The Boscoreale cups: copies of a lost monument? Fred S. Kleiner ANN L. KUTINER, DYNASTY AND EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS. THE CASE OF THE BOSCOREALE CUPS (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1995). Pp. xiv + 387, 125 figs. ISBN 0-520-06773-8. $75. In 1895 a spectacular hoard of gold and silver plate, secreted at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and never recovered by its owners, was discovered in the wine cellar of a villa rustica near Boscoreale. The cache, which quickly found its way onto the art market, consisted of a full range of tableware, from spoons and forks to ostentatious display pieces of extraordinary quality. The hoard seems to have represented the accumulated heirlooms of the family that owned the villa and to comprise items manufactured primarily during the late 1st ©. BC. and the early Ist c. A.D. The Boscoreale treasure, save for one magnificent dish that had already been acquired by the British Museum, was purchased by Baron E. Rothschild, who donated all but a half dozen of his pieces to the Louvre. The entire assemblage, including the pieces retained by Rothschild, was published in a grand folio volume by P. Héron de Villefosse in 1899. Almost a century later, in 1990, the Rothschild pieces were reunited with the rest of the Boscoreale hoard. In the interim, unfortunately, some of the pieces that were not part of the original gift to the Louvre were damaged and the 1899 monograph remains the only documentation of the appearance of these objects at the time of their discovery. Among the items that Rothschild kept for his private delectation are the two unique historiated silver drinking cups that are the subject of Ann Kuttner’s 1995 monograph. The cups, adorned with narrative reliefs celebrating Augustus and Tiberius, are of the highest impor- tance for the history of Roman art and although they figure in many survey books, they have not been the subject of a comprehensive inquiry since Héron de Villefosse’s initial publication. It must therefore be said at the outset that Kuttner’s book is very welcome indeed. Her mono- graph is the revised version of a dissertation submitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1987. The research, we are told, was completed in 1989, with “sporadic revisions into early 1991” (xii). Why the author did not take into account any of the many studies on Augustan art and Roman imperial iconography that appeared between 1991 and 1995 is unclear, and the omission from the bibliography of one of the very few detailed pre-1989 discussions of the Boscoreale cups is inexplicable: L. Polacco, “II trionfo di Tiberio nella tazza Rothschild da Boscoreale,” in Atti e memorie dell’Accademia patavina di scienze lettere ed arti 67.3 (1954- 55) 253-70. It has long been assumed that the “historical reliefs” on the two silver vessels in the Roths- child collection were not conceived by the silversmith but were derived from one or more monumental prototypes. Kuttner embraces this hypothesis and carries it further. She emphati- cally argues that the compositions on the cups are not merely based on state reliefs but are copies of “a unified set of monumental relief panels” (2) and that her book is “a monograph on a monument” (xi), a single “Julio-Claudian imperial state monument” (2) that “remained on public view at least into the middle of the third century” (156). About this, Kuttner is certain. This reviewer is not. 1 Since publication of Kuttner, the Boscoreale cups have continued to figure in general studies and more focused articles, most recently V. Huet, “Stories one might tell of Roman art: reading Trajan’s column and the Tiberius cup,” in J. Elsner (ed.), Art and text in Roman culture (Cambridge 1996) 9-31, esp. 24 ff.378 Fred S. Kleiner Kuttner’s detailed discussion of the four narrative scenes on the two Boscoreale skyphoi opens with the allegorical “panel” depicting a togate Augustus seated on a low dais holding a rotulus and a globe and receiving the homage of Venus (who presents the emperor with a wreath-bearing Victory), Amor, Roma and the Genius Populi Romani (more likely Virtus and Honos, pace Kuttner), Mars, and personifications of several provinces. This is a remarkable and singular composition, as all commentators have observed, because it shows the emperor, seemingly during his lifetime, receiving the homage of deities and personifications. Many scholars have asserted that such a composition is unthinkable on a public monument before ‘Augustus’s death and elevation to the status of dius and have consequently dated the Boscoreale cups to the period after A.D. 14. Others have rejected the theory of a monumental prototype and regarded the allegorical scene as the invention of the silversmith, a practitioner of one of the “minor arts” working in a “private” context. Kuttner goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the depiction of a seated toga-clad Augustus in such superhuman company should not surprise us. Among the works that she cites in support of her hypothesis that this (as well as all the other Boscoreale compositions) is a copy of a lost monumental relief are a seated statue of Augustus holding Victory reproduced on a denarius reverse; a statuary group in the Forum Iulium that included personifications of 14 Asia Minor cities and a seated