Thus the scene is set for the next relief: the Romans crossing the Danube on pontoon bridges to make a bridgehead on the other bank. Who can doubt the absolute necessity of reinforcing that border which was so exposed to barbarian attacks by establishing outposts in their territories? The ranks of soldiers walk over the bridges; at their head are the legions’ standards; the figures evoke the clanking tramp of marching troops, with helmets dangling from their shoulders and mess-tins tied to poles.
The protagonist of the story is, of course, the Emperor Trajan himself, who is portrayed sixty times in these reliefs; one could say that each episode is marked by the reappearance of his image. But how does one distinguish the Emperor from the other characters? Neither his physical aspect nor his dress offer distinctive signs; it is his position in relation to the others that denotes him without any shadow of doubt. If there are three figures in togas, Trajan is the one in the middle: indeed, the two on either side look at him, and it is he who directs matters. If there is a row of people, Trajan is always first, or he is in the position of haranguing the crowd, or of accepting the submission of the conquered: he is always in the place where the gaze of other people converges, and his hands are raised in eloquent gestures. Here, for instance, you can see him ordering a fortification to be built, pointing to the legionary who is sticking his head up from a ditch (or from the waves of the river?) and carrying on his shoulders a basket full of earth from the excavations for the foundations. Further on he is portrayed against the background of a Roman camp (in the middle of it is the imperial tent) while the legionaries push a prisoner in front of him, holding him by his hair (the Dacians can be made out by their long hair and beards) and, using their knees (almost as if tripping him up), they force him to kneel at his feet.
Everything is very precise: the legionaries are distinguished by their ribbed breastplates (a piece of armour with horizontal ridges), and, since they also had to perform the duties of sappers, we see them building a wall with stones or chopping down trees still with their breastplates on—an unlikely detail but one which lets us know who they are—whereas the auxilia (auxiliaries), who are more lightly armed, and are often portrayed on horseback, wear a leather waistcoat. Then there are the mercenaries who come from the conquered peoples: they are bare-chested, armed with clubs and have features that suggest their exotic origin, including Moors from Mauretania. All the soldiers sculpted in the reliefs, thousands and thousands of them, have been catalogued with precision because Trajan’s Column has hitherto been studied primarily as a document of military history.
More problematic is classifying the trees, which are represented in a simplified form, almost as ideograms, but still capable of being grouped into a restricted number of clearly distinct species. There is one kind of tree with oval leaves, and another with wispy leaves; then there are oaks, with their unmistakable foliage; and I think I can recognize a fig-tree as well, sticking out from a wall. Trees constitute the most frequently recurring landscape element, and often we see them falling beneath the axes of the Roman woodcutters, either to supply beams for fortifications or to clear the way for roads. The Roman advance opens up a path in the primeval forest just as the sculpted story opens up a passage in the block of marble.
As for the battle scenes, each of them is also different from the next, as in great epic poems. The sculptor has frozen them at the crucial point where the outcome is decided, arranging them according to a visual syntax that clearly stands out with great elegance and nobility of form: the fallen are at the bottom like a frieze of supine corpses at the edge of the ‘strip’; then there is the movement of the two armies clashing, with the victors in the dominant position; above them again is the Emperor, and in the heavens a divine apparition. And also just as in epic poems, they always have a macabre or violent detail: here is a Roman holding in his teeth the severed head of a Dacian enemy, the long-haired head dangling from his mouth; and other severed heads are presented to Trajan.
One gets the impression that every battle is also distinguished by a motif of geometric stylization that is different every time: for instance, here we see the Romans all with their right forearm raised at right angles, all in the same direction, as though throwing a javelin; and immediately above them is Jupiter, soaring with his robe like a sail, raising his right hand in exactly the same gesture, brandishing what was certainly a golden thunderbolt that has now disappeared (we are supposed to imagine these reliefs as coloured, just as they were originally), an unmistakable sign that the gods favoured the Romans.
The rout of the Dacians is not chaotic: instead, they maintain a mournful dignity even in their suffering. Away from the melee two Dacian soldiers are carrying a wounded or dead comrade: this is one of the most beautiful friezes on Trajan’s Column, and perhaps of all Roman statuary, a detail that was surely the source of numerous Christian Depositions. A little above them, amidst the trees in a wood, the Dacian king Decebalus sadly contemplates the defeat of his men.
In the following scene a Roman with a blazing torch is setting fire to one of the Dacian cities. It is Trajan himself who is giving him the order to do so, standing there behind the soldier. Tongues of fire (we imagine them painted red) lick round the windows while the Dacians start to flee. We are just about to condemn the Roman conduct of the war as merciless when on closer examination we see sticking up from the walls of the Dacian city poles with severed heads stuck on them. Now we are ready to condemn the Dacians as cruel and to consider the Romans’ revenge as justified: the orchestrator of the reliefs knew well how to balance the emotional power of the imagery with his pursuit of a celebratory strategy.
