Kampen, 'Myth, Meaning and Memory on Roman Sarcophagi', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-kampen-myth
@@@@95.12.21, Koortbojian, Myth, Meaning and Memory/Roman Sarcophagi
Michael Koortbojian, Myth, Meaning and Memory on Roman
Sarcophagi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
xx+172. $40.00. ISBN 0-520-08518-3.
Reviewed by Natalie Boymel Kampen, Women's Studies and Art History
-- Barnard College
nkampen@barnard.columbia.edu
Michael Koortbojian has written a learned and serious book about
some of the ways Roman artists constructed meanings on funerary
monuments. The book focuses on two primary themes represented on
Roman sarcophagi of the later second and third centuries: the
myths of Adonis and of Endymion. It asks, most importantly, how
individual motifs and narrative structures were used to
communicate meanings and how viewers came to understand those
meanings. Koortbojian thus works in the same field as some of
the most important historians of Roman art from Carl Robert and
Gerhard Rodenwaldt to Helmut Sichtermann, Guntram Koch, and
Koortbojian's teacher, Richard Brilliant.[[1]] He continues the
ongoing discussion about the interpretation of myth on sarcophagi
that began well before the famous debate of the 1940's between
Franz Cumont and Arthur Darby Nock about how much complex
philosophical or religious meaning attached to mythological
imagery in funerary art.[[2]] His contributions are not simply
to the reinterpretation of individual monuments but to the
presentation of a clear model for the way artists and viewers
understood the reuse of standard motifs that never lost their
meaningful connections to their original narrative settings. He
also reaffirms the necessity of seeing this artistic process in
relation to the visual habits of viewers whose large image
repertoire remained fixed in their memories firmly enough to
allow them to read an image within its new setting while holding
onto the old setting; thus could multiple layers of meaning come
to be apprehended. And finally, he demonstrates the extent to
which the Cumont and Nock positions have begun to yield a
synthesis, an interpretation of sarcophagus imagery as meaningful
on multiple levels yet never purely illustrative of a
priori ideas and texts.
What has happened in the field of sarcophagus studies since the
1940s has much to do with the mediation of German scholarship.
Not only have German scholars been responsible for much of the
cataloguing of mythological sarcophagi, they (although they have
hardly been the only ones) have also explored the iconography of
individual myths[[3]], examined the programs of sarcophagi in
relation to patrons' needs and to the use of groups of individual
myths and motifs[[4]], and given serious thought to the way
narration works[[5]]. What they brought to these studies, along
with superb scholarship was a position neither as rigidly
pragmatist as Nock's nor as luxuriantly romantic as Cumont's.
Looking at the way the sarcophagi worked, they assembled a corpus
of usable analyses on which studies such as Koortbojian's are
built and which permit Koortbojian and others to assume a base
level of meaning in the myths, a level onto which could be mapped
more complex individual interpretations that met the needs of
devotees or of formalists. The images are neither wall-paper nor
are they, at least not necessarily, Pythagorean debates.
All this provides the ground-work for Koortbojian's explorations
of the two myths. Building to some degree on Brilliant's
Visual Narratives, the author systematically constructs an
argument about choices and manipulations of motifs and
compositions. He demonstrates first that individual motifs were
often standardized; they could be moved from one narrative to
another, but they usually bore with them the ideas they had
carried in their original narrative settings. Thus, the Endymion
myth was depicted with certain elements normally present: The
goddess descends from her carriage, her eyes fixed on the
sleeping and often nude body of her beloved youth (Ch. 4). But
the myth might also be shown in variations, usually later than
this scene type with its implications of narrative that come from
the representation of the goddess as arriving. Cupid and Psyche
might offer a parallel (76), another repeated visit by a
night-time lover; the shepherd might suggest that the world of
the hereafter should be understood as bucolic and serene (78-84);
Endymion might appear alone as an abstraction from his story,
capable of reminding the right viewers of the whole story and its
layers of meaning (91-98, and 135-41). At the center of the
process is the implication not only that the artist has building
blocks with which to work and understands how to manipulate
meaning by conscious choices and arrangements but also that the
viewer carries with him/her a large set of understood images and
can participate in the construction of new meanings from standard
motifs through the reassembly of memory blocks.
The complexity of the building process, the way it works, is at
the heart of the book, and Koortbojian explores the variants of
the Adonis and Endymion myths as they take on and discard pieces
of both visual and literary traditions. In the process he makes
the case for several new interpretations of monuments,
interpretations that readers may find more or less convincing
depending on how willing they are to accept certain basic
assertions. An example can be found in the author's discussion
of the Adonis myth in his third chapter (Adonis Redivivus).
