Episode 57: Juno, A Colossal Roman Statue (late 1st century BCE)
VOICE 1: When I was walking by the door, because I was just going to walk right by, and all of a sudden I turned and saw this and I had to come in and check it all out.
VOICE 2: I walked in and looked up and my jaw just dropped. This is one huge sculpture.
VOICE 3: Um, I see, like a ginormous, like, goddess.
VOICE 1: It's just imposing. I don't want to say in-your-face. I guess it...it's a woman, and it's power, and I had to see it.
VOICE 2: She's, like, maybe 20 feet tall. It amazes me that this is a woman, too. I don't know why, but I sort of expect men to be made into huge sculptures.
VOICE 4: I love the way her hair flows to. It's absolutely beautiful. It's very luscious, the locks of hair. It almost looks like serpents.
VOICE 2: Her hands are broken off. And I really, really wonder what her hand gestures are, because one of them would have been raised to, like, her neck or her face.
VOICE 5: And the face has a rather big nose for modern standards. And big eyes and luscious lips, I guess.
VOICE 2: She's got really powerful legs, which I guess you would if you were a goddess. One knee is slightly bent and, you know, that sort of classic casual posture.
VOICE 4: She's posed so naturally and so beautifully, and there's such an elegant nature to the way she's standing.
VOICE 2: I don't know whether she's, like, casually watching people die off in the distance or walking somewhere or what.
VOICE 3: She looks, like, smart. And also, like, yeah. Yeah, like, warlike, probably.
VOICE 4: My first reaction is how amazing it is that someone could even carve something like this out of such a big block of marble. I mean, it takes an enormous amount of time and dedication, and I think it's just amazing that one even has the patience to do that.
VOICE 5: It's very well-preserved. You can see the heton coming down. And normally, those are... I'm from Greece, and therefore it's kind of unfortunate that I get to see this here. I wish I could actually see it in Greece because we have a lot of much smaller broken ones of these. Like when you go to Greek museums, you do not get something well-preserved like this.
VOICE 6: I was looking at it from the artist point of view, actually thinking to get that kind of perspective and dimensions correctly with a human being, it it's it's remarkable to me like how... Where would they stand? Who would be modeling it? And what's really fascinating to me is the drape of the fabric.
VOICE 4: I'm really amazed by the ripple effects of her dress and how it, like, how it cascades down.
VOICE 2: She's draped with drapey clothes, you know, like, oh, I just threw this on this morning.
VOICE 4: It feels casual, almost, just the way it's wrapped around her. It almost reminds me of just like putting a bath towel on.
VOICE 6: It just floors me. You what kind of tools they would have to use to get those little teeny creases and folds just right. For the sculptor to actually sculpt something that looks see-through and it's all stone. It's remarkable. It's...it's truly remarkable. Right?
When I was in fifth grade, we had a unit on Greek myths. You know the way you remember some things from childhood so clearly that you close your eyes and you’re there? For some reason, that’s Greek mythology for me. We were all given a book, like a real, grown-up chapter book without pictures, on the gods and goddesses of Olympus, and it quickly became my favorite book. I read it so many times I memorized it. It’s missing a cover and the pages are all squiggly from dropping it in the bath. I couldn’t get enough of these jokers. These gods and goddesses, they were so deliciously awful to each other, and in ways that seemed so much more human than the omniscient know-it-all Jewish God I grew up with. Their insecurities and sex drives and jealousy all felt so relatable; they helped explain grown-ups and Melrose Place to me. And no one was more jealous than Hera, wife of Zeus, who I always thought was done a little dirty. All the other goddesses were given such iconic identities: Athena is the goddess of wisdom, Aphrodite the goddess of love, and so on, while Hera was… Zeus’ wife. The goddess of wife. It seemed like her entire existence was to resent her cheating husband, a kind of Helladic Carmela Soprano. I know technically she’s the queen of the gods, but I guess that always felt like a title more than a job. At the end of the day, she’s always attached to Zeus, the goddess of marriage, which again, considering she’s always being cheated on, feels kind of weak. My point is, there was never any Hera without Zeus. She’s always in his shadow. She’s never allowed to contain her own multitudes. To just be her.