portrait of Tiberius; the statues of a seated emperor and Italia depicted on the Anaglypha Traiani; and a presumed cult statue of an enthroned Hadrian surrounded by the famous series of province reliefs in the cella of the Hadrianeum. But are these comparanda truly comparable? Kuttner, with disturbing regularity, chastises her colleagues for failing to match her own methodological rigor. In chapter 2, for example, she is critical of those who “inappropriately compare closed panels [i.e., those on the Boscoreale cups] to long processional friezes — namely, those of the Ara Pacis” (35), but she herself is guilty of a much more serious confusion of genres in arguing her own case. The placement of the province reliefs in the Hadrianeum is still much disputed and even if Kuttner’s reconstruction is correct, a series of under-lifesize relief figures displayed in the vicinity of a colossal cult statue is in no way comparable to the reliefs on the silver cup in which gods, personifications, and the emperor move and interact in a narrative context. The Hadrianeum was, moreover, erected a century and a half after the Boscoreale skyphoi were manufactured. The isolated image of Augustus on denarii struck in the east is also irrelevant. Nor are the Tiberian, Trajanic, and lost Augustan statuary groups that Kuttner postulates comparable to the Boscoreale narrative. One may see, for example, Nero accompanied by Pax as well as by Victory in the statuary group atop his arch on the Capitoline hill in Rome, but it is not until the Arch of Titus that we see any comparable mixing of personifications and humans in narrative relief — and the reliefs on the Arch of Titus are posthumous depictions of the deified emperor. By contrast, on the Boscoreale cup depicting the triumph of Tiberius, no divinity or personification is to be seen — only a lowly serous publicus. I would not rule out @ priori that monumental public relief sculpture portraying Augustus associating with gods and personifications existed, even in Rome, during the emperor's life- time. So much is lost that anything is possible, but the evidence we now possess speaks to the contrary. What true parallels we have for the allegorical elevation of Augustus to the divine sphere are, at present, all in the realm of the “minor arts”. Could this be pure coincidence, the freak product of a fragmentary record? Yes. By pointing to a similar association of emperors, divinities, and personifications in later statuary groups, has Kuttner demonstrated that monumental publicly displayed relief sculpture of this kind did exist under Augustus? No. The importance of this question cannot be underestimated, as Kuttner herself has acknowledged (36- 37), because if any one of the Boscoreale “panels” belongs to the realm of the “minor arts” alone, then the central thesis of her monograph is shattered. The other side of the “Augustus cup” is not an allegory at all but “a classic example of Roman documentary historical relief” (95) and Kuttner is at her best in dealing with this com-The Boscoreale cups: copies of a lost monument? 379 position. Augustus is once again seated and central and receives a group of foreigners who are presented to him by a Roman military officer whom Kuttner convincingly identifies as Drusus the Elder. The composition is thought by Kuttner to portray the delivery in 13 or 10 B.C. of Gallic princes to Augustus, who will raise and educate them in Rome under his aegis, an event also portrayed on Augustan coins struck at Lugdunum in 8/7 B.C. Similar, pethaps identical, foreign princes may appear on the Ara Pacis, as B. Rose has forcefully argued? Together, Rose and Kuttner make a compelling case that these children are not Gaius and Lucius Caesar, as many leading scholars believe, and 1 find their thesis very attractive, if still problematical, because a dynastic procession on the Ara Pacis without the two imperial heirs is difficult to accept. To state, as Kutter does, that “it is now clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that children of foreign rulers march in the processions of the Ara Pacis” (p. 203) is going too far. The second Boscoreale skyphos focuses on Tiberius rather than Augustus and bears represen- tations of a triumphal procession and a sacrifice. There has been considerable disagreement in the past as to whether these two scenes are to be read in sequence and, if so, whether the sacrifice to Jupiter is that which follows the triumphus or a propitiatory sacrifice before the imperator leaves the city. Kuttner believes the latter is the case, but it is also possible that the two panels are not meant to form a sequential narrative and that they are separate scenes with a common protagonist, as everyone agrees is the case for the “Augustus cup.” In a 1983 article (‘The sacrifice in armor in Roman art,” Latomus 42, 287-302), I observed that the “Tiberius cup” was the only instance before the Antonines of a mortal shown sacrific- ing while wearing a cuirass and carrying a spear (and, I would now add, with his head bare), and I questioned whether this was possible in Rome during the Early Empire when there seems to have been a prohibition against the wearing of armor within the pomerium. Furthermore, Tiberius is accompanied by a lictor whose fasces has an axe attached, which also seems to be incompatible with a ceremony