A face that never aged
In the late Republic, Roman leaders liked to be shown old, wrinkled and tough, a style historians call verism, that is, realism used to suggest experience and duty. Augustus, who became the first emperor in 27 BCE, broke with it. His portraits show a calm, ageless young man with a Greek-style face, and they stayed young until his death in 14 CE.
The message was clear: the civil wars were over, and a new age of peace had begun under a ruler who looked like a hero. The most famous example is the Augustus of Prima Porta, where the emperor stands in armour with bare feet, halfway between general and god.
Coins in every pocket
Most Romans never saw an emperor. They saw his face on coins, which carried his portrait, his titles and short slogans: victory, peace, concord, the return of lost standards. A coin changed hands thousands of times, so it reached markets from Britain to Syria, and new emperors put out new portraits as soon as they came to power.
Altars, arches and columns
In the city of Rome, emperors spoke through monuments. The Ara Pacis, the Altar of Augustan Peace, was decreed in 13 BCE and dedicated in 9 BCE. Its marble frieze shows the emperor’s family walking in procession, children included, as if peace and dynasty were the same thing.
Victory had its own language. The Arch of Titus, set up around 81 CE, shows soldiers carrying the treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem through Rome. Trajan went further: the column dedicated in 113 CE wraps the story of his wars in Dacia around a shaft of marble, scene after scene. Two centuries later, the Arch of Constantine borrowed reliefs from earlier emperors to place Constantine among the best of them.
Buildings as gifts
Emperors also gave the public buildings that carried their names. Vespasian and Titus built the Colosseum on land that Nero had taken for his private palace, a clear message about who the city belonged to. Hadrian rebuilt the Pantheon and kept the old inscription naming Agrippa, which made him look modest and respectful of the past. Baths, markets and aqueducts did the same work across the empire, together with the building techniques that made them possible.
Even the statue of an emperor on horseback was a message. The bronze Marcus Aurelius, made around 175 CE, shows him raising his hand to address his people, a gesture of command and of mercy at once.
Erasing an emperor
If images could make a ruler, they could also unmake him. When an emperor was disgraced after death, the Senate could order his name removed from inscriptions and his portraits destroyed or recut, a practice modern historians call damnatio memoriae. A painted wooden panel of the family of Septimius Severus, from around 200 CE, shows it plainly: after Caracalla had his brother Geta murdered, Geta’s face was scraped off the picture.
Art that was not propaganda
Not all Roman art served the emperor. Wealthy families decorated their houses with wall paintings, mosaics and portraits of their ancestors, and ordinary people commissioned tombstones showing their trades. The buried towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum preserve this private side better than anywhere else, and remind us that imperial propaganda was only one voice among many.
Where to see it
In Rome, the Arch of Titus stands in the Roman Forum, Trajan’s Column beside the Imperial Fora and the Ara Pacis in its museum by the Tiber. The Augustus of Prima Porta is in the Vatican Museums, the original Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoline Museums.
Sources
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline, “Roman Portrait Sculpture: Republican through Constantinian” and “The Roman Empire (27 B.C.-393 A.D.)”.
- Museo dell’Ara Pacis, the altar and its frieze.
- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antikensammlung, Severan Tondo.
- P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1988).
