The Triumph of Rome: Ancient Victories Painted for Modern Empires
The Roman triumph — the procession through the city in which a victorious general displayed his captives and the spoils of conquest before depositing the latter in the treasury and offering thanks at the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus — was the most spectacular public ritual of the Roman world, and its visual representation has served as propaganda for European rulers from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. The triumph’s logic — the hero returns, the enemy is displayed, the city is made to feel the extent of its power — was available for appropriation by any ruler who needed to communicate the same things, and the painters who rendered ancient triumphs for modern patrons understood they were serving both historical documentation and political argument simultaneously.
Andrea Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar, painted between 1485 and 1505 for the Gonzaga court in Mantua and now at Hampton Court, is the foundational work of this tradition. Nine large canvases arranged to be displayed in sequence depict the procession in a continuous frieze: the standards and trophies at the front, the spoils of war carried by soldiers, the captives and the sacred vessels, the generals and senators, Caesar himself in his chariot. Mantegna’s research was exhaustive — he drew on coins, inscriptions, and sculptural reliefs to reconstruct the visual details of the procession — and the result is the most archaeologically serious attempt to visualize a Roman triumph that existed before modern archaeology had generated sufficient material evidence for a more rigorous reconstruction.
The Gonzaga commissioned it partly as a celebration of antiquity — the Italian humanist courts of the fifteenth century were obsessed with classical precedent — and partly as an implicit elevation of their own dynastic status. To possess the most accurate visual representation of a Roman triumph was to associate the Gonzaga with Roman imperial power while maintaining the scholarly credentials that Italian humanism required. The painting is simultaneously scholarship and propaganda, archaeology and dynastic statement, which is the condition of most serious Renaissance engagement with classical antiquity.
Rubens produced multiple paintings on triumphal themes — his Triumph of Constantine, his Triumphal Procession of Charles V — in which the ancient visual vocabulary was applied directly to contemporary political figures, the Roman general’s chariot becoming the contemporary monarch’s vehicle, the ancient captives becoming the contemporary monarch’s enemies. This was not anachronism but method: the visual language of Roman triumph was available to be deployed by any ruler with the ambition to claim its associations. Rubens was the most accomplished practitioner of this transfer, and his ability to use ancient form in service of contemporary argument made him the most politically useful painter in Europe.
The tradition culminates, in a sense, in Jacques-Louis David’s work for Napoleon, in which the Roman imperial vocabulary — the laurel wreath, the eagle standard, the triumphal procession — was deployed to construct Napoleon as a new Augustus. David’s Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon, which is a triumph as much as a coronation, brings the Roman processional tradition into a contemporary setting with enough visual transformation to avoid looking like costume drama while retaining enough Roman visual reference to communicate the intended genealogy. Napoleon understood what he was doing when he asked David to paint his ceremonies in the Roman mode. He was claiming the succession.
The twentieth century’s relationship with the triumph imagery is more complicated. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will — the documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rally — deploys the visual grammar of the Roman triumph with awareness that requires no citation: the procession, the vast crowd, the single figure elevated above the mass, the standards and symbols. The connection to Roman precedent is both made explicit in the title and transformed by the specific use to which it is put. The triumph’s visual language turned out to be available to anyone who needed to communicate military power and popular submission simultaneously, regardless of the quality of the cause it served. That is the risk of any visual vocabulary powerful enough to have lasted two thousand years.