….cult images of the Roman world have a great deal in common with, for example, the Hindu images that he (Gell) does discuss as illustrations to his theories. Creco-Roman cult images were revered as divine; in various cases they were regularly clothed, fed, given offerings and sacrifices, decked with garlands, kissed, consulted for opinions, and asked for favours; they were painted, tended, and anointed; occasionally they were considered to move, speak, sweat, and bleed; some were bound or chained up as if to keep them in their place or under control.
Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult, Peter Stewart. From Arts Agency and Art History. P 159
The Roman Empire offers cases that invite consideration in Gell’s terms. Roman religion was polytheistic, and central to it were images of gods, which were effectively treated as if alive and were certainly positioned as partners in social relationships.
These images were treated “as if” they were in some sense alive – as if they embodied the deities represented and made them present. It is possible to explain away such irrational responses to images as “play-acting” or “make-believe”. At the opposite extreme one can imagine the ancient users of images really believing that the images are animate.
The similar position of an artefact and a person (or a god) within social relationships does not make them the same thing. Those who worship a cult image may readily accept that it is not a living creature. But in certain exchanges it is considered to act as one. So it would be misleading to present the attitudes of idolaters as the projection of animacy onto inanimate objects. Not is “make-believe” the right term for this behaviour. We need to consider the extent of which all interaction, even between humans, is based on the abduction of agency. Humans are usually more convincing as agents because they do a wider range of more complicated things and respond to each other with spontaneity. But generally speaking cult objects are not expected to be either complicated or spontaneous.
Gell writes:
When particular statues bleed, or perspire, or move about, these are “miracles”. But such happenings would not be miracles if the expectation was that all idols should behave in this way; in fact, they are generally expected not to. Idols may be animate without, in other words, being endowed with animal life or activity. In addition, there are automata, real or imaginary ones, which really do move, speak, and perform various human-like actions, but these are remarkable, not because they are alive, but because they are not alive, while maintaining the appearance of being so. It follows that “ritual” animacy and the possession of “life” in a biological sense are far from being the same thing.
Virtuoso artistic illusionism was often admired in Greco-Roman antiquity, but the numerous ancient expressions of wonder at the lifelikeness of works of art always start from the premise that artworks are not lifelike.
A useful illustration of this paradox is provided by the various cases of “agalmatophilia” (love of [cult] statues) described in classical literature.
Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult, Peter Stewart. From Arts Agency and Art History. P 163
In most of “Art and Agency”, Gell is primarily concerned with localized relationships between people and works of art. He dismisses systems of meaning in art as inaccurate abstractions. Yet we can see that iconography is not merely a traditional art-historical abstraction, divorced from the social realities of the “art-nexus”. In the case of Roman cult images, which in other ways share so much with the “idols” that occupy Gell’s attention, their adherence to an iconographical system has a clear effect on the ways in which they can operate. Iconography has a social reality. The iconography of gods make them easy to represent and recognise in different places and circumstances: it allows them to be conjured into existence even without the sorts of rituals of animation discussed by Gell. But, it also makes for significant relationships between different anthropomorphic cult images and, notably, it allows very specific images – such as particular statues – to multiply.
Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult, Peter Stewart. From Arts Agency and Art History. P168
Gell’s notion of the distributed person is perhaps of particular help in framing Roman cult images as a collectivity. He sees in the idol (for example) not merely a visual representation of the deity, but a bodily expression of its personhood – a sort of prosthesis. In one sense it owes its existence as an idol to the agency of the god, or at least we abduct the agency of the god from such physical forms. Gell offers numerous examples across cultures for this perspective on representations: from the “simulacra” of Epicurean philosophy which are deemed literally to carry the appearance of an object to the eyes of the viewer to the “exuviae” of sorcery – the cast-off’s that allow the sorcerer to exert control over the (distributed) person from whom they emanate.
I have suggested elsewhere that Gell’s idea of distributed personhood applies neatly to Roman portraiture, and specifically to the portraits of the emperor that were indeed distributed all over the empire. To the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, most of whom would have never seen the ruler, these portraits embodied his presence in their lives. For most Romans the emperor himself, insofar as one can speak of a “real” emperor distinct from these manifestations of his authority, operated “behind the scenes”. His existence was to be discerned form its physical symptoms: letters, laws, the images themselves. It is hardly surprising that the ruler portrait was treated as a proxy, presented with petitions, appealed to for asylum, venerated, and perhaps feared. The emperor was analogous to the absent god represented in cult images. Indeed, the living emperor was worshipped in just the same way in many parts of the empire, his portraits serving as the focus of cult.
Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult, Peter Stewart. From Arts Agency and Art History. P 169
…imperial portraits by their very nature would have announced themselves as extensions of the emperors personhood, simply because it is in the nature of portraits to refer back to the prototype. One might say that portraiture is a genre notionally exists to extend personhood beyond the natural extents of time and space. But, the typological, iconographical character of imperial portraits as a collectivity greatly extended their potential for distributing the revered ruler and his family.
The same principles apply to more conventional, iconic cult images. The gods have no reproducible facial likeness in the manner of imperial portraits, but since such portrait likenesses were fictionalised and might as well have been fictional, there is little fundamental difference. In summary, therefore, we can extend Gell’s concept of the distributed person, conceiving of gods embodied not merely by individual idols but by the whole collectivities of iconographically identifiable cult images which facilitate their distribution and partake in their very identities as omnipresent, multifaceted deities.
Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult, Peter Stewart. From Arts Agency and Art History. P 170
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