Until now. Now, she’s the subject of our episode, completely undeniable, all 13 feet and six and a half tons of her, before you even count the pedestal. In fact, she’s the largest classical sculpture in North America, this colossal Roman statue of Juno. Juno, is, of course, the Roman name for Hera. It’s the same goddess, the same cheating husband, the same story. But when you stand in front of her in the newly installed, airy gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, it doesn’t feel like the same story. Because there’s no Zeus. She’s having her moment. And there is nothing about this sculpture that feels weak, no shadow it could possibly fit in.
When it comes to ancient art, and particularly the freestanding sculpture that most people would recognize, we have a lot of stories to explore, all nesting inside one another like a weathered marble turducken. We know who she is because we know the stories, that is, the myths. But then there’s the story of the moment of her creation, that is, her context, what inspired Roman artisans in the first century BCE to carve this woman and her drapery and her brooches and sandals out of Carrera marble, and most likely put her in a temple to worship her. And then there’s the story of the sculpture ever since: you don’t survive thousands of years without seeing some stuff, without needing some work done, and without that restoration having stories of its own – remember episodes 19 on the Guanyin Bodhisattva, and especially episode 36 on the Ecce Homo Monkey Christ fiasco, that the decision to restore an antique object is incredibly loaded and probably says more about the cultural moment of its restoration than the moment it’s being restored to. But I digress. All of these stories – the myths, the history, and the provenance and restoration – are present in this monumental sculpture. So let’s dive into them: first into the object itself and then its journey through time and space to bring us to our moment, today, where Juno finally rules the court that’s always been withheld from her.
So first, the history. You really can’t tell the story of Roman statues without understanding that they’re wholly indebted to the story of Greek statues, and you can’t talk about Greek statues without explaining the evolution of Greek art from the ninth to first century BCE. So without further ado, here is an insultingly brief history of freestanding Greco-Roman sculpture that would make any ancient Greek historian shatter his teacup with indignation. But here we go.
When you think about Greek sculpture, you probably have some really famous figures in your head, ones that you never realized you would recognize forever, either by sight or by name or by its cultural clout – figures like the discus thrower that always gets trotted out at the Olympics, or the famously armless Venus de Milo, or the writhing and snake-bitten Laocoon and his sons. These figures are all part of a long trajectory over hundreds of years of artisans learning to depict the human body, and from there, learning how to infuse those bodies with subtlety and emotional depth. It’s actually pretty powerful to watch these sculptures evolve, almost like that old evolution diagram of monkey becoming man. We’re watching Western art become itself in real time.
And Ancient Greek art defined itself early on by this evolution, in strong contrast with, for example, Ancient Egyptian art, which was based on a strong desire for continuity and permanence, and therefore stayed relatively consistent over 3000 years. Greek art, which developed during a comparatively much shorter time, only about 800 years, is nothing if not variable – you could hold up a geometric-period pot from 750 BCE against a Hellenistic sculpture from 200 BCE and have no idea they were from the same culture. But what did remain consistent throughout was a deep sense of history, storytelling, and an indispensable religious imagination, which lead to the abundance of sacred sites, sanctuaries, and temples across the region that were dedicated to the gods. Each site, each structure, was an independent space that was integrated into its natural surroundings, a unique entity that was part of a larger spiritual and geographic community. And the increasing artistic desire to depict the human body, itself so individual and so communal, undoubtedly reflected this.
