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Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire By Hérica Valladares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021. Pp. 266. $99.99. ISBN 9781108835411 (cloth).

2021; Archaeological Institute of America; Volume: 126; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/718069

1939-828X

Nathaniel B. Jones,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewPainting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire By Hérica Valladares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021. Pp. 266. $99.99. ISBN 9781108835411 (cloth).Nathaniel B. JonesNathaniel B. JonesWashington University in St. Louis; [email protected] Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePainting and poetry have long been a dialectical pair. The nature of that dialectic, however, has not always been consistent. In Graeco-Roman antiquity and during the European Renaissance, for example, poets and painters alike delighted in exploring overt and subtle comparisons of the two art forms, with results ranging from symbiosis to outright paragone. From the Protestant Reformation onward, however, they began to be increasingly divorced, and in the mid 18th century, Gotthold Lessing would produce a disquisition on the proper (and to his mind, strict) boundaries between painting and poetry that did much to set the terms for modern academic discussion of the two media, a disciplinary separation that was only exacerbated by a tendency toward hyper-specialization in 20th-century scholarship. In recent decades, however, scholars of the ancient world have returned in earnest to the points of connection as well as the differences between the visual and verbal arts. Valladares’ new book is a welcome addition to this corpus, with much to teach us about how painting and poetry together shaped Roman attitudes toward love and domesticity, as well as the relations of self, other, family, and polity, in the first centuries BCE and CE.Valladares’ primary concern is with understanding the appearance in elegiac Latin poetry and Roman figural wall painting of a form of interpersonal relationship that she defines as “tenderness,” adapting Roland Barthes’ concept of tendresse to apply to a “representational mode that transforms sex into romance, giving form to the ineffable through a series of metaphorical displacements” (4). Although there was no single Latin word for it, Valladares adduces bountiful evidence for Roman tenderness, which she understands as a heterosexual, amatory relationship in which the erotic and the domestic are inextricably intertwined, and which often involves not only romantic reciprocity but also asymmetry and unfulfillment—as in the yearning male lover whose mistress’ door might close at any moment, and who eagerly overturns the power structures of conventional gender roles in an effort to demonstrate his passion.In exploring this concept, the book is structured into a long introduction and three primary chapters, capped by a briefer epilogue. It opens by looking at the broader cultural settings of the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire and then lays out the prehistory of elegiac poetry, the association of amor and domus in the work of Catullus, and the politicization of that association in Augustan poetic production, especially that of Propertius, in response to significant social and political changes in Rome. The main chapters revolve around visual case studies: the depictions of apparently normal, human couples disconnected from identifiable narratives in domestic interiors at the Villa della Farnesina in Rome; the overlooked tenderness of representations of the Cyclops Polyphemus’ love for the sea nymph Galatea in paintings from Rome and Campania, including the House of Livia on the Palatine Hill and the Augustan villa at Bosco-trecase; and the unexpectedly elegiac tenor of representations of Medea contemplating infanticide in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Though focusing on paintings, each chapter adroitly lays out the undervalued significance of poetic material to the questions these artworks give rise to. The epilogue pushes farther forward in time, to examples including the letters of Pliny the Younger and the funerary altar of Pedana, to show that in the High Empire the principles of elegiac tenderness had been thoroughly absorbed into a broad swath of Roman culture.Key to the book is the suggestion that tenderness emerges in elegiac poetry as a kind of protest against Augustan-era moral reforms, especially marriage legislation, which sought to tie down male aristocrats into socially stable, child-producing legal unions, and in so doing to also tightly control the amatory behavior of Roman women. Instead, elegists offered up a picture of a mode of love thriving outside the confines of traditional marriage, indeed a love directly subversive of that institution, insofar as it upended strictures of gender and social class. Valladares proposes that this radical, antisocial form of love, however, was then rather quickly co-opted into an Augustan-friendly practice of painting in elite houses, including some which have been associated with the imperial family itself, such as the House of Livia and the Villa della Farnesina in Rome or the Augustan villa at Boscotrecase. These paintings, for Valladares, deploy tenderness in the service of “safe” marital bliss, suggesting that a socially acceptable marriage might also be filled with the kinds of passions that had so exercised the elegists. Further softening elegy’s subversive edges are the ways in which wild and violent mythological figures, primarily Polyphemus and Medea, are incorporated into an elegiac mode of poetry and painting, making even such clear threats to social order as infanticide not just comprehensible to a Roman audience but worthy of empathy. The difference in focus between these paintings’ attempts to familiarize the mythological and the elegists’ interest in disrupting the domesticity of traditional Roman marriage highlights how tenderness could be put to strikingly divergent ends.There are potential chronological challenges to the story laid out here, especially given that the marriage reform laws for which we have the best evidence—those of 18 BCE—seem to postdate a significant portion of the elegiac corpus and that the dating of key examples of late Second Style painting remains in flux, which would suggest that we cannot trace with complete confidence a causal chain from legislative reform to poetic rebellion to painted retrenchment. Whatever the specifics of chronology, however, it seems clear that amatory tenderness was a significant part of Roman life in the first centuries BCE and CE, and that politicians, poets, and painters for whom it was a point of concern were all responding to a similar set of social conditions and artistic circumstances in unique and inventive ways.The interpretive verve with which this book approaches individual case studies throws the ubiquity and flexibility of tenderness into high relief. Valladares offers insightful observations at every turn, articulating, for example, the semantic fullness of depictions of furniture and other implements of domestic life as much as of actor and action, and exposing the unexpectedly modern urbanity of the herder Polyphemus communicating with Galatea by means of the exchange of letters, a common leitmotif of elegiac love poetry. She engages with the scholarly tradition to ground her analyses in archaeological and literary contexts, and is careful to situate the paintings she discusses within the lived experience of the houses where they were executed. What emerges is a well-rounded picture of how elegiac texts and tender images were actually operative in Late Republican and Early Imperial society, for not only their makers but their interpreters as well.Valladares’ readings of poetry and visual analyses of paintings demonstrate the range of problems and possibilities presented by amatory tenderness in the first centuries BCE and CE, which evinced the power to both construct and deconstruct the individual, family, and society. Ultimately, what Valladares shows is how tender love and its representation were beset by much the same paradoxes as Late Republican and Early Imperial Roman culture writ large, and how these paradoxes were key to its social and artistic fertility. This is a book that should find a wide readership among classicists and art historians, as well as those interested in the elegiac tradition, and it should offer a clear model for how genuinely interdisciplinary research can throw much new light onto our objects of study. I, for one, will long be looking anew for tenderness where I had not thought to see it before. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 126, Number 1January 2022 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 798Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/718069 Views: 798Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 11, 2021 Copyright © 2022 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.