Aesthete or imperialist? Hadrian’s afterlife in art
To mark the opening of the British Museum’s exhibition on the Emperor Hadrian, Caroline Vout traces the way that our image of him has been shaped by artists since the 18th century.
Caroline Vout, Sunday, 29th June 2008
Long before the opening of its summer exhibition, ‘Hadrian: Empire and Conflict’, the British Museum was giving Hadrian maximum exposure. In April, one of the key exhibits from its own collection, a spectacular bronze head of the emperor, which had been fished out of the Thames in 1834 (Fig. 1), was winging its way from Bloomsbury to Northumbria.1 Stopping first at Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, and then at Segedunum Roman Fort in Wallsend, Hadrian could be brought up to speed on ‘the Roman wall’, one of his most famous legacies. ‘This is a great moment’, said Neil MacGregor, the museum’s director. ‘I thought it profoundly moving to see him there.’2
Sporting his usual short beard and carefully curled hair, Hadrian stares across millennia. Originally the head would have been part of a colossal statue, presumably in a forum in London – the human face of Roman rule, a ‘hotline’ between Britain and the rest of the empire. It mattered little perhaps that few had caught a glimpse of him when he visited the island in ad 122. For how could one man match the majesty of this bronzed beauty, and the hopes and fears that it evoked? MacGregor’s optimism is not unrehearsed. To most people in antiquity even, this was Hadrian.
Not that Hadrian is exceptional in this regard. Hundreds of portraits of Rome’s rulers were displayed throughout the empire. With each replication, the emperor in question was turned from man to model, and equalled Roman power or imperium. Few people could have known what he was really like or how he measured up to the awe-inspiring image. But they would have had fun imagining. In this process, he is made more charismatic, whether more seductive or dangerous.
When an emperor died, if his reputation merited it, he was accorded apotheosis. Again his images aided and abetted his worship. Hadrian was one such ruler – even if (if not because) the ancient sources claim that his deification was contested. At this point, any speculation about the real Hadrian (for example, his feelings for his young male lover Antinous, whose images were subsequently also erected throughout the empire) was redirected to speak to his place on Olympus.3
So strong was this ‘image as emperor’ formula that subjects sometimes harmed imperial portraits, just as centuries later people would rip the images of Stalin and Saddam from their pedestals. Is this how our bronze head of Hadrian ended up in the Thames? Some 70 years earlier, British rebels under Boudicca had pulled down a bronze statue of the divine Claudius and thrown its head, now also in the British Museum, in Suffolk’s River Alde.4 What better way to pour cold water on Britain’s relation-ship with Rome than to cut it off at the head and throw that head in the river?
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