So let’s fast forward through the really early stuff, which is mostly lots of pots – and again, ancient art historians, my sincere apologies, don’t at me – to arrive at the Archaic period, from around 600-480 BCE, which is famous first and foremost for the development of those column orders you had to memorize in middle school – say it with me: Doric, the most solid and stolid, Ionic, which, with its flat-top swirls at the top, is the most iconic (that’s how I remembered it), and Corinthian, with its, you know carved rosettes and acanthus leaves and stuff, which is the most elegant and decorated. Clearly this is when temple architecture really starts to take off, and with it, the sculptures both carved into the temple’s facades in elaborate friezes, and, for our purposes, the venerable freestanding sculptures of the gods inside. The Archaic period saw the flourishing of city-states on the mainland and Aegean islands, and pushed its capital, Athens, to the forefront both commercially and artistically. Artistic commissions thrived, and even those pots we neglected started to be signed by individual artists. It was kind of like the Renaissance before the Renaissance, if you want to truly twist up your brain.
The first freestanding sculptures from these periods weren’t actually mythological gods but their immortal deity attendants, called a kore if it depicted a female or a kouros if it’s a male. These figures acted as grave markers and lined the entries of temples, and are notable for their straight-backed stiffness, almost like they were modeled from an Egyptian hieroglyphic. They have their clenched fists at their sides, their one foot forward, and, often, a gentle, closed-mouthed smile. But even the kouroi started to evolve and soften as the years passed, less imprisoned by artistic convention and more individualized, so that by the time we reach the Classical Period in 480 BCE, it’s not so shocking to see the first sculptures that we really recognize as classically Greek, the foundation for the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century, which is, of course, the revival of antiquity, which is, of course, this. Classical Greek art, a period of really only 160 years, is characterized by humanism, rationalism, and idealism, by the notion that man is the measure of all things, that only the necessary need be captured, with nothing in excess, and that mathematical proportionality can lead to the rendering of an authentic human body. The frozen one-foot-forward of a kouros from 530 BCE evolves into a smooth, more lifelike and proportional Kritian Boy in 480 BCE, and from there into a perfectly weight-bearing contrapposto in Polykleitos’ Spear Bearer from 450 BCE. The Archaic smile disappears into the subtle planes of the human face; musculature slowly appears beneath the skin. When you see these three figures side-by-side, and you consider that this aesthetic evolution happened in only 80 years, honestly, it takes your breath away.
And so 450 BCE, and our Spear Bearer, begin the High Classical Period, around 450-400 BCE, and famous for everything you recognize: the Acropolis, the Parthenon, Athens v. Sparta, the heyday of the ancient Olympic games, the discus thrower and his stunning naturalism, carved by artists who now understood how to capture not just the body itself, but how it moves, its hard muscles and soft flesh and gently turned out foot, and the tension of the pregnant moment before the action. And it’s this tension, this emotional energy, where the body isn’t just a thing in a vacuum but a person responding to its world, that takes us into the late Classical period, from around 400-323 BCE, the period of Plato and Aristotle and the School of Athens, and then, into the Hellenistic period which began in 323 BCE with the death of Alexander the Great, who was, among other things, Aristotle’s most famous student. Alexander’s death left a vast conquered empire with virtually no leadership or administrative structure, ultimately leaving it to be divided into kingdoms amongst his generals, ushering in a period of pluralism, rather than cohesion, until its ultimate conquest by the Romans in 31 BCE. Yet the art of this period is remarkably consistent, in that it aimed to reject its predecessors, to be anti-Classical and far more individualized, humanistic, and, like human beings, highly emotional and dramatic. Gone are the aloof expressions, the charged moment before the action – consider the fact that while the discus thrower’s body is taut and ready, his face is as subdued as if it’s waiting in line at the post office. The Hellenistic period replaced this with richly flapping drapery, the soaring wind-whipped Nike of Samothrace, or the priest Laocoon’s face of utter agony as he and his sons are beset by venomous snakes. We’ve talked before about how so often in art history, the pendulum swings between intellectualism and emotionalism, between the moment of anticipation and the moment of action, between the head and the gut. We see this as Renaissance moves towards Baroque, as Cubism moves towards Expressionism, as Abstract Expressionism moves towards Minimalism. This, however, is the OG, Classical to Hellenistic, when we go from admiring the muscles and proportion of a Classical athlete to empathizing with a suffering father.