Then Trajan receives an embassy from his enemies. But by now we have learned to distinguish between the Dacians wearing a pilleus (a round cap), who are nobles, and those who have long hair and wear no headgear, in other words the ordinary people. Well, the embassy is made up of men with long hair, and that is why Trajan does not accept them (his gesture with three fingers is a sign of rejection); it is clear that he is demanding to speak to those at a higher level (which will soon happen after further Dacian defeats).
Suddenly we see an unusual sight in this story that is totally male dominated, like so many war films: a young woman with a look of desperation on a ship that is leaving a harbour. There is the crowd bidding her farewell from the jetty, and a woman holding out a baby boy towards the departing woman, no doubt a child of hers whom the mother has been forced to leave behind. Inevitably Trajan is here too, witnessing this farewell. The historical sources explain the significance of this scene: she is the sister of King Decebalus, who is being sent to Rome as war booty. The Emperor raises one hand to say farewell to his beautiful prisoner and with the other points to the boy: perhaps reminding her that he will hold the little boy as a hostage? Or promising her that he will have him educated in the Roman way in order to make him a subject king of the Empire? Whatever its significance, the scene has a mysterious pathos, heightened by the fact that in the same sequence, we’re not sure why, we have just seen a raid on animals, with images of slaughtered lambs.
(Female figures appear also in one of the cruellest scenes on the Column: furious-looking women are torturing naked men—Romans, it seems, since they have short hair, but the significance of the scene remains obscure.)
The break between the scenes is marked by some vertical element, for instance a tree. But sometimes there is also a motif that continues over the break, from one episode to another, for instance the waves of the sea over which the prisoner princess sails away become the current of the river which in the following scene overwhelms the Dacians after their vain attempt to attack a Roman stronghold.
Alongside the horizontal con
tinuity (or rather diagonal continuity since we are dealing with a spiral winding round a marble trunk) we notice motifs that are linked vertically from one scene to another up the height of the Column. For instance: the Dacians have alongside them the Roxolani, cavalrymen whose bodies are entirely covered by armour made of bronze scales, and their horses too are all covered with these scales; their showy presence, almost a foretaste of medieval imagery, dominates in a battle by the river; but in the scene of another battle which comes immediately above this one we see another of these scaly creatures lying dead, stretched out like a kind of man-fish or reptile-man. Later on the movement of a battle is conveyed by ranks of oval shields advancing in a diagonal line; in the portion of column above it we see a series of shields of the same shape but this time deployed horizontally: they have been flung to the ground by enemies who have surrendered in another battle.
The spiral twists and follows both the development of the story in time and its journey through space, so the story never returns to the same place: here Trajan boards ship in a harbour, there he lands and starts marching to pursue his enemy, suddenly there is a fortress attacked by the Romans in testudo formation, and further on the field artillery enters the scene: the carrobalistae or catapults mounted on carts. Everywhere the frieze records the fallen and the wounded on both sides, as well as the medical care for which Trajan’s army was famous. One can clearly see the effort that has been made not to play down the contribution from any of the Roman army’s corps: if a wounded legionary is shown, by his side is placed another wounded man from the auxilia.
After the final battle of the first Dacian campaign Trajan is seen receiving the supplications of the defeated, one of whom embraces his knees. King Decebalus is there too amongst the suppliants, but set apart and more dignified. A winged Victory separates the end of the story of the first campaign from the beginning of the second, with Trajan setting sail from the harbour of Ancona. But for the moment this is as far the scaffolding goes, and I have not been able to see how it ends. I will tell you the rest of the story as soon as I have been able to see it for myself.
Finally we must mention the great mystery that surrounds this monument: a column so high and totally covered in scenes that have been sculpted in minute detail but cannot be seen from the ground. Of course, in the first century AD there were tall buildings around here that have now disappeared, whose terraces looked out on to the Column; but the distance from which these spectators had to observe it was not such as could allow a ‘reading’ of all the details, and in any case it was impossible to follow the continuation of the story along its spiral path. (This scaffolding is perhaps not too different from that used by the archaeologists sent by the sovereign heads of Europe to go up and make their drawings and casts: François I, Louis XIV, Napoleon III, Queen Victoria. More adventurously Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli had himself hoisted up there on a fire-fighters’ ladder. These explorations, however incomplete and irregular they were, have been carried out from one century to another, and it is thanks to their results that we have been able to study Trajan’s Column up till now.)
It is not only the addressee of this elaborate visual message that remains a mystery. We know nothing of the system whereby the eighteen ‘rocchi’ (or cylindrical marble blocks, hollow inside and with a spiral staircase in the centre), which make up the Column’s shaft, were hoisted on top of each other. Nor do we know whether these ‘rocchi’ were sculpted on the ground one by one or only after they had been raised up into place.
Then there are other mysteries: how could the ashes of Trajan and his wife have been walled into the base of the Column if a mandatory Roman law forbade the burial of the dead inside the pomerium (city precincts)? (Those collected in a golden urn were not his real ashes, but it was as if they were: Trajan, who had died at Selinunte and was cremated there, was represented at his triumph in Rome by a wax model, which was later burned with the honours due to an Emperor who was destined to ascend into heaven.)
