04-05-2001, 07:04 AM
Errata Corrige: not Palazzo Altemps but Palazzo Massimo<br>
delle Terme (*)<br>
<br>
For those of you that plan a visit in Rome there is a museum very near the Train Station (Termini) that is worth a visit, the Palazzo Massimo. There are many important and beautiful statues but the interest for the Roman Army buff is a huge sarcophagus with a great battle scene with Germanic barbarians. The period is the second century (Antoninus - Marcus). The equipment looks darn good! What really impressed me are the barbarians. The artist makes them very human and not at all stereotyped, the barbarian women particularly. The barbarian men have long beards with a stylized flow, but apart from that the facial expressions are true to life. This sarcophagus has been photographed many times and maybe some of you may have seem details of it in Roman Army books. But to see up close all the details and the overall scene is worth the visit to the museum, which has other works of art that some of you might appreciate too.<br>
<br>
P.S. The issue of how the Romans represented their own soldiers is an interesting topic. Indeed the artistic conventions are such that the equipment shown rarely gets close to reality (even in Trajan's column the shields are smaller than in reality probably because a correctly scaled shield would have covered too much the bodies of the soldiers). The helmets are very simplified. The Sarmatians are shown completely clad in scale armor, horses too and the artistic convention in this case is evident. The auxillaries are shown without armor only to distinguish them from the legionaries. In later monuments the equipment is even less representative of reality (e.g. the fifth century show the soldiers frequently in a classically stylized dress, probably very far from reality. Maybe it was a ceremonial dress, certainly not battle equipment). The sculptures were propaganda and not photos so the artists had other things in mind than showing the true equipment. The evolution of the artistic styles away from the Hellenistic-Roman idealizations of reality towards a more expressionistic style (see the column of Marcus as compared to that on Trajan's column) and finally the stylized propaganda dominated style of the late empire is for me very interesting in its own way. But how do roman army equipment specialists read these monuments? Can anything be deduced from them or are they simply too "false" (not-true)?<br>
<br>
(*) I got the name of the Palace wrong. Discovered my mistake when I looked throught the WEB for pictures of the sarcophagus. The one in the Altemps museum is the wrong one!<br>
In the web use a good search engine (e.g. google) and look for Museo Nazionale delle Terme. Also go directly to<br>
www.siba.fi/~kkoskim/room...ASSTER.HTM <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://pub45.ezboard.com/ugoffredo.showPublicProfile?language=EN>goffredo</A> at: 4/5/01 2:11:05 pm<br></i>
delle Terme (*)<br>
<br>
For those of you that plan a visit in Rome there is a museum very near the Train Station (Termini) that is worth a visit, the Palazzo Massimo. There are many important and beautiful statues but the interest for the Roman Army buff is a huge sarcophagus with a great battle scene with Germanic barbarians. The period is the second century (Antoninus - Marcus). The equipment looks darn good! What really impressed me are the barbarians. The artist makes them very human and not at all stereotyped, the barbarian women particularly. The barbarian men have long beards with a stylized flow, but apart from that the facial expressions are true to life. This sarcophagus has been photographed many times and maybe some of you may have seem details of it in Roman Army books. But to see up close all the details and the overall scene is worth the visit to the museum, which has other works of art that some of you might appreciate too.<br>
<br>
P.S. The issue of how the Romans represented their own soldiers is an interesting topic. Indeed the artistic conventions are such that the equipment shown rarely gets close to reality (even in Trajan's column the shields are smaller than in reality probably because a correctly scaled shield would have covered too much the bodies of the soldiers). The helmets are very simplified. The Sarmatians are shown completely clad in scale armor, horses too and the artistic convention in this case is evident. The auxillaries are shown without armor only to distinguish them from the legionaries. In later monuments the equipment is even less representative of reality (e.g. the fifth century show the soldiers frequently in a classically stylized dress, probably very far from reality. Maybe it was a ceremonial dress, certainly not battle equipment). The sculptures were propaganda and not photos so the artists had other things in mind than showing the true equipment. The evolution of the artistic styles away from the Hellenistic-Roman idealizations of reality towards a more expressionistic style (see the column of Marcus as compared to that on Trajan's column) and finally the stylized propaganda dominated style of the late empire is for me very interesting in its own way. But how do roman army equipment specialists read these monuments? Can anything be deduced from them or are they simply too "false" (not-true)?<br>
<br>
(*) I got the name of the Palace wrong. Discovered my mistake when I looked throught the WEB for pictures of the sarcophagus. The one in the Altemps museum is the wrong one!<br>
In the web use a good search engine (e.g. google) and look for Museo Nazionale delle Terme. Also go directly to<br>
www.siba.fi/~kkoskim/room...ASSTER.HTM <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://pub45.ezboard.com/ugoffredo.showPublicProfile?language=EN>goffredo</A> at: 4/5/01 2:11:05 pm<br></i>
Jeffery Wyss
"Si vos es non secui of solutio tunc vos es secui of preciptate."
"Si vos es non secui of solutio tunc vos es secui of preciptate."