Okay, end of breakneck speed preamble to bring us to Rome, and to Juno. The hand-off of Greek culture, the conquered, to Roman culture, the conqueror, isn’t nearly as straightforward as you’d imagine. You’d think that Roman art would swallow Greek art whole, but remember, Roman art was itself just getting off the ground, and Greece exerted an enormously oversized influence on this nascent culture. Greek art, with its humanism and elegance, was, if I haven’t already convinced you, pretty powerful, beautiful stuff, so much so that the Roman poet Horace famously wrote that “Greece, the captive, took her savage victor captive.” In fact, the smooth snow-white marble Greek sculptures we’re so familiar with are actually replications, Roman copies of original Greek bronze sculptures. Yes indeed, any marble sculpture you’ve ever been taught as ancient Greek isn’t actually from that period at all, but a Roman copy after the fact. There are a few reasons for this – first logistical, after all, the original bronze was a highly valuable material for weaponry and any number of other uses, so best to melt them down and use them more practically, but second is artistic and cultural: the early Roman craze for Greek art was all but unquenchable. Everyone wanted a piece. So the sculptures were molded into plaster casts and then into hollow marble that could barely support the weight, hence the little supports and carved tree stumps you tend to see around the feet, and then replicated endlessly, often with heads swapped in and out.
But Roman artists didn’t just pick up the mantle of Greek art, they continued its evolution. The emotional realism so characteristic of Hellenistic sculpture continued to evolve into the Roman Republic and early Roman empire by way of these swapped-out heads, called busts, because they were so focused on the human face. Where Greek sculpture perfected the human body, Roman sculpture actually let it begin to age. An interest in meticulous realism, called Verism, captured those big noses and tiny eyes and wrinkles and warts. Verism allowed for a lack of physical perfection in favor of authenticity and individuality. And this also led to an interesting new development in this highly politically-charged period: propaganda. After all, if something seems accurate, you’re less inclined to question its ability to manipulate you. And so the specificity of a portrait generated its recognizability. A coin with the image of Julius Caesar became unmistakable. A diadem, or tiara, atop a head of curls was unequivocally the goddess Juno.
This Juno was most likely carved during the early Roman Empire, under the reign of Augustus and during the Pax Romana, a legacy of over 200 years, from 27 BCE to 180 CE, of stability, economic prosperity, and internal peace, a time of building at an unprecedented scale and complexity, incredible engineering, and great beauty. She was carved from a massive piece of Carrera marble, named for the many quarries in the North Central Italian city of Carrera, which would have tied in nicely with Augustus’s desire to decorate his city with all the white marble he could unearth – the Roman historian Suetonius wrote that “Augustus found Rome a city built in brick and left it one of marble.” And like Napoleon III’s Haussmannization of Paris, which we discussed in episode 7, you can imagine how brilliantly bright the city must have become, how elegant, and, especially, how opulent. And we see evidence of this desire for richness in Juno herself: we can, of course, only understand the gods in terms of our own human instincts and desires, and so Juno’s queenliness is indicated by the exact stuff we’d find valuable: the pressed cloth of her voluminous drapery, the buttons on her sleeves, the brooches fastening the cloak at her shoulders, even her sandals. All were universally recognizable indications of wealth.
But about that “universally-recognizable” part. There’s a somewhat sizable snag in the story, and I probably shouldn’t have waited this long to mention it. But the fact is that, after all this build-up, we can’t actually be sure that this was originally meant to be Juno and not simply some wealthy female figure, or a muse, maybe, or part of a larger group of colossal sculptures. Because, as I mentioned, heads often got swapped, and this head – as I said, unmistakably Juno because of the diadem – wasn’t the original. Those broken-off hands could have been holding a musical instrument, or a scroll, or any other number of objects that would have been as symbolic as the diadem. It’s the head that makes her Juno, and this head is a later addition. So…sorry for the bait and switch. But this does bring us to the final leg of our story, the sculpture ever since.
