THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF AUGUSTAN CLASSICISM

In the history of ancient art few changes are so dramatically apparent as that which unfolded, gradually yet unmistakably, during the first two decades of the reign of Augustus. This change came about under the banner of a Classicism inspired by the great Attic examples of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The origins of this Classicism were, however, remote. In the architectural and art-historical context of late republican ‘Asiatic luxury’ (luxuria Asiatica), both the Classical models, which were already present in the Hellenistic culture inspiring that luxuria, and the genuinely baroque practices, which were peculiar to middle and late Hellenistic art, had been enthusiastically welcomed by Roman patrons of the ruling class. But in the Augustan and Julio-Claudian age, Classicism became an official artistic programme and one unique to the capital, and from this centre emanated the models adopted by greater and lesser private patrons, as well as by Italian and provincial municipalities, especially in the West. Both taste and knowledge were so deeply affected that the history of Roman imperial art can to a large extent be seen as a series of variations on and interpretations of the Classicizing message. In the age of Caesar, official architecture, sculpture and painting were still deeply imbued with a baroque and Hellenistic dramatic force, but they also recalled the distant experiences of the artistic culture common to the Etruscan and Italic world (the koine) of the third century B.C. This is especially discernable in the formal duality of the portrait.