In “The Aeneid,” his classic epic about the founding of Rome, Virgil wrote of that city’s destiny — of its leader young Romulus building “walls of Mars” and of its people, the Romans, for whom there would be “no limits, world or time,” only “the gift of empire without end.”
That empire, of course, would come stumbling to an end, but the city would endure as a repository of Classical art and architecture, as the seat of popes and as a myth-cloaked metropolis that remains an irresistible magnet for travelers and tourists. In his engrossing, passionately written new book, “Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History,” Robert Hughes, the former art critic for Time magazine and the author of critically acclaimed works like “The Fatal Shore,” gives us a guided tour through the city in its many incarnations, excavating the geologic layers of its cultural past and creating an indelible portrait of a city in love with spectacle and power, an extravagant city that, in Mr. Hughes’s words, still stands today as “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error.”
As readers of Mr. Hughes’s earlier books well know, he is highly opinionated, especially on all matters aesthetic, and never pulls his punches. “We cannot make the mistake with Romans of supposing that they were refined, like the Greeks they envied and imitated,” he writes near the end of this volume. “They tended to be brutes, arrivistes, nouveaux-riches. Naturally, that is why they continue to fascinate us — we imagine being like them, as we cannot imagine being like the ancient Greeks. And we know that what they liked best to do was astonish people — with spectacle, expense, violence, or a fusion of all three.”
The reader need not agree with Mr. Hughes’s acerbic assessments or even be interested in Rome as a destination on the map to relish this volume, so captivating is his narrative. Although his book is a biography of Rome, it is also an acutely written historical essay informed by his wide-ranging knowledge of art, architecture and classical literature, and a thought-provoking meditation on how gifted artists (like Bernini and Michelangelo) and powerful politicians and church leaders (like Augustus, Mussolini and Pope Sixtus V) can reshape the map and mood of a city. The one complaint a reader might lodge is that this book does not contain enough photographs to illustrate its richly evocative text.
These pages include some razor-sharp portraits — Seneca is described as “a hypocrite almost without equal in the ancient world,” Caravaggio as a saturnine genius who “thrashed about in the etiquette of early Seicento Rome like a shark in a net” — and some astute deconstructions of masterworks, like Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The chapel’s ceiling “is almost all body, or bodies,” Mr. Hughes writes. “The only sign of a nature that is not flesh is an occasional patch of bare earth and, in the Garden of Eden, a tree.”
Strewn throughout this volume, too, are intriguing asides about Rome’s fascination with water and its plethora of fountains; its architects’ love of different colors of marble, gathered from the far reaches of its empire; and the engineering feats involved in, say, executing the wish of Pope Sixtus V to move a 361-ton Egyptian obelisk from the back of the new Basilica of St. Peter’s to the front. When the task had been completed, the pope reportedly crowed, “The thing that was pagan is now the emblem of Christianity.” That was the point, Mr. Hughes adds: to Sixtus, moving the obelisk, “achieved with such immense, concerted effort and determination, symbolized the work of the Counter-Reformation, the reunification of the Church, the defeat and pushing back of heresy.”
Writing in vigorous, pictorial prose, Mr. Hughes expertly conjures the triumphal, over-the-top, Hollywood-like pageantry that Roman leaders excelled at. Imperial victory celebrations would often start with a long procession of spoils and loot (which could take as many as three days to pass by), followed by an address by the conquering hero.
His face, Mr. Hughes writes, “would be painted with red lead, to signify his godlike vitality,” and he “would be arrayed in triumphal purple, with a laurel crown on his head and a laurel branch in his right hand.” The victory parade would wind around the city and conclude at the Capitol, where further rituals, including sacrifices, would be performed at the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.
“Julius Caesar’s sense of display and drama was so developed,” Mr. Hughes goes on, “that when he walked up the final steps to the Capitol, he had 40 elephants deployed to his right and his left, each carrying a torch in its trunk.”
Mr. Hughes is not only adept at making us see the grandeur and spectacle of Rome, but he also reminds us that our image of that city, at least in its Classical period, “comes down to us in a very edited form,” shaped by the art and artists of later years, who gave us a city that is “mostly white,” filled with white columns, white colonnades, flights of white stairs.
In fact, he says, “the real Rome” of Augustus or even the second century A.D. was a “Calcutta-on-the-Mediterranean — crowded, chaotic, and filthy,” with most people living in tottering, jerry-built blocks of flats, “which rose as high as six stories and were given to sudden collapse or outbreaks of fire.”
In imperial Rome, Mr. Hughes reports, an estimated one person in three was a slave, and ordinary citizens were kept in line with free food and state-sponsored festivities, which included chariot races, melodramatic plays and bloody gladiatorial combat pitting man against man or man against beast. By the reign of Emperor Claudius, he says, Rome had an astounding 159 public holidays a year, about three a week.
Propaganda, of course, was another essential element of imperial rule, and Roman emperors became adept at using art to memorialize themselves. Trajan’s Column, a cylinder about 100 feet tall and wrapped in a continuous stone frieze, Mr. Hughes writes, is, at once, “an astonishingly ambitious piece of propaganda” and “a huge ancestor of the comic strip.”
As for Emperor Augustus, he seems to have preferred sheer quantity: a 2001 study cited in this book said there were more than 200 surviving heads, busts and statues of Augustus, and estimated ancient production at some 25,000 to 50,000 portraits in stone.
“All over the empire, sculptors were busy churning out standardized effigies of Augustus, mostly in marble but some in bronze,” Mr. Hughes writes, noting that this production seemed to be organized in “efficiently factorylike ways.” There “was more in common between classical Roman art and the techniques of Andy Warhol than one might at first suppose.”
When it comes to Rome in more modern times, Mr. Hughes grows increasingly dyspeptic. With the exception of filmmakers like Fellini, De Sica and Rossellini, he complains, the past 50 years have “yielded little of interest, culturally, politically or especially artistically,” and he assails Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy as a vulgar, meretricious place, “gutted by the huge and ruthless takeover of its imagination by mass tourism and mass media.”
And yet, under “the dreck and distractions of overloaded tourism and coarsened spectacle,” Mr. Hughes says, “the glories of the remoter past remain, somewhat diminished but obstinately indelible” — remnants of Rome’s splendiferous earlier lives.