many of those marble statues would have been brightly painted anyway and wouldn’t have gleamed white as they do now. (A re-tinted plaster cast in the Ashmolean Museum of the famous statue of the emperor Augustus from his wife’s villa just outside Rome gives one idea of what the overall effect might have been.)

A plaster cast of emperor Augustus, Ashmolean Museum | © Enrique Íñiguez Rodríguez (Qoan), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

But that’s only the beginning. Patterns of survival have ensured that far fewer sculptures in any sort of metal have made it down the ages, compared to the number in marble. What now looks like a largely marble repertoire with a few bronzes thrown in would originally have been much more evenly balanced between stone and metal (or even weighted in the latter’s favour). The reason is simple in the case of bronze. It could easily and usefully be recycled – meaning that very many bronze images of emperors probably ended up as missiles and other forms of military hardware. Marble was left to dominate.

There’s been a similar dramatic loss (though for a different reason) with two-dimensional portrait painting. It can be easy to forget that there ever was a flourishing Roman school of portraiture as we would recognize it (though largely painted on wood, not canvas). But there are enough casual references in ancient literature to suggest that you would have found such images of emperors everywhere across the Roman world. They haven’t survived, not because they were recycled, but because wood doesn’t last for millennia, except in very special climatic conditions (hot and dry). It is no coincidence that the only major surviving piece of imperial portraiture on a wooden panel comes from Egypt: it depicts the family of Septimius Severus.

“Severan Tondo” | © Giovanni Battista Bertucci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

So, what of gold and precious metals? There were certainly some, though many fewer, imperial statues in these materials, for the most part – so I would guess – not solid, but gold leaf over a wooden frame or gilded bronze. They too would have been good candidates for recycling, but more likely into jewellery than ammunition. So, the traces now are relatively sparse. But we are told, for example, that the emperor Caligula commissioned a golden statue of himself to be placed in a temple dedicated to his own “divine power”. And to make the point that it really was him, the statue was supposed to have been dressed each day in the clothes that the emperor himself was wearing (this is all recounted by Suetonius, Life of Caligula, 22).

But the fact that the monstrous Caligula is a prime example is a bit of a giveaway. For being represented in luxury materials was never a good sign, but a mark of dangerous excess and overweening power. In his Res Gestae (What I Did), chap. 24, Augustus notes that he removed eighty silver statues of himself that had been erected by others in the city and had them melted down and exchanged for gold offerings to the god Apollo. It was a public boast of both his modesty and his piety – and a clear indication that even silver statues might be seen to be going too far.

That point is made even more vividly by the elder Pliny when he discusses the riches of the victory parade in 61 BCE celebrated by “Pompey the Great” (one of the “almost autocrats” of the late Republic, who preceded full-blown autocracy). On display was a portrait head of Pompey himself made, this time, entirely out of pearls. Pliny fulminates: this was a gross luxury; it was effeminate (pearls were “women’s things”); and the head itself, on its own, rather than part of a full-length statue, was an ominous warning that Pompey would end up decapitated, which indeed he later did (his head – in a moment recreated in the picture at the head of this post – presented to his rival Julius Caesar).

The clear message is that those politicians who commission luxury images of themselves should watch out.

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