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The photographer Don McCullin has spent much of his career covering “conflict, war and tragedy” — to the point that he sometimes worries that his work is always about the same thing: “broken bodies and minds”.
His latest collection, The Roman Conceit, is the final of three volumes that capture the landscape, monuments and sculpture of the Roman empire. The sculptures photographed here are spectacular — as many who have seen them in real life will already know. Seen through McCullin’s lens, though, they are sensational. These sculptures, commissioned by the richest of Romans, do not just tell us about history, historical legacies and cultural or political capital; they tell us about wealth then and now.
High-status Romans were obsessed with beauty. Looking good in antiquity mattered. None of the sculptures pictured here — nor found on prominent display in museums around the world — show people who are old, or fat, or not able-bodied. Men are tall, strong and blessed with enviable abdominal muscles and even more enviable lack of concern at the modest size of their genitalia. Women are young and beautiful, graceful or demure; sometimes, like the empress Livia from the Altes Museum in Berlin, they are even powerful. Desire is always stoked or challenged, sometimes uncomfortably so, as in the Dresden Symplegma, where Hermaphrodite is depicted trying to escape from a satyr who is not “playing an erotic game” (as some scholars used to write) but trying to rape her.
The obsession with looking beautiful is of course not unique to Rome, but as the Instagram generation understand well, it can be oppressive to be bombarded by images of other people in peak physical condition. Art like this is insistent and exclusive. And of course it is also about wealth: as McCullin notes in a short introduction, it can be all too easy to forget that the stone was quarried by enslaved people, and that the statuary became spoils of war. That is why, of course, you can now find the glorious bust of Caligula in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, a city that did not feature in Roman geographies, having passed through the hands of various wealthy owners.
There is another layer too, though. Art is usually commissioned or bought by those with deep pockets, and these are rarely in the first flush of life. So, the owners of these glorious statues would have wandered around their villas and their gardens marvelling at how money can in fact buy beauty and youth. Wealth today has access to means surgical and otherwise to make this come true.
Codes of beauty — and, implicitly, wealth — have persisted, sometimes directly and sometimes evolving to suit the times. Think of the busts in the cast gallery at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, whose noble features echo in the sculptures of gentlemen (and ladies) that were made in the 18th and 19th centuries, portraying them as members not only of the British but also of Roman elites. Think too, today, about the Mar-a-Lago look of the court surrounding President Donald Trump, where a beauty standard is expected of those close to the most powerful man on Earth — complete with Botox, facial fillers and extreme tanning.
These sculptures were part of Romans’ concerns about wealth in the same way that people require status symbols today. Keeping up with the Julii was not easy. Worse, doing so could invite mockery.
Consider The Satyricon by Petronius, a bawdy Latin novel written in the first century AD when Rome had become not just powerful but wealthy, largely thanks to Octavian’s conquest of Egypt after the death of Mark Antony and Cleopatra a century earlier. The result: almost unlimited cheap food, plus access to trade with the Red Sea and beyond. Interest rates plummeted and unlikely people got rich.
One of the characters in The Satyricon is a man named Trimalchio. He had made himself an immense fortune supplying wine to the rich and famous, and loved flaunting his wealth and status. It was not just his success that galled his friends; he had once been an enslaved person too.
The description of his dinner party in the novel bears comparison to the excesses of the tech bros in Jesse Armstrong’s new film Mountainhead, which likewise details the lifestyles of those whose sense of reality evaporates as their net worth rises. Trimalchio only wanted the best that money could buy: pheasant brought in from the eastern coast of the Black Sea; guinea fowl from Africa; rare and expensive fish; plumed peacock; and much more besides, all presented in excess. There were dishes that had live birds sewn inside a whole pig, which flew out the moment the ham was carved, and silver toothpicks for the guests.
Petronius’s depiction is a reminder that the nouveaux riches are always unsettling. One way for newly wealthy Romans to fit in was to toe the cultural line, hence the vast demand for statues of familiar figures from the Greco-Roman tradition. Stick a few of those up in the garden or in the villa and you’d fit right in. That too is a reason why Roman sculptures look so pleasing to the modern eye — because we have become accustomed to a taste for them among the rich across two millennia.
You can’t go wrong harking back to the Roman world in your Menlo Park mansion; consider the neo-neoclassical sculpture of his wife that Mark Zuckerberg commissioned, “bringing back the Roman tradition”, he said. Everyone looks body-beautiful; there are no ominous religious messages to worry about; the enslaved, the oppressed and the poor stay reassuringly out of sight and out of mind. Comfortably numb, in other words — just like the statues themselves. But it is McCullin’s success that his photographs show them, and the classical world, in the best possible light.
Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at the University of Oxford
‘The Roman Conceit’ by Don McCullin is published by GOST
‘Don McCullin: A Desecrated Serenity’ opens September 9 at Hauser & Wirth in New York