Here, having shown convincingly in the previous chapter that the
artists chose for depiction scenes and motifs that would
emphasize the concept of heroic death and virtus,
Koortbojian notes the absence of references to the Adonaia and to
the symbolic rebirth of Adonis. He suggests that variations on
the standard type, on one sarcophagus in the form of
rearrangement of elements, and on another through the
introduction of a scene from the Aeneas repertoire, permitted the
interpretation of the myth not only retrospectively, to
"celebrate the life of the deceased" by mythic analogy, but also
allowed "a prospective vision that augments the
mythological analogy and evokes...a new fate for its
protagonist"(49). The rearrangement appears on a sarcophagus of
the early third century in the Vatican where we read from left to
right the hero with Venus in a kind of farewell, his horse at the
ready, the couple enthoned in the center (their faces now
portraits) as a doctor and an eros tend the wounded thigh of the
upright and alert Adonis, and finally, Adonis fallen as the boar
rushes at him from the right and the goddess rushes in from the
left. Unlike the usual arrangement and representation, couple
parting at left, boar hunt in the center, and hero dying in
Venus' arms at right, the new configuration, according to the
author, emphasizes, first, the importance and the equality of the
lovers (thus connecting the deceased couple with them) that
communicates Adonis' divinization, second, the apotheosis evoked
by enthronement, and, finally, the cleansing of the hero's
"revivified body for its presence among the gods" (53). Not only
does the new arrangement convey the hope for the future of the
deceased but it also "tells the tale of Aphrodite's powers, if
not to forestall Fate, at least to have the final say in the
drama" (53).
I think this interpretation works well in suggesting how much
composition has to do with the kind of meaning communicated; it
also makes clearer the way the portraits participate in the
reconfiguration. Not all readers will be equally convinced by
all the interpretations, some of which seem to me to be
overargued on the basis of too little evidence (the analogy of
Adonis and Aeneas, for example, pp. 53-62), but the demonstration
of processes for the construction of meaning through analogy and
the uses of memory remains absolutely worthwhile and provides a
highly useful model for other interpreters.
This book raises a number of interesting questions that it
addresses less fully than those I have noted above; I hope that
Koortbojian will soon produce studies of these. Among them, I
would point first to further discussion of the role of historical
change and context in the representations of myth on sarcophagi.
Although Koortbojian is always attentive to the problem of trying
to define the structures of eschatalogical belief in the Roman
world through both textual and visual sources, and although he
has offered an interesting and useful assessment of debates about
"demythologization" (138-40), he has not given a central place to
the problem of changes in beliefs over time nor has he devoted
much space to analysis of the multiplicity of audiences for whom
there was probably less uniformity of belief than our readings of
elite literary texts and formulaic inscriptions might indicate.
Another desideratum of mine, on a more specific level, would be
further investigation of the difference that gender might make in
our thinking about these two myths, given that both are unusual
in focusing on the youthful mortal male beloved of a female
deity. To compare the treatment of Adonis and Endymion with that
of Ariadne or Rhea Silvia would be especially interesting from
the point of view of their differing degrees of passivity or
agency in the stories as represented on sarcophagi and from the
point of view as well of the difference gender makes in the
outcomes of the stories (Koortbojian addresses himself to
outcomes in important ways but without really dealing with
gender); the analogies proposed by poses and compositional motifs
as well as by pendants (Endymion and Selene with Mars and Rhea
Silvia, 102-106) beg for more exploration of gender politics, and
so does the author's glance at the analogical relationship of the
poses of Venus and Adonis with Phaedra and Hippolytus (30-31). I
am not asking him to have written a different book; I am asking
him to write yet more and to continue the discussion of
sarcophagi and meaning by pushing its limits.
NOTES
[[1]] Carl Robert, initiator of the still-ongoing series, Die
Antiken Sarcophagreliefs, began his great work in the 1880s
and 1890s; Rodenwaldt published on sarcophagi in the 1930s and
40s; and the next generation, including Sichtermann and Koch
whose work on mythological sarcophagi has been appearing since
the 1960s and 70s, and Brilliant, whose book Visual
Narrative appeared in 1984, are by no means the only scholars
to whom one might point in discussing the development of studies
of meaning and program on mythological sarcophagi. A younger
generation, of which Koortbojian is a member, has continued this
project, although others of the cohort are exploring more
historical issues of gender (as Susan Wood) or commerce (as
Patricio Pensabene).
[[2]] Franz Cumont, Recherches sur le symbolisme funeraire
des Romains (Paris, 1942), and Nock's review essay,
"Sarcophagi and Symbolism," American Journal of
Archaeology 50 (1946) 140-170.
[[3]] E.g., Helmut Sichtermann, Spaete Endymion-Sarkophage:
Methodisches zur Interpretation (Baden-Baden, 1966).
[[4]] E.g., Nikolaus Himmelmann-Wildschuetz, "Sarkophag eines
Gallienischen Konsuls," in Festschrift fuer Friedrich
Matz, ed. N. Himmelmann-Wildschuetz and Hagen Biesantz
(Mainz, 1962) 110-24, or "Sarcofagi romani a rilievo: Problemi di
cronologia e iconografia," Annali della Scuola Normale
Superiore di Pisa, ser. 3, 4.1 (1974) 139-78.
[[5]] Peter H. von Blanckenhagen, "Narration in Hellenistic and
Roman Art," American Journal of Archaeology 61 (1957)
78-83; Tonio Hoelscher, Roemische Bildsprache als semantisches
System (Heidelberg, 1987); Salvatore Settis, "La Colonne
Trajane: Invention, Composition, Disposition," Annales ESC
40.5 (October, 1985) 1151-94; and Brilliant, Visual
Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca,
1984).