Portraiture is among the most obvious legacies of classical antiquity. Roman busts of rulers and private individuals, sculpted in marble or occasionally cast in bronze, are the frequent inhabitants of museums and country houses. Imposing portrait-statues survive in great numbers, albeit frequently missing some of their extremities. We also have many smaller and more subtle images like those carved in gems and semiprecious stones, and, of course, the heads on Roman coins whose influence on the design of modern money is still obvious. The very custom of modern portraiture itself is, broadly speaking, derived from Rome, though it is easy to take it for granted as if it were an obvious or universal art-form. The Roman world was truly crowded with portraits. They are the subject of intense study and interesting debate. As such they present a useful point of departure for this survey of Roman art history.

Famously, Suetonius records the boast of the emperor Augustus that he found Rome made of brick and left it made of marble. Republican Rome had been a powerful and no doubt impressive city. Its physical fabric had been embellished over the centuries with public buildings and monuments erected largely by wealthy aristocrats. (We have already touched on the portrait-statues of these individuals, but other works, particularly temples, trumpeted their military prowess and political importance.) However, in the middle of the first century BC the city of Rome still lacked many of the splendours that even relatively unimportant Greek cities could boast, and its spaces and structures were sometimes run-down and disorganized. Powerful individuals in the late republic started to transform the city, competing to emulate the Greek towns with public works that reflected their wealth and authority.

Not the most decorous of epitaphs perhaps. Yet warnings of this kind were not uncommon additions to Roman tombs and presumably they refer to a common threat. This should not be taken to imply that the Romans had appalling habits or were peculiarly disrespectful towards the dead. In fact these inscriptions suggest something about the position of graves and the prominence of monuments in the lives of the living. Ancient Roman law and custom prevented burial within the religious boundary of a town – the pomerium. Consequently most burial sites were clustered around the roads that led into the town. No doubt they frequently provided a shelter for travellers to rest and relieve themselves, which was not their purpose! But in other ways the builders of funerary monuments did acknowledge and desire the attentions of the numerous passers-by.

This chapter and the next are concerned with Roman domestic art. But the term ‘domestic art’ may create a slightly misleading impression of the paintings, mosaics and sculptures, the statuettes and stuccoes with which the inhabitants of the Roman world adorned the rooms and gardens of their houses. The phrase implies domesticity and homeliness – a comfortable backdrop for private family life, perhaps. But the properties that offer the best surviving evidence of ‘domestic’ Roman art were less intimate and more public than most modern homes. Like the interiors of modern homes, the works of art contained in such houses and villas said much about the status and concerns of those sufficiently affluent to possess them; but they did so in a much more obvious and imposing manner and, unlike modern decor, these works often represented a considerable investment of specialized labour on the part of Roman craftsmen.

Two other kinds of art played an extremely important role in providing appropriate decoration for the domestic setting. Mosaics so often survive on Roman archaeological sites, even when little wall-painting remains, that we think of them as one of the most typical of Roman art-forms. Domestic sculptures were more portable and are harder to pin to their original locations, but they also are well known today. Eighteenth-century gentlemen shared the Romans’ tastes in sculpture, and Roman villas in Italy were excavated to produce many of the ancient works that can now be seen in British country houses and museums. Roman mosaics and domestic sculptures represent an enormous body of material and it is hard to make generalizations either about their character or their recent study. However, some general observations are required.

Figure 35 shows one of the most famous of Roman monuments, the Arch of Constantine in Rome. Ironically it is largely famous for being bad art. This arch was dedicated in AD 315 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Emperor Constantine’s elevation to power, and more specifically his victory in a civil war which gave him control of Italy in AD 312. The inscriptions in the upper, attic portion of the arch record that it was dedicated in traditional fashion by the senate and people of Rome for Constantine’s divinely inspired defeat of his rival, the ‘tyrant’ Maxentius. Perhaps there is an allusion here to his new patronage of the growing Christian religion. The arch is next to the Colosseum, not far from the older arches of Titus and Septimius Severus, and it resembles the latter in general design. So in many respects it fits in the Roman monumental tradition, yet it is a highly problematic structure.