This collection of studies, deriving from a workshop held at the Swedish Institute in Rome on 16–17 April 2014, is a novel contribution to a growing literature on the history of the emotions. First of all, it is Roman. Latin studies have been late to the topic, which remains dominated by Hellenists. This book redresses that balance by placing Roman culture at the centre in its own terms while thematising emotions in general, rather than one emotion in particular. Secondly, it embeds ancient emotion studies more firmly in the work of historians and psychologists of the emotions in the early modern world. This has been relatively rare in studies of ancient emotions, with the unintended effect of projecting a notion of ‘ancient Greece’ as a unique case among human cultures. Roman culture seems to be more easily understood in continuity with later traditions and our own psychological perceptions, counterbalancing the alterity of the ‘Greeks’. Last, but not least, the volume highlights the visual dimension of cultural history. It engages with actual images right from the start, provides a theoretical justification for the approach (while also recognising its limits), and discusses many concrete examples, taking a broad conception of the visual, including performance and imagery as well as artefacts.
The collection is opened by Susan Matt, with a chapter on ‘recovering emotion from visual culture’. This rounded introduction has much of value to say on the differences between textual and visual sources, on the tension between particularism and universality in the study of emotions and on the need to attend to demographic variability (by class, gender, or age) as well as to historical change. The chapter is an excellent introduction to the subject, offering a bridge between the usual preoccupations of studies of emotions in antiquity and those of scholars working on other periods.
The body of the collection can be subdivided into studies prioritising figurative evidence — the majority — and those analysing written testimony of the visual. Those in the first category obviously tend to focus on the more intense, externalised emotions which can be expressed through image: here grief, cheer and anger. Larsson Lovén (ch. 9) looks at the conventions and restrictions of imperial-period funerary reliefs, an important chapter in the stylised repertoire of human emotions, posing the key question of comparative psychology about the grief felt at the death of children in a high-infant-mortality context. Her careful exploration of the wording and imagery of funerary monuments, aided by socio-economic considerations, leads her to confirm the common ground between the ancients and our own feeling of exceptional grief at the death of children (though it was surprising not to see engagement with the work of Christian Laes here).
In chapter 3, J. Rasmus Brandt explores death through material less familiar to a general reader in history of emotions, Etruscan tomb paintings. He shows how these images channel grief and despair, but also the less expected extremes of joy and celebration. Elements of ritual and liminality associated with death are brought into play here, and also the construction of the Etruscans as hyper-sexualised people whose customs, in many ways, are seen to reverse ‘decent’ Graeco-Roman life. Brandt also offers more concrete reflections about the audiences, practitioners and demographics of funerary rituals among the Etruscans, rounding off a rich introduction to this culture through the lenses of human emotion.
Joy, cheer and lightness are more straightforwardly on the foreground of the next two chapters. Hedvig von Ehrenheim examines ‘humour in Roman villa sculpture’ (ch. 4), focusing on the outward expression of the emotion, laughter. She takes us on a walk through the garden of a Roman villa, exploring it as a place of otium and conversation, whose intellectual and emotional stimuli are mirrored, if with a light and playful touch, in the sculptures populating it — a carefully and idiosyncratically chosen landscape of parodistic characters and poses. Laughter is more theoretically explored in John R. Clarke's study covering jokes and humoristic effects in Pompeian houses and vases (ch. 5). Clarke's interpretations are both sociological and poetic, drawing particularly on Bakhtinian notions of the ‘carnival’. The images here are another visual treat. Arja Karivieri then turns to a different aspect of Pompeian wall painting and mosaic: the multimedial complicity between text and image, in its various inflections.
Anger, finally, is a key emotion in antiquity, seen as problematic and pathological but also dignified by particular circumstances. In chapter 8, Kristine Kolrud looks at the allegories of fury painted by Vasari in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. It is an excellent study in figurative reception, exploring the political and ethical articulations of an emotion that was seen as characteristic of the upper class in the Roman world in a Renaissance court, in the light of the elaboration they offer of Latin epic loci (Virgil but also Statius) and of ancient mythological narratives more broadly. Texts are a key aid to the reading of images, as two other chapters illustrate in more detail. Gesine Manuwald (ch. 2) considers a number of ‘performative’ Latin texts, mostly drawn from drama and oratory, to map the Romans’ awareness of facial expressions as communicative and never entirely controllable. She surveys passages from Seneca, Cicero and other authors, looking for the visual expression of emotions and the thematisation of visualisation. Texts are also under the spotlight in Selliaas Thorsen's study of ‘emotions of erotic love in Roman poetry’ (ch. 7), which considers the well-known combination of love and vision in textual sources (mostly Virgil and Ovid). The connection to vision could perhaps have been examined more deeply — one misses a reference to the wider context of erotic vision in ancient culture — but the chapter is a delightful survey of famous loci of Augustan poetry.
More attention to the framing and conventionality is required when emotions are described in accounts of the prominent and celebrated, as the final two chapters show. Johan Vekselius's ‘Trajan's tears’ (ch. 10) explores this key bodily symptom, and more generally the voluntary display of grief and commotion, in the portrayal of Roman emperors, considering their relationship to virtue and humanity, but also conventionality and possibly hypocrisy. Marina Prusac-Lindhagen then turns to the portrait genre of figurative art in the centuries after the third c.e. She explores the negotiation of conventions, reactions and constructions such as restraint and dignified self-control which come into play in the genre of portraiture. This study contains many important theoretical observations — on Freudian approaches to figurative art and art history, on the relationship between power and collective psychology and on the history of emotion in general, all with reference to highly stylised visual evidence.
As Jan Bremmer rightly remarks in his Epilogue, the strength of the volume is the focus on the visual dimension. This focus entails some limitations on the psychological territory analysed. Since visual representations more often respond to conventions and express institutions and social habits, it is more difficult to divine the idiosyncratic and intimate from such evidence. These restrictions, however, are the unavoidable consequence of what is a very welcome and innovative shift in focus for history of ancient emotions. The book is, moreover, impeccably produced and packed with beautiful, high-quality images. It is thus not only a must-read for any historian interested in this area of ancient culture, but a model to follow for further exploration of the visual dimension in historical psychology.
