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In Focus: Works of Art
Ars Fecundus
Cultural Confluence in Religious Art of the Roman Mediterranean
By GAIL S. MYHRE
August 28, 2009
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Head of Serapis
Egyptian, early Roman (after 31 B.C.)
Marble
10 3/8 x 7 3/8 in. (26.4 x 18.7 cm)
Diam.: 6 3/4 in. (17.2 cm)
© Brooklyn Museum |
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Architectural Relief with Head of Dushara-Dionysus
ca. 1st Century A.D.
Petra
Department of Antiquities, Amman, Jordan |
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Mosaic of Menorrah
Roman (3rd-5th Century A.D.)
Tunis, Tunisia
57 x 89 cm (22 7/16 x 35 1/4 in.)
© Brooklyn Museum |
Tales of Christians thrown to the lions notwithstanding, the Roman religious tradition was one of tolerance and adaptation. Romans were quite willing to find in provincial (pagan) gods reflections of their Hellenistic tradition. Their legionaries, stationed for long terms far from home, often adopted the beliefs of the places where they were garrisoned. Foreign tenets and creeds traveled back to Italy with returning soldiers and took root in the fertile soil of the existing pantheon.
Roman Saturnalia evolved from a festival that commemorated the ritual midwinter unbinding of Saturn (the god of sowing and grafting, his image traditionally girded with ropes during the rest of the year) to include a celebration of Sol Invictus, the unconquered and reawakening Sun God. The cult of Sol Invictus was itself a variation on the Mithraic cults of Persia. One can see from this ancient celebration how religious practices in the Mediterranean world tended, under Roman influence, to comingle and evolve into new and significant forms.
Roman Art of Asia and Africa
The rule of the Romans and their commercial prosperity linked peoples completely alien to each other. They fused ideas from opposite ends of the then-known world. In the arts, this blending is seen most dramatically in works from areas of Roman expansion into North Africa and the Near East. In these areas, previously under Parthian and Egyptian domination and influence, Roman religious ideas and art began to synthesize with those earlier forms.They created an entirely new (yet still completely familiar) conception of deity.
The Brooklyn Museum's marble Head of Serapis (after 31 B.C.) represents the Hellenistic-Egyptian god. Apis was an Egyptian bull deity whose ritual sacrifice represented the renewal and deification of the ruler. Upon death, Apis became identified with Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld. Under the rule of Ptolemy Soter (ca. 367-283 B.C.), the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty, efforts were made to integrate native Egyptian beliefs with those of the region's Hellenistic rulers. This was expressed in sculpture through the adoption of a strictly anthropomorphic model proclaimed to be Osiris-Apis. This god became fully Osiris and was not simply the expression of the Egyptian ka (life force). This deity eventually became Serapis.
Roman Art of the Middle East and Judaea
Similar convergences occurred throughout the Roman world. Along the path of rich trade routes, the Nabataean people (living in present-day Jordan) were strongly influenced by classical traditions before Rome's annexation of their capital city, Petra. These influences are visible in a stone sculpture of Dushara, a chief Nabataean god depicted as another eternally youthful and self-renewing deity, Dionysus, the Greek god of wine.
It should not be supposed that this melding took place only in the realm of the gods. The very display of religious sentiment was also changing as the art forms used for this purpose began to be disseminated from one culture to another. Mosaic was not very much a Jewish art form. Yet the floor of a synagogue from Aquae Persianae (now Hamman Lif in modern Tunisia) was paved with tiles in a distinctly Jewish expression of faith.
A Common Cultural Heritage
While Roman rule united the whole of the known world, a common cultural idiom began to assert itself, one based in the Hellenistic tradition that liberally and openly incorporated artistic and religious sensibilities from every society it touched. This beautifully cross-fertilized tradition included images and iconography that could be easily recognized, its imagery understood by any citizen from Gallia to Judaea.
As the Roman Empire began to collapse, so too did its religious legacy came apart, its cultural heritage divided east and west into the Byzantine and Carolingian empires. Latin, the language of Rome, degenerated into several Romance languages. Changes also occurred in visual expression. The artistic division between eastern and western Roman traditions continued through the European Renaissance into the present day.