On the other hand, the major interests that the Roman conquests in the Black Sea area entailed (Dacia was rich amongst other things in goldmines) fully explain the grandiose nature of the cult of Trajan (the celebration feasts lasted 180 days; the donation that each citizen received was the most generous ever recorded) and the complex of gigantic monuments around the Emperor’s tomb and temple. What remains for us all the way down to our own times is this epic in stone, one of the most copious and perfect visual narratives in history.
[1981]
The Written City: Inscriptions and Graffiti
When we think of a Roman city in imperial times we think of temple colonnades, triumphal arches, baths, circuses, theatres, equestrian monuments, busts and herms, bas-reliefs. It does not occur to us that this silent scenery made of stone lacks the most characteristic element, even from a visual point of view, of Latin culture: writing. The Roman city was above all a written city, covered by a layer of writing that went across pediments, tombstones, shop-fronts. Armando Petrucci writes:
Writing was present everywhere, painted, scratched on to surfaces, engraved, placed on wooden tablets or traced on to white squares . . . sometimes advertisements, sometimes political graffiti, sometimes to do with funerals, with celebrations, now public, at other times very private, notices or insults, or good-humoured memories . . . displayed everywhere, with a preference, it is true, for some specially chosen spots such as squares, fora, public buildings, or necropolises, but these were only for the most solemn forms of inscription; not like other writing which was scattered all over the place wherever there was a shop-entry, a crossroads, a piece of blank stucco at human height.
However, in the medieval city writing disappeared: both because the alphabet had ceased to be a medium of communication within everyone’s reach and because there were no more spaces available to accommodate writing or to attract people’s eyes. The roads were narrow and winding, the walls all protuberances and bumps with ornamental mouldings under arches; the place where all discourses about the world were transmitted and kept was the church, whose messages were oral or figurative rather than written.
These two opposing images are suggested by Armando Petrucci at the opening of his article ‘La scrittura fra ideologia e rappresentazione’ (Writing between Ideology and Representation), which—in 114 pages and 122 illustrations—constitutes the first historical outline ever of inscriptions in Italy from the Middle Ages to today, and not only of inscriptions but of every example of visible writing and thus, in short, of what today we call graphics. Grafica e immagine (Graphics and Images) is in fact the title of the new volume of the Storia dell’arte italiana (The History of Italian Art), published by Einaudi (Part III, volume 2, tome 1), of which Petrucci’s is one of the chapters.
In the medieval city Roman inscriptions continued to speak with their own solemn voice that few now understood. At the same time the tradition of writing perfectly executed characters was preserved in the pages of manuscripts written inside cells by monks who were scribes, using techniques and models that were by now completely different. As a result, when from 1000 onwards words were needed for the walls of cathedrals and palaces, there would be two letter-forms they would use for their inscriptions in faulty Latin, either as alternatives or in combination: straight block capitals, as in ancient inscriptions, or the alphabet they found in books, which was Gothic, spiky and twisted, and which filled the walls thickly as though they were pages.
Nothing seems more static and codified than Latin capitals. And yet it is precisely when the Roman letter-form comes back to prominence in the fifteenth century that the adventures of each letter can be followed in the restricted range of whimsical ornamentation the
y developed. The letter Q is the one that allows itself most whims, since its most characteristic feature is its ability to wag its tail as it wants: a cat-letter that like a feline curls round itself and moves its tail, now lengthening it under the following letter, now hurling it in lightning-sharp whiplashes, now dragging it lazily and making it curve in either convex or concave undulations. But A too can afford some liberties, for instance resting all its weight on its left leg, or (in less orthodox variants) bending its bar at an angle, while M can choose between a position of being at ease, with its legs spread wide, or one of attention with its legs vertical and parallel. The G can end with a rounded curl or with a sharp tooth or with a pug-nosed hook, or close in on itself like an alembic. The letter X can escape its arithmetical and algebraic vocation by varying the angles of its crossing or allowing one arm to stretch out in undulating movements. As for Y, it never misses an opportunity to stress its non-Latin origin by adopting the form of a palm-tree with curved leaves. Sometimes conventions of epigraphic abbreviation prompt the invention of new signs, such as an NT which is condensed into one ideogram, a letter which itself acts like a bridge and not by chance appears in the plaque celebrating the construction of a bridge dedicated to a ‘pontiff’ (the Ponte Sisto, 1475).
Initially determined by the act of engraving with a chisel or writing with a pen, the shape of alphabetic characters quickly adapted to the needs of the new art of printing, which soon held sway over all types of writing. And printed frontispieces taught a new sense of proportions, of relationships between white spaces and black characters, which was immediately picked up in stones and plaques. The composition of pages in print soon produced bizarre, spectacular paginations, as in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna, a book printed in Venice but conceived in Rome.