There’s a lot to her journey that brought her from then to now, enough that the MFA published a whole book about it – the research required to piece together her story is herculean, no ancient Greco-Roman pun intended – so we’re just going to touch on the greatest hits. While her early provenance from antiquity to the Baroque is a collection of muddy best guesses, she first appeared with confidence in 1633 in the inventory of an Italian cardinal, Cardinal Ludovisi, known for his family’s prized collection of antiquities. She would have presided over an avenue of Cyprus trees, then into a palace, in the 1730s she was sold to a Pope, then ceded to the French at the turn of the 19th century, then returned to Rome 20 years later. She would have been visited by Goethe, by Stendhal, by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, and most notably by the German art historian Johann Winkelmann, who essentially told the Ludovisis the value of what they had on their hands, and, with a tone you can almost hear, that her upper lip had been poorly restored. By the end of the 19th century, most of the Ludovisi collection had been purchased by the Italian government, the Ludovisi gardens became a construction site, and Charles F. Sprague, a US congressman and avid art collector in Brookline, Massachusetts, who was hard at work creating an Italian-themed garden, got a tip from his landscape architect that he had an in on a “big statue,” a “stunner,” whose availability was “a chance such as hardly ever occurs.” Finally, in 1904, after several complicated years that included bureaucratic red tape, issues with the Italian government, and Sprague’s death, twelve oxen pulled the statue down the driveway of Mrs. Sprague’s house, and Juno found her new home for the next century. She was then bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts and underwent an extraordinary restoration beginning in 2012, which included the removal of her 400 pound head, the fixing of her somewhat disfigured face – apparently a guest of the Sprague’s tried to climb the statue, causing the head to tumble and nose to break off, and honestly, after a few wine spritzers, who among us?) – and the general cleaning and restoring after five hundred years of garden life and exposure to the elements, and two thousand years of life on this planet, to arrive at this moment, in this gallery, with birdsong piped in to evoke the outside, the sun and mist and wind, where so much of her life had been spent.
So these are the stories that brought her to this point. And now it’s time for one more: the story we tell ourselves. What does Juno mean to us? Why do we put so much energy into tracing her origins, into knowing where she’s been and what she’s seen? And what does that say about our desire to understand our own origins? Even with all of this incredible research, there’s still quite a bit we take on faith. After all, so much of restoration and the study of antiquities in general amounts to extremely educated guesses. We think this how best to restore her. We think this is Juno. And if we decide that she is, then we think this is most accurate retelling of her historical story, so that she, queen that she is, can best tell her own, to explain Greek mythology to us, today. But we don’t have the proof, we don’t have Duchamp or Picasso taking pen to paper to write manifestos and explain exactly why their art looks like this, why it met its exact historical moment like this. Instead, we have history, which is to say, we have lots and lots of stories, and from them we carve and craft, we turn the marble into a larger picture of its context, and that picture into our understanding of the vast, endless expanse of the world before we arrived. And, like I said, we have faith: that humans then are like humans now, that all we’ve ever wanted was a world put into terms that we can understand. It’s why Greek artists carved sculptures that look like themselves. It’s why people before them told stories of gods and goddesses in their petty, human images. It’s why I, in fifth grade, used Greek myths to understand my own world, which included Melrose Place.
So think about this when you stand in front of this monumental sculpture, this stunner, at the culmination point of all of her stories, and ours. Think about us, the mortals on the ground, how much we know, and how little we know, and how it’s the combination of both that pretty much what makes up the entirety of human experience. And think about how we made her just to worship her: the captive, taking us captive, casting her own magnificent shadow, and presiding over us all.