inside the walls of Rome. Kutter gets around these difficulties by asserting that there is no difference between a paludatus and an officer in full battle-dress. Yet the pictorial record is clear on this point: there are hundreds of paludati in Roman art who do not wear a cuirass, including sacrificing paludati. Since Kuttner assumes that the Boscoreale panels are exact copies of monumental reliefs, she cannot dismiss these details as errors or intentional deviations from the model(s) on the part of the silversmith — although they might be. She suggests, as have others before her, including Héron de Villefosse in 1899, that the sacrifice in question is the nuncupatio votorum on the Capitoline hill before Tiberius left Rome for battle. She may in fact be correct, but her case is built on surmise, not on any written or pictorial evidence. “The cup panel must be a nuncupatio votorum because that is the only ceremony that could possibly account for the depiction of a group consisting of an armed imperator and lictores paludati, but no soldiers, sacrificing at the Capitolium. The cup in turn becomes our first pictorial document from the Republic and early Empire for this particular ceremony’ (141). This kind of reasoning does not inspire confidence. In her concluding chapter, Kutter sketches a self-portrait of herself as a Roman art histor- ian, placing her work in a line with that of Hélscher, Zanker, Simon, Fittschen, Coarelli, Torelli, and Brendel, and she invites her readers “to judge the efficacy and clarity of [her] approach” (199) to the “case of the Boscoreale cups” and to Roman art in general. As my pre- vious comments make clear, I find her approach wanting. I cannot subscribe to the central tenet of Kuttner’s book, namely her implicit characterization of the designer of the two Rothschild skyphoi (and “minor artists” in general) as a passive recipient of official iconography, reproducing monumental panels exactly, even though working at greatly reduced scale, on a curved surface, and in metal using the repoussé technique, rather than on a large stone slab employing hammer, chisel, and drill. This scenario is unlikely prima facie and in every other 2 "Princes and barbarians on the Ara Pacis,” AJA 94 [1990] 453-67.380 Fred S. Kleiner instance of “copying” — e.g., Greek paintings on wooden panels echoed on frescoed Roman walls; Greek bronze statues translated into marble; statues, buildings, and narrative scenes re- configured on Roman coins — it is patently not the case. In fact, even in the copying of official portraits, modem scholarship has long recognized that not every portrait we have is a faithful replica of a fixed type, and an elaborate vocabulary of nuanced terms has been spawned to describe more accurately the process of replication, adaptation, and modification. To approach the Boscoreale cups as if they are photographic reproductions of marble panels, reliable in every detail, is methodologically unsound Ifor one do not believe that the scenes on the Boscoreale cups copy a single set of monumental reliefs that once decorated a single lost monument in Rome, whether one dates that monument to the Augustan or to the Tiberian period. The central problem with Kuttner's thesis is her failure to allow, at the very least, for the inevitable adjustments that the Boscoreale silversmith would have had to make in transferring the compositions of moumental stone reliefs onto the curved sides of the silver cups he made for a private home, even if his aim was to copy. And she does not allow for the possibility — an exceedingly likely one, I think — that the Boscoreale cup designer drew on multiple sources and/or a repertory of motifs and compositions that were widely used in the Early Empire. One could argue, after all, that every one of the Boscoreale “panels” is a “copy” without concluding that a single source lies behind all four. Moreover, the type of original monument that Kuttner postulates — “the quadratic base of a monument such as an honorific column bearing a portrait of Augustus ... the best thing I can think of for a monument needing four reliefs of equal dimensions” (196-97) — is as yet undocumented before the 2nd c. A.D. Kuttner has even chosen a site for this imaginary monument — the Forum of Caesar — but this is pure invention. There is much of value in Kuttner’s treatise on the Boscoreale cups, but anyone who accepts her premise that we can now add a new monument to our corpus of historical relief sculpture, a monument with four — and only four — reliefs that look exactly like those on the silver cups will, in my opinion, be making a mistake. "One can so easily ... assert too much rather than too little,” as Kuttner rightly observes (200). The goal of reconstructing lost monuments of Roman art based on the evidence provided by the “minor arts” is a laudable one, but the search must be conducted in a more nuanced and less dogmatic way, with allowance made for modification and adaptation, for conflation of models, for addition and subtraction to meet the requirements of a different scale or a different medium or a different patron, even for human error and misunderstanding on the part of the “copyists”. Kuttner has shed more light on the “case of the Boscoreale cups” than anyone before her, but the case remains unsolved. Art History Department, Boston University